[A House of Air 01] • A House of Air by Fitzgerald Penelope

Author:Fitzgerald, Penelope [Fitzgerald, Penelope]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Writing
ISBN: 9780007355426
Goodreads: 19171999
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Published: 2003-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

to show one side only is to falsify it and therefore deprive it of all value…there are no wholly ‘nice’ people, or wholly ‘nasty’ people in real life, and they therefore have no place in the particular form of roman psychologique in which I happen to be interested.

The jealousy that bedevils the gentle and pliant Monica is a product of ‘the whole tradition of her world, daily and hourly soaking into her very being, so that it became an ineradicable part of herself.’ There is, for example, the beginning of a real friendship between Monica and Cicely Marlowe. But the news of Cicely’s engagement (even though the man is not All Right) while Monica herself is still doggedly waiting and hoping, is almost too painful to be borne. ‘It added to her misery that she was ashamed of it, and despised and reproached herself for her unworthy jealousy.’ Still more disgraceful is her relief when the whole thing, after all, comes to nothing.

Thank Heaven Fasting would be a sombre book if it were less witty, and less deceptively mild. Proceeding, as it does, in the kind of short paragraphs that were then thought suitable for the Woman’s Page, it concentrates from beginning to end, and with admirable clearness, on the main story. In this sense, it must be counted a classic. Characters and places are carefully limited. The tone is detached, or seems so. E. M. Delafield had, she said, ‘consciously striven, throughout the whole of my writing life, for ability to observe impartially, unbiased either by sentiment or by cynicism, and courage to record faithfully and without dramatic emphasis.’ She isn’t impartial, of course. What is the use of an impartial novelist? But she is accurate, calm, and lucid. She possessed what she called a phonographic memory, and could repeat, word for word, conversations which she had heard or overheard many years earlier. Dialogue, even in short snatches, is one of her great strengths as a writer. In Thank Heaven Fasting the conversations are often—as they are in real life—duels, open or disguised. Mrs Ingram has an easy victory over Monica.

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