An Excerpt (Rachel Ferguson's The Brontes Went to Woolworths)

[radiantfracture]

Circa 1930s London: Katrine, the actor sister of a trio (journalist, actor, student) has her end-of-term show at Dramatic School. The narrator is her older sister, Deirdre.

Ahem.

* * *

The end-of-term shows at the Dramatic School were so funny that my nose began to bleed, and I had to grope my way out and yell it off in the cloak-rooms. But mother, shuddering with giggles, sat it all out so as to be able to say what there was to say to Katrine. Her roles included Polonius, and she'd just got to "costly thy habit" when her beard came half off and swung like a pendulum for the rest of the scene, and in The Professor's Love Story (Oh! what a bad play!) the gate stuck, and pinned that whimsical recluse to his own fence.

And later on, mother told me, one of the girls (as a farmer) had to fill a pipe and smoke it, and she stuffed the bowl so full that a man in the audience said "Christ" out loud, and of course it wouldn't draw, and the girl pulled nearly all of it out again, and mother said "The stage was knee-deep in shag. That girl ought to get on."

* * *

Reading it, I barked helplessly like a hoarse hound.

{rf}

Comments

[anne]

That looks great! I must remember to make an appointment to read it--it's library-use-only, sigh.

[radiantfracture]

It's so deep in the protagonist's perspective that it almost becomes an experimental novel, while still also being a comic novel of pre-WWI manners.

It begins like this:

"How I loathe that kind of novel which is about a lot of sisters. It is usually called /They Were Seven/, or /Three - Not Out/, and one spends one's entire time trying to sort them all, and muttering -- 'Was it Isobel who drank, or Gertie? And which was it who ran away with the gigolo, Amy or Pauline?'"

And then it is precisely one of those novels, of course, though you never mix anyone up with anyone else.