Summer will show by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Pages: 329
Published: 1936

This is an odd novel.

It does some things very well.  I'm not sure I've ever read anything that seems to capture so well the experience of living through momentous events.  As you live your life, you don't necessarily know that you're living through something that history will regard as significant.  And as the experience drags on, day by day, week by week, month by month...well, you have to eat, and get dressed, and be hungry or bored just as you would if History weren't happening. Your friends will still misunderstand you, your ex-husband might still betray you for the most personal of reasons.  And the fact that you're literally part of a Communist plot might not feel as important to you as your lover's life or happiness.

Some parts of the characterizations are also skilful.  The entire first section of the book captures in a very plausible way the interior life of an upper class British woman of the mid-19th century.  Mrs Willoughby of Blandameer is both focused on perfectly meeting the obligations of raising her children and of managing her estate, and is impatient with them.  The doctor's wife is a mouse who is fiercely, secretly opposed to meddling in her neighbour's life. The lime kiln keeper is equally indifferent to the expectations and the griefs of his mistress.

And yet, the novel does some things so badly.  It's disjointed:  there are jumps in time that don't really make sense.  The fatal, compelling attraction of the main character to her ex-husband's mistress Minna isn't well drawn, and the previous mutual attraction between the ex-husband and Minna seems implausible once you meet both characters. It also assumes things you may not be familiar with:  if you don't know much about the European revolutions of 1848 you might not realize that the characters are in the midst of them, and the ending of the novel will not have the same resonance if you don't recognize that Sophie is reading the Communist Manifesto.

I picked this up at the library, initially thinking that it was an imprint of the Virago Press. Instead it's a similar 'lost classics' imprint from the New York Review of Books.  It has a similar interest:  in the moment, it is impossible to tell which books will be thought to be important by a later era.  And yet, the books that "don't last", that aren't characterized as "classics", and that don't join the "canon"....can still be interesting reads.  This is one of them.