This is a look at a society which is about to undergo great change, but Young’s focus is also on relationships and women’s role. Disliked by her husband, Piers’ presence and growing relationship with Rosamund Fraser brings years of Bertha’s repressed anger and frustration to the surface. I don’t have this one (trying to limit my book purchases at the moment), but I remember enjoying Tea Is So Intoxicating immensely, and I have Dangerous Ages lined up next.

I'm so happy that I finally finished this and am so looking forward to our discussion because I'm sure everyone will have a LOT of opinions about it! The conclusion of this novel leaves us to our own conclusions as to the future of these characters, not the least of which is the setting just before the beginning of WWII. That’s a lovely description of her style as it never feels laboured or heavy-handed; and it could so easily have been a potential pitfall here, especially with the political thread on the appeasement process. The Frasers are a single-parent household headed up by the beautiful Rosamund, and her five children. Although I have still to read a few of her novels – especially those early hard to find ones – I feel confident in saying that Chatterton Square is almost certainly her best novel.Marriage is very much the theme of this book, but it is set in 1939 and war looms large throughout the narrative. The protagonist feels isolated in her community (but not in her home) by what she sees as acceptance of the loss of what England stands for and why it matters. Without turning her head, Rhoda turned the eyes which had been watching her father towards her mother and intercepted the glance Mr. She wrote about love and hate and, of course, about sorrow and joy and pain and all of the little, almost imperceptible emotional mutations which mean that we are living, that we are alive. So, with Rosamund’s husband; Fergus, choosing to live abroad, away from his family – Rosamund took the opportunity to save her friend – bringing her in to the warm, lively family she has never had for herself.

There are a couple of characters Young dislikes, Herbert Blackett and his eldest daughter, and there she really keeps her thumb on the scales. H. Young wrote with ironic tenderness — an irony more revealing because of the tenderness — about the rather comfortably off English middle classes.James Fraser and Flora Blackett are students at the same university and have developed a mild flirtation, and middle daughter Rhoda has begun borrowing books from Miss Spanner. Also living with the Frasers is Rosamund’s close friend, Miss Spanner, a spinster in her forties, somewhat akin to a maiden aunt. Like the hapless Baron from Elizabeth von Armin’s novel, The Caravaners, Herbert Blackett – with his pompous nature and lack of self-awareness – has completely underestimated his wife’s intelligence, something that is all too apparent to the reader. Blackett is as pompous and ridiculous as any character in Dickens, and it is a true delight to watch his world unravel around him, without his understanding or knowing why.