The arrival of the post can sometimes only add to my reading dilemmas, though in the nicest possible way. Either I have ordered a book from somewhere, or a publisher has very kindly sent me one. I have, over the years, managed to cut down the number of books that arrive (it was once up to fifty a week) and rarely ask for them now, preferring the freedom of making my own choices, but I do make exceptions.
I’m not sure Handheld Press were entirely on my radar. They may have emailed before but that whole inbox thing runs away with me sometimes too, but anyway I noticed the most recent message and I would urge you to check them out, because Handheld definitely publish our sort of books. The book in question they were promoting was a novel, Business as Usual by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford.
The description was enough to draw me in...
‘Business as Usual is a charming 1933 novel about the Selfridges book department and its library. An illustrated novel in letters, it tells the story of Hilary Fane, an Edinburgh girl fresh out of university who is determined to support herself by herself by her own earnings in London for a year, despite the resentment of her surgeon fiance. After a nervous beginning looking for a job while her savings shrink, she finds work as a typist in the London department store of Everyman's (a very thin disguise for Selfridges). Through luck and an inability to type well she rises rapidly through the ranks to work in the library, where she has to enforce modernising systems on her entrenched and frosty colleagues.’
Anyway, I requested a copy of Business As Usual and was delighted when it arrived tissue-wrapped to reveal that delightful cover. It was one of those to open at the breakfast table, start reading and carry on.
Hilary Fane is quietly determined to fill the year between leaving university and marrying her surgeon fiancée with a bout of financial independence and so heads from Edinburgh to London in search of work. Written in the form of letters (and the format works like a dream) Basil is unimpressed and this much becomes apparent from Hilary’s letters to him. Finding employment for women in the early 1930s was nigh on impossible and, passed from one interview to another, Hilary finally ends up at Everyman’s department store as a stand in for someone who has succumbed to appendicitis. Her first job will be completing address labels for the books being sent out from the store...for nine hours a day, for week after week and all for the princely sum of £2:10:0 a week. Promotion based on her failings eventually comes Heather’s way and she is soon working in the store’s library.
If you enjoyed books like High Wages by Dorothy Whipple or Ladies Paradise by Emile Zola (follow the links to my thoughts on here) then you will certainly enjoy Business As Usual, not only for its wonderful insights into life in a London department store but also for insights into women’s lives in the 1930s. The men rule the roost in the store and below them the spinsters who have been in post since Jurassic times, all with their set ways and mysterious and inexplicable systems. Hilary has a wry eye for the amusing and her comments in her letters to Basil and her family are a delight to read. Budgeting to the nearest halfpenny whilst knowing that, though her life wasn’t going to depend on it forever, that was certainly not the case for the women she worked with, Hilary creates a moving and believable image of the lives of these lone women holding body and soul together for year on year. This the generation affected by deprivations of the First World War and the shortage of men.
And now of course it feels as if the department store in 2020 might be doomed, they no longer seem to be the bustling and essential places they once were, making books like Business As Usual an important part of their history.
And alongside all this two prolific authors who I had never heard of. Kate Macdonald’s introduction reveals all. Meticulous research has unearthed a wealth of information about the lives and writing of Jane Oliver (Helen Rees nee Evans) and Ann Stafford (Anne Pedler).
I have almost finished Business As Usual and will be sad when I turn the final page. Sometimes, when the weather’s awful and the world seems in turmoil, it pays to fill the hot water bottle and head for the sofa with a book like this. I’ll call it comfort reading for now, though that does Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford a disservice. The issues they raise under the guise of humour deserve much closer scrutiny, making this a great basis for a book group discussion.
So how about your comfort reads...
And books about shops and shopping...there must be more...
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