Jenny Wren is Jenny Rendall - one of two sisters living with their mother in a boarding house in Upper Radstowe (Bristol, for those interested in imaginary topography). Jenny and Dahlia are the daughters of sensual countrywoman Louisa, and an academic, intellectual, socially superior, and now deceased father. Like Jane Austen, the book delights in opposites and contrasts, and also in picking them apart at the seams to show that they are often not quite what they seem. Like Jane Austen, she is acutely aware of the minutiae of the English class system. And she is also in the business of love and marriage. The marriage of the Rendall parents at the heart of the book is one where sexual attraction overpowers propriety - and this marriage infects all of the other relationships and individuals in the book - from the desiccated women who see Louisa's sensuality as some kind of unspoken threat, to the men who cast their eyes over the Rendall women. Jenny Wren herself holds this together - an unreal character, feeling sexual desire and social unease in a toxic combination. It's a more complex book than may appear.

“In the sloping, one sided street called Beulah Mount, no two houses are alike. Some of them are flat fronted, a few are bow-windowed and some have flimsy, roofed balconies outside the first floor windows, and these, even when in need of painting, give an effect of diminished but persistent gaiety to a terrace built in an age of leisure and of privilege.”
Jenny and her older sister Dahlia Rendall have recently moved from their old home at the white farm, in the countryside to a house in Upper Radstowe. Here their mother has installed the first of her lodgers, young Mr Cummings, who knows about antique furniture and has ambitions for a shop of his own. Jenny and Dahlia are socially superior to their mother, taking after their gentleman father who had previously protected them from their mother’s common ways and the gossip surrounding a supposed affair years earlier. Now Jenny and Dahlia feel the sharp glances of their neighbours who see the still beautiful Louisa as not respectable and assume her daughters are no better. Dahlia is more laid back, but Jenny is acutely embarrassed by her mother, and lives in horror of her mother’s older sister Sarah descending on them. Next door – in another house of lodgers lives the vicious Miss Jewel, jealously guarding her lodger the curate Mr Sproat and watching Louisa with delicious disapproval, noticing farmer Thomas Grimshaw’s weekly visits and spying on Jenny and Dahlia too.
“Jenny stayed in the sitting room. She was wondering why, among so many disadvantages, they had to endure the daily annoyance of hearing their names mispronounced, when there were so many which could have been uttered without offence. This thought had often occurred to her father, and he had to blame himself. Louisa chose the first child’s name, when he was still sufficiently in love to forget how she would misuse it but, when Jenny was born, he insisted that her name must not end like Dahlia’s with a vowel, and characteristically overlooked the dangerous consonant. Jenny was registered, she was not christened, as Jennifer, and Louisa stubbornly refused to accept the abbreviations he and Dahlia used.”
Although a tentative friendship develops between Jenny and Edwin Cummings the lodger, Jenny dreams of another life, a life she feels must be denied her because of her mother. So when Jenny meets the handsome young squire Cyril Merriman – Jenny is afraid of him knowing her real name. Cyril meets Jenny secretly in the woods and fields that she loves – believing her name to be called Jenny Wren. Dahlia meanwhile befriends the rather serious Mr Sproat, who given the task of finding more lodgers for the Rendalls, encourages the rather sad little Miss Morrison to make her home with them. Poor Miss Morrison, who sees Mr Sproat’s interest in her living arrangements as being something more than they are.
This is a novel about social inequalities and the dissatisfaction that this can cause. Dahlia and Jenny’s father married beneath him, and rued the day. He made sure that his daughters grew up young ladies, but they are now caught between the class they feel part of and their mother’s background, and the realities of living in a boarding house. Louisa works hard for her daughters, beginning sadly to acknowledge that she may be holding them back. Jenny and Dahlia have to learn that those things which are best for them and will provide for them a safer happier and more stable future are maybe closer than they thought.
Having read other E H Young books – I could see where the story was going right from the start, although this predictability didn’t in any way spoil it for me. I already have the sequel to this novel; The Curate’s Wife on my TBR and I am looking forward to it. Although not my favourite E H Young novel to date – that would be William, this is an excellent novel, I love E H Young’s Upper Radstowe, and the small disappointed lives she often writes about.

This is a book about trying to live within the strictures of Victorian sociability when one does not fit neatly into any of the categories. Jenny Rendall's father married down, his wife Louisa was never quite able to adapt to middle class rules of behavior. Sidney Rendall was able to educate his daughters in social graces, and Jenny, in particular, takes to the demands and graces of middle-class life. Sidney's death creates a crisis for the family. To earn money Louisa and her daughters attempt to start a boarding house. The work and the clientele are shocks to Jenny's delicate sensibilities. She finds herself regularly embarrassed by Louisa, but disquieted by her embarrassment. When Jenny meets the heir to the local manor her shame leads her to adopt a fake persona, becoming the upscale Jenny Wren.

A novel about class and manners, the book presents Jenny as the parvenu. She is the woman who has been introduced to the sensibilities of the upper classes, but who can't materially sustain them. Jenny has acquired enough of the sensory delicacies of the upper classes to feel acutely upset at her situation, but she lacks the resources of the upper class that would prevent her problems. Louisa retains enough of her lower-class orientation to enjoy more visceral pleasures, but not enough to avoid being horrified by her sister the servant and her suitor/moneylender Mr. Grimshaw. The novel roils in intellectual and emotional discomfort. Everyone is discontented. Weeding through that discomfort takes a great deal out of each of the characters. Though the book is set in the early 20th century, it had a very 19th century feel to me. ( )

Comparisons to Jane Austen are inevitable. "Jane Austen" becomes a kind of shorthand for an English novel that concerns itself primarily with the lives and relationships of women, and in particular their pursuit of husbands. Jenny Wren centers on the lives of two sisters, Dahlia and Jenny Rendall, who live with their mother in the upscale suburb of Upper Radstowe, where the widowed Mrs. Rendall keeps a boarding house. The girls' father, Sidney Rendall, was a scholar who married below his class, and his younger daughter, Jenny, has inherited his cultured distaste for her mother's rusticity. She dreams of marrying a squire—and when she actually meets one, she hides the shame of her mother's origins, and the deeper shame of her mother's affair with the farmer Thomas Grimshaw.

Like Jane Austen, E.H. Young has a a subtle sense of humor, a satirical attitude toward the British class system, and a beautiful prose style. Like Jane Austen, E.H. Young explores the conflicts between the inner lives of her characters and the external reality in which they are forced to live and interact with other people. Jenny, with her prejudices and her self-absorption, is in many ways an unsympathetic character, but Young is interested in exploring the ability of people to love each other despite, and perhaps even because of their flaws. One of the most affecting aspects of the novel is the relationship between Louisa Rendall and her daughters: Young beautifully renders the ways in which their antagonism—Jenny's shame, Louisa's resentment—shades into loyalty and mutual affection.

Unlike Jane Austen, E.H. Young is acutely aware that her characters possess physical bodies, with all of the desires or aversions that accompany those bodies. In her longing for intimacy, unfulfilled in her unequal marriage to Sidney Rendall, Louisa has an extramarital affair with Thomas Grimshaw. The pious young curate, Cecil Sproat, discovers, in his attraction to Dahlia, that he can be motivated by concerns of the flesh as well as by concerns of the spirit. Miss Morrison, a spinster who would have been more at home in a novel by Barbara Pym, comes to realize that, having entirely repressed her sexual nature, her charm even for a pious curate is incomplete. Sidney Rendall represents mind and spirit; Louisa Rendall represents sexuality: the question is whether Jenny and Dahlia can reconcile both sides of their inheritance, and express them in a healthy and fulfilling manner in their own lives.

E.H. Young writes beautiful sentences, many or which are like short stories in themselves. Here, for example, is a description of Miss Morrison, who comes to board with the Rendalls: "Here was the desired respectable spinster, without the fussiness Dahlia feared: here, also, was money punctually paid, but Miss Morrison's desire to be at home in Beulah Mount, to be sisterly with her young hostesses, sympathetic with their mother and comradely with Mr. Cummings, to assert, by practice, her belief that all was right with the world, had the nature of a lesson disguised as a play."

I wish I could regularly write sentences that say so much, so flowingly, and that come around to such a witty and astute summing up. ( )

This was an engaging read, about two sisters of socially "mixed" parentage, and their differing attitudes toward the reduced circumstances created by the death of their father. Jenny feels the loss of status caused by her mother's need to take in lodgers, and the shame of the rumored scandal in her mother's past. She wants her old life back, and pins her hopes for the future on an obviously unworthy young man, from whom she feels the need to hide her true identity. Although the book is named for Jenny, the story isn't exclusively hers, and I found her sister Dahlia to be a more appealing character, with her practical approach to life and happiness. Dahlia will not be brought down by "love", and is more amused than offended by the scorn of upright neighbors or relatives. Although she thinks with her head rather than her heart, one gets the feeling that someday she will be surprised by joy, unlikely as that may seem when she is plainly moving toward a marriage with the deliriously unexciting but dependable Mr. Sproat. A heart-wrenching, O. Henry-ishly ironic development near the end of this book makes me even more eager to carry on with The Curate's Wife, for clearly E. H. Young can be counted on to throw her readers, as well as her characters, a curve from time to time. ( )