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Bezig met laden... A Pink Front Door (1959)door Stella Gibbons
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Onderdeel van de uitgeversreeks(en)Furrowed Middlebrow (60)
James's gesture with the key was cautious because he was not always sure of who or what he would find in the hall when he got in. It might be someone in tears, or someone asleep while they filled up time waiting to catch a train, or someone drunk. James Muir has reason to be cautious about entering his own home. His wife Daisy just can't resist solving everyone else's problems. There's Delia Huxtable, a young unwed mother, and her daughter Evelyn ('my illegit'), Molly Raymond, who falls far too easily in love, Tibbs, an Eastern European refugee, and Daisy's old school friend Don ('The Hulk') and his family, for whom Daisy commandeers her neighbour Mrs Cavendish's top floor. All watched over, reluctantly, by Daisy's father, a retired Army man, her elderly cousins Ella and Marcia (the latter a Dame thanks to her World War I service), and the long-suffering James-not to mention her young son James Too ('That white thing? I thought it was a parcel. She drags that child around too much.') But when Mrs Cavendish decides to enslave Don's wife to replace her lost servants and Molly turns her affections on James, Daisy is forced to re-think her priorities. First published in 1959 and reprinted here for the first time, A Pink Front Door is one of Stella Gibbons' most delightful and perceptive social comedies. This new edition features an introduction by twentieth-century women's historian Elizabeth Crawford. 'As usual Stella Gibbons tells a good story, combining a sharp eye for absurdities with pity for poor humans' Birmingham Post Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.91Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999WaarderingGemiddelde: (4.14)
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All was sort of well till one of these 'drears' fell in love with Daisie's husband James.
It's mostly a gloomy comedy, though a serious moment was had by one of the snooty characters, Anthea:
The soup in the thermos was really hot, and already her small porcelain face was losing its cold pink for a warmer tint, but just for a moment - in the quiet and the hush of the fog-shrouded night, in the silent room surrounded by the things that spoke of a happier past and a future that seemed to have no chance of becoming anything but ever more impoverished, staitened, hopeless and sad - the thought of suicide touched her mind.
Funny to think that there was absolutely nothing and no one at this particular moment to stop her going downstairs and turning on the gas oven and putting her head into it . . . No more having to be always graceful and gay, no more tiredness, no more hateful thoughts about losing one's head and one's chances . . . just a few minutes' sickness and terror, and then eternity.
Things turn out well enough for the gloomy Anthea, by the way.
Gibbons usually makes much of the flower world, etc. but in A PINK FRONT DOOR not so much.
The novel ends with old Marcia musing on life and the death of the painter of the streets, Ella:
'For all that matters in the world,' she thought, standing by the window, 'are duty and courage and love. Art, philosophy and science are toys, but by the other three a human being can live and die.' She had always known about duty and courage; now she must learn about love.
Gibbon's didn't publish anything during the last twenty years of her life. She left two works unpublished. (