REVIEW: Henrietta's War
Jun. 8th, 2020 07:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllHenrietta’s War: Joyce Dennys Bloomsbury 2009
This series of fictional letters written during the second world war was first brought together in one volume in 1985. They’d previously been serialised during the war itself. It made me think of a Venn diagram between Mrs Tim and The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Society with a dollop of Dad’s Army.
They purport to be letters written by Mrs Henrietta Brown, a middle-aged doctor’s wife living in a Devon coastal town. She’s writing to her childhood friend Robert, now a general in the army fighting in France, wanting news of home. I gather it was somewhat autobiographical. The letters are vivid portraits of a community facing privations, changes and a constant, looming threat, but with determined old ladies, baffled housewives and the comedy of human nature being what it is. They run from October 1939 to the end of 1941, I only wish they had gone on longer.
We get to know Henrietta and all her weaknesses, her friends Lady B, the glamourpuss Faith and Mrs Savernack. These are the ladies who form a sewing bee, who have the hearts of lionesses and very down-to-earth adventures. Henrietta’s husband Charles is just demonstrative enough when he isn’t rushed off his feet. Their children, Bill and ‘the Linnet’, are old enough to go and serve, leading to all kinds of maternal pangs. Henrietta also records how their town is taken over by extraordinary Visitors (people who escape the city, the evacuees proper and soldiers) and what the locals really think about them.
Reading it in 2020 A.D. was interesting, but I’m no fan of reaching for the wartime metaphor for what we’re going through, as I don’t find it illuminating, and I was struck by the differences in our experiences.
Because of its nature, this wasn’t at all a book to sit down and read in long stretches. Ideally, you’d want to read Dennys’s writing as the first audience did, pretending you were receiving each letter yourself, that you were Robert, perhaps, savouring each one, although, no, the readers would have been going through something similar to Henrietta. Each letter mostly revolves around one theme and amusing incident, each one building on the previous ones to portray a war experience. I generally read a couple of months’ worth of letters in one go. So, it’s a book to dip in and out of, perhaps.
The book also features the sharp, stylish illustrations of the heroine/author herself.
[Edited on 26/11/2022.]
This series of fictional letters written during the second world war was first brought together in one volume in 1985. They’d previously been serialised during the war itself. It made me think of a Venn diagram between Mrs Tim and The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Society with a dollop of Dad’s Army.
They purport to be letters written by Mrs Henrietta Brown, a middle-aged doctor’s wife living in a Devon coastal town. She’s writing to her childhood friend Robert, now a general in the army fighting in France, wanting news of home. I gather it was somewhat autobiographical. The letters are vivid portraits of a community facing privations, changes and a constant, looming threat, but with determined old ladies, baffled housewives and the comedy of human nature being what it is. They run from October 1939 to the end of 1941, I only wish they had gone on longer.
We get to know Henrietta and all her weaknesses, her friends Lady B, the glamourpuss Faith and Mrs Savernack. These are the ladies who form a sewing bee, who have the hearts of lionesses and very down-to-earth adventures. Henrietta’s husband Charles is just demonstrative enough when he isn’t rushed off his feet. Their children, Bill and ‘the Linnet’, are old enough to go and serve, leading to all kinds of maternal pangs. Henrietta also records how their town is taken over by extraordinary Visitors (people who escape the city, the evacuees proper and soldiers) and what the locals really think about them.
Reading it in 2020 A.D. was interesting, but I’m no fan of reaching for the wartime metaphor for what we’re going through, as I don’t find it illuminating, and I was struck by the differences in our experiences.
Because of its nature, this wasn’t at all a book to sit down and read in long stretches. Ideally, you’d want to read Dennys’s writing as the first audience did, pretending you were receiving each letter yourself, that you were Robert, perhaps, savouring each one, although, no, the readers would have been going through something similar to Henrietta. Each letter mostly revolves around one theme and amusing incident, each one building on the previous ones to portray a war experience. I generally read a couple of months’ worth of letters in one go. So, it’s a book to dip in and out of, perhaps.
The book also features the sharp, stylish illustrations of the heroine/author herself.
[Edited on 26/11/2022.]
