REVIEW: Mariana
Oct. 30th, 2025 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllMariana: Monica Dickens
Persephone Books, 2022 reprint
Persephone tried to sell this as 1930s chicklit in the blurb, but it feels solidly middlebrow. Both a coming-of-age and romantic novel, I may perhaps have come to it too late in life, because I felt too much distance from our heroine, who lacks Bridget Jones’s charm, although to some extent, we’re meant to find her hard to like.
The novel is bookended by a wartime event, where a young married woman, who still thinks of herself as a girl, has to wait the longest night of her life through a storm having heard potentially devastating news about her husband on the radio, but the phone lines are down and it would be folly to leave the house in the country until the storm has passed. The conceit is that she thinks back to all that has brought her here, though the focus is personal and domestic.
Mary Shannon and her widowed mother spend their holidays in Charlbury with Mary’s father’s family. She adores it, the countryside, the traditions, both silly and familial, that she has known all her childhood. She loves spending time there with her cousins, most of all Denys, two years older than her. Her rather admirable mother, Lily, is less ecstatic about the visits to Charlbury, but well capable of making the best of them.
They spend the rest of their time in London, living with Lily’s actor brother. She is a teacher of domestic arts who later becomes the manager of a fashion boutique. The Shannons run a well-regarded restaurant, but Mary’s grandparents behave like landed gentry, and it is her grandfather who gets Mary into a good secondary school, not her scholastic abilities.
Mary is described as being so shy that she’s self-absorbed. She isn’t very bright, believing herself to be engaged to her first cousin, who gives her every reason to keep believing this until she’s a teenager. Conventional and stubborn, she decides to study dramatic arts after leaving school because her more talented best friend, Angela, is doing so. Mary is terrible, and, to her horror, her uncle returns from Hollywood in time to see her end of year performance. When it all goes to pot, her mother suggests that she go to France to study dressmaking with an eye to helping out at the boutique.
This is where the novel switches from coming-of-age to romance, for Mary, people watching, attracts a suave Frenchman, who says all the right things – or does he? Just as she realises that she doesn’t love him and doesn’t want to make Paris her home, she grasps that her mother is in dire financial straits, and getting engaged would allow her to help.
That episode gets resolved in a way that is only surprising to Mary, and we jump ahead to a Mary who is more comfortable in her own skin, except for the recurring pains that this reader as medic rightly diagnosed just when she meets The Right Chap. Finally, finally, once she makes it through an operation, she is about to get the future she longed for, except she hadn’t been paying attention to international affairs, and Hitler upsets her honeymoon, and may indeed take away the happily married future she was embarking on (echoing what happened to her mother in the first world war.)
It took ages for the reason for the title to reveal itself – Mary’s cousin Denys does call her Maria, but the title comes from Tennyson’s poem, which Mary botches reciting at drama school, in part because she doesn’t understand it. The detail is acute – the foreword makes the valid points that Dickens was writing in 1940, using her childhood and youth to a large extent as material, and looking back with a nostalgia that was starting to be honed by deprivation. Every now and then, there’s an absolute gem of a description, and Mary’s view of the world, both misguided and judgmental in the way that only youth can be, is consistent and clear.
Some of the later plot developments are a little too convenient, but the reader is able to admire Lily Shannon, to nod at Grandma Shannon’s good advice and see the heroine grow up a little. Of course, Monica Dickens could not have known that naming a very minor character Guy Ritchie would lead this reader to snicker some eighty five years later. One last thing, I disliked the painting they used for the cover, even if it was period appropriate, the hair colouring was all wrong.
Persephone Books, 2022 reprint
Persephone tried to sell this as 1930s chicklit in the blurb, but it feels solidly middlebrow. Both a coming-of-age and romantic novel, I may perhaps have come to it too late in life, because I felt too much distance from our heroine, who lacks Bridget Jones’s charm, although to some extent, we’re meant to find her hard to like.
The novel is bookended by a wartime event, where a young married woman, who still thinks of herself as a girl, has to wait the longest night of her life through a storm having heard potentially devastating news about her husband on the radio, but the phone lines are down and it would be folly to leave the house in the country until the storm has passed. The conceit is that she thinks back to all that has brought her here, though the focus is personal and domestic.
Mary Shannon and her widowed mother spend their holidays in Charlbury with Mary’s father’s family. She adores it, the countryside, the traditions, both silly and familial, that she has known all her childhood. She loves spending time there with her cousins, most of all Denys, two years older than her. Her rather admirable mother, Lily, is less ecstatic about the visits to Charlbury, but well capable of making the best of them.
They spend the rest of their time in London, living with Lily’s actor brother. She is a teacher of domestic arts who later becomes the manager of a fashion boutique. The Shannons run a well-regarded restaurant, but Mary’s grandparents behave like landed gentry, and it is her grandfather who gets Mary into a good secondary school, not her scholastic abilities.
Mary is described as being so shy that she’s self-absorbed. She isn’t very bright, believing herself to be engaged to her first cousin, who gives her every reason to keep believing this until she’s a teenager. Conventional and stubborn, she decides to study dramatic arts after leaving school because her more talented best friend, Angela, is doing so. Mary is terrible, and, to her horror, her uncle returns from Hollywood in time to see her end of year performance. When it all goes to pot, her mother suggests that she go to France to study dressmaking with an eye to helping out at the boutique.
This is where the novel switches from coming-of-age to romance, for Mary, people watching, attracts a suave Frenchman, who says all the right things – or does he? Just as she realises that she doesn’t love him and doesn’t want to make Paris her home, she grasps that her mother is in dire financial straits, and getting engaged would allow her to help.
That episode gets resolved in a way that is only surprising to Mary, and we jump ahead to a Mary who is more comfortable in her own skin, except for the recurring pains that this reader as medic rightly diagnosed just when she meets The Right Chap. Finally, finally, once she makes it through an operation, she is about to get the future she longed for, except she hadn’t been paying attention to international affairs, and Hitler upsets her honeymoon, and may indeed take away the happily married future she was embarking on (echoing what happened to her mother in the first world war.)
It took ages for the reason for the title to reveal itself – Mary’s cousin Denys does call her Maria, but the title comes from Tennyson’s poem, which Mary botches reciting at drama school, in part because she doesn’t understand it. The detail is acute – the foreword makes the valid points that Dickens was writing in 1940, using her childhood and youth to a large extent as material, and looking back with a nostalgia that was starting to be honed by deprivation. Every now and then, there’s an absolute gem of a description, and Mary’s view of the world, both misguided and judgmental in the way that only youth can be, is consistent and clear.
Some of the later plot developments are a little too convenient, but the reader is able to admire Lily Shannon, to nod at Grandma Shannon’s good advice and see the heroine grow up a little. Of course, Monica Dickens could not have known that naming a very minor character Guy Ritchie would lead this reader to snicker some eighty five years later. One last thing, I disliked the painting they used for the cover, even if it was period appropriate, the hair colouring was all wrong.
