A Double Affair by Angela Thirkell

When I resumed blogging in January the plan was that I would limit my posts to writing about books I had read and books I had written or am writing.  My thought was that this would be a more mangeable use of time and not be overly demanding.  As a result longer gaps between posts would be the norm, but the delay between the two most recent posts is not due to not having finished any books.  In fact, I have finished two, A Double Affair, the subject of this post and an 800 page biography of Andrew Carnegie. 

The major reason for this delay has been extensive and intensive preparations for two talks - one today at the Brooklyn Historical Society and another tomorrow at the Montclair Women's Club.  But for the second time this winter, the weather has played havoc with my plans.  The major snow storm that is going on around me is preventing me from going to Brooklyn today and tomorrow's program has already been cancelled.  I guess the lesson is to be flexible, but it is definitely weird to plan everything around these two talks and then have neither of them take place.

In writing about A Double Affair, I first want to say something that I have been meaning to say about a number of prior posts on Angela Thirkell's books or more specifically the pictures that I have been including.  The pictures come off the Internet and I have no idea as to how they are supposed to relate to the book.  Most of the books I have been reading come from the original American editions (courtesy of the Rutgers library) and have no pictures either inside or on the cover. 

It may be that the picture used for this book is supposed to be a portrait of Edith Graham.  Edith is the last of the six Graham children, as noted in my last post, the three Graham daughters have played major parts in the novels while the three sons appear seldom and are treated almost as a group, not as individuals.  Edith not only plays a major part in the later novels, but also seems to have the longest running courtship in all of Thirkeldom and it doesn't end in this book. 

Like many novelists that I have read Thirkell sometimes uses the dynamic of one man or one woman with multiple possible candidates as their future spouse.  Typically it is a 2-1 dynamic, but in A Double Affair, Thirkell outdoes herself and actually sets up three possible suitors for Edith.  At the end of the prior book, Never to Late I was starting to wonder exactly how that would work out.  One of the differences between Thirkell and her literary ancestor Anthony Trollope is that Thirkell always seems to work out some kind of satisfactory resolution for the loser while Trollope doesn't.  No one likes to see the more painful results that Trollope sometimes writes, but it also seems more real - not every story has a story book ending.  

So given in this case there seemed to be at least two possible losers, I wasn't sure how Thirkell would work it all out.  Unfortunately I must say that I was somewhat disappointed with her solution as in this book Thirkell does something that I don't ever remember her doing before or at least not to this degree.  It is not unlike a criticism of some mystery novels that with solutions that seem to pulled out of a hat - what used to be called deux ex machina - God in a machine - resolution by divine intervention.  In this case the divine intervention takes the form of two new characters, sisters who appear for the first time and are almost instantly wooed and won by two of Edith's potential husbands.  There is some reference to one of the couples having met before, but it feels almost like marathon like courtship of Edith Graham has been offset by two of the shortest courtships on record.  

Although I was disappointed in this and would have to say that A Double Affair isn't one of my favorites, I still enjoyed it and am glad to have read it.  To paraphrase something that somebody said after a 21-1 defeat in vintage baseball - a bad day of Thirkell is better than a good day of yard work.  Or in today's context, better than a good day of snow shoveling.