The Miss Buncle Books by D E Stevenson

 

cover credit: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1200465.Miss_Buncle_s_Book

The reviewer’s bias: I prefer stories with well developed, pleasant characters. I like writing that is clever and witty – entertaining in itself. I prefer first person narratives, or close third person narratives. I dislike thinly disguised fanfic and stories with gaping plot holes.

Not science fiction. As I have mentioned before, I like “little” stories. Stories that concern themselves with issues that, while they may gravely concern the characters, they have no consequences for the world, galaxy, or universe at large. Plus, I am somewhat of an anglophile, and find “old time” life in Britain in the first half of 20th century interesting. In pursuit of that interest I have sought out and enjoy reading light novels about life in Britain in that time period. I recognize that they may not be the most realistic presentation of that life, but since they were written as contemporary fiction at the time, I think that you do get a taste of those now long by-gone times. At one extreme of this type of stories, you have the stories of P G Wodehouse, which no one is likely to take as being anywhere close to realistic. At the other extreme, you have the darker, more literary books by Evelyn Waugh. I prefer reading books on the Wodehouse side of High Street.

Three decades ago or so, I read a number of these light novels of everyday life in Britain, including Miss Read’s Fairacre Novels and Thrush Green stories, as well as a number of books by D E Stevenson. Stevenson wrote over 40 “light romantic novels” beginning in 1923 and up to 1970. The ones I read were rather old books back when I borrowed them from the library and I figured that they would’ve been long purged from library stacks many years ago. But I was wrong. One of the blogs I follow is The Next Fifty http://wanda-thenextfifty.blogspot.com/ It's blogger, Wanda, reviewed Miss Buncle Book. I commented that I was surprised to see that D E Stevenson was still being read, but I guess there is still a readership for those types of stories. Indeed it appears that at least four of them were reprinted only ten years ago or so, the Miss Buncle’s Series of four books. Intrigued, I ordered up all four books from the library, and this is the review of those four books. Having to order them up from various libraries, I read them out of order, but I don’t think it matters much in what order you read them, since the second book’s title is a spoiler for the first book…

 

cover credit: Amazon.com

Miss Buncle’s Book (1934) Miss Buncle Married (1936) The Two Mrs Abbotts (1943) and The Four Graces (1946)

I don’t like spoilers, so I’ll only outline the stories briefly.

Miss Buncle’s Book tells the story of a single woman in her early 30’s (I’d guess) who lives in the house she grew up in located in the small village of Silverstream. Written during the Great Depression, Miss Buncle finds that the dividends she’s been living on no longer pays the bills. In desperation to generate an income, she decides to write a book, since everyone knows that writing a book is a certain road to fame and fortune. Trust me on that. It was either that or raising chickens. Because she believes that she has no imagination, she bases her story on the people she knows in the village – and all the things she knows and has observed about them, good and bad. She merely changes their names and the name of the village to Copperfield. In her book she describes their ordinary lives, and then has a magical “Golden Boy” come through the village who magically awakens them to their unhappiness. In the books, things happen as a result of this magical intervention.

 

cover credit:https://www.pinterest.com/pin/249246160603258999/

So much for the book. She keeps it a deep secret, and finds a publisher straight away. She publishes it under the pen name of John Smith, which is a good thing since the book becomes something of a best seller and finds its way to Silverstream. There, the inhabitants recognize themselves in the book and are up in arms about their thinly disguised portraits in it. They want to sue John Smith for libel, and failing that, horse-whip him. However, the book has much the same effect of the Golden Boy in the story. It opens their eyes, and some of the events of the book come more or less to pass, as a result. All this time Miss Buncle is living under the threat of being discovered as the author – though she’s so plain and inconsequential that no one ever suspects her. While this is all going on, she writes a sequel describing the uproar in the village as a result of this book. However, by the time this book is published Miss Buncle,  her secret now revealed, has found a love and slipped away with her new husband.

So much for the plot. The story, like all the others in this set, is written in omnipresent 3^rd person, which is my least favorite style. Most of us live our lives in first person singular, and that style seems to me to be the most natural way to tell a story. I don’t like being a god and looking down on the characters as they move inevitably to their reward or doom. However, D E Stevenson’s third person is not a god, but a village nosy-parker/gossip. You get to know everyone involved. Each has their little stories woven in throughout the story. But it’s a ground level view of them, almost as if you knew them from gossip, so I didn’t mind her style at all. And well, clearly she was having fun writing this novel about a novice writer. There are lots of intricately moving parts in this story which kept me reading and looking forward to reading more of it.

 

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Miss Buncle Married takes up her story two years later. She and her husband move to a new little town and once again we are treated to D E Stevenson’s exploration of different types of people. The title character has matured and become more sophisticated – somewhat unconvincingly, but no matter. There are less moving parts in this book. The romance of her husband’s nephew is a prominent element of the book. It is resolved a little too neatly, in my opinion, but still the book is entertaining, if not quite up to the standard of the first one. (I read this one first, and enjoyed it, so it’s good, just not as good as the first story.)

 

cover credit: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2426629.The_Two_Mrs_Abbotts

The Two Mrs Abbotts is set something like seven years later, in the middle of World War ll. The title characters are Barbara Abbott (nee Buncle) and the wife of her husband’s nephew, who is now away fight in the war in North Africa. In this story we get a little portrait of life during the war in England, and a variety of sub-plots. The romantic sub-plot this time around revolves around a popular romance novelist who has suddenly become disenchanted with her work, and so she takes a holiday, boarding with the younger Mrs Abbott to escape her older sister who is her agent, business manager, and publicity agent who wants her to continue writing and earning them money.

 

cover credit: https://thecaptivereader.com/2013/06/06/the-four-graces-d-e-stevenson/

The Four Graces shares a few characters from the last two books, but is otherwise a different story altogether. It tells the story of a vicar with four daughters in their 20’s, with a romance or two and various trials and tribulations set in the last year or so of World War ll. Once more you get to know the various characters, though fewer this time than the previous stories. This was probably my second favorite book of the set.

As I said way back in the introduction to these little reviews, I like to read this type of story to get an idea of what everyday life was like when these were contemporary stories. These books had a curious takeaway. Class. (Upper?) Middle class. Almost all the named character in these stories either employed at least one servant, and more likely more, or were servants themselves. Even the poor Miss Buncle employed her old nurse/nanny as her housekeeper, who did all the cooking and cleaning for her. Miss Buncle might potter around in her garden, but it was her old servant who did all the house work, cooking, and tea making in the house. And the same for all her associates. I am sure that there were many more people in the village, but we only get to know the class of people wealthy enough to employ servants. And these aren’t people living in country homes. They were pretty much middle class people, with husbands that worked or their widows.

Married Miss Buncle employs not only her old nanny, but a husband and wife team to keep the house and garden. And when she has her children, her old nanny is once again a nanny to her children. She spents her day visiting neighbors, going or hosting teas, and going out to dinner. She would sometimes go up to the nursery and have tea with her children. Not only was I struck by the extensive use of servants in modestly wealthy households, but eighty years later, I was also struck by the idleness of these women’s lives. Of course I don’t know how authentic a portrait of this class these books are, they are fiction, after all, but I’m sure there is some truth in them. I suspect that D E Stevenson drew on her lifestyle for her books.

One other thing struck me – her treatment of lower class Londoners, driven to the countryside by the blitz and their children. They are portrayed rather condescendingly, as dirty, lazy, ignorant, or selfish. The children, if raised properly in the countryside, could be taught to be proper domestic servants. Though, in the end, she usually gives them some good characteristics, acknowledging that they are a product of a hard life.

Clearly these books are not everyone’s cup of tea. Probably not yours. But I enjoyed them. Indeed, I’m reading some Miss Read stories now. I may review them at a later date.