A Glove Shop in Vienna

I pulled this Eva Ibbotson book off the shelves at the Athenaeum just because I knew I hadn't read it yet; it wasn't till I got home that I realised that it was actually a collection of short stories. I hadn't known that Ibbotson wrote a large number of short stories for magazines like Good Housekeeping and Women's Journal before she became established as a novelist -- when A Glove Shop in Vienna was published, she had only two novels to her name.

It's possible that a whole volume of Eva Ibbotson short stories might be a bit much to consume in one go. The usual Ibbotson ingredients are all here -- intense romance, love at first sight, tragic partings, gentle humour, Russia and France, beautiful and trusting young girls, brave and sensitive young men... It's all very lovely and perfect comfort reading, but I was happy to intersperse these stories with other reading material.

Maybe my favourite was the final story, 'A Question of Riches,' which is in some ways not a typical Ibbotson story at all: it features a young boy at boarding school who sent to stay with each of his grandmothers in turn -- one is rich and haughty, one is poor and loving. Have a guess which grandmother Jeremy chooses to spend Christmas with?