Mariana

My adult fiction pile has been a bit slender lately, so I was casting around for something to read, when I remembered that there were a couple of novels in this collection of Monica Dickens' books that I hadn't ever got around to reading. I'd bought it yonks ago mostly for One Pair of Hands (memoir about working as a domestic servant in the 1930s) and One Pair of Feet (memoir about working as a nurse).

Mariana was first published in 1940, after One Pair of Hands, when Dickens was only about twenty three, and apparently it's quite autobiographical. It's very much a young author's book, focused on Mary's childhood and adolescence, and her various misadventures in love and career. Ostensibly the message of the novel is something about becoming an individual and growing into one's own unique personality -- it's just a shame that Mary seems to accomplish this mostly by meeting the perfect man. 

Mariana is a gently funny novel, but plot-wise there is not much at stake here (though Dickens does her best to ratchet up the tension by making Mary's husband's ship sink on the third page -- and of course we don't yet know exactly who that husband might be). Nonetheless it's engaging, and the details of daily life in 1930s London are the main drawcard for me: dances, theatre, nightclubs, fashion, fog, appendicitis (which means weeks lying luxuriously in hospital and then convalescence at the seaside afterwards). Nowadays they probably kick you out the same day as the surgery!