Tessa Hadley is an underrated contemporary novelist; perhaps that will change in time. Her latest collection of short stories, Married Love, was serialised in the New Yorker last autumn. The stories I read there were hugely enjoyable though unsparing insights into the private and often loveless lives of others. Their content confirmed my suspicion that Hadley was invoking Marie Stopes’ Married Love, the infamous and innocent account of what she thought married life ought to be, first published in 1921. It’s a provocative echo for a woman to have sounded in 2012.
The vapid obsession with the scions of the Rothschilds continues. Hannah Rothschild has gone in search of her lost and lamented relative, Nica. The Baroness: The search for Nica, the rebellious Rothschild is the story of a Rothschild who abandoned the highlife to go and slum it with Thelonious Monk in 1950s New York. Her self-inflicted privations sound awful.
Of more interest is the reissue of Challenge by Vita Sackville-West, which has been out of print since the early ‘80s. Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has written the introduction to the new edition of this professed ‘lesbian classic’. Sackville-West penned it at the apogee of her affair with Violet Trefusis and promptly suppressed it for fear of scandal and censure.
Frances Osborne, otherwise known as the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s wife, enjoyed wild success with her recent book The Bolter — another tale about the mischievous Happy Valley Set. Now, Osborne has turned to fiction with Park Lane — an upstairs, downstairs saga with oodles of sex and intrigue. The Books Blog will be interviewing Osborne later in year.
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