Town Girl

[from review in The Evening Sun (Baltimore, Maryland) - Sat, Jan 4, 1936]

Lady Into Farmwife

Tessa Bennett, a London working girl with an overdeveloped taste for the sophistries of town life and an underdeveloped appreciation of the charm of rural customs, if forced to stay with her married sister in the country to escape the propositions of a London playboy. There she falls in love with Robin Amesbury, a farmer lad of the servant class, but withal very charming. Married to him, she is faced with may problems: readjustment to her husband's personality and to a different mode of living, continual strife with a tyrannical mother-in-law, childbirth, poverty and social ostracism; and it with her solution of these problems that the latter part of the book is concerned.

Ok, you've got your hardscrabble farm -- "a spotted pig lurched out of the gate as she spoke, grunted at her, waddled on its ungainly way, and somehow, for no reason, added to the general untidiness and depression of the ill-kept yard." (86). You've got your crabbed and bitter mother, nursing a childhood grievance, dominating her household -- "he won a scholarship for an architectural college and his mother wouldn't let him go. She said he was all she'd got and that if he went away she'd poison herself." (54) You've got your virile, inarticulate farm boy -- "... a big, hefty youngster of twenty-three or four in a blue shirt open a the neck, with sleeves rolled up" and "the teeth of a healthy, well-fed young animal" (50) You've got your town girl with the expensive tastes and the "analytical mind" (19). And by the time Robin doggedly repeats "There's been Amesbury's at Wheatlands for close on three hundred years" (200) you'll have long realized that this one's steeped in the same earthy brew Stella Gibson had spiked so brilliantly in her Cold Comfort, three years previously. This being Mills & Boon, there's no love child and only a moderate depth of loam, but, otherwise, it really does till the same soil -- err, scranlet the same corner -- albeit with an entirely straight face.

Elizabeth Carfrae was a Mills & Boon staple and some of her earlier work, like this one, features a surprising amount of (closed-door) love-making. The Mills & Boon formula, per publisher history Passion's Fortune, was still, at this point, pretty loose and, as Boon's son put it: "Father was very careful about the moral line, about the boundaries you could not cross...But he was not very hesitant of sex." There's the protagonists' relationship, of course, but there's also a lot of frank discussion about the desire, not wholly material, that leads Tessa to flee her wealthy town would-be lover. And on the darker side, of the experience of young professional urban women trying to navigate the dating scene -- the "tussle in the taxi" (16) and what men expect when they pay the dining and dancing bill (88).

The story meanders and I'm not sure Robin's other attractions tip the scale against his bullheaded apron-string loyalty, but it's still interesting and you don't get many true inter-class romances in light reading of this period, so those discussions are something to note.