Summer Pudding

[from Greyladies reprint] Take one farm in wartime England, a motherless young girl and her father. Add a young woman bombed out of her London office, a beautiful but selfish younger sister, a sick mother, a resentful housekeeper, a retired colonel and his daughter at the Big House, and a canny old codger too old for the army. Mix well and leave to simmer for a delicious frothy summer confection.

[Susan Scarlett is a penname of Noel Streatfeild] Summer Pudding is a light, quick, pretty cozy village read. It's also one of the hundreds of vintage romances that feature a sound-as-a-bell heroine up against a glamorous sister (mother/cousin/frenemy) who's a spoiled, deceitful, basically sociopathic, man-magnet. The puzzling thing about this trope is -- from a modern reader's perspective -- well, first its popularity: were there really women like this around IRL for this to resonate? And second, how rarely (as here) the unlovely lovelies face a truly proportionate comeuppance. Unless they're expressly violent -- in which case they're sometimes killed off -- there's a surprising degree of affection and empathy shown to them by other characters and a weirdly high tolerance for their shenanigans. Other characters may clear-sightedly acknowledge their complete lack of conscience and inability to form healthy attachments, but are more likely to smile and shake their head over it rather than being, like the modern reader, totally disturbed. Is it the flipside of the sexism of the time -- young women aren't powerful enough to be taken seriously in even their flaws? Is it just the authors trying to keep things light? I really can't figure it out. That aside, there's enough to enjoy about Summer Pudding. Even if she wasn't a fan of her Scarlett books -- they seem to have been written from purely practical considerations -- Streatfield's writing is, no question, solid. The countryside war setting is escapist without being glib. (In this, it reminded me a bit of Stevenson's The Four Graces.) One of the story's strongest points is the warm portrayal of mother-daughter relationships -- both the female MC, Janet, and her mother, Maggie, (who gets her own little romance, which I always appreciate) and the widowed male MC's young daughter's memories of her own loving, vivacious mother. Scott, over at "The Furrowed Middlebrow" has a nice review up and I agree with his assessment that Gladys, the housekeeper and, possibly dangerous, rival is the character with the most emotional depth. She's kind of like a less-morbid, more sympathetic pure-romance take on Mrs. Danvers and, honestly, I would have loved a sequel about her getting some self-respect and a man who fit her better than this MC, who was fine enough, but a bit of a clueless lump...