Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} To Bed With Grand Music by Marghanita Laski Fleur in her World. Notes from a bookish life on the Cornish coast … To Bed With Grand Music by Marghanita Laski (as Sarah Russell) She could only say defiantly, “Well, even if what you think its true it’s not all that wrong. You’ve never had to do without your husband, and in any case, you’re different from me. Some women can do without a man and some can’t, and I’m one of those that can’t.” Oh, the lies that we tell ourselves to allow us to behave however we choose. “Deborah, said Joe, “I want to tell you what my wife said to me in New York just before I came away. she said, “Joe, you’re a normal man and we’re maybe going to be parted for a long time. It’s no good shutting our eyes to what’s going to happen, but I’m going to ask you one thing. Don’t cheapen our marriage. I’d hate you to think of you going with any cheap woman and then coming back to me. But if you ever find a girl you can really respect, like you do me, I wouldn’t mind so much, because it wouldn’t be cheap.”” And the consequences that those lies can have. To Bed With Grand Music is a story about those lies – ones that we sometimes don’t realise are untruths – and those consequences. The story open with Deborah in bed with her husband Graham. He is about to go away and, though he does not offer the same, she promises loyalty and fidelity. But that promise is swiftly broken. Deborah is bored at home and her mother and her housekeeper are more than willing to take care of her infant son. And so Deborah heads for London. To keep busy, to help the war effort, to be happier… But Deborah meets Joe, a charming American, a family man without his family. A relationship develops. When Joe is sent overseas Deborah meets Sheldon, another American. And then Pierre, an older Frenchman. “Pierre, said Deborah urgently. “Will you teach me to be a good mistress?” “I tell you it is a question of temperament,” said Pierre, “and you do not understand, because you have not got that temperament. But you have got a lot of other things, beauty and freshness and naivety.” “To hell with naivety,” though Deborah angrily, “I’m damned if I’m going to be put off learning what I want, just because Pierre likes me naive.” I couldn’t find it in myself to like Deborah. But though it might seem that it would be easy to dismiss her as selfish and vacuous, it wasn’t. There isn’t too much background, but it was fairly clear that Deborah was a trophy wife. A woman who could only see herself as significant in relation to her man. Her mother’s character strongly suggested that she had been brought up to be just that. She had no other interests, no idea how to occupy her time. But she lied to herself about what she was doing, what the effects would be. Did she realise? I think she did, but I think she just lied to herself again so she could carry on. Yes, she was selfish. She was vacuous. And she was responsible for her actions and their effects. There would be more men as Deborah turns slowly from a faithless wife into a scarlet woman. Her journey was compelling and utterly convincing. And so I found another Marghanita Laski book that I could argue with while reading. She is so good at that! She’s great at characters and storytelling too, and she makes some very telling points along the way about double standards and the emotional effects of war. And then there’s the ending. She is so so good at endings, and this one is stunning. War is over, and the implications of that do not suit Deborah one little bit. Even after everything that has gone before, it is a shock to realise what Deborah has become. Little Boy Lost. The Village. The Victorian Chaise-Longue. To Bed With Grand Music. Four novels by Marghanita Laski reissued by Persephone books. All different and all excellent. Review: To Bed with Grand Music by Marghanita Laski. I am so delighted that it is finally fall and the temperatures are getting cooler and the NFL season has begun here in the U.S. I am a huge New York Giants fan and I am hoping for a stellar year. Speaking of sports, this is another interesting Persephone title, the plot of which involves a woman using sex as a game while her husband is away at war. My Review: I thought that the first scene in this book was quite shocking, but as it turns out the subject matter of the entire book is rather bold. Deborah is in bed with her husband, Graham, who is about to leave for the middle east where he will be stationed during World War II. Graham informs her that there is no way he can be expected to be faithful to her for the duration of the war. Graham also gives Deborah permission to have a dalliance of her own since he will be away for so long. I couldn’t decide what was more shocking: his declaration of intended unfaithfulness or his suggestion that his wife have an affair as well. Deborah is the type of woman who needs a man to complete her identity. When she is left alone with her three-year-old son and her housekeeper she thinks she will go crazy from the boredom and the monotony. Deborah’s mother suggests that she get a job to help pass the time until the war is over. Deborah eventually finds a job in London as a clerk and it is also in London that she has her first indiscretion with a man. The first one night stand disgusts her and she runs off in shame, but she quickly changes her mind and her attitude towards having extramarital affairs. Deborah eventually comes to the conclusion that it is acceptable to have lovers while her husband is gone so that she isn’t lonely. The first prolonged affair that she has is with an officer named Joe who lavishes attention on Deborah and even gets along well with her son. When Joe is sent to the frontlines Deborah takes on yet another lover. The rest of the novel is an account of Deborah’s string of lovers. Some of the book is very funny, especially when she finds ridiculous reasons to dump one man and move on to the next. One of her lovers gets along very well with Deborah’s mother and Deborah is extremely irked by this. So she casts him off and moves on to the next soldier. Many of Deborah’s lovers provide her with lavish gifts, jewelry, expense differs and clothes. Deborah is not a sympathetic characters since she is taking advantage of the situation of war to have a series of affairs which are all to her emotional and material benefit. One part of the book that I found particularly sad is the fact that Deborah cannot bring herself to move back home and take care of her son. The little boy craves his mother’s attention and the scenes in which she leaves him to go off to London with one of her many lovers is pathetic. The boy becomes more and more attached to his nanny and we wonder whether or not his mother’s abandonment will have a lasting effect on his life. This is a very interesting book to compare to Laski’s other World War II title, Little Boy Lost . Both books bring up a very different side of the war that are somewhat controversial. And children do not fair well in the lives of adults in either book. If I found the subject matter of this book bold then I wonder what the reaction to it was in 1946 when it was originally published. About The Author: English journalist, radio panelist, and novelist: she also wrote literary biography, plays, and short stories. Lanksi was to a prominent family of Jewish intellectuals: Neville Laski was her father, Moses Gaster her grandfather, and socialist thinker Harold Laski her uncle. She was educated at Lady Barn House School and St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith. After a stint in fashion, she read English at Oxford, then married publisher John Howard, and worked in journalism. She began writing once her son and daughter were born. A well-known critic as well as a novelist, she wrote books on Jane Austen and George Eliot. Ecstasy (1962) explored intense experiences, and Everyday Ecstasy (1974) their social effects. Her distinctive voice was often heard on the radio on The Brains Trust and The Critics; and she submitted a large number of illustrative quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary. An avowed atheist, she was also a keen supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Her play, The Offshore Island, is about nuclear warfare. Persephone Books. The spring cleaning continues in this [blank] garden of mine! As I mentioned last week, I decided to transfer some of my reading project pages to regular posts – so, you will be seeing a lot of those in the coming weeks. The Persephone Project is a personal long-term project of mine, where I intend to read my way through the entire Persephone Books’ catalog. Persephone Books is an independent publisher founded in 1999 by Nicola Beauman. They reprint neglected fiction and non-fiction by mid- twentieth century women writers. I will update this post as I go along. You will be able to find a link to this post on my projects page.

Read books are marked as (✓ ) Favourites are marked as ( ) DNFed books are crossed off Books I own are in bold Books reissued as Persephone Classics are marked as ( ) My reviews, when available, will be linked below. Start Date: 05.02.2016 Current score : 19/ 139 Persephone Classics : 03/12. The List.

William – an Englishman , by Cicely Hamilton ✓ Mariana , by Monica Dickens ✓ Someone at a Distance , by Dorothy Whipple ✓ Fidelity , by Susan Glaspell An Interrupted Life (Etty Hillesum) ✓ The Victorian Chaise-longue, by Marghanita Laski ✓ The Home-Maker , by Dorothy Canfield Fisher Good Evening, Mrs Craven , by Mollie Panter-Downes Few Eggs and No Oranges (Vere Hodgson) Good Things in England (Florence White) Julian Grenfell (Nicholas Mosley) It’s Hard to be Hip Over Thirty (Judith Viorst) Consequences , by E.M. Delafield Farewell Leicester Square (Betty Miller) Tell It To a Stranger (Elizabeth Berridge) Saplings , by Noel Streatfeild Marjory Fleming (Oriel Malet) ✓ Every Eye , by Isobel English They Knew Mr. Knight (Dorothy Whipple) A Woman’s Place (Ruth Adam) Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day , by Winifred Watson Consider The Years (Virginia Graham) Reuben Sachs (Amy Levy) Family Roundabout (Richmal Crompton) ✓ The Montana Stories , by Katherine Mansfield Brook Evans (Susan Glaspell) The Children Who Lived in a Barn (Eleanor Graham) Little Boy Lost , by Marghanita Laski The Making of a Marchioness , by Frances Hodgson Burnett Kitchen Essays , by Agnes Jekyll A House in the Country (Jocelyn Playfair) The Carlyles at Home (Thea Holme) The Far Cry (Emma Smith) Minnie’s Room (Mollie Panter-Downes) Greenery Street (Denis Mackail) Lettice Delmer (Susan Miles) ✓ The Runaway (Elizabeth Anna Hart) Cheerful Weather for the Wedding , by Julia Strachey ✓ Manja by Anna Gmeyner The Priory (Dorothy Whipple) Hostages to Fortune (Elizabeth Cambridge) ✓ The Blank Wall byElisabeth Sanxay Holding The Wise Virgins (Leonard Woolf) Tea With Mr. Rochester (Frances Towers) Good Food on the Aga (Ambrose Heath) Miss Ranskill Comes Home (Barbara Euphan Todd) The New House (Lettice Cooper) The Casino (Margareth Bonham) Bricks and Mortar (Helen Ashton) The World That Was Ours , by Hilda Bernstein Operation Heartbreak (Duff Cooper) The Village (Marghanita Laski) Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary (Ruby Ferguson) They Can’t Ration These (Vicomte de Mauduit) ✓ Flush , by Virginia Woolf They Were Sisters (Dorothy Whipple) The Hopkins Manuscript (RC Sherriff) ✓ Hetty Dorval , by Ethel Wilson) ✓ There Were No Windows by Norah Hoult Doreen (Barbara Noble) A London Child of the 1870s (Molly Hughes) How To Run Your Home Without Help (Kay Smallshaw) Princess in the Land (Joanna Cannan) The Woman Novelist and Other Stories (Diana Gardner) Alas, Poor Lady (Rachel Ferguson) Gardener’s Nightcap (Muriel Stuart) The Fortnight in September , by RC Sherriff The Expendable Man (Dorothy B Hughes) ✓ Journal , by Katherine Mansfield) Plats Du Jour (Patience Gray and Primrose Boyd) The Shuttle , by Frances Hodgson Burnett) House-Bound (Winifred Peck) The Young Pretenders (Edith Henrietta Fowler) The Closed Door and Other Stories (Dorothy Whipple) On the Other Side (Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg) The Crowded Street (Winifred Holtby) Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (Penelope Mortimer) A Very Great Profession , by Nicole Beauman) Round About a Pound a Week (Maud Pember Reeves) The Country Housewife’s Book (Lucy H. Yates) Miss Buncle’s Book (D.E. Stevenson) Amours de Voyage , by Arthur Hugh Clough) Making Conversation (Christine Longford) A New System of Domestic Cookery (Mrs. Rundell) High Wages (Dorothy Whipple) To Bed With Grand Music (Marghanita Laski) Dimanche and Other Stories (Irène Némirovsky) Still Missing (Beth Gutcheon) The Mystery of Mrs. Blencarrow , by Mrs. Oliphant) ✓ The Winds of Heaven , by Monica Dickens) Miss Buncle Married (D.E. Stevenson) Midsummer Night in the Workhouse (Diana Athill) The Sack of Bath (Adam Fergusson) No Surrender , by Constance Maud Greenbanks (Dorothy Whipple) Dinners for Beginners (Rachel and Margaret Ryan) Harriet , by Elizabeth Jenkins A Writer’s Diary (Virginia Woolf) Patience (John Coates) The Persephone Book of Short Stories Heat Lightning (Helen Hull) The Exiles Return (Elisabeth de Waal) The Squire (Enid Bagnold) The Two Mrs. Abbotts (D.E. Stevenson) ✓ Diary of a Provincial Lady (E.M. Delafield) Into the Whirlwind (Eugenia Ginzburg) Wildred and Eileen (Jonathan Smith) The Happy Tree (Rosalind Murray) Because of the Lockwoods (Dorothy Whipple) The Country Life Cookery Book (Ambrose Heath) London War Notes (Mollie Panter-Downes) Vain Shadow (Jane Hervey) Greengates by RC Sherriff Gardeners’ Choice by Evelyn Dunbar and Charles Mahoney Maman, What Are We Called Now? by Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar A Lady and Her Husband by Amber Reeves The Godwits Fly by Robin Hyde Every Good Deed and Other Stories by Dorothy Whipple Long Live Great Bardfield by Tirzah Garwood Madame Solario by Gladys Huntington ✓ Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane Earth and High Heaven by Gwethalyn Graham Emmeline by Judith Rossner The Journey Home and Other Stories by Malachi Whitaker Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton Despised and Rejected by Rose Allatini Young Anne by Dorothy Whipple Tory Heaven by Marghanita Laski The Call by Edith Ayrton Zangwill National Provincial by Lettice Cooper Milton Place by Elisabeth de Waal The Second Persephone Book of Short Stories Expiation by Elizabeth von Arnim ✓ A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf One Woman’s Year by Stella Martin Currey ✓ The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger English Climate: Wartime Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins Random Commentary by Dorothy Whipple. That’s it for now, folks. Do you have any recommendations? Please let me know. The Captive Reader. Today marks the start of a Mini Persephone Readathon, hosted by the ever-enthusiastic Jessie, and I’m delighted to be taking part. It’s just until Sunday – hence its “mini” status – so I thought I’d get started right away. First published in 1946, To Bed with Grand Music by Marghanita Laski was published while the war was still fresh in everyone’s minds. And that memory is important because already routines were beginning to be re-established and conventions once again adhered to, things that had briefly loosened during the topsy-turvy war years and provided undreamt-of freedom for so many. Sometimes that freedom was productive – as for the men and women whose wartime experiences gave them careers their education or gender never prepared them for – and sometimes it was merely license to misbehave. And wartime misbehaviour is Laski’s focus. We meet Deborah Robertson just as her husband, Graham, is about to depart for Cairo. Married for several years and parents to a young son, they are both upset at the idea of parting, trying to reassure one another of the strength of their passion. Passion, rather than affection, is certainly the correct word and the shallowness of their relationship is made clear as Graham reassures his wife that he will “be missing you every hour of every day, thinking how bloody attractive you are.” This is not a marriage of two minds, safe to say. Before he leaves, Graham idiotically explains to his wife that the affairs he will have out East will only be with women he does not respect and so won’t mean anything and asks her to promise the same for her own affairs. Deborah, claiming the moral high ground, asserts that she will be comforted by her love for him, will spend her time caring for their son, and will remain completely unchanged by their separation. Subtlety is not Laski’s strong point (to be fair, she never attempts it) so, unsurprisingly, the rest of the book is about how unfaithful Deborah is and how much she changes. Bored with her son and country life, Deborah soon seizes the chance to move to London on her own (leaving her son in the loving and much more capable hands of the housekeeper). And even before she completes her move, she has her first affair. It is a meaningless thing, done more out of a sense of inevitability than anything, but it sets her on a path that she soon finds impossible to give up. Her attempts to abstain make her sour and petulant so, she decides, why not have fun. To be twenty-four, beautiful and free in wartime London is a heady thing indeed. One man leads to another, then another, and so on. At first she can pretend love is involved but she soon realises that is not it. Her relationships have nothing to do with her feelings about the men, except perhaps for what they can give her – beginning with nice meals out, stockings, perfume, small things. But as she learns her new craft, her ambitions grow. She looks at her friend Madeleine, far more used to this lifestyle than Deborah and able to attract what Deborah thinks of as “grown-ups”, and “longed to graduate into a class genuinely competitive with her, and yet had no notion of what qualities she lacked that consistently prevented her from doing so.” Deborah figures out those qualities – with the not altogether willing assistance of a Frenchman whom she has poached from Madeleine – and from there her career as a tart is assured. The men she sleeps with are barely people to her, only stepping stones on her path of self-improvement. Her moral qualms disappear alarmingly quickly; it is much nicer to have a new bag or hat or piece of jewellery than anxieties. And why shouldn’t she be happy rather than anxious or ashamed? As she says: “I know it’s better to be happy than unhappy, and not only for me but for my baby as well. I like this sort of life, in fact, I love it, and seeing as how I’m hurting no one and doing myself quite a lot of good, I rather think I’ll carry on with it. I’ve come to the conclusion that conventional morals were invented by a lot of unattractive bitches to make themselves feel good.” Laski is extremely popular with Persephone readers and one of their best represented authors – they have reprinted five of her books now: Little Boy Lost, The Village, The Victorian Chaise-Longue, To Bed with Grand Music, and Tory Heaven. And I can completely understand why. She epitomizes the middle brow, writing about seemingly-serious topics in a titillating way with basic, extremely readable prose (Little Boy Lost is particularly difficult to put down). Would I consider this a significant psychological portrait of a woman experiencing a moral crisis amidst a chaotic, collapsing social structure? Hardly. But, despite lacking nuance or depth, it is great fun. Laski knew what people wanted: a bit of excitement and a touch of the taboo to keep them glued to the pages, confidently smug that they could never be as morally inept as Deborah. It’s true but that is a very, very low bar to clear. This post contains affiliate links from Book Depository , an online book retailer with free international shipping. If you buy via these links it means I receive a small commission (at no extra cost to you). To Bed With Grand Music by Marghanita Laski. I read To Bed With Grand Music (1946) by Marghanita Laski for the excellent Undervalued British Women Writers conference I went to a while ago, but it’s been one of those titles I’ve had on my real or imagined tbr pile for a long time. It seems such an unusual novel – and so risky that Laski published it under the pseudonym Sarah Russell. It takes place during the Second World War, and our ‘heroine’ – in a fairly loose sense – is Deborah, whose husband has been called up to fight for King and Country. Before he leaves, he initiates a frank chat about what will happen whilst he’s gone. He can’t, he assures her, be expected to remain celibate. He is sure (he adds) that she will understand. Deborah isn’t happy about it… But, once alone, she rather quickly falls into her own life of dalliances, kicking off with an American soldier named (of course) Joe. It’s rather more nuanced than that, but the reader can see it coming – she finds her scruples gradually worn down, and after the first, the scruples more or less don’t exist. We are taken on a rather dizzying whirl of the men she has relationships with in London – well, some are rather briefer than relationships – and Laski does a great job of delineating them and demonstrating what their appeal is to Deborah. Sometimes it is power, sometimes money, sometimes charm, sometimes looks. One of them, mais naturallement, is French. Meanwhile, her son is left in the countryside (with the rather more affectionate and capable housekeeper), and Deborah feels only occasional pangs of guilt. Deborah understood him. “You’re at least the third person,” she said, ” who has asked me if it mightn’t be better if I went home to my chee-ild. Well, darling, that’s just one of the things I’ve really thought out for myself and I know it’s better to be happy than unhappy, and not only for me but for my baby as well. I like this sort of life, in fact, I love it, and seeing as how I’m hurting no one and doing myself quite a lot of good, I rather think I’ll carry on with it. I’ve come to the confusion that conventional morals were invented by a lot of unattractive bitches to make themselves feel good.” Laski balances two things well – a real investigation of what might confront a woman in Deborah’s position, and (I think I’m right in saying) some sort of satire. It feels like a parody of the Casanova type – there is a real treadmill of conquests – but the tone remains firmly realistic, never allowing hyperbole to creep in, or any laughter from the author. The mix works well, even if it ends up wrong-footing the reader a bit. This isn’t as sophisticated as some of Laski’s novels, perhaps chiefly because it’s only really doing one thing. The plot, or even the scenario, is really the point of the novel – an exercise in examining one woman and her choices, rather than a more complex canvas. As such, it works very well at what it is trying to do, and shines a light on a part of the war that most 1940s fiction left in darkness, but it is not her most ambitious novel. But, for the parameters she sets, it is both very good and very intriguing. Others who got Stuck into this Book : “No matter where you stand on the issue of Deborah’s character, this is an absolutely fascinating, brilliantly written portrayal of a completely different side of wartime life” – Book Snob. “This is a very interesting book to compare to Laski’s other World War II title, Little Boy Lost .” – The Bookbinder’s Daughter. “And so I found another Marghanita Laski book that I could argue with while reading. She is so good at that!” – Fleur in Her World.