The Causeway

[moderate shelfwear, with paper-covered boards slightly rubbed through along the bottom edges, slight bumping to upper corners, old bookseller's rubber-stamped name (Bertrand Smith Acres of Books, Long Beach, California) at lower corner of front pastedown; the jacket is edgeworn with various small nicks and tears, light soiling, and the spine faded to unreadability]. Described in the jacket blurb as "a witty satire of modern English life," this novel (the author's first) is set in London during the late 1930s and into the early years of World War II. (The period that includes the blitz takes up only about the last one-sixth of the book.) The main character is Davina, the 36-year-old unmarried daughter of a rector, who is involved in a deeply-felt but non-sexual romance with a young man of twenty-one, and at the same time is the object of frustrated affection from another guy (also younger than she but not by so much), a schoolmaster who is a paying guest in the rectory. There are a variety of eccentric figures in the book (including a yoga-practicing vegetarian maiden aunt), none more so than the rector himself, who prior to the beginning of the story had suffered a stroke that had radically altered his personality, changing him from a gentle, pious and beloved cleric into what one contemporary reviewer of the book called "a sadistic, obscene old monster, liable to flare into murderous rage over nothing." The author was co-principal of a school in Birkdale, in northwest England, from 1948 to 1971, and subsequently wrote several other several other novels, all of which seem to have been drawn on her professional experience; the last was "Those Peculiar Things," published in 1991.

Product Info

Publisher: The Macmillan Company

Year: 1948

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Seller Info

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