Valerie Grove
Mayfair Lady
Marriages are Made in Bond Street: True Stories from a 1940s Marriage Bureau
By Penrose Halson
Macmillan 357pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
On Sunday mornings at my grandmother’s house in the 1950s I would read the two women’s magazines she took. A ten-year-old could learn a thing or two from Evelyn Home’s problem page in Woman, but Barbara Cartland’s romantic stories and Godfrey Winn’s sentimental pieces taught me something much more important: how not to write in a style dripping with flowery artifice and goo. So opening this book in 2016 to find it entirely couched in that preposterously dated style was quite a shock. Still, Penrose Halson relates a story worth telling: of how Heather Jenner founded her matchmaking agency in 1939.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3