Dangerous Ages

I picked this up because it was part of the British Library Women Writers series and the other books I’ve read in that imprint have been great. So I was expecting an interesting read and I got one. Incidentally, this was the third book I read on my holiday in Cornwall. I had picked up the other two for having Cornish settings, but this one ended up in Cornwall as well with characters even cycling between Marazion and Land’s End at one point. It was a nice bit of serendipity.

It’s not a book with a great deal of plot. It ambles around between various women in the same family. Neville is turning 43 at the start of the book. We see her almost grown up daughter Gerda as well. And her mother, almost always referred to as Mrs Hilary, you need to read closely to realise her name is actually Emily. And her mother is Grandmamma and I really didn’t catch a name for her. Then there is Neville’s 33 year old sister Nan who is the one referred to as being at “a dangerous age”. However the point of the book is, I think, that women of all these ages, from teens to eighties, could be considered to be dangerous.

The book is set (and was written in) 1920 but there were many ways in which it seemed quite contemporary and it’s certainly a feminist book. I really sympathised with Neville. In her youth she had given up her place at medical school to get married and now her children are just about grown up she wants to get back to her studies and become a doctor. She finds this tough but I felt the major obstacle was everyone else telling her she wouldn’t be able to manage it at such an advanced age (that was 43) and I think what depressed me the most about that thread of the book was that whilst vast quantities of things have changed in a century I felt the social expectations of others could fall on Neville in pretty much the same way today.

I found the chunk of the book that involved excursions into Freudian analysis hadn’t aged as well as the rest but I found a lot of it was rather dryly funny. There are lots of discussions of marriage as Nan and Gerda both consider it during the book, so you get everyone else’s opinions as well and these are definitely enlightening to read today. I’m not going to spoil the whole book for you, it’s a really interesting read. There’s not a great deal of plot but plenty of character exploration and development. Also “Neville” grew on me as girl’s name over the course of the book, apparently using traditionally male names for female characters is a characteristic of Macauley’s work. I need to read more!