Cheerful Weather for the Wedding - Softcover

Strachey, Julia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903155274 ISBN 13: 9781903155271

Publisher: Persephone Books Ltd, 2009

Synopsis

A short novel that was first published in 1932 by a niece of Lytton Strachey: in this 'sharp, unsentimental domestic comedy, the weather is something less than cheerful the day Dolly Thatcham marries the Hon Owen Bingham: "In the furious March gale, everyone felt as though they were being beaten on the back of the head and on the nose with heavy carpets, and having cold steel knives thrust up inside their nostrils."'
Frances Partridge, a lifelong friend of Julia Strachey's, who wrote a memoir about her called Julia, has now written a Preface for the Persephone Books edition of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding. In it she points out that Julia wrote very little but what she wrote was of outstanding quality.
Julia Strachey was renowned for her sharp wit and unusually beautiful prose style. 'After Cheerful Weather's appearance, the literary editor of The New Yorker wrote to Julia saying he would publish anything she cared to send him,' said Frances Partridge in Julia. 'It was evern said that her book was for a while obligatory reading for his staff.' Julia only wrote two novels but Cheerful Weather is her most lasting work. Virginia Woolf described it as 'a very cute, clever, indeed rather remarkable acidulated story...I think it astonishingly good - complete and sharp and individual.' The Observer, calling it ' the slightest but the more perfect' of her two novels, wrote: 'The observer is so sharp-eyed and so delicate-tongued that her book reveals, on one level, the rich absurdity of the participants, on a deeper level the helpless despair which they carry about with them.' Yet the overall effect of the book is very funny in a Forsterian manner, Dolly Thatcham in Cheerful Weather being out of the same stable as Lucy Honeychurch in A Room with a View and both the mothers, Mrs Thatcham and Mrs Honeychurch, sharing many appalling similarities.

About this title

Product Description:

Making Conversation

About the Author:

Julia Strachey (1901-79) was born in India and lived with relations in England after her parents divorced. She worked as a model at Poiret, as a photographer, and as a publisher's reader. She was married to the sculptor Stephen Tomlin from 1927-34. In 1939 Julia met the art critic Lawrence Gowing, who was twenty-one; the two married after fifteen years. Frances Partridge (1900-2004) was the oldest surviving member of the Bloomsbury Group, having been married to one of its members and counting most of them as her friends. Julia Strachey was one of her oldest friends and she wrote "Julia" a biography. Partridge kept a diary all her life and several volumes have been published by Little Brown.

About this edition

• Publisher: Persephone Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1903155274
• ISBN 13: 9781903155271
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 136