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Summary
Summary
London, 1922. It's a cold November morning, the station is windswept and rural, the sky is threatening snow, and the train is late. Vivien Ripple, 20 years old and an ungainly five foot eleven, waits on the platform at Dilberne Halt. She is wealthy and well-bred--only daughter to the founder of Ripple & Co, the nation's top publisher--but plain, painfully awkward, and, perhaps worst of all, intelligent. Nicknamed "the giantess," Vivvie is, in the estimation of most, already a spinster. But she has a plan. That very morning, Vivvie will ride to the city with the express purpose of changing her life forever.
Enter Sherwyn Sexton: charismatic, handsome--if, to his dismay, rather short. He's an aspiring novelist and editor at Ripple & Co whose greatest love is the (similarly handsome, but taller) protagonist of his thriller series. He also has a penchant for pretty young women--single and otherwise. Sherwyn is shocked when his boss's hulking daughter, dressed in a tweed jacket and moth-eaten scarf, strides into his office and asks for his hand in marriage. But his finances are running thin to support his regular dinners on the town, and Vivien's promise to house him in comfort while he writes is simply too good to refuse. What neither of them know is that she is pregnant by another man, and will die in childbirth in just a few months...
With one eye on the present and one on the past, Fay Weldon offers Vivien's fate, along with that of London between World Wars I and II: a city fizzing with change, full of flat-chested flappers, shell-shocked soldiers, and aristocrats clinging to history.
Inventive, warm, playful, and full of Weldon's trademark ironic edge, Before the War is a spellbinding novel from one of the greatest writers of our time.
Author Notes
Fay Weldon was born in Worcester, England on September 22, 1931. She read economics and psychology at the University of St. Andrews. She worked as a propaganda writer for the British Foreign Office and then as an advertising copywriter for various firms in London before making writing a full-time career.
Her work includes over twenty novels, five collections of short stories, several children's books, non-fiction books, and a number of plays written for television, radio and the stage. Her collections of short stories include Mischief and Nothing to Wear and Nowhere to Hide. She wrote a memoir entitled Auto Da Fay and non-fiction book entitled What Makes Women Happy. She wrote the pilot episode for the television series Upstairs Downstairs.
Her first novel, The Fat Woman's Joke, was published in 1967. Her other novels include Praxis, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Puffball, Rhode Island Blues, Mantrapped, She May Not Leave, The Spa Decameron, Habits of the House, Long Live the King, and The New Countess. Wicked Women won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award. She was awarded a CBE in 2001.
Fay Weldon died on January 4, 2023, in a nursing home in Northampton, England, at the age of 91.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"Vivien is single, large, ungainly, five foot eleven inches tall and twenty years old." An intelligent, ambitious illustrator and the only child of Sir Jeremy Ripple, head of a publishing house in 1920s London, Vivien flaunts convention-and conventional notions of beauty-and relies on her mind to fulfill her life and goals. Sherwyn Sexton, a short and egotistical editor at her father's publishing company, accepts her proposal of marriage with visions of vast sums of money and a mistress or two, but little does he know that a scheme to rise the corporate ladder by marrying the boss's homely daughter will be more complicated than it seems. After a chance encounter in a stable with what Vivien claims to be the Angel Gabriel, layers of façade and family courtesy fall by the wayside. Featuring a cast of oddball characters and astute observations about courtship, family, and what it means to be human, Weldon's (Mischief) novel crackles with erudite writing evocative of the time period. This is a complex character study filled with wit and wisdom about family, society, and the restrictions both can place on women. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Adela Ripple, last seen in Weldon's Long Live the King (2013), manipulates her daughter and anyone else she can get her hands on in order to preserve her own wealth and status.Weldon (Mischief, 2015, etc.) begins in 1922 with the image of Adela's daughter, Vivvie, "single, large, ungainly" and, "moreover, mildly Asperger's," waiting for a train to London. Vivvie "means to propose to Sherwyn Sexton," an aspiring novelist working for her father, Sir Jeremy Ripple, a socialist publisher and Old Etonian. She very practically suggests that Sherwyn will be wealthy and free to write if he marries her and that he will also be free to have affairs. Sherwyn is presented at first as a selfish, vain man, but as the book unfolds, he becomes more sympathetic, rising to the example of Rafe Delgano, fictional hero of a series of thrillers he goes on to write. He also comes to see with clear eyes that Vivvie is a victim of her self-absorbed father and her selfish, vain mother. Weldon deploys her usual opinionated narrator, who occasionally steps outside the story to offer asides about the characters; Adela, for instance, "turned out not to be a good person at all." Interjections of authorial opinion and wit entertain, the occasional appearance of real historical characters (such as Somerset Maugham) lends an air of reality, and the rotten mother is a literary car crash, impossible to go past without staring. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Weldon follows up her Dilberne Court trilogy, set during the costume drama of Edwardian times, with a book situated chiefly in the less glittering period between WWI and WWII. Adela, who appeared in the trilogy as a teen, is now living at Dilberne Court, married to successful publisher Sir Jeremy Ripple. Their ungainly daughter, Vivvie, has her own inheritance and, anxious to be free of parental mostly maternal control, she proposes a marriage of convenience to Sherwyn Sexton, an ambitious but impecunious young man who works in the editorial department at her father's firm. This marks the start of Sherwin's career as an author of best-selling thrillers. Unbeknownst to him, Vivvie is already pregnant when she walks down the aisle, causing Adela to concoct an elaborate scheme to avoid scandal. When Vivvie dies shortly after giving birth to twin daughters, Adela commandeers the girls and raises them as her own. Fans will relish Weldon's latest concoction, part domestic comedy, part social commentary, and part bedroom farce, enlivened by her characteristic sly humor and arch tone.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"IT SEEMED to be one of life's wonders," observes Sherwyn Sexton, the not wholly unlikable cad at the center of Fay Weldon's lively if sometimes frustrating new novel, "Before the War," "that nothing happens and nothing happens and all of a sudden everything happens." The line is a sly wink in a novel full of playful authorial interjections, in this case channeling an aphorism widely attributed to Weldon herself. Eventfulness is indeed what fuels this comedy of aristocratic manners, set in a bygone era when Britain is in a state of collective shell shock and relative deprivation. "We like to dream the costume drama of Edwardian times, all fine clothes, glittering jewels and clean sexy profiles," Weldon writes, "but we are less drawn to the 20 years between the wars." We first meet 20-year-old Vivien Ripple in 1922 as she awaits a London-bound train, en route to meet Sherwyn Sexton. He is handsome, but under 5-foot-7 - some four inches shorter than Vivien. Size matters in this novel, not just in height but in, er, length, about which we learn plenty. But here physicality isn't at issue: This will be a marriage of convenience. Vivien has money; Sherwyn can't afford to resole his shoes. He's an aspiring writer; her father is a publisher. So begins this maelstrom of twisty plot points, complicated entanglements, pregnancies of ambiguous etiology and colorful if sometimes stock characters. Historical details, which abound, are often fascinating. (Who knew that beards interfere with gas masks?) And Weldon's descriptions can beguile. Adela, Vivien's self-absorbed mother, is observed in a mink coat, "hiding inside it, as if she were some tiny furry Alpine creature evading predators." Adela, who first appeared in Weldon's Love and Inheritance trilogy, is grimly funny and entirely oblivious. She never understood the fuss about Germany invading Austria. "Apart from a few details like what they ate for breakfast and what kind of bed they slept in," Austrians and Germans seem to her to be the same. At times, "Before the War" can offer wry social satire, but with its many quirks and repetitions it sometimes reads like breezy "notes to self." Weldon appears to be having great fun, periodically bursting onto the page to speak to the reader or to offer a 21st-century reference, including one to the best-selling 2012 novel "Gone Girl." Early on, she even confides a plot quandary: "I haven't yet quite determined whose fault Vivvie's death is going to be. . . . I will let you know." Another Weldonian idiosyncrasy is a fondness for the word "anyway," which appears in lieu of a more artful transition at least six times in the first 22 pages. The reader will find this either cute or highly annoying. We are told twice that it took three years for Sherwyn to write his novel and that his employer underpays him. And Adela twice laments that her husband was present as she gave birth to Vivien, as if they were in a "foaling box." Speaking of Vivien, potentially the novel's most intelligent and intriguing character, she is rendered two-dimensional, reduced to a barrage of adjectives about size, from "large" and "ungainly" to "crude," "excessively sized," a "giantess" and an "elephant," with hands that are "raw, red peasant things dangling from the end of intolerably long and large limbs." Weldon tells us (twice) that unattractive women are generally ignored in literature and film and asks, "Why should I break the rules?" Given the evident delight she takes in balking at narrative convention, you have to wish she had made an exception for her unfortunate heroine. ? SUSAN coll is the author of five novels, most recently "The Stager."
Library Journal Review
At the beginning of this latest novel from -Weldon, who wrote the pilot episode of Upstairs Downstairs as well as numerous novels (The Heart of the Country; Wicked Women), a socially awkward but wealthy spinster prepares to propose marriage to a dashing employee at her father's publishing house just after World War I. Readers' hopes for the young woman's happiness are quickly dashed by an omniscient and rather snarky author-as-narrator, who then relates the continuing misadventures of young Vivien and her associates over the next few decades with a consistently irreverent tone. Weldon's witty descriptions of human foibles and humorously self-referential style may be attractive to Downton Abbey fans ready for a break with something a bit lighter than most of the usually billed read-alikes. Weldon determinedly keeps a satirist's requisite emotional distance from her characters throughout, and none of the privileged protagonists are sympathetic figures (or even much fun to root for or against). Verdict Though a quick read, this novel is likely best suited for only Weldon's most dedicated fans. [See Prepub Alert, 10/3/16.]-Mara Bandy, Champaign P.L., IL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.