Category: Henley Literary Festival

Book Review: Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson

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Meet Me at the MuseumAbout the Book

In Denmark, Professor Anders Larsen, an urbane man of facts, has lost his wife and his hopes for the future. On an isolated English farm, Tina Hopgood is trapped in a life she doesn’t remember choosing. Both believe their love stories are over.

Brought together by a shared fascination with the Tollund Man, subject of Seamus Heaney’s famous poem, they begin writing letters to one another. And from their vastly different worlds, they find they have more in common than they could have imagined. As they open up to one another about their lives, an unexpected friendship blooms. But then Tina’s letters stop coming, and Anders is thrown into despair. How far are they willing to go to write a new story for themselves?

Format: Hardcover, ebook (224 pp.)    Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 17th May 2018  Genre: Literary Fiction, Contemporary Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Meet Me at the Museum on Goodreads

My Review

In her debut novel, written in epistolary form, Anne Youngson not only gives the reader an insight into the thoughts and feelings of Tina and Anders but explores the act of letter writing itself.   What emerges from their correspondence is that the act of transforming thoughts into words can have a therapeutic, even cathartic, quality.  In one of her early letters, Tina writes, ‘Please be aware, I am writing to you to make sense of myself.’  Later she confides, ‘I don’t know where these thoughts come from except that when I sit down to write to you it seems as if all the strings holding my conscious mind together come loose and let me sub-conscious leak out.’

Both Tina and Anders seem to be  trying to make sense of things in their own mind and in this respect their letters are an unburdening and at times have a confessional quality.  For example, Anders writes at one point: ‘You have made it possible for me to talk of things I have never spoken of before, and to understand what has been hidden.’

Of course, Tina and Anders are fortunate to have found a correspondent so in tune with their own reflective, thoughtful nature.  As Anders says, ‘We have written at length and thoughtfully, and to do this, we have both had to read the letters we received in a thoughtful way.’

Tina and Anders share an explorative, questioning approach to their lives and experiences in their letters although Anders is initially more analytical and less willing to share his emotions than Tina.  However this changes in the course of their correspondence.  The way they open and sign-off their letters reflects a growing informality and affection and a sense of the mutual support, perhaps even dependence, the letters provide.  As Tina confides at one point, ‘I do not know how I would cope without your letters.’

Meet Me at the Museum is a tender story of friendship but also of regret, disappointment and the questioning we probably have all done at some time about life decisions we’ve taken – wondering about the road not travelled, so to speak.  As Tina says, ‘We have been talking to each other about where life went, and if the way we each spent it was the way we meant to have spent it or would have chosen to spend it if we had known when we made our choices  what the other choices were…’

The conclusion left this reader not disappointed but slightly sad.  However, I’d like to think that the ending I hoped for did take place in some alternative literary universe.

You can find out about the Silkeborg Museum on their website and more about The Tollund Man here.

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In three words: Intimate, reflective, moving

Try something similar…Dear Mrs. Bird by A J Pearce (read my review here)

About the Author

Anne Youngson worked for many years in senior management in the car industry before embarking on a creative career as a writer. She has supported many charities in governance roles, including Chair of the Writers in Prison Network, which provided residencies in prisons for writers. She lives in Oxfordshire and is married with two children and three grandchildren to date. Meet Me at the Museum is her debut novel, which is due to be published around the world.

Connect with Anne

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Throwback Thursday: The Dark Tide by Vera Brittain

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ThrowbackThursday

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme originally created by Renee at It’s Book Talk.  It’s designed as an opportunity to share old favourites as well as books that we’ve finally got around to reading that were published over a year ago.

Today I’m reviewing a book from my Classics Club list – The Dark Tide by Vera Brittain.  You can find my full list here.

The Dark TideAbout the Book

Bright, romantic and vivacious, Daphne Lethbridge is back at Oxford after a period of voluntary work.  The First World War has ravaged Europe, but it has done nothing to daunt her spirit, and she plunges headlong into the whirl of college dinners, debates and romances.  Her enjoyment, though, is soured by her cynical contemporary Virginia Dennison, who spars with Daphne on every occasion. Beneath their surface civility seethes a deep envy.

Daphne seems to triumph over Virginia when she makes a brilliant marriage to a rising political star.  But after they settle in London, she begins to realize the bitter truth of her marriage. It takes a chance encounter with her old enemy for her disillusionment to give way to a mature understanding of a woman’s destiny and a woman’s friendship.

Format: Paperback (260 pp.)    Publisher: Virago Modern Classics
Published: 1999 [1923]              Genre: Fiction

Find The Dark Tide on Goodreads

My Review

Better known for her autobiographical works, in particular Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain also wrote a number of novels.  The Dark Tide was in fact her first novel and, although I hesitate to say so, it shows.  However, you don’t need to take my word for it because the author herself was fairly critical about this first attempt at fiction in her foreword to the reprinted 1935 edition.  Although defending the accuracy of the novel’s depiction of the life of women students in the 1920s, she concedes ‘the crude violence of its methods and unmodified black-and-whiteness of its values’.

As Mark Bostridge, Vera Brittain’s biographer, observes in his introduction to the 1999 edition of The Dark Tide, the book created a minor sensation when first published on account of its portrayal of an Oxford women’s college (a thinly veiled Somerville College).  It also risked causing offence to her friend, Winifred Holtby, caricatured as the character Daphne Lethbridge in the novel.   He describes the characters in The Dark Tide as ‘not so much imaginatively redeveloped as simply transferred direct from fact to fiction’.  One of the key scenes in the book describing a college debate in which Daphne and Virginia cross verbal swords re-enacts an actual event involving Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby during their time at Somerville (described by Brittain in Testament of Youth).

My main issue with the book is that I felt I was being invited to see aspects of Virginia’s character as faults when they seemed to me mostly positive traits.  Conversely, Daphne, whom I felt I was supposed to admire, came across as spiteful, vindictive and envious of Virginia’s achievements and intellect.   My view of Daphne was redeemed to a certain extent by her developing self-awareness at the book progresses but it’s difficult to like a character who displays snobbery such as in the following passage: ‘She flung her books and papers in a heap on the table, and took down her new green coat and skirt from the wardrobe.  It was very expensive, and Daphne loved it – especially as it would make her appear such a contrast to Virginia. Virginia always seemed so fond of black; it was sheer affectation, Daphne thought, to adopt such a sombre style.’

The character I really liked was History Tutor, Miss O’Neill, for her kindliness towards the students.  She came across as perceptive, intelligent and successful but not arrogant about that success; a really positive role model for a woman of that time.    I do thought have to give the author credit for conveying the insular, slightly claustrophobic and at times bitchy atmosphere of an institution where people are thrown together in close proximity and in academic competition.

Towards the end of the book, I began to feel more sympathy for Daphne and the situation in which she finds herself.  However, I still found myself frustrated at her submissiveness and how, for a clearly intelligent woman, she had the wool pulled over her eyes so comprehensively.

The Dark Tide is interesting from the point of view of its place in the evolution of  Vera Brittain’s writing but I believe she definitely wrote better novels and that her non-fiction remains her crowning achievement.  If you feel inclined to explore her fiction, Honourable Estate or Born 1925 may be better places to start.

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Vera BrittainAbout the Author

Vera Mary Brittain (1893 – 1970) grew up in provincial comfort in the north of England.  In 1914 she won an exhibition to Somerville College, Oxford, but a year later abandoned her studies to enlist as a VAD nurse.  She served throughout the war, working in London, Malta and the Front in France.

At the end of the war, with all those closest to her dead, Vera Brittain returned to Oxford.  There she met Winifred Holtby – author of South Riding – and this friendship which was to last until Winifred Holtby’s untimely death in 1935 sustained her in those difficult post-war years.

Vera Brittain was a convinced pacifist, a prolific speaker, lecturer, journalist and writer, devoting much of her energy to the causes of peace and feminism.  She wrote 29 books in all – novels, poetry, biography, autobiography and other non-fiction – but it was Testament of Youth which established her reputation and made her one of the best loved writers of her time.

Vera Brittain married George Catlin in 1925 and had two children.  Her daughter is Shirley Williams, Baroness Williams of Crosby, who is a British politician and academic who represents the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords.