10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Story of the Maidens, Without Sentimentality, December 30, 2001
Jane Gardam's The Flight of the Maidens follows three young women during the summer before their entering university in England in 1946. That basic description may have you assuming that this novel would be a sweet, sentimental exploration of these three girls "growing up." I know that's what I thought it would be. It's not. All three young women face challenges that while completely believable, are not predictable or "canned" in any way. Each one of them surprised me in several ways, and it is this element of subtle surprise that I think distinguishes this novel. The characters are charming, without being corny; the story is entertaining, without being predictable. Enjoy.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Three girls, December 30, 2011
This review is from: The Flight of the Maidens (Paperback)
It is 1946. Three girls come of age in the weeks after they emerge from school. All of them are poor, all have won scholarships to elite English colleges.
They live in Yorkshire. The background characters are passionate people who like to be seen as generous and self-sacrificing. They also tend to be petty and narrow, repressed and stunted, prone to selfishness and narcissism. There is the legacy of the puritan era, and laid over that, the first world war's residue of widowhood, spinsterhood and male madness.
Over the last six years females have focused in on each other; in the towns and cities, buildings still lie in ruins. People are still digesting the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the reduction of Hamburg and Dresden to `paste'. A new order had not yet begun, the postwar boom not suspected. The old England is not yet fully chewed through: run-down aristocrats still cling to castle ruins, politics disturbs the thoughts of ordinary burghers over their morning papers, the Communist Party is still an option, the Pill not yet. Threaded through all this is the silent calm of Quakerism: the puritan tradition at its gentlest, in its most dignified clothing, Quakers are presented as the force that did most to help Jews out of Germany in the 1930s.
Hetty is the daughter of an erudite man, mentally smashed in WW1, who lets his social connections lie fallow while he digs graves for his income. Quite another story is Hetty's saintly, pretty, suffering, hyper-attentive, Anglo-Catholic mother. In a ghostly way she extends everywhere: into her own tight grey circle of female acquaintances, into the life not only of the local Vicar but also of Hetty's boyfriend, the `glass of cold water' Eustace; into the past, into the future, above all into Hetty's heart and mind. Sickened by these undue familiarities, Hetty has a few week's holiday alone in the Lake District, where she is thrown in with farmers and daffy local aristocrats, never ceasing from spiritual combat with her mother, in all her inner and outer forms.
Liesolette is a refugee German Jew, sent out by her family in 1936. She was then raised by childless English Quakers. She has their calm silence on the outside, and another, appalling silence within. For a while before uni she moves to London, into the congested dwelling of another childless couple, German Jews like her, and she attracts a young Polish Jew as suitor; in their company the brittle silence inside her shatters at last. But complicating it all is the offer of an alternative future, from a rich great aunt, childless again, in California. Liesolotte is pulled from afar into her eerie, suburban cocoon of wealth, between forest and sea.
The third girl Una lives, or rather scrapes by, with her matter-of-fact, streetwise mother. Cambridge beckons but meanwhile Una is busy exploring life with her boyfriend: shy, sensible, laconic and stern, a union man and communist. Una is a relief from the intensity of the other two (despite the earlier suicide of her father, another one done in by the Great War) and serves to tie the story together.
The plot's coincidences and contrivances may irritate some readers but really just lighten the tone and do not, I think, get in the way of what the tale sets out to do.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Transatlantic gap, February 15, 2009
Were any of the other American readers puzzled, even put off, by the strange dialect attempts Ms Gardam made with the Californians? Brit writers seem to always come up with a weird polyglot of Manhattanese, Cowboy and even Valley Girl which may pass in Britain but left me trying to figure it out phonetically. This, obviously , interrupts the flow of the narrative and adds a touch of unintended humor and implausability.
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