Customer Reviews

The Flight of the Maidens: A Novel

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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.

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.

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.

Jane Gardam set out to write a very ambitious book about three girlfriends and their diverging lives in the summer between their last year of high school and their first year of college. The setting is England, post World War II and Gardam's characterization of post-war city life is interesting. Though the novel begins and ends with the three girls hanging out and contemplating their futures, in between they have very little contact with each other. This novel is really just three short stories about Hetty Fallowes, Una Vane and Liseolette Klein and their adventures during one fateful summer.

Which can be a fine premise for a book. It just did not seem to work here. I felt that the author really short changed the stories of Una and Liseolette. Una is the daughter of a doctor who committed suicide and a mother who now runds the local beauty parlor ("Vane Glory"). That summer, she becomes romantically involved with her socialist milk delivery boy during the course of their long bike rides together. Liseolette, a German citizen living with kindly Quakers, discovers that she has living relative, after previously not knowing whether all of her family perished in the concentration camps. Both of these stories are potentially very interesting, but Gardham does not devote enough time to either one. The characters seem flat and unemotional; their revelations seem contrived and premature.

It seems that Gardham's favorite character is Hetty, and as a result, mine was too. Hetty is the daughter of a disillusioned, emotionally dead veteran and an immature, thoughtless and hypocritical mother. Hetty's mother prides herself on her piety, yet is having a blatant affair with the vicar, whom she begs Hetty to confess her own sins to. Yet for all her faults, Hetty's mother loves her, and Hetty loves her mother. Desperate to escape her mother's oppresive concern, Hetty rents a room in the Lakes District under the premise of studying for her college courses. Distance gives Hetty the distance she needs to appreciate her parents for what they are and are not.

Though my parents are wonderful people, and my mother is nothing like Hetty's mother, I could appreciate being 17 and feeling extremely ambivalent about my parents. They could exasperate me and even embarass me, and five minutes later I would be reflecting on something about them that I loved. This horrible but exciting feeling of adolescence is beautifully depicted in Gardham's story of Hetty and her mother.

Overall, the story of Hetty somewhat redeems the rest of this "novel", which is full of superficial characterizations and excessive symbolism.

Jane Gardam's "The Flight of the maidens" takes us back to England, post WWII, in 1946.

It is summer, and we meet the three friends, Hetty Fallowes, Una Vane, and Lieselotte Klein. They are about to leave their safe homes in Yorkshire to enroll in Universities in London. We follow these 3 young ladies through summer, we see how they solve the different challenges they encounter, and how they prepare for college. Hetty leaves town, renting a room far out in no-where land to read the whole reading list before University starts up, Una gets romantically involved with Ray, and Lieselotte ends up in California, to stay with distant relatives.

This is, what I would call, a hopelessly romantic book, with no other purpose than to make you feel good..

"The Flight of the maidens" came highly recommended from a friend, and I really wanted to like this book. But honestly, it didn't take me long to realize that this was not my thing. Sorry Paul, no offence - this is not a bad story or awful writing.. this was simply not my cup of tea... (Although I have to admit that I liked Hetty...)