"Penelope's Hat" is a portrait of a woman's life from childhood to old age. It details her family, her relationships and her creativity. Ronald Frame's first novel won the Betty Trask Award, and he subsequently published "Sandmouth People". He also writes for film and television.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Penelope Milne, a "mediumly famous" English novelist, shamelessly makes her life public in her fiction but remains privately haunted by betrayals, family skeletons and messy affairs. Her early childhood in Borneo and move to London, her father's mysterious death, a stint driving an ambulance during WW II and her intense relationship with a controlling mother mold her personality. A too-perfect marriage to banker Guy Gerrault ends with his feigned death and Penelope's belated discovery that he was an impostor. Romantic liaisons with her agent, with a BBC radio producer, with a married publisher and with a reserved Cambridge scholar whose secret life she is totally unaware of provide grist for her literary mill. She never achieves inner equilibrium, however, and after she dies in Australia, her editor pores over Penelope's Hat , her final novel, testament to her loves, losses and self-delusions. The many different hats Penelope wears and discards like so many used selves are the leitmotif of Frame's beautifully nuanced, Jamesian performance. The Glasgow-based writer unravels the weft and warp of experience in intoxicating prose and witty dialogue.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
A woman novelist--never certain who she and others are, both a product and an observer of the English middle class notorious for preferring appearances to the truth--kindles the imagination in Frame's haunting new novel (A Woman of Judah, 1989; Sandmouth, 1987; Winter Journey, 1986). Here, Frame covers the 1920's through the 80's. Styles and periods he is too young to have witnessed--including 1920's Borneo, a tennis club in 1930's Cornwall and wartime London--he captures with uncanny skill. His heroine is also a convincing period piece, with her taste for hats that both proclaim and conceal and with her need for a certain type of man to take her emotional life in charge. She wavers between being flesh and blood and an amalgam of the sensitive women who graced British drawing-room novels between the wars. Likewise, Frame's latest wavers between being an enormously clever parlor trick and literature of a more authentic kind. The author has some postmodern cards up his sleeve with his heroine writing books that obliquely refer to the life the reader has just read about, interviews by journalists with the heroine about why she writes and what she is trying to say, and mysterious, often melodramatic holes purposely left in the story to be filled in later or not at all. For Anglophiles, the book is a feast of the poetry of well-heeled English life--Harrod's, the Savoy, the Berkeley, holidays in France--and the very English poetry of good manners papering over emptiness, hatred and despair. Beautifully written, almost musical story of a woman's journey from childhood to old age trying to find clarity in a muffled world that makes its point by what it does not say. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A diamond that shines amongst pebbles--intriguing & bizarre.,
By Connie<connie@warpdrive.com.sg> (Singapore) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Penelope's Hat (Hardcover)
I came across Penelope's Hat in the public library. For the past one and the half year, I'm the only one borrowing this book. This book is strangely bizzare and time seemed to be a rather insubstantial quality to the plot of the novel. As I dwell deeper into the novel, I discover myself revelling into different realms of reality. I can't put a finger to describe how exactly intrigued and affected I am by the book. I still hadn't fully understood the book and am still re-reading it to get a fuller picture of it. I get the feeling that there are a few shifts as to who the protagonist is. Sometimes it seemed like Ronald Frame himself is telling the story but sometimes Penelope herself. I can't say enough about how much I'm drawn to Penelope's hat. I always believe that true power lies in perception. Perception that manifests in words. The descriptive language is beautifully written. Ronald Frame has used his brilliant craft to tell his tale. He shows and tells-- with this, he has poignantly enthralled me. Frame is definitely a master at story-telling and as a budding writer myself, I would really love to possess this inner strength that he exudes in his works. Lastly, I must say that this book is a rare gem and is all the more so since it's already out of print. I am still searchimg for a copy to keep myself.As the plot of the novel is not confined to the unreal chains of time, this makes the book all the more timeless. Hence, Penelope's Hat is definitely a work that shines like a diamond amongst pebbles!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A good read!,
By ANON (MA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Penelope's Hat (Hardcover)
I have already read this book and found it to be very interesting, confusing and engrossing. I don't want to give anything away. It's not "suspenseful", but you are never quite where you think you are, and it does create suspense iin a kind of subtle non obvious way. I would like to read it again, and plan to give it as a present.
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