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Book Description
Like Dusty Answer, Rebecca, I Capture the Castle or The Pursuit of Love, this is one of those novels about a young girl growing up and encountering life and love which all have the common characteristic of being funny, readable and yet perceptive. They are 'hot-water bottle' novels - books to curl up with on the sofa with a rug and a cup of tea and a bar of chocolate on a wet Saturday afternoon.
But Mariana is more than this. As the Observer's Harriet Lane wrote in her Preface, critics may have tended 'to dismiss its subject matter: crushes, horses, raffish uncles, frocks, inconsequential jobs, love affairs...but it is Mariana's artlessness, its enthusiasm, its attention to tiny, telling domestic detail that makes it so appealing to modern readers. As a snap-album - as a portrait of a certain sort of girl at a certain time in a certain place - it now seems, sixty years after first publication, entirely exotic.
'Yet it also deals with timeless, familiar concerns that are once again admissable after a long period in the wilderness. After all, this is the sometimes comic story of a young woman trying, often quite desperately, to occupy her days while waiting for the arrival of the right young man: a plot that would probably ring some bells with a certain Bridget Jones...'
Monica Dickens's admirers included J.B.Priestley, Rebecca West (it is 'life itself which is caught up in the pages of her books'), John Betjeman (who called her 'one of the most affectionate and humorous observers of the English scene') and, nowadays, AS Byatt. The Sunday Telegraph reviewer of the Persephone edition described it as 'funny and poignant'. 'The contemporary detail is superb,' wrote the Spectator, 'the characters are observed with vitality and humour...the book is written with verve and exuberance.'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The life and trials of Mary,
By
This review is from: Mariana (Paperback)
Mariana is the story of a young girl's life in the 1930's. Told in flashback, it opens with Mary waiting anxiously for news of her young husband who has been reported missing during WWII. Then, we turn back to Mary's childhood and adolescence, a time of school, wonderful summer holidays, first love, a disastrous attempt at drama school, love affairs with the wrong men, and finally, the meeting with the right man which will lead us back to the present. Monica Dickens wrote this novel when she was only 24, and it's perspective is that of a lively young woman who has no idea what to do with her life. It's written with great humour (the episode when Mary recites Tennyson's "Mariana" at drama school is very funny) and the details of life in the 30's are an added attraction to modern readers. The tone of light romance deepens as we move closer to the end of the novel, and remember the opening scenes of Mary waiting for news of her husband. The final scenes are beautifully written and very moving.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A timeless tale of growing up,
By Sarah Roberts (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Mariana (Paperback)
I picked this up just after reading Monica Dickens' autobiography, An Open Book, in which Dickens explains how much she drew from her own life when writing Mariana (her second book). With this personal experience to guide her, she paints a lovely, unvarnished portrait of a girl's growing up in London between the wars. She touches on issues that nearly every female can relate to: the excitement and pain of a first love; the joys and struggles of making friends; the often difficult task of fitting in at school; and the search for excitement and purpose in life. In refreshingly unpretentious prose and in a deceptively simple style, Dickens, like her great-grandfather Charles, gets to the heart of basic human emotions and dramas. It's a book to take to bed on a cold night or to read while on holiday: fun, honest, and heartwarming - another Persephone delight.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Different world, same feelings.,
By
This review is from: Mariana (Paperback)
Mariana is a story that takes the reader through a girl's life - from child to young woman. It's point of view is flawless, changing and developing with the character as she moves from a naieve and unsure girl to an individual who is happy with the role of being herself; who comes to realise that whatever happened 'all one could do was to get on with the job that nobody else could do, the job of being oneself'. But it isn't just a 'coming of age' novel. It is beautifully descriptive - taking us back to the 1930s and giving a glimpse of a world that seems so different, where girls did wait for a husband to turn up, and could be saved financially by making a good marriage, and when London, Paris, the world, somehow seems more exotic, more finely presented, and more innocent, but none of it is portrayed in a saccharine way. The novel starts with Mary, the main character, waiting for news of her husband who is away from her, as a naval officer in WW2, and then flashes back to her youth. As you approach the end of the book you can't help remembering the start of the novel and hoping, very much, that the news of the man - who she feels is as close to her as to almost be a part of her - will not be bad.
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