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The Friendly Young Ladies (Paperback)

by Mary Renault (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
RRP: £8.99
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Customers buy this book with The Heat of the Day (Vintage classics) by Elizabeth Bowen

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Product details

  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Virago Press Ltd; New edition edition (1 Dec 2005)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1844081362
  • ISBN-13: 978-1844081363
  • Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.6 x 2.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 507,568 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #23 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > R > Renault, Mary

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Product Description

Review

'Undeniably charming ... has an enormous nostalgic attractiveness' New Yorker 'Written with rare insight' Boston Globe 'A very lively and human story' New York Times Book Review

Product Description

Elsie, sheltered and naive, is seventeen and unhappy. Stifled by life with her bickering parents in a bleak Cornish village, she falls in love with the first presentable young man she meets -- Peter, an an ambitious London doctor. On his advice she runs away from home and goes to live with her sister Leonora, who escaped eight years earlier. But there are surprises in store for conventional Elsie as her sister has a rather bohemian lifestyle: not only does Leo live in a houseboat on the Thames where she writes Westerns for a living, she shares her boat, and her bed, with the lovely Helen. When Peter pays this strange menage a visit, turning his attention from one 'friendly' young lady to the next, he disturbs the calm for each of them -- with results unforeseen by all ...Mary Renault wrote this delightfully provocative novel in 1943 partly in answer to the despair characteristic of Radclyffe Hall's the Well of Loneliness. The result is this witty and stylish social comedy.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Unsual and slightly puzzling....but not a bad book, 3 Oct 2007
An unusual book and a puzzling one...i'm not sure really what it's about or what the point of it was, but it was a pleasant read and it was written well. However, I found most of the characters not that likeable or sympathetic with their intermittently cold and flippant behaviour towards each other.

It's set in the 1930s and features a couple of lesbians (one of who writes westerns and is not actually a very committed lesbian) one very shallow and self-absorbed man and one confused young girl - the main character Elsie.

Elsie is a mousy timid little girl who is overwhelmed by her parents constant bickering and dislike of each other and runs away to join her sister who lives on a houseboat on the Thames. Elsie sort of grows up by the end of the novel and...I think... so does her sister. But it's unclear (or it was to me anyway) if the book is actually about Elsie growing up, lesbians, casual sex in the period it was written or just a meandering look at a group of quite dysfunctional people. By dysfunctional, I mean in the sense that they are unable to have intimate and honest relationships with each other, rather than because of their sexual identity or confusion about it.

I did like the book, but am hestiant about it because I'm left wondering if I just didn't get it. Or is that because it wasn't meant as anything too deep? Renault does say she wrote this as an antidote to the Well Of Lonliness, which apparantly (I haven't read it) is a very heavy and depressing book about lesbianism. So perhaps this was meant to be a light fun book about lesbians and different sexuality back when in the days when this whole topic was really taboo. (The Well of Loneliness was banned when it was first published and people could only buy illegal copies published in France.)
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