Hostages to Fortune

WITH A PUBLISHER'S NOTE
344pp
ISBN 9781903155318

This autobiographical first novel follows the life of a young woman from 1915, when she has her first baby, until 1933. Catherine's husband is invalided out of the army and buys a doctor's practice in an Oxfordshire village, where the young couple bring up their three children and become deeply involved in the life of the village. It is a surprisingly hard life, full of difficulties and disillusions, but a satisfying one nevertheless.

Hostages to Fortune was first published in June 1933 and it was the Book Society Choice for that month. But, wrote the Saturday Review of Literature reviewer that summer: 'Let me say at once that I do not believe that sun-bathers and sea-shore nymphs will in any considerable number select this book as a beach companion, It is something to be read and relished in an armchair at home. Its taste and intelligence call for corresponding qualities in the reader. For this author has successfully attempted an extremely difficult literary feat: she has essayed simply to describe the day-to-day life of a middle-class English family, living in narrow circumstances in an Oxfordshire village; and in doing it she has drawn an all but faultless picture of what has sometimes been described as the "lost generation"... I have no hesitation in describing this book as in many ways the most remarkable, and one of the best written, that I have read in a long time.'

Hostages to Fortune is a brave and unusual novel in its description of both the realities of parenthood and its attendant disappointments - there is no plot as such, and yet the reader becomes absorbed in a life which is in one sense faraway and in another, because this is a domestic novel par excellence, not very different from many such lives today. 

Endpaper

The endpaper is a 1933 hand-printed linen designed by Edwin Parker for the Silver Studio.

Picture Caption

Frederick William Elwell 'The First Born' 1913