This is a bit of a biography of some young women who hung around with British literary critic Cyril Connolly in the thirties, forties, and fifties. The audiobook is read pretty decently by Clare Corbett, although the introductory part was a pain to put up with, especially since I had no ready way to skip it while driving! Yuk! After that it improved. Subtitled "Love and Literature in Wartime London," the book mostly covers four of these 'girls': Sonia Brownell, Lys Lubbock, Barbara Skelton, and Janetta Woolley, but one that caught my imagination was named Diana Witherby. I don't know what it is, but there's something about that name that really captures my imagination. She was a poet evidently who fractured her pelvis in a car accident when it was hit by a military truck on the blitz-darkened streets of London.
But I digress! These 'lost' girls typically experienced a less-than-satisfactory home life, were in at least one case, orphaned, and had to stand on their own two feet. Although they were shabbily treated by the men they associated with, they also learned to fend for themselves and they were survivors. The sad thing is that they seemed to be universally shallow and pretentious and oriented only toward the high life and living off men. Usually that would be the only option for a girl back then, but these women had skills and talents, and evidently chose not to use them.
Sonia married George Orwell late in his life for no good reason - except maybe to live off his earnings once he was gone. Lys was a fashion model who was later Connolly's mistress-cum-servant. Barbara Skelton was briefly married to British literary critic Cyril Connolly (among others!), and Janetta Woolley seems to be primarily known for abandoning her husband and young child. These women were supposed to be quite the lookers in their time and perhaps by standards of that era they were. To me they seemed quite ordinary - neither lookers nor unattractive - just people, so why they had this reputation I do not know. It seems unfortunate that they were saddled with that sort of a credit when they had other qualities, but perhaps if they truly were as shallow as their looks, they were appropriately pigeon-holed.
If this had been a novel I would have ditched it long before the end and probably quite close to the beginning since the women are so uninspiring and the men worse, but it's a true story of real people and the author has dug deep into stories, letters, diaries and such to bring it all out. He did a good job except in that he seemed to dance around chronologically and confusingly, and at one point was comparing one of the four to a character in a novel. I was driving at the time so I could not concentrate sufficiently to follow properly what was being said, and it became annoying so I skipped that chapter rather than let it confuse me on the drive home! Besides, I was much more interested in their less than selfless motivations and their seriously poor choices, and in the life they led, rather than how they looked. This book certainly delivered on that score!
The lives of these women seemed to pivot around Cyril Connolly who sounds to me, from this book like, as the Brits might say, a complete and utter arse. he was a jerk: a needy under-achiever who took money for writing commissions on which he never delivered, who used women terribly, and who evidently was sufficiently charming with his puerile approach to life that these women took pity on him and let him walk all over them. The bigges tproblem seemed ot be how hihgly-strung these people were, constantly at each others' throats and blindly enterign into shallow and doomed relationships. I'm honestly surprised that no-one actually murdered anyone within this dysfunctional group.
I'd never heard of him before except that his name was in a Monty Python song (Eric the Half a Bee), and now, after this, I'll be fine if I never hear of him ever again. Wikipedia's entry on him has this to say at one point about his immediate post-grad situation: "He struggled to find employment, while his friends and family sought to pay off his extensive debts. In summer he went for his annual stay at Urquhart's chalet in the French Alps, and in the autumn went to Spain and Portugal." So while those suckers are digging around paying for his lifestyle, off he goes to the alps and Portugal on vacation. Dick move, Cyril.
But I do have some ideas for characters now that I can use in novels down the line, so I considered this a worthy read, informative about wartime life in the UK, and about how selfish and spoiled some people were while others were living impoverished because of the war and its aftermath. The US doesn't, I think, quite grasp how dire the situation was in Britain, In the US, and apart, of course, from the appalling loss of life once the US entered the war, life pretty much went on as ever. There were no great shortages, no blitz, and no blackouts in cities. In the UK, with food shortages and rationing that continued long after the war ended, with bombs falling, and then the immense work of rebuilding London afterwards, things were very different. This book delivers some of that, but it also inadvertently contrasts it with how spoiled and unappreciative these people truly were.
