Dorothy Whipple was a popular English novelist between the two World Wars who enjoyed a resurgence earlier this century, when critics re-discovered her tales of middle-class life, notably High Wages and They Knew Mr. Knight. “The Jane Austen of the twentieth century,” declared the novelist and playwright J. B. Priestly. In their latest installment of re-published memoirs, Slightly Foxed offers us Whipple’s account of growing up the middle child in Lancashire at the turn of the last century. (She was born in 1893.) The Other Day is hilarious and heart-breaking, told from the viewpoint of a child with a keen ear for dialogue and a sharp eye for character. And, as is always the case with Slightly Foxed editions, the book itself is a beauty to hold.
This is an unusual book to describe, which is only one of the reasons to love it. No chapter is longer than a few pages, and the range is wonderfully breathtaking, from actors who met death in car accidents to Lee Miller’s photographs of concentration camps that appeared in, of all places, Vogue, to a neighbor who advised that boiling an egg took four minutes, not five, and that the spoon on the plate must point toward the egg and not away from it. The neighbor also seemed to have a crush on Deborah Levy’s boyfriend. Tender, wise, and wistful, The Position of Spoons does not have a drop of the mawkish in it. Levy is a bracing and subtle writer, and our only hope is this collection leads you not just to her acclaimed novels but to her autobiographies, which so far amount to three volumes.
