Company in the Evening by Ursula Orange

First published 1944; this edition Dean Street Press, 2017

Why?

A complete chance discovery when searching out yet more obscure novels from the period. I had never heard of Ursula Orange, nor Dean Street Press.

It turns out that the latter has an entire imprint, Furrowed Middlebrow, devoted to rediscovering neglected women writers of the early and mid-twentieth century - which immediately feels like a rabbit hole worth disappearing down.

Company in the Evening particularly appealed because it is set during the Second World War and follows Vicky, a then-unconventionally university educated divorced single mother bringing up her daughter while commuting to London to work in a literary agency.

Enjoyment factor

Plot is definitely not the point. Very little happens, but the characterisation absolutely sparkles. Orange is particularly acute on female relationships: between mothers and daughters, sisters-in-law, friends and women of different generations, with all the affection, irritation, competitiveness, obligation and misunderstanding that entails.

Vicky herself is fascinating. Educated at Oxford, divorced, bringing up a child largely single-handedly and determined to continue working even though she does not particularly need the money, she feels strikingly modern.

I found myself wondering how autobiographical she might be. Certainly the first-person voice has an immediacy which makes her feel observed rather than invented, while the literary-agency scenes have the unmistakable ring of someone who knows that world.

It left me thinking ...

…firstly, about the extraordinary body of fiction written by women about apparently “domestic” subjects throughout much of the twentieth century. From the interwar period onwards, women novelists increasingly wrote about marriage, motherhood, work, money, friendship and domestic life - subjects which can look small from a distance but which were actually the battlegrounds on which enormous social changes were taking place.

Perhaps this fiction did more than simply coincide with women's liberation. By taking women's choices and interior lives seriously, it helped normalise the idea that there might be many different answers to the question of “a woman's place”.

Company in the Evening is particularly interesting because it presents several of them simultaneously. Marriage is neither automatically desirable nor automatically oppressive; work can provide purpose as well as money; motherhood does not have to subsume identity; independence brings both freedom and responsibility.

It also captures a fascinating moment in the destruction of the old British social order.

The novel is set during the war, yet it is still simply assumed that a middle-class household will contain at least one live-in member of domestic staff. That old world sits rather incongruously alongside Vicky's thoroughly modern existence: Oxford-educated, divorced, commuting into London, earning her own living and raising a child without a husband.

The Second World War didn't abolish the old order overnight, but reading books written during it makes it very easy to see why it could not survive for much longer.

Vicky would have been roughly my grandmother's generation. Her mother belongs to a generation born into the Victorian world. And yet neither woman feels remotely as distant from us as that chronology might suggest.

It is one of the pleasures of novels like this: history suddenly contracts. The social furniture may have changed enormously, but the people themselves seem remarkably familiar.