When she first steps on to the page in Margery Sharp’s Britannia Mews, Adelaide has very little clue how to operate in the world. She can be forgiven at this point, since she’s under ten and is the sheltered daughter of comfortably middle class Victorian parents. Over the course of the novel—which spans more than fifty years—we see Adelaide grow into a very posed woman who doesn’t seem to change at all. Adelaide’s world rewards the stubborn.
Adelaide feels uncomfortable with her role as dutiful daughter and potential society bride. The only thing that appeals is her drawing instructor, who flirts with her after a solo lesson. Lacking and other options, and feeling flattered by the attention of a man she believes will someday be a great artist, Adelaide lets herself fall in love with Henry Lambert. When she starts pushing for marriage, Henry grows cool. Still, Adelaide manages to get married to the reluctant man and moves into the Britannia Mews (a slum in 1875). Life is far different from her coddled existence in Kensington. No matter how much she pushes, Adelaide can’t make Henry a better man. All she can do is raise the standards of her own little dwelling—at least until Lambert takes a tumble down the stairs one day and breaks his neck.
Britannia Mews is an unusual fortune’s wheel type of book. It’s gentler. While Adelaide does fall very far from her former life, she’s never truly in desperate straights (in spite of some blackmail from an odious neighbor). Her wheel starts rising after hitting its lowest point and, as Adelaide rises, the Mews gets gentrified. Adelaide’s saving grace is her refusal to lower her standards (apart from a few months of moderate gin drinking). Once she figures out who she is, she never bends to what other people want her to do. She won’t go back as a penitent to her family or become the victim her blackmailer wants. Adelaide is a remarkable woman.
This novel leaps forward in time to World War I, the 1920s, and World War II. The world changes. Adelaide does…not change so much. And yet she fits in with any era because she doesn’t expect not to. When I read the first half of the novel, I was worried that Adelaide would follow the same route as Lily Bart in The House of Mirth. Margery Sharp, however, is not Edith Wharton. There are characters with flaws that would, in a Wharton novel, be tragic and probably fatal. In Britannia Mews, redemption is possible. Of course, being a Sharp novel, redemption comes from living long enough to prove the naysayers wrong.
This sounds charming! I do have a copy of this ($1 at a book sale) and really should read it. Some love Sharp, and I find her a little light, but I have enjoyed her books–particularly The Rescuers and its sequels, which, bizarrely, seem more serious (in a comic way) to me than her adult books!
I got it through an online sale because I really liked her novel, The Nutmeg Tree. This one was not as light as that novel, but it wasn’t nearly as grim as it could have been given that it’s set in a slum.