"Peter Stanley lay on his back on Jane's lawn. His head reclined on a cushion which one of her children had offered him. 'Would you like a blue cushion?' it had said, leaning over him with an intent expression."
"The September sunshine bathed his eyelids and drenched his body. He gave himself up to a delicious lassitude. Scents and faint sounds drifted across his mind like clouds across a pool; thoughts, disjointed memories, stirred momentarily in its depth, rippled the surface, dived again with silver agility, and disappeared."
Sylvia Thompson (1902-1968) is an author I came across in a reference book of 20th century British women writers. I had not heard of her before or any of her books, but I discovered that my library owned one, Portrait by Caroline, and a quick visit to the fiction section meant I had found my newest lost in the stacks book to share.
I've not been able to find out much information on Thompson, other than a few remarks gleaned from a couple of book reviews, but it sounds as though she had one bestseller amongst her many novels and then faded into obscurity. She was part of the 'Oxford Generation' of authors that included Margaret Kennedy, Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain. Their circle was known as 'The Somerville School of Novelists', and it's her inclusion with such famous names that piques my own curiosity.
Published in 1931 Portrait by Caroline is a story of infidelity. A Time magazine review calls it a novel of "human situations", so it's a drama of sorts I would guess. I feel like I am doing my own bit of sleuthing trying to find out information on some of these books I come across, but I've not done a very good job with this one.
Her major novel, The Hounds of Spring, was written when she was only 23 in 1926. The premise sounds interesting--a women who believes her lover is dead marries another man but later discovers that he is alive. I'm trying to get a copy through ILL as her books are not available online, and will try and dip into Portrait by Caroline in the interim. Her work is supposed to focus on young people between the wars, "women's experiences of grief and their desire for safety and order".
This is a very pretty little book and it appears to have been circulated a number of times all the way through the late 1970s. It's always a little sad to think of these forgotten books and the stories within the pages. Has anyone read Sylvia Thompson?