Miss Mole

By E.H. Young

Book Overview

'Young is a sharp and funny writer with a brilliant eye for moral fudging and verbal hypocrisy, and she has a splendid foil in Miss Mole' Sally Beauman WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZE 'Who would suspect her sense of fun and irony, of a passionate love for beauty and the power to drag it from its hidden places? Who would imagine that Miss Mole had pictured herself, at different times, as an explorer in strange lands, as a lady wrapped in luxury and delicate garments?' Miss Hannah Mole has for twenty years earned her living precariously as a governess or companion to a succession of difficult old women.Now, aged forty, a thin and shabby figure, she returns to Radstowe, the lovely city of her youth. Here she is, if not exactly welcomed, at least employed as housekeeper by the pompous Reverend Robert Corder, whose daughters are sorely in need of guidance. But even the dreariest situation can be transformed into an adventure by the indomitable Miss Mole. Blessed with imagination, wit and intelligence, she wins the affection of Ethel and her nervous sister Ruth. But her past holds a secret that, if brought to life, would jeopardise everything.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0349014132
• ISBN13: 9780349014135
• Release Date: October 2021
• Publisher: Virago Press (UK)
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

A stunningly good novel

I read this book after reading "The Misses Mallet", which I thought was brilliant. "Miss Mole" is even better. It is a tour de force character study of a funny, intelligent woman. Miss Mole is employed as a housekeeper, and through her eyes we see the foibles of those with whom she comes into contact. It is a tragedy that this wonderful author is largely out of print.

The world aslant

E. H. Young's delightful Hannah Mole is over forty, unmarried, and always on the run for new work as a companion, nanny, or housekeeper. Although proud of her work, she realizes her humorously sharp tongue and satirical perception of the world will always get her tossed from each new job; yet despite her hand-to-mouth circumstances, she keeps fairly happy by always amazing herself at the qualities and peculiarities of human nature. This much-loved, but little-known 1930 masterpiece, which details the return of Miss Mole to her favorite city of Radstowe (really Bristol) to care for a clergyman's family is told with an angularity and asperity befitting its great central character. Nothing in this novel is ever told straightforwardly, but always at a kind of slant like sunlight through spar; but this is the way Miss Mole herself views the world, and the result is a very comic and very intelligent novel by one of the most unjustly forgotten British novelists who might be best characterized (with her quirkiness and love of aphortism) as an early 20th-century George Meredith.