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Lise Lillywhite
Lise Lillywhite
256 pages
First published May 1, 1969
1 person is currently reading
55 people want to read
About the author
Margery Sharp
80 books184 followersMargery Sharp was born Clara Margery Melita Sharp in Salisbury. She spent part of her childhood in Malta.
Sharp wrote 26 novels, 14 children's stories, 4 plays, 2 mysteries and many short stories. She is best known for her series of children's books about a little white mouse named Miss Bianca and her companion, Bernard. Two Disney films have been made based on them, called The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under.
In 1938, she married Major Geoffrey Castle, an aeronautical engineer.
Sharp wrote 26 novels, 14 children's stories, 4 plays, 2 mysteries and many short stories. She is best known for her series of children's books about a little white mouse named Miss Bianca and her companion, Bernard. Two Disney films have been made based on them, called The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under.
In 1938, she married Major Geoffrey Castle, an aeronautical engineer.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 12, 2017
In 1900, Charles Lillywhite left his family’s ancestral home in Somerset to settle in France. He didn’t return until 1946, when he took up lodgings in North London with his daughter, Amelie, and his orphaned granddaughter, Lise.
Lise Lillywhite had been brought up in the best traditions of French and English society, she was watched over by her fiercely protective Tante Amelie, and her family’s dearest wish was that she would take her place in high society as the wife of a great and good man.
It was quite possible – Lise was beautiful, demure, poised and accomplished.
Her days were spent:
“In domestic duties, in the study of Italian, in selected French and English reading: in listening to classical music on the wireless: in visits to museums and picture galleries, always accompanied by her aunt: and in fine needlework.”
The trouble was, she had been brought up for a world that didn’t exist anymore; a world that had been irrevocably changed by two wars.
Her grandfather hoped that his family would help to launch Lise, but the ancestral home that he had left nearly half a century earlier had changed too. The fortunes of the Lillywhite family had faded and the ancestral home had been turned into a pig and poultry farm.
And so Margery Sharp asked one of her favourite questions, about a young woman slightly out of step with the world:
“What’s to become of her?”
The answering of that question makes a lovely romantic comedy.
The Somerset Lillywhites – Luke who ran the farm, his lovely wife, Kate, and his unmarried sister, Susanna – are much too busy getting on with things to be interested in relations they had never met; but Luke’s younger brother, Martin, is a rather dull bachelor who lives and works in London, and he is charmed by young Lise.
The ever vigilant Tante Amelie spots that, and she is quick to take advantage. She secures an invitation to Somerset, where she hopes that Lise will charm young Lord Mull. She makes use of his London contacts and positions Lise to catch the eye of his friend Stan – a Polish refugee who is more formally known as Count Stanislav.
It was unfortunate that Lord Mull was a rather vacant young man who wanted only to escape to a Scottish Island.
It was even more unfortunate that Stan was a racketeer who would face criminal charges if he tried to go home to his castle in Poland.
Margery Sharp drew all of these characters – and others – so very well. She dropped little details of what they said, what they did, what they looked like, so cleverly that I felt I knew them all wonderfully well.
She spins a story around them just as cleverly.
It’s a wonderfully light and bright social comedy, with just enough weight and reality to stop it floating away.
It paints a wonderful picture of a time when the war is over and done with, but nobody quite knows what the future will hold.
There are themes and details here that are familiar from reading Margery Sharp’s other books, but this book has more than enough that is different to make it distinctive.
At first it seems that Lise Lillywhite is quiet and passive; her voice is rarely heard and she follows the course set out for her.
In time though it becomes clear that Lise is a very clever girl, and when she was being education and acquiring all of those wonderful accomplishments she was learning the most important things of all. She was learning to think for herself, and she was learning what she really wanted from life and how she might get it.
She was all the things she had been brought up to be, but she was also had the one essential attribute of a Margery Sharp heroine.
Lise Lillywhite would chart her own course through life!
I was delighted when I read:
“It is time to enter Lise Lillywhite’s mind. So far its workings, at any rate in result, have easily been reflected in the minds of others: now what Lise thought about was strictly her own business. She was in fact engaged upon a most important and difficult enterprise….”
I loved the way that Lise twisted her own story, and brought it to the most wonderful ending.
The more I thought about it the more I liked it; and it was exactly the right conclusion for Lise, for her times, and for the future.
Lise Lillywhite had been brought up in the best traditions of French and English society, she was watched over by her fiercely protective Tante Amelie, and her family’s dearest wish was that she would take her place in high society as the wife of a great and good man.
It was quite possible – Lise was beautiful, demure, poised and accomplished.
Her days were spent:
“In domestic duties, in the study of Italian, in selected French and English reading: in listening to classical music on the wireless: in visits to museums and picture galleries, always accompanied by her aunt: and in fine needlework.”
The trouble was, she had been brought up for a world that didn’t exist anymore; a world that had been irrevocably changed by two wars.
Her grandfather hoped that his family would help to launch Lise, but the ancestral home that he had left nearly half a century earlier had changed too. The fortunes of the Lillywhite family had faded and the ancestral home had been turned into a pig and poultry farm.
And so Margery Sharp asked one of her favourite questions, about a young woman slightly out of step with the world:
“What’s to become of her?”
The answering of that question makes a lovely romantic comedy.
The Somerset Lillywhites – Luke who ran the farm, his lovely wife, Kate, and his unmarried sister, Susanna – are much too busy getting on with things to be interested in relations they had never met; but Luke’s younger brother, Martin, is a rather dull bachelor who lives and works in London, and he is charmed by young Lise.
The ever vigilant Tante Amelie spots that, and she is quick to take advantage. She secures an invitation to Somerset, where she hopes that Lise will charm young Lord Mull. She makes use of his London contacts and positions Lise to catch the eye of his friend Stan – a Polish refugee who is more formally known as Count Stanislav.
It was unfortunate that Lord Mull was a rather vacant young man who wanted only to escape to a Scottish Island.
It was even more unfortunate that Stan was a racketeer who would face criminal charges if he tried to go home to his castle in Poland.
Margery Sharp drew all of these characters – and others – so very well. She dropped little details of what they said, what they did, what they looked like, so cleverly that I felt I knew them all wonderfully well.
She spins a story around them just as cleverly.
It’s a wonderfully light and bright social comedy, with just enough weight and reality to stop it floating away.
It paints a wonderful picture of a time when the war is over and done with, but nobody quite knows what the future will hold.
There are themes and details here that are familiar from reading Margery Sharp’s other books, but this book has more than enough that is different to make it distinctive.
At first it seems that Lise Lillywhite is quiet and passive; her voice is rarely heard and she follows the course set out for her.
In time though it becomes clear that Lise is a very clever girl, and when she was being education and acquiring all of those wonderful accomplishments she was learning the most important things of all. She was learning to think for herself, and she was learning what she really wanted from life and how she might get it.
She was all the things she had been brought up to be, but she was also had the one essential attribute of a Margery Sharp heroine.
Lise Lillywhite would chart her own course through life!
I was delighted when I read:
“It is time to enter Lise Lillywhite’s mind. So far its workings, at any rate in result, have easily been reflected in the minds of others: now what Lise thought about was strictly her own business. She was in fact engaged upon a most important and difficult enterprise….”
I loved the way that Lise twisted her own story, and brought it to the most wonderful ending.
The more I thought about it the more I liked it; and it was exactly the right conclusion for Lise, for her times, and for the future.
October 20, 2017
Reviewed in conjunction with Virginia Woolf's The Years
One of the things I do in Geneva is hang out at the local flea market trying to suppress my urge to preserve dead lives. Every week you'll see people disrespectfully pawing over the beloved libraries of the deceased, libraries which with possibly indecent haste, have been taken away by market vendors who, I can imagine, don't pay a cent for them. It is merely enough that they are willing to cart them off. There in the market they sit in boxes, 2CHF a book. Amongst them will often be intimate belongings such as photo albums, travel diaries or autograph books. Every time I see this, I want to save the memory even if nobody else does. Could I not keep just a skeleton of the library's existence?
As it is, my own library is, as much as anything else, a cemetery of book bones, nothing as whole as a skeleton no doubt, but each death provides my shelves with something more. There are many reasons for loving a book. Some of mine I love simply because they belonged to people who cared about them and I have inherited them if only by chance. Not least, the library remnants of the Hautevilles' library.
When the sale of the chateau and its contents was first mooted, the best of the books went to a posh auction house. The refuse of that process ended up at the local flea market. Each time I see one of these discarded deceased estates, lying higgledy-piggledy in boxes, I don't just look at the books one by one, deciding which small treasure to take home. I also read the story of the library itself. Ah, so and so was a jazz and cinema lover, as I see a record collection, the reference books lovingly collected on its side, now the junk man's province. This Swiss person made trips to Australia in the 1950s, here are the photo albums, the travel books of the period. Oh, and he was into....
So it goes on. Most of these deceased book lovers leave only a small tale. The Hautevilles, however, were a prominent family for many generations and their story is told via important legal battles, their castle and through the auction of the contents of that castle. They loved theatre and put on productions, so the auction included the costumery collected over the years. At the 'junk' end, ordinary books not worth anything, was a lovely collection of children's and adult's fiction from the pre and post WWII period. It contained many gems of the period including an author, almost forgotten these days, Margery Sharp. She is perhaps due for the requisite revival, not least because it would not be entirely unreasonable to call her the Jane Austen of her day. I hesitate to do that, but as it may get somebody to read her, and as almost nobody on GR - none of my friends - have read this, I will take the chance.
rest here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...
One of the things I do in Geneva is hang out at the local flea market trying to suppress my urge to preserve dead lives. Every week you'll see people disrespectfully pawing over the beloved libraries of the deceased, libraries which with possibly indecent haste, have been taken away by market vendors who, I can imagine, don't pay a cent for them. It is merely enough that they are willing to cart them off. There in the market they sit in boxes, 2CHF a book. Amongst them will often be intimate belongings such as photo albums, travel diaries or autograph books. Every time I see this, I want to save the memory even if nobody else does. Could I not keep just a skeleton of the library's existence?
As it is, my own library is, as much as anything else, a cemetery of book bones, nothing as whole as a skeleton no doubt, but each death provides my shelves with something more. There are many reasons for loving a book. Some of mine I love simply because they belonged to people who cared about them and I have inherited them if only by chance. Not least, the library remnants of the Hautevilles' library.
When the sale of the chateau and its contents was first mooted, the best of the books went to a posh auction house. The refuse of that process ended up at the local flea market. Each time I see one of these discarded deceased estates, lying higgledy-piggledy in boxes, I don't just look at the books one by one, deciding which small treasure to take home. I also read the story of the library itself. Ah, so and so was a jazz and cinema lover, as I see a record collection, the reference books lovingly collected on its side, now the junk man's province. This Swiss person made trips to Australia in the 1950s, here are the photo albums, the travel books of the period. Oh, and he was into....
So it goes on. Most of these deceased book lovers leave only a small tale. The Hautevilles, however, were a prominent family for many generations and their story is told via important legal battles, their castle and through the auction of the contents of that castle. They loved theatre and put on productions, so the auction included the costumery collected over the years. At the 'junk' end, ordinary books not worth anything, was a lovely collection of children's and adult's fiction from the pre and post WWII period. It contained many gems of the period including an author, almost forgotten these days, Margery Sharp. She is perhaps due for the requisite revival, not least because it would not be entirely unreasonable to call her the Jane Austen of her day. I hesitate to do that, but as it may get somebody to read her, and as almost nobody on GR - none of my friends - have read this, I will take the chance.
rest here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...
December 19, 2019
Another wonderful novel by Margery Sharp.
Pay attention to the subtext on post War societal/class changes.
https://margerysharp.wordpress.com/20...
Pay attention to the subtext on post War societal/class changes.
https://margerysharp.wordpress.com/20...
June 22, 2021
For the first 200 pages or so, the story is told through the eyes of Lise's odd cousin, Martin, who is enamored of her old world grace and charm and hopelessly jealous of anyone who seems to get in-between them. It is an incredibly biased viewpoint. Every once in a while he makes a token excuse as to why he doesn't really do anything to advance his case or even inform her of his feelings .
While whole stories and tragedies have wrenched hearts for years with similar plot lines, this one doesn't. Martin is a hypocrite. He half-heartedly tries to get rid of his forever girlfriend-on-the-side and goes to lots of places "Lise should never go" and is mildly in love with his brother's wife, Kate, but oh-so-superciliously contemptuous of their lifestyle. Watching him live out his peaks and valleys in his brain grew exhausting because he never did anything about it and he wasn't really interested in changing anything about his life. Don't get me wrong, Stan and Lord Mull were quite diverting as characters. But I would have enjoyed them more if it weren't for Martin's bitter and slightly dishonest musings.
The story really picked up when we finally got Lise's point of view about 50 pages from the end. But by then my interest was practically gone. But, as the point of view shifted back to Martin in the final pages, it didn't really end on a high note for me.
While whole stories and tragedies have wrenched hearts for years with similar plot lines, this one doesn't. Martin is a hypocrite. He half-heartedly tries to get rid of his forever girlfriend-on-the-side and goes to lots of places "Lise should never go" and is mildly in love with his brother's wife, Kate, but oh-so-superciliously contemptuous of their lifestyle. Watching him live out his peaks and valleys in his brain grew exhausting because he never did anything about it and he wasn't really interested in changing anything about his life. Don't get me wrong, Stan and Lord Mull were quite diverting as characters. But I would have enjoyed them more if it weren't for Martin's bitter and slightly dishonest musings.
The story really picked up when we finally got Lise's point of view about 50 pages from the end. But by then my interest was practically gone. But, as the point of view shifted back to Martin in the final pages, it didn't really end on a high note for me.
May 5, 2022
this story can be described in about one sentence: man thirsts after his cousin and mopes around like a nice guy when nothing happens. good book, though.
—spoilers—
to be honest, i both love and hate this story. margery sharp is a beautiful writer and i adore the personalities of the characters, but it's precisely those same characterizations that make me despise half the cast. martin, by far, was the most annoying character in this book, which sucked considering majority of the story was in his perspective. like, if i could hate him anymore it would a miracle; he strings chloe along for so long, is completely hypocritical and self-absorbed, an utter ass to duff (who is truly one of my favorite characters in the book). if possible, martin probably would've whisked lise away to another country like the freak that he is.
lise is a very subpar character, to be honest. however, sharp wrote and stuck true to her personality well, and perfectly encapsulated what happens when your autonomy is stripped away from you. lise is a very malleable person, in simple terms. yes, she does have her own thoughts and will have moments of assertive behavior, defying the obedience that the family expects, but lise more or less goes with whatever opinion that people she respects has. amelié is a literal cunt and yet the girl was willing to give up the ONE romance she actually wanted because amelié disagreed. i think my favorite thing about lise is that she contradicted everything martin thought about her. he, despite all that he thought, did not know what was going on in her mind.
—spoilers—
to be honest, i both love and hate this story. margery sharp is a beautiful writer and i adore the personalities of the characters, but it's precisely those same characterizations that make me despise half the cast. martin, by far, was the most annoying character in this book, which sucked considering majority of the story was in his perspective. like, if i could hate him anymore it would a miracle; he strings chloe along for so long, is completely hypocritical and self-absorbed, an utter ass to duff (who is truly one of my favorite characters in the book). if possible, martin probably would've whisked lise away to another country like the freak that he is.
lise is a very subpar character, to be honest. however, sharp wrote and stuck true to her personality well, and perfectly encapsulated what happens when your autonomy is stripped away from you. lise is a very malleable person, in simple terms. yes, she does have her own thoughts and will have moments of assertive behavior, defying the obedience that the family expects, but lise more or less goes with whatever opinion that people she respects has. amelié is a literal cunt and yet the girl was willing to give up the ONE romance she actually wanted because amelié disagreed. i think my favorite thing about lise is that she contradicted everything martin thought about her. he, despite all that he thought, did not know what was going on in her mind.
October 15, 2018
If you have a weakness for Jane Austen's nastiest characters - Mrs. Norris, anyone? Then you will appreciate Margery Sharp's Tante Amelie. A portrait etched in strong acid of a snobby, selfish, bossy, nightmare, she dominates the virginal heroine and everyone else - until all of a sudden, her fangs are drawn.
January 29, 2024
This is the second real dud I have read from the oeuvre of Margery Sharp...of course me calling it a dud is my own esteemed opinion.
It seems to be a period piece, the events of the novel taking place in 1947 and a year or two beyond that. Lise is a 17-year-old teen who was reared by her aunt and to a lesser extent her grandfather in France during the War (WW II). They have since come back to England and are living in a small apartment in Paddington. At times it seems the aunt wants to get her married to somebody rich and aristocratic and then at other times she seems to want Lise to keep her company for the rest of her life (the aunt has never been married). Then there is a cousin of Lise, Martin (34 years old) who at times thinks he wants to marry Lise, and then at other times just wants to serve as her protectorate and her virginity. Weird, but then again this is 2024, eh? So whatever happens to Lise?
I think if I had a choice between watching paint dry versus reading this novel I would choose the former. 😜 😂
(Alright, I’d probably choose to read the book, but it would be a pain in the ass. Once I start a novel, and particularly by somebody I like, I tend to want to finish it, no matter how bad it is.)
I would give this novel 1.75 stars. I was very glad to get to the last page, let me tell you!
Reviews:
• https://www.stuckinabook.com/two-marg...
• https://margerysharp.wordpress.com/20...
• https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re... (review published in Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 1951)
It seems to be a period piece, the events of the novel taking place in 1947 and a year or two beyond that. Lise is a 17-year-old teen who was reared by her aunt and to a lesser extent her grandfather in France during the War (WW II). They have since come back to England and are living in a small apartment in Paddington. At times it seems the aunt wants to get her married to somebody rich and aristocratic and then at other times she seems to want Lise to keep her company for the rest of her life (the aunt has never been married). Then there is a cousin of Lise, Martin (34 years old) who at times thinks he wants to marry Lise, and then at other times just wants to serve as her protectorate and her virginity. Weird, but then again this is 2024, eh? So whatever happens to Lise?
I think if I had a choice between watching paint dry versus reading this novel I would choose the former. 😜 😂
(Alright, I’d probably choose to read the book, but it would be a pain in the ass. Once I start a novel, and particularly by somebody I like, I tend to want to finish it, no matter how bad it is.)
I would give this novel 1.75 stars. I was very glad to get to the last page, let me tell you!
Reviews:
• https://www.stuckinabook.com/two-marg...
• https://margerysharp.wordpress.com/20...
• https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re... (review published in Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 1951)
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews