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The Other Day
Memoir. Slightly Foxed Editions No. 68
264 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1936
About the author
Dorothy Whipple
27 books368 followersBorn in 1893, DOROTHY WHIPPLE (nee Stirrup) had an intensely happy childhood in Blackburn as part of the large family of a local architect. Her close friend George Owen having been killed in the first week of the war, for three years she worked as secretary to Henry Whipple, an educational administrator who was a widower twenty-four years her senior and whom she married in 1917. Their life was mostly spent in Nottingham; here she wrote Young Anne (1927), the first of nine extremely successful novels which included Greenbanks (1932) and The Priory (1939). Almost all her books were Book Society Choices or Recommendations and two of them, They Knew Mr Knight (1934) and They were Sisters (1943), were made into films. She also wrote short stories and two volumes of memoirs. Someone at a Distance (1953) was her last novel. Returning in her last years to Blackburn, Dorothy Whipple died there in 1966.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
July 10, 2023
Re-read 10/07/23
A charming memoir of Dorothy Whipple's early childhood before WW1. She tells us of her life in the town, racing caterpillars and pulling up her father's garden for the almshouse residents, her school life, and later on, her life in the country.
An interesting account of a bygone time.
A charming memoir of Dorothy Whipple's early childhood before WW1. She tells us of her life in the town, racing caterpillars and pulling up her father's garden for the almshouse residents, her school life, and later on, her life in the country.
An interesting account of a bygone time.
January 14, 2025
Charming! It just gets better and better as it goes. The last fourth was my very favorite. I could see echoes of Greenbanks in Dorothy’s own story, so it is serendipitous that I just re-read it. This is very much a child’s perspective and not an adult reflecting on her childhood. Occasionally, Dorothy makes a comment from her writerly adult perspective but it’s mostly to comment on how foreign the child mind is to an adult and vice versa. I love how she gets to tell stories to her three younger siblings as she is watering and tending the seed in her that flowered into being a novelist. I wish there was a sequel to this about her teenage and young adult years! I would so like to know. I love Dorothy’s voice and would put her name in for an answer of a figure in the past I would like to have tea with. Now I have a hankering to re-read both Young Anne and Random Commentary. I want to remember what she says about her parents and siblings in the latter.
July 4, 2023
But I was slow in learning that if you wish to save your vision from destruction at the hands of other people, you must keep it secret.
A beautifully told memory of childhood. Without pathos and sermons. With a gentle touch of the child's perspective.
I understood what kind of childhood and family Dorothy Whipple had (although, the book was more like a bunch of stories than a full account of the first twelve years of her life). I also got the picture of the world (society) in which she grew up. There was fun, sadness, anger, and happiness - all that contain most childhoods.
Very satisfying book. I would have liked to read more of her memoir, sadly it is the only one. Fortunately, she wrote novels. And for sure, I am going to read them (I haven't read, so far).
[4.5 stars]
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July 9, 2012Dorothy Whipple’s memoir of her early years is as enjoyable as any of her novels. She beautifully captures the heights of ecstasy and horror present (often in rapid succession) in even an outwardly uneventful childhood, as well as the extent to which children and adults dwell side-by-side in mutually inaccessible worlds. I was sorry to finish reading it.
August 14, 2011
This memoir captures without sentiment the author's memories of her Edwardian childhood, including surreptitiously punching down the bread dough, sitting making page after page of pothooks in her first school, cutting down all her Father's prized dahlias to make a garden for the workhouse inmates she just met, and escaping a bull in the countryside. Full of incident and personalities, clearly and sometimes humorously recalled. No surprise that this observant child grew up to be a novelist.
" The cupboard was in the wall beside the fireplace. I opened it and was amazed. Its sides were whitewashed and as lumpy as buttermilk. It smelled of pepper and cake crumbs; a nice holiday smell. The thing in it were homely and comfortable. A mottled brown teapot, highly glazed, with a pouting expression about the spout. The peppers and salts were of pot instead of silver, and the cups and saucers had life-size violets painted upon them. It would be nice and different to have tea out of them, I thought."
" The cupboard was in the wall beside the fireplace. I opened it and was amazed. Its sides were whitewashed and as lumpy as buttermilk. It smelled of pepper and cake crumbs; a nice holiday smell. The thing in it were homely and comfortable. A mottled brown teapot, highly glazed, with a pouting expression about the spout. The peppers and salts were of pot instead of silver, and the cups and saucers had life-size violets painted upon them. It would be nice and different to have tea out of them, I thought."
February 13, 2025
"They smiled at me. The fire was warm behind me. Their faces were dear and familiar. My life, like the life of most children, was full of hidden agitations; but I kept putting into the port of home, as now, and finding myself relieved of stress, sheltered...sometimes things were wrong at home. But at other times this balm fell on us all."
...
I just read Dorothy Whipple's early novel Greenbanks and I wasn't too taken with it. It doesn't have the same force or quality as her later novels. But reading this memoir directly after was exactly the right thing to do as you can see so many biographical details she wrote into Greenbanks, especially regarding her relationship with her grandmother. Greenbanks may not be a novel of hers that I'll reread, but reading The Other Day made me appreciate it much more.
Anyway I just loved this memoir so much. And it was an especial treat to read the gorgeous Slightly Foxed edition. Dorothy Whipple has such a gift for writing children in her fiction and this memoir of her childhood sheds light on that gift. She was a sensitive child and remembered well what it felt like to be misunderstood by adults.
"Thus do we grow older and come to marvel in our turn that the young understand us no better than we understand them."
...
I just read Dorothy Whipple's early novel Greenbanks and I wasn't too taken with it. It doesn't have the same force or quality as her later novels. But reading this memoir directly after was exactly the right thing to do as you can see so many biographical details she wrote into Greenbanks, especially regarding her relationship with her grandmother. Greenbanks may not be a novel of hers that I'll reread, but reading The Other Day made me appreciate it much more.
Anyway I just loved this memoir so much. And it was an especial treat to read the gorgeous Slightly Foxed edition. Dorothy Whipple has such a gift for writing children in her fiction and this memoir of her childhood sheds light on that gift. She was a sensitive child and remembered well what it felt like to be misunderstood by adults.
"Thus do we grow older and come to marvel in our turn that the young understand us no better than we understand them."
November 13, 2022
This is a glorious collection of autobiographical tales of Dorothy Whipple’s childhood in Pendle and Blackburn in the early 1900s. It’s a beautiful, relaxing, beguiling and well written book about a kind of childhood that I would imagine just doesn’t exist anymore; adults are remote, awe-inspiring and vaguely terrifying, roaming the neighbourhood, hills and parks is what you do all day and hair-brained schemes are seen through to their end. This is also a fascinating historical document, fixed in its particular time through references to friends who would go on to die in WW1, servants who stay with the family for thirty years, and younger siblings succumbing quickly to childhood illnesses that have now been nipped in the bud by penicillin. Sad, happy, funny and affecting this has a universality that plugged me right back into my child-brain. You think as your small self did whilst reading this book and access your inner child. Would recommend to anyone looking for something light.
December 10, 2024
Such a delight! Took me back to my childhood, with all its delights, fears, misunderstandings and discoveries.
July 19, 2023
Rounding down from 3.5 stars.
Beautifully written, but I didn’t find the content as engrossing as Whipple’s fiction.
Favorite quote: “I hated to be organised. I early developed an almost morbid dislike of fixtures; of other people’s fixtures. My own fixtures . . . I yearned towards” (243).
Beautifully written, but I didn’t find the content as engrossing as Whipple’s fiction.
Favorite quote: “I hated to be organised. I early developed an almost morbid dislike of fixtures; of other people’s fixtures. My own fixtures . . . I yearned towards” (243).
April 26, 2026
I mentioned Dorothy Whipple only the other day in my review of a novel by Kingsley Amis that I hadn’t expected to enjoy because of his generation’s role in supplanting writers like Whipple.
Dorothy Whipple is up there in my pantheon of most-favourite-ever authors. In terms of blunt categories she’s a woman writer with a strong regional interest (like my other all-time favourites, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Alison Uttley and Norah Lofts).
But it’s more than that. I actually feel myself tingle when I’m reading her novels, I enjoy them so much. She lights up the domestic with a magic voltage. Her characters live on in your imagination as genuine people - usually passive-aggressive friends and vexing family, but endearing, complex and startlingly real.
I’ve now had the exquisite pleasure of reading all her novels for the first time, mostly consuming them in greedy gulps. And then re-reading them more slowly and (hopefully) more thoughtfully as a fully-flavoured main course.
So imagine my excitement at finally getting my hands on her autobiography! It’s something I’ve been looking forward to for years. And here I was with a feeling of more than slight trepidation, the book in front of me unopened. I realise I’m assuming I’ll like the author as a person - indeed, as a child - entirely because of the intense pleasure I take in her books. But am I going to be like one of those die-hard fans who finally get to meet their adored celeb face-to-face and discover they’re not at all as they’d imagined?
Well, I’m thrilled to report that I discovered no feet of clay here. My only surprise was that Dorothy Whipple was minded to sally forth down Memory Lane at the tender age of just 43.
Mind you, young celebs these days write their autobiographies (correction: have them written by ghost-writers) very much earlier on in their lives than that. Pop Idols and social-media influencers barely in their twenties now dutifully regale us with the misery and hardships they’ve had to overcome in their struggles to stardom.
There’s nothing like that in Dorothy Whipple’s autobiography. No recriminations, no grievances, no bitter revelations. On the contrary, and most unusually for these days, her memories are of a generally well-balanced, happy and secure childhood.
Random recollections that I especially enjoyed included:
- Watching the dough rise for her mother’s bread and sticking her finger in it (p16).
- Travelling first-class on the train with her elegant, remote Aunt Kitty and being violently sick, vomiting up “bottled cherries swallowed whole at lunch” (“I marvelled at the wholeness of them. Jonah could not have returned more complete from the whale” p21).
- Spending Saturday pennies on green gooseberry and tangerine orange drops (p41).
- Her father refusing to sing a particular parlour song, accompanied by Dorothy, because it contained the word “bosom” (p46).
- Her lovingly handmade Christmas decoration - a “Silver Bough” covered with bits of tin foil and sweet wrappers (p80) - that distinctly underwhelms her brothers.
- Her enthusiasm for sausages, sadly not shared by her peevish snooty chum, Geoffrey (“I was dumbfounded. It had never occurred to me that anyone could be indifferent to sausage” p144).
- Kate, the dependable, short-tempered family cook-and maid-of-all-work, turning all left-overs into rissoles (“The recurrence of rissoles in our lives was as steady as the recurrence of rain in Lancashire” p202).
- Dorothy’s mother, not a country girl, hoping desperately that bullocks they encounter on a walk had “been ostracised, or whatever it is” (p214).
- A remote village described as “both feudal and smart” on the grounds that “you could get Gentlemen’s Relish and that kind of thing at the village shop” (p220) - a particularly poignant description, as in the very week I was reading this, it was announced that this famous brand of anchovy paste would no longer be manufactured.
The general impression of a secure and contented childhood doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t also memories that these days would probably require trigger warnings. For example:
- “Many smacks” from her mother, which “I don’t remember any of us resented” and punishment by her father with a slipper so “solemn” that “the world went dark and desolation overwhelmed us” (p16).
- The death of her little sister at eighteen months from pneumonia (“I learnt from the tears and silence of my elders that it was best not to speak of her again” p36).
- The terror, the “awful possibility” (p41), that something “would happen” to her father and leave the family destitute.
- Fanny, the housemaid from next door, being abused and abandoned by her brutish husband - a deeply troubling first encounter for Dorothy with “the effects of misery and poverty on one we had known” (p51).
- On a family visit to friends on a farm, a sweet loving little calf befriended by Dorothy is slaughtered while they wait for their tea (“It was a moment of pure horror, as timeless and intense as a nightmare” p59).
- Cruelly bullied and humiliated by a bitterly sarcastic maths teacher, Miss Paton, to the point that 11-year old Dorothy “struggled against a wish to drown, to put my head in my desk and give up” (p119).
Dorothy Whipple’s epigrammatic wit and wisdom shines through in her elegant, gently ironic prose. Sentences I particularly relished included these:
- “One gets a good deal of pleasure in thinking of what one might do - more than in doing it - and I do not deny myself this” (p11).
- “Children bear a great deal that their elders know nothing of” (p18).
- “It was years before I recognised the formidable power of other people’s opinion to destroy one’s visions” (p80).
- “I have often since detected myself in the same unreasonable annoyance with those who refuse to enjoy what I enjoy” (p143).
- “The best primroses always seemed to be on the opposite side of the stream, but when, with great difficulty you had crossed over, you saw that they were just as good, if not better, on the side you had left; only you had missed them. Life, it seems to me, is rather like that” (p250).
So do autobiographies only look back in time … or can they glance forwards too? On a few occasions the older and wiser Dorothy slips in and hints at sadnesses to come.
For example, when remembering her school friend, May, who came to tea at Dorothy’s every Saturday, she wistfully tells us “that half the world now lies between them” (p114).
And describing a children’s dance hosted by the local gentry, she poignantly adds that in “the dark future” the boys “were all soldiers, and of Sir Harry’s sons, one was killed and the other cruelly injured” (p108).
Writing these memoirs in 1936 Dorothy also has a prescient vision: “Later there comes a day when you can stand in the streets and watch the new generations sweep past without recognition. No one remembers you; your coming makes no stir” (p51).
Just two decades after writing these words, this is exactly what did happen to Dorothy Whipple. Her novels stopped selling and she moved back to her hometown where she spent the last decade of her life increasingly forgotten and ignored.
Overtaken, in fact, by the thrusting new generation of Angry Young Men - like Kingsley Amis who I’ve just read - who were more interested in satirising the Establishment than in the teacups and drawing rooms of middle-aged, middle-class women of Middle-England …
Dorothy Whipple is up there in my pantheon of most-favourite-ever authors. In terms of blunt categories she’s a woman writer with a strong regional interest (like my other all-time favourites, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Alison Uttley and Norah Lofts).
But it’s more than that. I actually feel myself tingle when I’m reading her novels, I enjoy them so much. She lights up the domestic with a magic voltage. Her characters live on in your imagination as genuine people - usually passive-aggressive friends and vexing family, but endearing, complex and startlingly real.
I’ve now had the exquisite pleasure of reading all her novels for the first time, mostly consuming them in greedy gulps. And then re-reading them more slowly and (hopefully) more thoughtfully as a fully-flavoured main course.
So imagine my excitement at finally getting my hands on her autobiography! It’s something I’ve been looking forward to for years. And here I was with a feeling of more than slight trepidation, the book in front of me unopened. I realise I’m assuming I’ll like the author as a person - indeed, as a child - entirely because of the intense pleasure I take in her books. But am I going to be like one of those die-hard fans who finally get to meet their adored celeb face-to-face and discover they’re not at all as they’d imagined?
Well, I’m thrilled to report that I discovered no feet of clay here. My only surprise was that Dorothy Whipple was minded to sally forth down Memory Lane at the tender age of just 43.
Mind you, young celebs these days write their autobiographies (correction: have them written by ghost-writers) very much earlier on in their lives than that. Pop Idols and social-media influencers barely in their twenties now dutifully regale us with the misery and hardships they’ve had to overcome in their struggles to stardom.
There’s nothing like that in Dorothy Whipple’s autobiography. No recriminations, no grievances, no bitter revelations. On the contrary, and most unusually for these days, her memories are of a generally well-balanced, happy and secure childhood.
Random recollections that I especially enjoyed included:
- Watching the dough rise for her mother’s bread and sticking her finger in it (p16).
- Travelling first-class on the train with her elegant, remote Aunt Kitty and being violently sick, vomiting up “bottled cherries swallowed whole at lunch” (“I marvelled at the wholeness of them. Jonah could not have returned more complete from the whale” p21).
- Spending Saturday pennies on green gooseberry and tangerine orange drops (p41).
- Her father refusing to sing a particular parlour song, accompanied by Dorothy, because it contained the word “bosom” (p46).
- Her lovingly handmade Christmas decoration - a “Silver Bough” covered with bits of tin foil and sweet wrappers (p80) - that distinctly underwhelms her brothers.
- Her enthusiasm for sausages, sadly not shared by her peevish snooty chum, Geoffrey (“I was dumbfounded. It had never occurred to me that anyone could be indifferent to sausage” p144).
- Kate, the dependable, short-tempered family cook-and maid-of-all-work, turning all left-overs into rissoles (“The recurrence of rissoles in our lives was as steady as the recurrence of rain in Lancashire” p202).
- Dorothy’s mother, not a country girl, hoping desperately that bullocks they encounter on a walk had “been ostracised, or whatever it is” (p214).
- A remote village described as “both feudal and smart” on the grounds that “you could get Gentlemen’s Relish and that kind of thing at the village shop” (p220) - a particularly poignant description, as in the very week I was reading this, it was announced that this famous brand of anchovy paste would no longer be manufactured.
The general impression of a secure and contented childhood doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t also memories that these days would probably require trigger warnings. For example:
- “Many smacks” from her mother, which “I don’t remember any of us resented” and punishment by her father with a slipper so “solemn” that “the world went dark and desolation overwhelmed us” (p16).
- The death of her little sister at eighteen months from pneumonia (“I learnt from the tears and silence of my elders that it was best not to speak of her again” p36).
- The terror, the “awful possibility” (p41), that something “would happen” to her father and leave the family destitute.
- Fanny, the housemaid from next door, being abused and abandoned by her brutish husband - a deeply troubling first encounter for Dorothy with “the effects of misery and poverty on one we had known” (p51).
- On a family visit to friends on a farm, a sweet loving little calf befriended by Dorothy is slaughtered while they wait for their tea (“It was a moment of pure horror, as timeless and intense as a nightmare” p59).
- Cruelly bullied and humiliated by a bitterly sarcastic maths teacher, Miss Paton, to the point that 11-year old Dorothy “struggled against a wish to drown, to put my head in my desk and give up” (p119).
Dorothy Whipple’s epigrammatic wit and wisdom shines through in her elegant, gently ironic prose. Sentences I particularly relished included these:
- “One gets a good deal of pleasure in thinking of what one might do - more than in doing it - and I do not deny myself this” (p11).
- “Children bear a great deal that their elders know nothing of” (p18).
- “It was years before I recognised the formidable power of other people’s opinion to destroy one’s visions” (p80).
- “I have often since detected myself in the same unreasonable annoyance with those who refuse to enjoy what I enjoy” (p143).
- “The best primroses always seemed to be on the opposite side of the stream, but when, with great difficulty you had crossed over, you saw that they were just as good, if not better, on the side you had left; only you had missed them. Life, it seems to me, is rather like that” (p250).
So do autobiographies only look back in time … or can they glance forwards too? On a few occasions the older and wiser Dorothy slips in and hints at sadnesses to come.
For example, when remembering her school friend, May, who came to tea at Dorothy’s every Saturday, she wistfully tells us “that half the world now lies between them” (p114).
And describing a children’s dance hosted by the local gentry, she poignantly adds that in “the dark future” the boys “were all soldiers, and of Sir Harry’s sons, one was killed and the other cruelly injured” (p108).
Writing these memoirs in 1936 Dorothy also has a prescient vision: “Later there comes a day when you can stand in the streets and watch the new generations sweep past without recognition. No one remembers you; your coming makes no stir” (p51).
Just two decades after writing these words, this is exactly what did happen to Dorothy Whipple. Her novels stopped selling and she moved back to her hometown where she spent the last decade of her life increasingly forgotten and ignored.
Overtaken, in fact, by the thrusting new generation of Angry Young Men - like Kingsley Amis who I’ve just read - who were more interested in satirising the Establishment than in the teacups and drawing rooms of middle-aged, middle-class women of Middle-England …
June 15, 2023
I really enjoyed this book. I hadn’t realised when I bought it that is was a childhood memoir rather than fiction. But I loved reading about Dorothy’s adventures and her mistakes. It’s made me want to read some of her novels too as she’s clearly a gifted storyteller
September 19, 2023
This was a lovely look back at childhood. She captures emotions felt so strongly as children-- a sense of injustice, of abandonment, and adoration. Such big feelings felt by us when we are so small.
And the anecdotes are delightful.
Highly recommend-- it's aged well!
And the anecdotes are delightful.
Highly recommend-- it's aged well!
February 18, 2023
4.5 stars. Delightful childhood memoir set in the early years of the 20th century.
December 31, 2024
While not as gripping as other Whipple novels, it was interesting to get a glimpse of the author’s early life. Her time spent as a Protestant in a Catholic girls school was an experience I hadn’t seen explored before.
December 23, 2023
3.5 rounded up. Very readable - but I found it a mite depressing…
February 22, 2023
I'd love to read this book again. Fat chance, not in the library now like it was back in the day. None available online to purchase that I can find. I'm thinking keep all my books in case I want to read them again, they never seem to be available afterwards.
October 3, 2024
I didn’t expect this to be so good. What a pleasant surprise. I really need to re-read by Whipple faves ... my memory is so bad it will be like reading them afresh...expect I know that I will like them since I gave them 4 or 5 stars... (and those are: Someone at a Distance; The Priory; Young Anne; High Wages).
This is a memoir of her childhood days, from around age 5 to age 12. It started out good and stayed there for about the first half of the book and then took a swift trajectory upwards...it was just a pure joy to read. I usually do not laugh out loud when reading humorous books...I did with this one at least twice. Couldn’t help myself. So, the memoir was humorous a good part of the time but at other times had some sad recollections from her — for example, a really mean sadistic teacher of hers — and overall was thoughtful and interesting, and a slice of life about a girl growing up. I wrote down some stuff that struck me as either just good writing or funny... (at least to me):
• The pianist emerged from the screened corner and proceeded to perch herself on the piano stool like an elf on a mushroom.
• ...Miss Paton was the Mathematics mistress. She was a dried-up person with a dry manner, dry skin and hair like wisps of hay. All the nature had gone out of her; as if she had been too often to the dry-cleaners.
• (She was at a Roman Catholic Convent school and she was there for her first day and talking to a nun) ...The nun: “I’ll pray for you; I’ll pray to Our Lady of Good Success.” Dorothy: I thanked her, hoping she would not know that I did not know what she meant.
• ...she couldn’t swim because she unlike other girls her age had not learned how to do so at the Convent School ...If we found ourselves in the water, we should be expected, it appeared, to drown with pious resignation and decorum.
• She and her classmates at the Convent School are visited by the bishop which the nuns are very excited about.... it’s a big deal to them and the girls at the school are therefore excited too. They’re supposed to call Jesus ‘my Lord’ but they get mixed up when the bishop arrives. ...We ran to him and fluttered to the floor lie a covey of birds coming to ground. There was something a little forced in our behavior. We knew we were expected to be bright young things, and we were. We laughed and chirped: “Oh my Lord!” and were careful to be enraptured with all he said. ... I knelt bolt upright on my increasingly aching knees, gazing with avid brightness into his face and saying — “oh, my Lord,” and “Ah, my Lord,” when the others did, or only a little behind.
Anyway, please take my word for it, this is a touchingly sweet and funny memoir of an author known for her novels. Persephone Books is a wonderful publishing house, and I should have known this was going to be good, because I read from a Persephone edition. They have the coolest endpapers and distinctive grey dust wrappers with French flaps. The endpapers for this book were taken from a 1900 printed linen textile with stylized tulips and ogee leaf frames @ MODA (which I found out is the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, and which I sadly found out is that it is closed down).
Reviews:
• https://karensbooksandchocolate.blogs...
• (this reviewer got her copy from the library...an interlibrary loan...and was excited that the book came all the way from Illinois to the New York Public Library for her) Dorothy Whipple’s The Other Day: An Autobiography | Nooks & Crannies - ’cus they’re perfect for a book lover (wordpress.com)
• Fantastic review and she told me this which I didn’t know: “Apparently, The Other Day, was a book commissioned in 1935 – published a year later – by Dorothy Whipple’s literary agent. It was not a book she particularly wanted to write. https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2022/...
• This person I think has reviews of all of Whipple’s books here... https://whatmeread.com/tag/dorothy-wh...
This is a memoir of her childhood days, from around age 5 to age 12. It started out good and stayed there for about the first half of the book and then took a swift trajectory upwards...it was just a pure joy to read. I usually do not laugh out loud when reading humorous books...I did with this one at least twice. Couldn’t help myself. So, the memoir was humorous a good part of the time but at other times had some sad recollections from her — for example, a really mean sadistic teacher of hers — and overall was thoughtful and interesting, and a slice of life about a girl growing up. I wrote down some stuff that struck me as either just good writing or funny... (at least to me):
• The pianist emerged from the screened corner and proceeded to perch herself on the piano stool like an elf on a mushroom.
• ...Miss Paton was the Mathematics mistress. She was a dried-up person with a dry manner, dry skin and hair like wisps of hay. All the nature had gone out of her; as if she had been too often to the dry-cleaners.
• (She was at a Roman Catholic Convent school and she was there for her first day and talking to a nun) ...The nun: “I’ll pray for you; I’ll pray to Our Lady of Good Success.” Dorothy: I thanked her, hoping she would not know that I did not know what she meant.
• ...she couldn’t swim because she unlike other girls her age had not learned how to do so at the Convent School ...If we found ourselves in the water, we should be expected, it appeared, to drown with pious resignation and decorum.
• She and her classmates at the Convent School are visited by the bishop which the nuns are very excited about.... it’s a big deal to them and the girls at the school are therefore excited too. They’re supposed to call Jesus ‘my Lord’ but they get mixed up when the bishop arrives. ...We ran to him and fluttered to the floor lie a covey of birds coming to ground. There was something a little forced in our behavior. We knew we were expected to be bright young things, and we were. We laughed and chirped: “Oh my Lord!” and were careful to be enraptured with all he said. ... I knelt bolt upright on my increasingly aching knees, gazing with avid brightness into his face and saying — “oh, my Lord,” and “Ah, my Lord,” when the others did, or only a little behind.
Anyway, please take my word for it, this is a touchingly sweet and funny memoir of an author known for her novels. Persephone Books is a wonderful publishing house, and I should have known this was going to be good, because I read from a Persephone edition. They have the coolest endpapers and distinctive grey dust wrappers with French flaps. The endpapers for this book were taken from a 1900 printed linen textile with stylized tulips and ogee leaf frames @ MODA (which I found out is the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, and which I sadly found out is that it is closed down).
Reviews:
• https://karensbooksandchocolate.blogs...
• (this reviewer got her copy from the library...an interlibrary loan...and was excited that the book came all the way from Illinois to the New York Public Library for her) Dorothy Whipple’s The Other Day: An Autobiography | Nooks & Crannies - ’cus they’re perfect for a book lover (wordpress.com)
• Fantastic review and she told me this which I didn’t know: “Apparently, The Other Day, was a book commissioned in 1935 – published a year later – by Dorothy Whipple’s literary agent. It was not a book she particularly wanted to write. https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2022/...
• This person I think has reviews of all of Whipple’s books here... https://whatmeread.com/tag/dorothy-wh...
October 11, 2024
In her introduction, the editor of this reprint says this is a memoir in which nothing much happens, yet everything happens. I didn't have a pencil handy and so did not note specific passages that rang true with me, but many did. Whipple's opening, a dialogue with her many distractions from starting to write and her other, younger self's reluctance to look back juxtaposed nicely with the end, that same self now reluctant not to continue reminiscing. It's the small, seemingly inconsequential moments of our formative years that can last the longest.
September 9, 2025
Unfair for me to rate this really as I had no idea it was an autobiography when I picked it up in Daunt Books as the cover was entirely plain and no info on the back at all - I simply thought I’d try a Dorothy Whipple book. Alas, an autobiography wasn’t interesting to me as it has no story to it. But I enjoyed imagining her surroundings in that time period and her description of life just the same.
July 23, 2021
I loved this book, particularly for what it described and partly for its sly humour. I quote: ‘We did not attend public baths from the convent. If we found ourselves in the water we should be expected, it appeared, to drown with pious resignation and decorum.”.
Set well over a hundred years ago, it was an interesting read, written from the perspective of a young girl.
A photo of the Coe can be found at https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/The-Coe-Ri...
Set well over a hundred years ago, it was an interesting read, written from the perspective of a young girl.
A photo of the Coe can be found at https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/The-Coe-Ri...
January 5, 2024
Kind of a hard read - life was so different (especially for girls) in the late 1800's/early 1900's. It seems the stories she told were often of very awkward situations and mistakes she made. I'm sure she had a very good life as compared to many in large families during that time, so tried to see the positive bits.
April 13, 2025
A charming memoir looking back on the author's Victorian/Edwardian childhood, written with the author's consistent eye for detail.
What struck me was the contrast between the stuffy, strict household and school with the freedom to travel, play and roam by herself or with friends. Another interesting peep into society a few generations ago.
What struck me was the contrast between the stuffy, strict household and school with the freedom to travel, play and roam by herself or with friends. Another interesting peep into society a few generations ago.
January 11, 2026
A gentle, quaint and rather twee insight into life for the middle class in the 1930's, The Other Day by Dorothy Whipple is a memoir of her nice, cosy early childhood, up to the age of 12.
June 4, 2026
I found this book utterly delightful. It was like eating a favourite food that makes my toes curl with the good feeling that arises from doing such. Or a cuppa that just hits the right spot.
July 2, 2026
Highly enjoyable and well written
November 24, 2023
See my review here:
https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2023...
https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2023...
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