Kitty

by Mary Ann Gibbs

192 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

1900-1985

Pseudonym for Marjorie Elizabeth Sarah Bidwell. AKA Elizabeth Ford.

Reviews

[Barbara Gordon · Rating 2 out of 5]

A frustrating read. The narrative seemed to regularly lose interest in meek, dutiful little Kitty Ralston, and to wander off like the camera in Tampopo to see what other characters were doing. I can't be bothered to do a page count, but I suspect that there's at least as much wordage given to Effie (her vulgar, scheming mother) and Stephen Brett (her chilly father) and to their ambitions and failures after their fake marriage ends. We get more detail about Stephen's later real marriage and his affection for his sickly young son than we do about Kitty's marriage, married life, and early widowhood (basically - they get married, go away on a ship, and she comes back alone). Heck, we get more of the inner life of her lower-class suitor, Sid, than we do of hers.
While the childhood portion of the story is nicely handled, with lots of well-researched detail, all too often afterwards the interesting incidents happen offstage, leaving minor characters to fill us in, via maid-and-butler exchanges, on what happened with our supposed protagonists. Kitty collapses after overworking to support her younger brother? The doctor tells someone else about it afterwards. Kitty befriends the crotchety grandmother with her innocent ways? The narrator tells us this happened while we weren't looking. Sid rushes off to a suffragette riot to rescue a friend of Kitty's? Why would you want to see any of that action?
I understand that despite the series it was published in, this was not actually a romance. It might be a novel of manners, or just a novel set in a specific historical period. I kept reading it to see if there was going to be an actual narrative arc, but I can't say that there was, and I half-wish the author had chosen to write about Kitty's father, because that's where her interest seemed to be strongest.

[Dlana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Duplicate Alert - the same as The Sugar Mouse.

I found this book difficult to read and confusing.
I generally find Gibbs books to be totally engaging but she used some writers tricks with this that made it confusing. Too many characters, too many names and in the beginning the mysterious Ellie.
Overall, still Gibb's tight and non repetitive writing style but the connections in the plot seemed loose as if she wrote this over a period of time with long periods off when even she lost the flow of the story. This is unlike her and not representative of her work.
I didn't enjoy it and was glad when it was over.
By the way, I think this is a duplicate publication of The Sugar Mouse.