Persephone Books discussion

Has anyone been reading this one? This book is one of my favorites...so funny!
Here's a great review of the book (from 2008, so not the Persephone edition):
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008...
Ms. Copper makes the interesting point that the female characters are more defined than the men, which I also noticed. All of the male characters seem fairly flat and shallow.
The Provincial Lady is very self-deprecating, and I wonder if she is as awkward and clumsy as she makes herself out to be. I wonder how the other characters in the book would describe her?

Here's a blog post about the book:
http://fleurfisher.wordpress.com/2014...

Haha, just realized that the blog post was written by one of our members - thanks, Jane!! :)

Yes, all the men are rather alike! I got the idea the Provincial Lady found them rather tiresome. She certainly seemed very keen to escape to London, and later, further afield - but that's in the sequels. I have the edition with the flowery cover that you can see in Jane's blog post - it includes the sequels, and I read them all last year, but then couldn't resist buying the Persephone edition too when it came out!

I suspect other people might have found her scarily acute!

I remember picking up the book in college, in a used bookstore, reading the first few pages and just being baffled as to why I was supposed to care about whether or not she got her bulbs planted. Picking it up again as a middle-aged wife and mother, I related much more, and quickly read through the whole series (The Provincial Lady in America is my favorite). Sometimes those little everyday things really are Fraught. To me the charm of the book is that it reads as though it's addressed to an understanding friend. The little disappointments and difficulties of life are so much easier to bear if at least you can make someone laugh about them. I recently tried to read Delafield's The Way Things Are, which is about a woman in very similar circumstances as the Provincial Lady, but seen objectively, from the outside, the account of her somewhat dreary life and marriage was just too dispiriting to make me want to continue.

I'm still reading this. I've been enjoying the gentle humor and view of a very different way of life--a cook, housemaid and governess with a family of four! But the little quirks of life-- the preachy neighbor, the flower project that doesn't prosper, little social embarrassments like dropping her purse and having the sugar candy fall out-- could happen to anyone.