F. Tennyson Jesse's 1934 novel was based on what the back cover describes as "a sensational murder trial in the 1920s", namely the Thompson/Bywaters case. For anyone reading the book who is aware of that case, it means that you are coming to the book already knowing what the ending will be. While it's unusual to come to a novel already knowing the ending, it doesn't actually spoil the enjoyment of what feels like a surprisingly modern story.
Our tale begins just before the outbreak of World War I as a bildungsroman, with the teenage London born and based (anti) heroine Julia Almond about to leave high school to study fashion illustration at college. The picture we get of Julia at this point is of a slightly spoilt, slightly attractive, charismatic child given to pashes on teachers. She has a throughly developed imagination and her chief loves in life are her teacher, her dog Bobby and her own space. At this point, she is about 75% Collette's Claudine, 25% St Trinians.
From the fashion illustration course she uses her connections to gain an apprenticeship at a fashion boutique, where she rises through the years from apprentice to shop girl to fashion buyer and dependable second in command. She has her own money, she has glamorous friends who she goes to see in plays at the theatre, and can be found creeping up the stairs to bed at her parents house in the early hours of the morning.
When her father dies, her income is not enough for her or her mother to live on and it is decided that Julia's loathsome aunt, uncle and cousin will move into the house to keep them afloat financially. This arrangement means her mother acting like a skivvy to the Beales and Julia being forced to share her room with a younger cousin who bears a remarkable resemblance to a slightly older Violet Elizabeth Bott from Just William.
Julia, feeling claustrophobic and trapped, is faced with a choice at this point: She can move out, gain a greater degree of independence but be forced to live a hand to mouth existence in seedy digs on her wages, she can stay at home and endure the unpleasant, interfering Beales and continue to share a room with the nauseating Elsa, or she can accept the offer of marriage from Herbert Starling, a family friend and older man recently widowed, who has lusted after her for years. She chooses to marry Herbert, despite having no real idea of what marriage will mean.
Her marriage to Herbert Starling, and what it will mean, isn't exactly up there with Tess Derbyfield being 'rescued' by Alec D'Urberville, but it's similar in the sense that it's at this point that a sense of unease begins to creep into the readers mind. At first, things are largely fine - Julia has a nice flat in a nice neighbourhood with a nice maid, who loves her dog Bobby. Herbert is away, fighting in the war, so she doesn't spend much time with him and is largely left to her own devices outside of work. She can, at this point, essentially live the life she wanted - that of a working single woman, living in a nice house. It's when the war ends that things change and she's forced to reckon with the consequences of what marriage means.
Julia, unusually, manages to hold onto her job and is quickly earning more than her husband in his gentleman's fashion outlet. This, and her unwillingness to allow him his 'rights', cause a great deal of the tension in the marriage, which didn't start from a happy place to begin with.
When Julia re-meets Leonard Croft, who appears early on in the book as a naughty child in a class of younger children that the teenage Julia is asked to look after for the afternoon, she is attracted to this confident, charismatic younger man just as he is to her.
Tennyson Jesse does a good job of summoning up the feverish atmosphere of Leo and Julia's love affair and their letters to each other, and this section of the book speeds along while also building a sense of increased desperation and the sense that their inner worlds are bleeding into the real world, with disastrous consequences.
The later sections of the book are the ones that feel the most modern in some ways, with the issues Julia faces still relevant today. It is, needless to say, the final section of the book that is the most harrowing. Tennyson Jesse has created a heroine who is so vivid, so alive, so determined that it's a shock to see her brought so low.
This is a book that haunts you and stays with you long after you have finished reading it.
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