flight of the maidens book review

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THE FLIGHT OF THE MAIDENS

by Jane Gardam ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2001

A fine introduction to a quintessentially British novelist who isn’t nearly well enough known Over Here.

With winning charm and wit, two-time Whitbread-winner Gardam ( Queen of the Tambourine , 1995, etc.) explores the social and emotional climate of postwar England.

Gardam weaves together the stories of three village girls who, between the summers of 1946 and ’47, earn university scholarships and prepare to leave their former lives behind. Hetty Fallowes stages a hesitant rebellion against her mildly neurotic, maddeningly possessive mother. Una Vane flutters mothlike toward the flame of left-wing politics and the adventure of having a lower-class lover (a somewhat surly delivery boy). And Liselotte Klein, an orphaned German refugee delivered to England by the Kindertransport , tests her steely stoicism against the reflexive compassion of the Quakers who become her foster parents. Gardam moves among their experiences with sophisticated assurance, enriching the novel’s texture with memorable characterizations of the protagonists’ acquaintances and especially their elders, notably Hetty’s shell-shocked father, a traumatized war veteran who has become a philosophical gravedigger with a hilariously mordant sensibility, and her flighty, effusive mother, who’s simultaneously less and more than the smothering monster Hetty believes her to be. This is essentially familiar material (think Muriel Spark’s classic The Girls of Slender Means ) redeemed by invigorating detail (especially the piecemeal portrayal of how wartime hardships were patiently endured) and an elegiac affection for the excesses and absurdities of youth on the puzzling, intimidating threshold of maturity. Gardam frames her story in dozens of crisp, brief scenes featuring deliciously dizzy conversation (“I’ve no belief in women with careers . . . It shrinks the womb”). Reading The Flight of the Maidens is a little like listening to your favorite dotty aunt rattle on about bygone days and absent friends: you shake your head in wonder and mild exasperation while the old girl effortlessly charms you.

Pub Date: July 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-7867-0879-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001

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by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2006

A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.

Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.

McCarthy ( No Country for Old Men , 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.

Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006

ISBN: 0-307-26543-9

Publisher: Knopf

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006

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by Cormac McCarthy ; illustrated by Manu Larcenet

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by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019

Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.

Atwood goes back to Gilead.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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Review: 'The Flight of the Maidens,' by Jane Gardam

FICTION: Jane Gardam recounts the tragicomic adventures of three women headed to college in 1946 England.

By ELLEN AKINS

If "charming" weren't so tainted with tweeness, it would be the word I'd use about "The Flight of the Maidens," a reissue of a 2001 novel by Jane Gardam, a multiple-award-winning writer far better known in her native Britain than here.

The book, set in northern England in the summer of 1946, follows the fortunes of three young women preparing for college, each poised for her, yes, maiden flight: Hetty, Ina and Liselotte. Chief among them is Hetty, whose scholarship is unexpected — an "academic bombshell." But she's had the help of her older boyfriend, Eustace, a sexless, insistently literary lance corporal (upon meeting Hetty he says, "I'm said to look like Siegfried Sassoon").

Hetty's father, an intellectual damaged in World War I (He's "on the Somme. All the time."), works as a gravedigger and is not good for much besides providing droll, slyly incisive commentary.

Meanwhile, Kitty, Hetty's overly devoted mother, a pretty girl-woman, finds comfort in the arms of the local vicar and in her circle at the Lonsdale Cafe. In these off-kilter gossip sessions and in her letters to Hetty, Kitty is the source of some of the most piquant comedy in this on-the-cusp-of-coming-of-age tale, which is often funny in the knowing, affectionate manner of a Jane Austen novel.

Ina, a more useful than fully formed character, has taken up with a "sharp-faced boy from the fish shop who belonged to a cycle club" and comes cycling up whenever things need to be discovered, discussed, reported or done.

Liselotte, a German Jewish orphan brought to England by the Kindertransport in 1939, undergoes the most remarkable transformation. When we meet her, she is "pasty, boneless and fat," sitting "in a hump like unrisen dough." But after the summer's stints with truly eccentric guardians, first in postwar London, then in California, she emerges as a worldly sophisticate, "a sharp, bright girl in high heels and lipstick."

Gardam is very good at eccentricity. There are those guardians, of course, a tiny pair of Jewish refugees hoarding endangered art in their London apartment, and the ancient, wildly wealthy American aunt like a Tennessee Williams character dropped into "Sunset Boulevard." And there are odd others, such as the bizarre family of fading aristocrats Hetty meets during her summer sojourn in the Lake District, and the antique Girl Guides leaders who are always of service, invariably in uniform.

Most wonderful, though, is the author's eye for the eccentric in what's perfectly normal. Learning about love and loss, navigating the courses of family and friendship, negotiating the transitions between adolescence and adulthood and between generations: It's familiar territory, in life and in novels.

But what Jane Gardam does, in this novel and in her others, is remind us of how strange the familiar can be when we first encounter it, as each of us must. And finally, that's even better than charming.

Ellen Akins is a writer and a teacher of writing in Wisconsin. www.ellenakins.com

The Flight of the Maidens By: Jane Gardam. Publisher: Europa Editions, 328 pages, $18.

about the writer

Ellen akins, more from books, the pandemic made writer kate dicamillo realize, 'i'm not going to get through this unless i have a fairy tale to write'.

LOCAL FICTION: Featuring stories within stories, she’ll discuss the book at Talking Volumes on Tuesday.

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the flight of the maidens.

It is the summer of 1946 --- one year to the week that the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki --- and three 17-year-old English girls sit in a Yorkshire graveyard contemplating their future in a world so recently torn apart by war. The girls, Hetty, Una, and Lieselotte, have gathered in the churchyard, having just heard the news that they've each received full state scholarships to University in October --- Hetty to the University of London, and Una and Lieselotte to Cambridge. Having reached maturity during the lean, uncertain years of World War II, and still living on food rations and clothing coupons, the girls look forward to a bright and promising future far away from Yorkshire but each inwardly wonders if she is ready to let go of the familiarity of home and face the challenges that await in a society struggling to rebuild itself from the ground up. In the months before they set off for college, each girl will face one last transformative lesson that will prepare them for their new life.

Hester "Hetty" Fallowes was always thought to be the least likely candidate for scholarship --- never considered clever by anyone and labeled as an "unsteady, self-conscious, show-off" by teachers, Hetty seemed destined to replicate the stifling, domestic life led by her mother Kitty --- a life dominated by religious fervor and gilded society luncheons. Kitty Fallowes had raised her daughter to strive after the stringent goodness that she felt she herself had failed at. Under her mother's guidance, Hester "was to be Kitty perfected." Hetty's ambitions are suddenly raised when at age 16 she meets and falls for intellectual "older man" Eustace. Twenty-one-year-old Eustace is a soldier in the Army Pay Corp who has already secured a place at Cambridge upon his is release from the army. Desperate to impress Eustace, and determined to join him at university, Hetty throws herself into her studies and soars to the top of her class. When she discovers Eustace has been writing intimate letters to her mother on the sly, a confused Hetty sets off on her own for a three week retreat in England's Lake District where she hopes to gain independence and insight into her own expectations for herself.

Unlike her best friend Hetty, quiet and confident Una Vane always excelled in school. The daughter of a prominent doctor, there was never any doubt that Una would find success in anything she put her mind to. In her final year of school Una surprises everyone by taking up company with Ray, a sharp-faced railroad employee from the wrong side of the tracks who shares Una's love of cycling and, like Una, is "economical with words." As Una and Ray's cycling trips take them to increasingly secluded destinations along the countryside, Una discovers that there just might be much more to life than academic success.

Lieselotte Klein is by far the most complex of the three girls, and her journey perhaps the most important. Since arriving from Hamburg on the Kindertransport in 1939, she was always considered by her classmates to be "too alarming, too mysterious, and too brilliant to be anybody's friend." Up until the day she is awarded the scholarship that unites her in a common bond with Una and Hetty, no one ever really paid any attention to her. When just days after receiving her award Lieselotte is suddenly and inexplicably sent to live with an elderly couple in London, who tell her they have adopted her, Lieselotte is prompted into questioning what happened to her own family back in Germany. She begins a quest that takes her all the way to the California shore, where she must decide whether to place her trust in a stranger who may or may not have her best interests at heart.

THE FLIGHT OF THE MAIDENS satisfies as a perfect summer read filled with genuine humor and heartache. Two-time Whitbread Award winner Jane Gardam effortlessly transports her readers back in time to a precarious era in history where the old rules no longer apply but the new have yet to be written. This one should serve to win Gardam many new fans on this side of the Atlantic.

Reviewed by Melissa Morgan on January 22, 2011

The Flight of the Maidens by Jane Gardam

Publication Date: June 25, 2002
Genres: Fiction
Paperback: 278 pages
Publisher: Plume
ISBN-10: 0452283345
ISBN-13: 9780452283343

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SEEING THE WORLD THROUGH BOOKS

Reviews by Mary Whipple

Jane Gardam–THE FLIGHT OF THE MAIDENS

Apr 27th, 2018 by mary

Note: Jane Gardam has twice been awarded the Costa (Whitbread) Award, and has been honored with the Phoenix Award for Children’s Literature and the Heywood Hill Literature Prize for her lifetime contribution toward the enjoyment of literature.

“All Hetty could think of was ink. There happened to be a bottle of blue-black Quink upon the table….It brought back to Hetty, and perhaps to her father in times past, examination rooms, the joy of easy questions, the knowledge that all the work had paid off. ‘I can do this!’ No joy like it. Page after page of wet, salt ink, blotted, legible, confident. It was ink that had freed her. Blessed ink. Ink for immortality. Stronger than history itself.”

Author Jane Gardam

Here, Gardam tells the stories of three seventeen-year-old girls from Yorkshire who are just finishing their school work. Much of the action surrounds Hetty Fallowes, who is “poor because her father, who had been four years in the trenches in the First World War, had returned miraculously unscathed in body but shattered to bits in mind.” He now works as a grave-digger. She and her gossipy mother do not always get along, and Hetty is not sure that she will be able to get the financial aid she needs for college, but she would like to study literature if she has a choice. Una Vane, “an owl of a child with sober manners who always had clean finger-nails,” lived a typical life until she was nine, when her father, a physician, walked out of his house and never came back. A victim of “the Somme,” her father had later been found dead below the rocks of Boulby Head. She is anxious to study physics at university. Though Hetty Fallowes and Una Vane are friends, the third girl, Liselotte Klein, whom they know but are not close to, has always been an outsider to them, one of the many Jewish children who were smuggled out of Germany in 1939 and “adopted” by people in England who were committed to their schooling. Liselotte has had no confirmation about the fate of her family in Germany, but she looks forward to college and plans to study foreign languages.

Wright’s Coal Tar Soap, the best description Hetty has for Eustace’s scent.

As Gardam tells the stories of the three young women – still girls, really – she fills the action with vivid period detail, some of which conveys attitudes and subtle commentary. This is obvious when Hetty is introduced. She first met Eustace, the man in her life, at the vicarage the previous year. She was sixteen, and he was twenty-one, a lance-corporal in the Army, stationed locally. He declared his love after their second meeting, admiring her mind. Their frequent walks during the summer of the action here always involve discussions of books, and when they begin to kiss, at last, Gardam notes that Hetty “had been kissed before, at sweaty school dances and was becoming good at it. Eustace was not adept.” The lively Hetty continues to regard him as a boyfriend, somehow managing to “subdue the recent regret that he never laughed,” and when she picks up his watch band for him at a local watchmakers, she notes that “the leather smelled male. Somehow Eustace had not smelled male. He’d smelled of Wright’s Coal Tar soap.” He does help Hetty study for her entrance exams, however, and when she passes them, the whole world is surprised. As the summer and the pre-college activity involving Una and Liselotte also develops, Hetty’s attachment to Eustace is thrown into sharp relief.

The view from the hostel where Una and Ray stay may be like this one from the Ghyll Mill Hostel in North Yorkshire, within biking distance of where these girls live.

Una Vane has been friendly with Ray, “a sharp-faced boy from the fish shop who belongs to a cycle club, and also with a gigantic girl called Brenda Flange, who has Amazonian shoulders and thighs.” The three of them go out regularly on their racing bikes, and gradually Una, a late bloomer, and Ray become a couple. Their chaste relationship continues, and though Ray eventually becomes a clerk on the London and North Eastern Railway, Una’s mother cannot help feeling that Una “could do a bit better.” Una eventually agrees to go away with Ray for a cycling weekend, where they will stay at a youth hostel in the high hills, where the “brick cottages out of which the youth hostel had evolved possessed one of the most spectacular views in England.” Their trip takes on new meaning when they are surprised to meet another couple there.

Liselotte meets Carl outside King’s College in London.

Liselotte Stein, whose role is the smallest in the novel, is removed from the Quaker home where she has been living for several years and placed with a Jewish couple which has been rescuing stolen antiques and artifacts, storing them in their house, so crowded with “stuff” that all the inhabitants must sleep on couches. Eventually, Liselotte decides to find out the truth about her family and travels alone to find them.

The Notting Hill area of London, where Liselotte lived with the Feldmans.

The novel reaches its climax at the end of summer as all three girls, now more mature, take off for their colleges in London. All have had “flights” from someone or something, and all have grown dramatically during their summer vacations. Gardam has told their stories with sympathy, drama, and plenty of action, making 1946 come alive for the reader. The social and class differences in England play a role in the plots, the reluctance to confront the Nazi terror and its aftermath is evident in the fate of Liselotte, and the importance of an education as an entrée to social acceptance is stressed. The resolutions to the stories of the three girls, however, are heavily dependent upon coincidence, and while Gardam does make the reader care about her characters, they are not as fully developed as they have been in other, less “crowded” Gardam novels. Delightful to read and revelatory of the period, The Flight of the Maidens will keep a reader fully occupied on a long plane ride or at the beach.

ALSO, by Gardam: CRUSOE’S DAUGHTER , GOD ON THE ROCKS , LAST FRIENDS , A LONG WAY FROM VERONA , THE MAN IN THE WOODEN HAT , OLD FILTH , THE PEOPLE OF PRIVILEGE HILL , THE QUEEN OF THE TAMBOURINE .

Photos. The author’s photo is from https://www.barnesandnoble.com/

Wright’s Coal Tar Soap, in business since the 1800s, is Hetty’s best description for Eustace’s scent. https://www.youtube.com/

The view from the hostel where Una and Ray stay may be like this one from the Ghyll Mill Hostel in North Yorkshire, within biking distance of where these girls live in Yorkshire. https://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/

Liselotte meets Carl outside King’s College in London. https://www.studyacrossthepond.com/

Liselotte lived with the Feldmans in Notting Hill, an area like this one: https://www.booking.com/

THE FLIGHT OF THE MAIDENS REVIEW. PHOTOS. Book Club Suggestions, Coming-of-age, England, Historical, Literary, Social and Political Issues Written by: Jane Gardam Published by: Europa Editions Date Published: 08/01/2017 ISBN: 978-1609454050 Available in: Ebook Paperback Hardcover

Posted in 3-2018 Reviews , Book Club Suggestions , Coming-of-age , England , Historical , Literary , Social and Political Issues

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The Flight of the Maidens by Jane Gardam

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to love this novel. Three young women lounging in an ancient graveyard in the Yorkshire sticks that Gardam knows so well have all received good news. All three eighteen-something year olds have received grants and scholarships to attend either Cambridge or London University.

It’s 1946 and Britain is limping towards recovery after World War II. A crushed grapefruit, a banana, decent coffee, are still precious luxuries. In London, the walls of museums are full of blank spots since the pictures haven’t brought out of hiding. Whole streetscapes are in ruin from incessant bombings. And a documentary about concentration camps, specifically Belsen, is making the rounds of movie theaters.

From now on their paths will diverge and the novel is energized by triple plotting. This is the last time they’ll all be together until the end of the story as Jane Gardam writes with a full-throated confidence that makes The Flight of the Maidens my favorite of the four novels by her I have read. It’s a great “Europa Editions read”, meaning it’s an uncovered gem of indisputable literary quality.

Hetty has the lead in the reader’s attention. Her state scholarship has come as a surprise. An unsympathetic teacher finds it unbelievable and some of her small-town neighbors are gossiping that it must have been a mistake. But Hetty has had a mentor. A diffident, watery sort of fellow named Eustace, about ten years her senior, who serves as Hetty’s off-the-cuff paramour. Eustace is very well read and he amplifies Hetty’s reading list.

Una lives with her widowed mother who ekes out a living as a mediocre hairdresser in the front room of their house. She implies she’s a professional, that she’s been trained, but she hasn’t. Una’s father left the house one evening and never came back. He jumped off a cliff. Many of the characters in this rural town, having borne the trauma of the first World War not so long ago, are now being asked to bear up under another world war. Hetty’s father is mentally bent as well. He’s the town’s gravedigger, a rather intellectual one since he attended Oxford. Those who know Gardam’s work will recognize her talent for weirdness at full tilt.

Liselotte, the last of the trio, is a Jewish refuge from Hamburg. She arrived in England in 1939. In an automobile trek over the Yorkshire vale, her papers were carelessly lost by her helpers. As a result, she is lost to her family for seven years. Her one remaining relative is a wealthy elder aunt living in California, her parents having died in a concentration camp. Having a writer as totally English as Gardam depict California is a stretch. She muddles through but the terrain is not her forte. Gardam equals Yorkshire, pretty much. Liselotte lives in a stone cottage with a Quaker couple who try to serve as surrogate parents.

The best single line that I read in The Flight of the Maidens is when Ray, Una’s boyfriend, who works for the railroad and used to be the town milk boy, counsels Una that everyone must occupy and live their own life. It’s good advice even if it means leaving some characters in irretrievable loneliness on the Yorkshire moors. Obviously, I think you should read this novel.