Miss Mole

I read this book after reading "The Misses Mallet", which I thought was brilliant. "Miss Mole" is even better. It is a tour de force character study of a funny, intelligent woman. Miss Mole is employed as a housekeeper, and through her eyes we see the foibles of those with whom she comes into contact. It is a tragedy that this wonderful author is largely out of print.

E. H. Young's delightful Hannah Mole is over forty, unmarried, and always on the run for new work as a companion, nanny, or housekeeper. Although proud of her work, she realizes her humorously sharp tongue and satirical perception of the world will always get her tossed from each new job; yet despite her hand-to-mouth circumstances, she keeps fairly happy by always amazing herself at the qualities and peculiarities of human nature. This much-loved, but little-known 1930 masterpiece, which details the return of Miss Mole to her favorite city of Radstowe (really Bristol) to care for a clergyman's family is told with an angularity and asperity befitting its great central character. Nothing in this novel is ever told straightforwardly, but always at a kind of slant like sunlight through spar; but this is the way Miss Mole herself views the world, and the result is a very comic and very intelligent novel by one of the most unjustly forgotten British novelists who might be best characterized (with her quirkiness and love of aphortism) as an early 20th-century George Meredith.