What to read for my very first Persephone title? So many delicious titles, but ultimately, I decided to pick something a little close to home. When I discovered that Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey was both admired and published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, that the author was the niece of Lytton Strachey, and that she traveled in Bloomsbury circles in her life, well, this seemed like a natural fit. And I was not disappointed.
The prose is immediately attractive, taking up the material of a story about a wedding day but transparently hinting at the blackness of the house, the players, the circumstances. As Dolly, the reluctant, rum-swilling bride who has secreted herself away in her tower for hours before her wedding, gazes into the ancient mirror above the writing-table, she sees not an accurate reflection of self but a distorted image of self and surroundings "wiped free of all signs of humdrum and trivial existence."
"This mirror was rusted over with tiny specks by the hundred, and also the quicksilver at the back had become blackened in the course of ages, so that the drawing-room, as reflected in its corpse-like face, seemed forever swimming in an eerie, dead-looking, metallic twilight, such is never experienced in the actual world outside."
The house is chock full of stereotypical English eccentrics, and we as readers are given two lenses through which to view them. We may laugh at their antics (especially an ongoing argument between brothers concerning the inappropriateness of bright green socks for wedding attire) or we may view this as social satire in which that which is considered benign or charming in the characters is actually far darker business. The multiple references to devils and serpents and forked tongues. "... her mouth sideways in a devil's grimace." The comparisons of the characters to animals, beasts - "So the animals are being fed in the library," the mother that hisses like a snake, a sister that cackles like a hen, a maid who receives the white wedding shoes "in her wrinkled claws."
The imagery of color is also interesting in the book. Things either are described in the bright colors of the English garden, reflections of the "cheerful weather" here that is anything but pleasant in reality or as black and dire and decaying like the trappings of society.
Black humor at its finest. All your darkest suspicions and chuckles validated by the wickedly clever ending. Think Stella Gibbons. Think I picked a great first Persephone.
Many thanks to Claire and Verity for hosting this week's festivities.
