Press Coverage Spring 2008

‘How to explain Dorothy Whipple to those who aren't already fans?' asked the Oldie.  ‘In The Closed Door she tells moral, old-fashioned (some would say unfashionably old-fashioned) tales in straight-forward prose, with the emphasis on story – and yet they are utterly gripping.  These stories, despite their ‘quiet’ plots – Ernest and Alice oppress their daughter, a woman is divorced by her husband and only allowed to see her children once a month –  are page-turners just like her novels.’

‘Frederick Taylor (author of Dresden), wrote in the Literary Review about On the Other Side: 'These are the unvarnished, often raw, impress-ions of a decent, intelligent woman living through impossible times.  When she rails against Allied bombing (Hamburg was attacked scores of times between 1940 and 1945), it is with the emotive immediacy of someone who has experienced the death and suffering it has caused and who naively resents the fact that her family, who never supported Hitler, are forced to share their Nazi compatriots’ fate.  When she complains that the British, whom she and her husband so admired and were initially delighted to see occupy the city in May 1945, reveal themselves as vengeful, pettifogging conquerors, it feels authentic (and even more naive – a fact she has the sense to recog-nise in a later entry).  Persephone Books has yet again performed a great service in publishing a handsome new edition of a neglected treasure. The afterword is a model of concise and erudite contextualisation that makes clear how urgently we need to read and reread such revealing tales from “the other side”.’

‘On the Other Side contains the unsent correspond-ence Mathilde Wolff-Monckeberg wrote to her adult children during the war, when they were all living abroad,’ said the Independent on Sunday. ‘They show a woman desperate to maintain a link with those she loved but thought she might never see again. It’s difficult to read what are obviously very personal, private documents, but they contain a kind of truth that can only be read with a strong degree of discomfort.  Testimon-ies like Tilli’s illustrate why war should always be unthinkable.’

‘In The Closed Door, the compass of Dorothy Whipple's concerns is apparently small,’ observed Matthew Dennison in the Spectator. ‘Her focus is the domestic life of a certain sort of Englishwoman at a given moment in time. Her heroines are unremarkable, distinguished only by anxiety or unhappiness. That they suffer is the result not of Grand Guignol or seismic events in the world at large, but the petty malevolence of the dysfunctional family. Whipple’s work has a strong period flavour, but the problems it unravels – the fragility of lifelong emotional fulfilment or the cruelty latent in relationships defined by love – remain constants of human experience. Her sense of place is as vivid as that of Doris Lessing or William Trevor –  although in place of Lessing’s Africa or Trevor’s Ireland is a series of smarter residential streets in unnamed provincial towns, all tall trees and painted railings. Dorothy Whipple wrote with a story-teller’s instinct, so that each of these compelling short stories is a richly satisfying page-turner.’

‘Charlotte Mitchell, in her thoughtful and well-informed introduction,’ wrote Juliet Townsend in the Spectator, ‘points out that although The Young Pretenders is about children, and views the bewildering grown-up world through their eyes, it was written with both a child and adult audience in mind. Part of the enjoyment for the older reader lies in the merciless light the innocent but tactless candour of childhood sheds on the shallow pretension of the sophisticated world. Edith Henrietta Fowler casts a bright light on a particul-ar kind of Victorian home at a particular moment in time, with a mixture of humour, perception and sympathy.’