Guest Post: Review: ‘What Every Girl Wants’ (1937) by Phyllis Bottome #1937Club

Today I have a guest post from my mother who enjoys joining in with Karen and Simon‘s clubs. This is her review of a short story from a new-to-me (and her) author Phyllis Bottome.

I am not overfond of short stories with a few exceptions, like “The Cats of Ulthar”. Afterall, how much can an author express in a few pages. And this story is a really short one, all of twelve pages.

I had never heard of Phyllis Bottome either, but the name cropped up when I ran a search for 1937. What further intrigued me was the prologue:

 “Miss Alice Devine and life, and how they finally got together, and what she thought of it. A modern climax for an old-fashioned upbringing”.

Alice Devine, recently bereaved, overwrought and depressed, after five years of nursing, has just lost the mother with whom she has contentedly spent her entire life. The good family doctor, much to her astonishment, advises her to go away from all that is familiar and see what else life has to offer, in other words “Go on a Cruise”.

Money is not an issue. Alice, heir to the princely sum of 3,000 dollars a year, in her own words, is “rich for life, if there had been any life to be rich for”. But the fear of the unknown is.

Aghast at the thought of setting off on an ocean voyage, she remembers her mother’s advice, “A breath of ozone,” her mother had often said, “is so good for us, dear, before the winter sets in.”  “Well, the rest of her life, Alice thought, would be the winter setting in; Perhaps it would be a good thing to get a breath of ozone first.”

Braving the disapproval of her closest relatives, she sets off on a cruise. Once on board, everything is new and different, the ship, the setting, and the people in high spirits, cavorting around much to the dismay of the staid thirty-year-old. But to her surprise, she proves a good sailor and one of the few who can brave the open deck, while others struggle to find their feet. Swimming is one of the activities she has mastered, and it is in the swimming pool that she meets the tall young man with honest grey eyes, which hold a strange attraction.

cover via fadedpage

But such happiness is often short-lived, and once the passengers emerge, along comes competition in the shape of a flighty young woman, who immediately latches onto Ray, all set for a shipboard romance. Alice soon feels slighted and begins to withdraw into her shell once again.

But things rarely remain the same, and the balmy sunny weather changes overnight. While the passengers still see bright blue skies and enjoy the heat of the sun, the crew knows they are in the path of a hurricane. And all hell breaks loose! Extreme danger and looking death in the face bring out the worst in most people and the best in a few. “You can’t, Alice thinks, really face death, because if you’re happy, it’s not there—and if you’re not, you’re too frightened to know what is there!”.

Will Alice survive and find the real meaning of Life?

Phyllis Bottome is a master at sketching a scene. She also crams so much emotion into a few pages that the reader feels totally satisfied with the few words read. In fact, this is more a novel than a short story.

Phyllis Bottome via fadedpage

Equally interesting is the author herself. One of the two daughters of an American clergyman, Rev. William MacDonald Bottome and his English wife Mary Leatham, Phyllis was born in 1884 in Rochester, Kent. When her sister succumbed to tuberculosis, she was sent to St. Moritz to escape the same fate. There she met Alban Ernan Forbes Dennis, a British diplomat working first in Marseilles and then in Vienna as Passport Control Officer, a cover for his real role as MI6 Head of Station with responsibility for Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia. They married in Paris in 1917, and later started a school in Austria.

Based on the teaching of languages, the school was intended to be a community and an educational laboratory to determine how psychology and educational theory could cure the ills of nations. One of their more famous pupils was Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels. In 1960, Fleming wrote to Bottome, “My life with you both is one of my most cherished memories, and heaven knows where I should be today without Ernan.” Other pupils at Kitzbühel who went on to become authors included Ralph Arnold, Cyril Connolly (who wrote about his time there in The Unquiet Grave), and Nigel Dennis (Wikipedia).

Bottome died in London on 22 August 1963. Her husband survived her by nine years.