Lettice Delmer

WITH A PUBLISHER'S NOTE AND PLOT SUMMARY
196pp
ISBN 1 903155215

We first discovered Lettice Delmer when we were in the British Library reading another, less good book that came out the same year and on the back of the jacket a novel in verse was announced with a 'puff' from T.S.Eliot. We ordered it up and it turned out to have that unputdownable quality that is, we hope, the hallmark of a Persephone book. It was also in an unusual genre that began with wandering minstrels round the fire, continued with Chaucer and Don Juan, Eugene Onegin and Aurora Leigh and more recently culminated in Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate (1986) and Sarah Crossan's One (2015) – a novel, i.e. a narrative with plot, characterisation and psychological insight, where the verse form is readable, not too intrusive, but essential.

Lettice Delmer begins in 1912 when Mrs Delmer visits a hospital for unmarried mothers and invites one of them, Flora Tort (flower wronged), and her five-year-old boy to come and live with the Delmer family in Highgate. The experiment is not a success; the main victim is eighteen-year-old Lettice, the pampered daughter of the house who, as so often at that time, has been given nothing to do with her life except wait for marriage, who is innocent, egocentric and bored, not even interested in the outbreak of the First World War because 'I can't enter into it: pin flags, study the papers and the maps each day.' Her parents both die, she moves in to a women's hostel, she is raped by a friend of her brother's and has an abortion, she gets a job in a guest-house and falls in love with one of the men living there who gives her a venereal disease, but eventually – and by now it is the late 1920s and she is living in Bloomsbury – finds spiritual redemption.

So Lettice Delmer is by no means an uplifting or easy book, but it is a brave, moving and highly original one. It was first published in 1958 and we cannot recommend it highly enough. We believe it will be admired and enjoyed by people who would never normally dream of reading a novel in verse. It was a great favourite of T.S. Eliot's, who considered it 'a very poignant story', while according to Storme Jameson, 'Its simplicities are at a profound level. The theme is a great one and the characters are superb'. 

Susan Miles's real name was Ursula Roberts: she was married to the Rector of St George's, Bloomsbury and was a published novelist and poet. In 1920 Harold Monro singled her out in Contemporary Poets as one of the fifty most important poets then writing.

Picture Caption

Prato Cathedral, 15th century fresco

Endpaper

The fabric is 'Plantation', a 1958 design by Lucienne Day. It is modernist, yet the squares of umber and grey have a timeless quality and are in keeping with the novel's 1920s setting. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London/ Design © Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation