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fly's review
funny
informative
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
renardthefox's review against another edition
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
flappermyrtle's review
4.0
This collection of short stories is excellent to curl up on the couch with a cup of tea. The little nuggets of everyday life, described in Towers´ lovely style, with sometimes striking metaphors and a certain emotional honesty made me want to know these characters, their friends, their society better. But that, of course, is the beauty of the short story form, if written well: you'd like to step beyond the story, know more, but have to make do with the story there is. I like the variety of female characters that appear in these stories, and the small ordinary motions they go through that are, in fact, major life events to them. I felt like an insider, another inhabitant of their houses, rather than an outsider looking into a window. Though it may be pointed out Towers uses the trope of the literary daughter quite a lot, I did not feel this was truly repetitive (and I read all the stories in two days). An absolute pity she had not written more before her death.
steve1213's review
emotional
hopeful
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.5
Really liked some fell flat with others
kcogman's review
mysterious
relaxing
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
girlwithherheadinabook's review
4.0
For my full review: https://girlwithherheadinabook.co.uk/2018/06/review-tea-with-mr-rochester-frances-towers.html
Published in 1949, a year after her death, Tea With Mr Rochester is Frances Towers' only published work - a collection of short stories which had previously appeared in periodicals. She spent most of her life working as a teacher in a girls' school where her sister was headmistress. Although the afterword notes that there is a certain overlap in the stories' subject matter, Towers' prose is so flawless that this is barely noticeable. Elegant and elliptical, Tea with Mr Rochester is reminiscent of the writing of Elizabeth Bowen and reminds me again why I love 1940s fiction. Pure vintage delight.
The titular story centres around Prissy, a young girl who imagines her aunt's friend Mr Considine as Mr Rochester, thereby making actual meetings with him tricky to handle. Prissy is typical of the heroine found across the stories, the archetypal 'literary daughter'. Like Jane Eyre herself, the literary daughter may feel plain or ignored but is full of imagination and notions about the world which she must find a way of expressing. The literary daughter is on the cusp of her innocence, aware that there is more to be known.
Prissy is regarded as a child by her aunts but behind her reserve, she is full of closely-regarded romantic feeling. Aunt Athene asks cautiously about talking after lights-out at boarding school, 'Are there any horrid girls, who try to tell you things you shouldn't know?' while Prissy cringes and hopes that she will not be asked about what she is reading. Finally ordered to accompany Aunt Athene to tea with Mr Considine, Prissy sits in rapture imagining herself in Jane Eyre itself:
They went on with their gay, incomprehensible conversation as if she was not there. It was quite safe to steal glances at Mr Considine, recalling the moments when he had played with Jane, as a cat with a mouse, the delirious moments when he had broken short a sentence with a betraying word, all the moments of agony and bliss one had shared with the little governess. And that most wonderful moment of all, when he at last declared his love and gathered her into his arms, and one had nearly fainted with delight.
But suddenly Mr Considine took her by surprise. The blue eyes looked straight into her own, and then he said, with an amused smile – “Prissy has been weighing me all this time in her invisible scales. And what, Prissy, if I may ask so personal a question, is your private opinion of me?
This is the pattern for each of the stories, they are gentle and soft and then abruptly the action turns so that Towers never fails to leave her mark on the reader. My own favourite from the collection was 'The Little Willow' which also appeared to have a heavy Brontë inspiration. There are three sisters; artist Charlotte who has a mesmerising power over men, poetic Brenda who can say 'divinely right things' and then the story's central character youngest sister Lisby who is ignored by all. Lisby 'had no poetic conception of herself to impose on the minds of others. However, she had her uses. She cut sandwiches and made coffee and threw herself into the breach when some unassuming guest seemed in danger of being neglected.' A familiar pattern?
The sisters play host to a revolving cast of young men passing through London during World War II with various young men falling at the feet of Charlotte and Brenda before returning to active service and their eventual fate. One of the visitors is the quietly-spoken Simon, who Lisby takes to her heart before he is abruptly purloined by Brenda. While I am not a believer in Anne Brontë's lost love for William Weightman, the parallels between this story and that episode from Brontë mythology are clear. The conflict between Lisby's understated hearth-side affection and her sisters' seductive qualities mirrors the struggle for Anne Brontë fans to champion her more earth-bound novels against the dark passions within her sisters' books. Charlotte and Brenda take their would-be suitors' love for granted and tread them underfoot but Lisby is a very different creature. The final page of 'The Willow Tree' brought me to tears, an unusual happening.
While comparisons are more often made between Towers and Jane Austen, due to their similarly elegant sentence structure, the Brontë themes kept on unmistakably recurring throughout the book. In 'Don Juan and the Lily', Elsa notes that she had always preferred Wuthering Heights to Jane Austen. Elsa Craigie has been assured by her mother that she will never marry, since the women on her father's side never do. Her mother's five sisters had all gotten engaged right out of the schoolroom but Elsa is 'pure Craigie'. Doomed to a spinster existence, Elsa weaves exotic fantasies around her older colleague Miss Dellow, the only woman allowed to attend the looming ogre of Mr Pellow. When Miss Dellow goes on holiday and Elsa finally visits Mr Pellow's office herself, a different picture emerges.
Despite initial appearances, there is a darkness too behind various of the chapters. The opener 'Violet' sees a newly-arrived servant coming to have a very strange hold over the family, culminating in a bizarre outburst. In 'Spade Man From Over The Water', a young wife has enjoyed making a friend of her near neighbour but the ending comes so abruptly that I had to re-read the whole thing twice before I reached a firm conclusion about what precisely had gone on. Mrs Asher definitely spotted something that she did not want to tell Mrs Penny.
Chaste though Towers' writing undoubtedly is, this does not stop sex peeking at us out of the shadows, from Miss Dellow's tall tales in 'Don Juan and the Lily' to how the sight of two young people kissing and almost 'gobbling' each other has so haunted Ursula in 'The Rose in the Picture'. Strangest of all though was 'The Chosen and the Rejected', a tale full of cynicism as close friends Florence and Lucy make friends with the Prydes of the Big House only for Mrs Pryde to reveal to them her plans for her husband after her death. Like enchanted princesses, it does not seem that they will be able to escape. Indeed, while only one of the stories is overtly supernatural, there is an unearthly quality about almost all of them.
There was something so satisfyingly beautiful about Tea with Mr Rochester - it reminded me of the scent of a rose. This is perhaps unsurprising since floral imagery is used quite frequently by Towers, with Prissy noting that Aunt Athene 'talked in a rose's voice, a yellow tea rose's, and Miss Pinsett in a zinnia's, crisp and clipped' and in 'Lucinda', Venetia 'loves poetry as a gardener loves the dark, wistful violets which take the airs of March with fragrance'. In 'The Golden Rose', Emma recalls her mother 'a light in the mind and a fragrance in the memory'. Flowers are picked, plucked, arranged, re-arranged, taken as symbols of character and along the way, they lend an added fragrance to the book.
The contemporary review from 1949 notes in its final words that it 'is a bitter thought that we shall hear no more of this' and that is as true now as it was then. Frances Towers' book is such a slender thing and yet so rich in what lies within it. Writing in 2003, Frances Thomas' Afterword observes that 'whatever her age might be in real life, the spirit of the Literary Daughter is forever arrested at that interesting stage of adolescence when Jane Eyre is the greatest novel in the world and its boorish hero the man of your dreams'. The Literary Daughter is found across the pages of literature, from consciously naive Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle to the endlessly self-examining Bridget Jones. Frances Towers feels so keenly observant of human nature, her writing is at all times 'as sharp and clear as an icicle' and as one of her characters observes to another, Tea with Mr Rochester taps into the way in which 'life can be terribly sad and utterly ridiculous, sometimes at the same moment.' A stunning piece of literature - I could only feel regret that this is the only trace that Towers left behind.
Published in 1949, a year after her death, Tea With Mr Rochester is Frances Towers' only published work - a collection of short stories which had previously appeared in periodicals. She spent most of her life working as a teacher in a girls' school where her sister was headmistress. Although the afterword notes that there is a certain overlap in the stories' subject matter, Towers' prose is so flawless that this is barely noticeable. Elegant and elliptical, Tea with Mr Rochester is reminiscent of the writing of Elizabeth Bowen and reminds me again why I love 1940s fiction. Pure vintage delight.
The titular story centres around Prissy, a young girl who imagines her aunt's friend Mr Considine as Mr Rochester, thereby making actual meetings with him tricky to handle. Prissy is typical of the heroine found across the stories, the archetypal 'literary daughter'. Like Jane Eyre herself, the literary daughter may feel plain or ignored but is full of imagination and notions about the world which she must find a way of expressing. The literary daughter is on the cusp of her innocence, aware that there is more to be known.
Prissy is regarded as a child by her aunts but behind her reserve, she is full of closely-regarded romantic feeling. Aunt Athene asks cautiously about talking after lights-out at boarding school, 'Are there any horrid girls, who try to tell you things you shouldn't know?' while Prissy cringes and hopes that she will not be asked about what she is reading. Finally ordered to accompany Aunt Athene to tea with Mr Considine, Prissy sits in rapture imagining herself in Jane Eyre itself:
They went on with their gay, incomprehensible conversation as if she was not there. It was quite safe to steal glances at Mr Considine, recalling the moments when he had played with Jane, as a cat with a mouse, the delirious moments when he had broken short a sentence with a betraying word, all the moments of agony and bliss one had shared with the little governess. And that most wonderful moment of all, when he at last declared his love and gathered her into his arms, and one had nearly fainted with delight.
But suddenly Mr Considine took her by surprise. The blue eyes looked straight into her own, and then he said, with an amused smile – “Prissy has been weighing me all this time in her invisible scales. And what, Prissy, if I may ask so personal a question, is your private opinion of me?
This is the pattern for each of the stories, they are gentle and soft and then abruptly the action turns so that Towers never fails to leave her mark on the reader. My own favourite from the collection was 'The Little Willow' which also appeared to have a heavy Brontë inspiration. There are three sisters; artist Charlotte who has a mesmerising power over men, poetic Brenda who can say 'divinely right things' and then the story's central character youngest sister Lisby who is ignored by all. Lisby 'had no poetic conception of herself to impose on the minds of others. However, she had her uses. She cut sandwiches and made coffee and threw herself into the breach when some unassuming guest seemed in danger of being neglected.' A familiar pattern?
The sisters play host to a revolving cast of young men passing through London during World War II with various young men falling at the feet of Charlotte and Brenda before returning to active service and their eventual fate. One of the visitors is the quietly-spoken Simon, who Lisby takes to her heart before he is abruptly purloined by Brenda. While I am not a believer in Anne Brontë's lost love for William Weightman, the parallels between this story and that episode from Brontë mythology are clear. The conflict between Lisby's understated hearth-side affection and her sisters' seductive qualities mirrors the struggle for Anne Brontë fans to champion her more earth-bound novels against the dark passions within her sisters' books. Charlotte and Brenda take their would-be suitors' love for granted and tread them underfoot but Lisby is a very different creature. The final page of 'The Willow Tree' brought me to tears, an unusual happening.
While comparisons are more often made between Towers and Jane Austen, due to their similarly elegant sentence structure, the Brontë themes kept on unmistakably recurring throughout the book. In 'Don Juan and the Lily', Elsa notes that she had always preferred Wuthering Heights to Jane Austen. Elsa Craigie has been assured by her mother that she will never marry, since the women on her father's side never do. Her mother's five sisters had all gotten engaged right out of the schoolroom but Elsa is 'pure Craigie'. Doomed to a spinster existence, Elsa weaves exotic fantasies around her older colleague Miss Dellow, the only woman allowed to attend the looming ogre of Mr Pellow. When Miss Dellow goes on holiday and Elsa finally visits Mr Pellow's office herself, a different picture emerges.
Despite initial appearances, there is a darkness too behind various of the chapters. The opener 'Violet' sees a newly-arrived servant coming to have a very strange hold over the family, culminating in a bizarre outburst. In 'Spade Man From Over The Water', a young wife has enjoyed making a friend of her near neighbour but the ending comes so abruptly that I had to re-read the whole thing twice before I reached a firm conclusion about what precisely had gone on. Mrs Asher definitely spotted something that she did not want to tell Mrs Penny.
Chaste though Towers' writing undoubtedly is, this does not stop sex peeking at us out of the shadows, from Miss Dellow's tall tales in 'Don Juan and the Lily' to how the sight of two young people kissing and almost 'gobbling' each other has so haunted Ursula in 'The Rose in the Picture'. Strangest of all though was 'The Chosen and the Rejected', a tale full of cynicism as close friends Florence and Lucy make friends with the Prydes of the Big House only for Mrs Pryde to reveal to them her plans for her husband after her death. Like enchanted princesses, it does not seem that they will be able to escape. Indeed, while only one of the stories is overtly supernatural, there is an unearthly quality about almost all of them.
There was something so satisfyingly beautiful about Tea with Mr Rochester - it reminded me of the scent of a rose. This is perhaps unsurprising since floral imagery is used quite frequently by Towers, with Prissy noting that Aunt Athene 'talked in a rose's voice, a yellow tea rose's, and Miss Pinsett in a zinnia's, crisp and clipped' and in 'Lucinda', Venetia 'loves poetry as a gardener loves the dark, wistful violets which take the airs of March with fragrance'. In 'The Golden Rose', Emma recalls her mother 'a light in the mind and a fragrance in the memory'. Flowers are picked, plucked, arranged, re-arranged, taken as symbols of character and along the way, they lend an added fragrance to the book.
The contemporary review from 1949 notes in its final words that it 'is a bitter thought that we shall hear no more of this' and that is as true now as it was then. Frances Towers' book is such a slender thing and yet so rich in what lies within it. Writing in 2003, Frances Thomas' Afterword observes that 'whatever her age might be in real life, the spirit of the Literary Daughter is forever arrested at that interesting stage of adolescence when Jane Eyre is the greatest novel in the world and its boorish hero the man of your dreams'. The Literary Daughter is found across the pages of literature, from consciously naive Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle to the endlessly self-examining Bridget Jones. Frances Towers feels so keenly observant of human nature, her writing is at all times 'as sharp and clear as an icicle' and as one of her characters observes to another, Tea with Mr Rochester taps into the way in which 'life can be terribly sad and utterly ridiculous, sometimes at the same moment.' A stunning piece of literature - I could only feel regret that this is the only trace that Towers left behind.
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