Product Description

The setting for this, the third novel by Dorothy Whipple Persephone have published, is Saunby Priory, a large house somewhere in England which has seen better times. We are shown the two Marwood girls, who are nearly grown-up, their father, the widower Major Marwood, and their aunt; then, as soon as their lives have been described, the Major proposes marriage to a woman much younger than himself - and many changes begin.'"The Priory" is the kind of book I really enjoy', wrote Salley Vickers in the "Spectator", 'funny, acutely observed, written in clear, melodious but unostentatious prose, it deserves renewed recognition as a minor classic. Whipple is not quite Jane Austen class but she understands as well as Austen the enormous effects of apparently minor social adjustments...Christine is a true heroine: vulnerable, valient, appealing, and the portrait of her selfless maternal preoccupation, done without sentiment and utterly credible, is one of the best I have ever come across. The final triumph of love over adversity is described with a benevolent panache which left me feeling heartened about human nature...A delightful, well-written and clever book'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33787 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-22
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 536 pages

About the Author
Born in 1893, DOROTHY WHIPPLE (nee Stirrup) had an intensely happy childhood in Blackburn as part of the large family of a local architect. Her close friend George Owen having been killed in the first week of the war, for three years she worked as secretary to Henry Whipple, an educational administrator who was a widower twenty-four years her senior and whom she married in 1917. Their life was mostly spent in Nottingham; here she wrote Young Anne (1927), the first of nine extremely successful novels which included Greenbanks (1932) and The Priory (1939). Almost all her books were Book Society Choices or Recommendations and two of them, They Knew Mr Knight (1934) and They were Sisters (1943), were made into films. She also wrote short stories and two volumes of memoirs. Someone at a Distance (1953) was her last novel. Returning in her last years to Blackburn, Dorothy Whipple died there in 1966.

Customer Reviews

The Jane Austen of the 20th century
It's a tragedy that Dorothy Whipple isn't more well known, because all of her books are superbly crafted portrayals of people so real you could almost reach into the pages and touch them. Like Jane Austen, she had that remarkable skill of being able to breathe life into her words, managing to create characters and situations that are completely relatable to everyday life, effortlessly transcending time, age and social status. Everyone knows somebody like the characters in this book; everyone can relate to some extent with the events that happen; because of this, you genuinely care for the people this novel is centred around; you want them to be happy, you want it all to work out; you understand their hopes, their fears, and their dreams, and this is what makes The Priory a page turner of the most literal kind.

The Priory concerns the Marwood family and their servants, who live in The Priory of the title, and the other people that over the course of the novel come into their lives and change them, for the worse or the better. They are very ordinary people; no one does anything particularly exciting, or special, or ground breaking, but it is because of this that their lives are so engrossing. They are just ordinary people, like us, with their own faults and failures, and how they choose to live their lives and deal with the situations that come their way is mainly the concern of this wonderful, character driven novel. It is set in 1939, just before the outbreak of WWII, and the fear and tension underneath the surface of this novel, of a world about to change, is not so different from today. We might not have an army of servants behind our own green baize doors any more, but take away the period detail and you will find a timeless story that cannot fail to touch you and leave you wanting far more pages to turn that those it contains. Absolutely marvellous.

A wonderful find
The people who live in The Priory are real and the novel is finely crafted with various interwoven stories. I don't know why Dorothy Whipple hasn't been discovered by television producers because her stories are so alive with human feeling and real emotion without being overwhelming or overly dramatic. I'll certainly be reading more of her novels.

The Priory and its Inhabitants
'The Priory' is another wonderful, and wonderfully readable book by the excellent Dorothy Whipple. The Priory, a large house inhabited by members of the Marwood Family, becomes the backdrop for the stories of a dysfunctional family. As in all the Dorothy Whipple novels published by Persephone, the characters are real and rounded, but there are some strange characters here. There is a lack of communication between members of the family, and their servants, which makes life so difficult, and money worries are at the heart of many of the problems encountered. I found myself really caring about what happened to each of the characters.

I heartily recommend this book; it's long, but really worth it!