Miss Buncle's Book

DE Stevenson

In these days of heartache and doom-scrollling, I didn’t realize how hungry I was for delight until, opening Miss Buncle’s Book, I entered Silverstream, an English village, circa the early 1930s, where the deliciously high and mighty Mrs. Featherstone Hogg has her knickers in a twist over Disturber of the Peace, a recently released novel chronicling life in the fictional village of Copperfield whose inhabitants are disturbingly familiar to her.

Who is this John Smith, the author?

Mrs. Featherstone Hogg is determined to find out and set the gallant Colonel Weatherhead (AKA Major Waterfoot in the novel) upon him. But, alas, Colonel Weatherhead has become smitten with his neighbor Dorothea Bold (exactly as Colonel Waterfoot became smitten with his neighbor Miss Mildmay in the novel) and cannot be shaken from his blissful state.

John Smith is, in fact, Barbara Buncle, a spinster, who turned to authorship in desperation as dwindling dividends began to jeopardize her already meagre finances.

“I thought of lots of other things first,” she tells Mr. Abbott, her publisher. “—keeping hens for one thing. But I don’t care for hens much. I don’t like touching them, they are such fluttery things, aren’t they?”

OMG, I thought. Thank you.

And left the real world behind.

It’s one intrigue after another in Silverstream as Mrs. Featherstone Hogg tries to get to the bottom of things. Needless to say, there’s a vicar involved. More spinsters, a shameless gold digger, a grouchy academic.

Meanwhile, Miss Buncle, having received a hundred-pound payment from her publisher, takes the train to London and buys a new hat!

How I’d love to be able to write a novel like Miss Buncle’s Book, hilarious and at the same time so right on in skewering the foibles of, well, everyone. How lovely to be able to make readers laugh out loud, as I did, and forget their troubles for a while.

Miss Buncle’s Book was a gift from my friend, E, who told me that one day, lost in London, she came upon Persephone Books on a narrow street near the British Museum, wandered in, and found it there. The store has since moved to Bath, but its mission to reprint “neglected fiction and nonfiction, mostly by women writers and mostly dating from the mid-twentieth century” remains.

I love the book itself, so gray and unassuming--

Until you open it and—oh!

Miss Buncle’s Book was published in 1934. Its author, “D.E. Stevenson had an enormously successful writing career: between 1923 and 1970, four million copies of her books were sold in Britain and three million in the States.”

Thanks, Persephone, for keeping it alive just for me.