DISCOVERIES

The Perfect Summer

England 1911, Just Before the Storm

Juliet Nicolson

Grove Press: 304 pp., $25

“THIS is a biography of a summer, a particularly lovely English summer, for some the most perfect of the twentieth century.” Motorcars and Poiret gowns, parties and politics, heat and decadence -- Juliet Nicolson, granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, daughter of Nigel Nicolson, parses the particular grammar of the heady summer of 1911. The weather, by all accounts, was miraculous, warm and sunny in May but so hot by July that the London Times ran a regular column titled “Deaths From Heat.” (In a biblical twist, hailstones rained down on London on July 27.) Summer began with the debutante parties of Lady Diana Manners and the author’s grandmother and ended with a dockworkers’ strike that strengthened the transport unions and affected even the age-old master-servant relationship. It was a summer of exquisite beauty; women like Gladys Ripon, Ida Sitwell, Lady Cunard, Elinor Glyn and her sister Lady Duff Gordon were in their prime. The arts were also in full flower -- the Ballets Russes, with Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina, was in London. The preceding fall, Roger Fry had organized an exhibit of new painters: Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh. The Bloomsbury writers (Rupert Brooke, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, to name just a few) and painters (Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant) were young and just beginning their fruitful careers. Edward VII had died the previous year, and England was peeking out from under the Victorian hem. Nicolson quotes H.G. Wells: “Queen Victoria had, ‘like a great paperweight sat on men’s minds and when she was removed their ideas began to blow about all over the place haphazardly.’ ” Nicolson captures it all, down to the frantic silliness and boredom of the upper classes; she has woven the details of those last days before the Great War into an unforgettable literary history.

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Mrs. Miniver

A Novel

Jan Struther

Harvest Books: 162 pp., $14 paper

“MRS. MINIVER” began as a fictional series in the London Times in 1937. “Jan Struther” was the pseudonym of Joyce Maxtone Graham, a poet, essayist and mother of three; the series was based partly on her life. The book version was published by Chatto & Windus in 1939; the MGM movie, starring Greer Garson, appeared in 1942. “Mrs. Miniver” was an instant hit, perhaps because of the sweet, safe picture of London domesticity and Mrs. Miniver’s zest for life. When the family (parents and three children) gathers, the rooms in the Miniver home are “laced with an invisible network of affectionate understanding.” The first day of spring is “a Wedgwood day, with white clouds delicately modelled in relief against a sky of pale pure blue.” Or maybe its popularity owed something to the imminence of war, which hovered not just at the edge of that life but, mid-novel, appears smack at the center, when the family is forced to stand in line at the Town Hall for gas masks. Mrs. Miniver is pleased that, unlike the last wartime generation, parents in her own generation try to explain the war to their children. She recalls Walter de la Mare’s “Fare Well”: “Look thy last on all things lovely, / Every hour.... “ Yet normality prevails: shooting parties, invitations on “lavishly stout cream-laid,” hop-picking in August, New Year’s Eve, trips to the dentist. When they are finally exiled to the country, Mrs. Miniver thinks, “[I]t oughtn’t to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise.” The clear thinking in the novel, the elegant noticing of weather and daily details, the awareness of self in relation to the world and the humble practicality (though Mrs. Miniver was by no means poor) are enviable qualities before the onslaught of endless choices and dissatisfactions of modern life.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com