Our August LWD Book Club selection is Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns. I’m really not all that familiar with this British author but from what I’ve been reading about her, I’m intrigued. I’m hopeful I’ve “discovered” a new-to-me favorite.
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Our Spoons Came From Woolworths
by Barbara Comyns
Pretty, unworldly Sophia is twenty-one years old and hastily married to a young painter called Charles. An artist’s model with an eccentric collection of pets, she is ill-equipped to cope with the bohemian London of the 1930s, where poverty, babies (however much loved) and her husband conspire to torment her.
Hoping to add some spice to her life, Sophia takes up with Peregrine, a dismal, ageing critic, and comes to regret her marriage – and her affair. But in this case, virtue is more than its own reward, for repentance brings an abrupt end to the cycle of unsold pictures, unpaid bills and unwashed dishes…
Born and raised in England, Barbara Comyns (1909-1992) was a writer and artist who juggled various creative and entrepreneurial endeavors throughout her colorful life, leaving behind a rich literary legacy.
“I told Helen my story and she went home and cried.” So begins Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. But Barbara Comyns’s beguiling novel is far from tragic, despite the harrowing ordeals its heroine endures.
Sophia is twenty-one and naïve when she marries fellow artist Charles. She seems hardly fonder of her husband than she is of her pet newt; she can’t keep house (everything she cooks tastes of soap); and she mistakes morning sickness for the aftereffects of a bad batch of strawberries. England is in the middle of the Great Depression, and the money Sophia makes from the occasional modeling gig doesn’t make up for her husband’s indifference to paying the rent. Predictably, the marriage falters; not so predictably, Sophia’s artlessness will be the very thing that turns her life around.
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WHAT ARE YOU READING LATELY?
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Other LWD Book Club Selections:
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