Before the war /
Fay Weldon.
- 298 pages ; 22 cm.
- Spoils of war ; 1. .
- Weldon, Fay. Spoils of war. .
Consider Vivien in November 1922. She is twenty-four, and a spinster. She wears fashionably droopy clothes, but she is plain and - almost worse in those times - intelligent. At nearly six foot tall, she is known unkindly by her family as 'the giantess'. Fortunately, Vivien is rich, so she can travel to London and bribe a charismatic gentleman publisher to marry her. What he does not know is that Vivien is pregnant with another's child, and will die in childbirth in just a few months... Fay Weldon, with one eye on the present and one on the past, offers Vivien's fate to the reader, along with that of London between the wars. This is a city fizzing with change, full of flat-chested flappers, shell-shocked soldiers and aristocrats clinging onto the past. Inventive, warm, playful and full of Weldon's trademark ironic edge, this is a spellbinding historical novel from one of the best novelists of our time.
9781784082062 9781784082079 (paperback)
Aristocracy--Great Britain--Fiction. Interpersonal relations--Fiction. Young women--Fiction. Nineteen twenties--Fiction. Single women--Fiction. Companionate marriage--Fiction. Man-woman relationships--Fiction. Aristocracy (Social class)--England--Fiction.