Nest Of Magpies - Softcover

Marshall, Sybil

3.95

77 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140231323 ISBN 13: 9780140231328

Publisher: Penguin UK, 1994

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Written by the author of "Sharp Through the Hawthorn", this tale centres round two women in Old Swithinford: Fran, who is restoring her grandfather's gracious old house, and newcomer Johanna, whose feminine appeal dazzles every man.

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About the Author:

Sybil Marshall (1912 - 2005) was a British writer, teacher and educationalist. Working first as a teacher and then as a university lecturer, she later became an author and her books include Fenland Chronicle and the trilogy of novels A Nest of Magpies, Sharp Through the Hawthorn and Strip The Willow.

From Publishers Weekly:

Marshall's entertaining first novel, set in the 1960s in the secluded town of Old Swithinford, England, is a solid historical romance. While most of the locals are obsessed with adhering to centuries' worth of convention, Fran Catherwood, a 40-ish widow who's moved back to Old Swithinford after working as a TV scriptwriter in America, manages to shed her "self-spun cocoon of Victorian morality," though only after considerable soul-searching. Fran, always outwardly proper, decent and forgiving, privately struggles with repressed anger toward her histrionic, seductive friend, Johanna; with repressed desire for her married step-cousin William, who shares her feelings and her home; and with the fear of malicious gossip from small-minded townsfolk about her untraditional, if still innocent, living arrangement with him. Marshall is largely effective in conveying the burden Fran shoulders, caught between an old world resistant to change, but which she loves nonetheless, and a new world of progress that may bring women's liberation but is epitomized by the entrepreneurs who want to turn an old manor house into a hotel. Curiously, the energy Fran directs toward Johanna can sometimes seem more erotic than that directed toward William, who, while a gentlemanly British academic, has a disturbing side ("You didn't know how near you came to being raped, that night," he teases Fran). Even so, the author limns a sympathetic protagonist whose self-analysis is perceptive and complex.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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