Penelope's hat - Hardcover

Frame, Ronald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340493976 ISBN 13: 9780340493977

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1989

Synopsis

"Penelope's Hat" is a portrait of a woman's life from childhood to old age. It details her family, her relationships and her creativity. Ronald Frame's first novel won the Betty Trask Award, and he subsequently published "Sandmouth People". He also writes for film and television.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

A woman novelist--never certain who she and others are, both a product and an observer of the English middle class notorious for preferring appearances to the truth--kindles the imagination in Frame's haunting new novel (A Woman of Judah, 1989; Sandmouth, 1987; Winter Journey, 1986). Here, Frame covers the 1920's through the 80's. Styles and periods he is too young to have witnessed--including 1920's Borneo, a tennis club in 1930's Cornwall and wartime London--he captures with uncanny skill. His heroine is also a convincing period piece, with her taste for hats that both proclaim and conceal and with her need for a certain type of man to take her emotional life in charge. She wavers between being flesh and blood and an amalgam of the sensitive women who graced British drawing-room novels between the wars. Likewise, Frame's latest wavers between being an enormously clever parlor trick and literature of a more authentic kind. The author has some postmodern cards up his sleeve with his heroine writing books that obliquely refer to the life the reader has just read about, interviews by journalists with the heroine about why she writes and what she is trying to say, and mysterious, often melodramatic holes purposely left in the story to be filled in later or not at all. For Anglophiles, the book is a feast of the poetry of well-heeled English life--Harrod's, the Savoy, the Berkeley, holidays in France--and the very English poetry of good manners papering over emptiness, hatred and despair. Beautifully written, almost musical story of a woman's journey from childhood to old age trying to find clarity in a muffled world that makes its point by what it does not say. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Penelope Milne, a "mediumly famous" English novelist, shamelessly makes her life public in her fiction but remains privately haunted by betrayals, family skeletons and messy affairs. Her early childhood in Borneo and move to London, her father's mysterious death, a stint driving an ambulance during WW II and her intense relationship with a controlling mother mold her personality. A too-perfect marriage to banker Guy Gerrault ends with his feigned death and Penelope's belated discovery that he was an impostor. Romantic liaisons with her agent, with a BBC radio producer, with a married publisher and with a reserved Cambridge scholar whose secret life she is totally unaware of provide grist for her literary mill. She never achieves inner equilibrium, however, and after she dies in Australia, her editor pores over Penelope's Hat , her final novel, testament to her loves, losses and self-delusions. The many different hats Penelope wears and discards like so many used selves are the leitmotif of Frame's beautifully nuanced, Jamesian performance. The Glasgow-based writer unravels the weft and warp of experience in intoxicating prose and witty dialogue.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0340493976
• ISBN 13: 9780340493977
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1