The Summer Before The War by Helen Simonson

The Summer Before The War by Helen Simonson

Published March 2016 by Random House Publishing Group

Source: checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary:

East Sussex, 1914. It is the end of England’s brief Edwardian summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so beautiful. Hugh Grange, down from his medical studies, is visiting his Aunt Agatha, who lives with her husband in the small, idyllic coastal town of Rye. Agatha’s husband works in the Foreign Office, and she is certain he will ensure that the recent saber rattling over the Balkans won’t come to anything. And Agatha has more immediate concerns; she has just risked her carefully built reputation by pushing for the appointment of a woman to replace the Latin master.

When Beatrice Nash arrives with one trunk and several large crates of books, it is clear she is significantly more freethinking—and attractive—than anyone believes a Latin teacher should be. For her part, mourning the death of her beloved father, who has left her penniless, Beatrice simply wants to be left alone to pursue her teaching and writing.

But just as Beatrice comes alive to the beauty of the Sussex landscape and the colorful characters who populate Rye, the perfect summer is about to end. For despite Agatha’s reassurances, the unimaginable is coming. Soon the limits of progress, and the old ways, will be tested as this small Sussex town and its inhabitants go to war.

My Thoughts:

This was my book club's selection for July, chosen because it was a book about a teacher and because I was a huge fan of Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, a book I found charming but also appreciated for it's look at society and prejudices. Here Simonson is again looking at society and prejudices, although this time the prejudices are almost exclusively aimed at women, but also at refugees, Gypsies, and homosexuals. 

Beatrice is a young woman who, at all of 23 years of age, is already considered a spinster, which is fine with her because she has no intention of marrying. Despite the way society already seems to consider her unmarrigeable, though, it also looks down on her for considering that to be a choice she gets to make. And it's all well and good for her to be a teacher, just not in certain subjects which are the purview of men. Agatha and the other women of the village understand that the only real power they have is in figuring out how to manipulate the men in their lives. A young refugee girl is looked down on for being pregnant, despite the circumstances that put in that place. Two suffragettes are looked down upon by the very people they are trying to help. 

But Rye is going to have to come to grips with the changes in the status of women...and so many other changes in the world around them and war changes their lives forever. 

At 461 pages, this book is maybe 100 pages too long. But what ever would you take out? The descriptions that make the people, the setting, the time period come alive? Absolutely not. Beatrice's relationship with her now deceased father? Can't do that - it says so much about why she is who she is. The exploration of the various ways women were kept down 100 years ago? Nope. The war scenes? They seem essential to get to the end place. Maybe the answer is that each of those areas could have been trimmed up without losing any of what makes this book charming, witty, and interesting. Because as much as it was work to get through the book, it was, for me, also all of those things.