A book set in a bookstore for new and rare books in 1950 sounded good even before I opened it and saw a list of the books’ characters with a brief description. That amped up my anticipation as it took me back to classics I read in my youth with their lists of people I would be meeting in the pages before the story started. Bloomsbury Girls by Natalie Jenner, just out from St. Martin’s Press, lived up to my expectations.
Each chapter begins with one of the general manager’s fifty-one unbreakable rules that foreshadows the content of the chapter. Bloomsbury Books bookstore with a masculine guiding force in each of its departments seems about to miss out on the creativity and intelligence of the women who are kept in subservient roles. There is Grace Perkins, secretary to the general manager, with a husband who thinks she should be taking care of things at home. Staff member Vivien Lowry, has lost her fiancé to the war, and sees injustices. Grace and Vivien are best friends who tell each other everything, well, almost everything. Evie Stone, the new girl, graduated from Cambridge, but was passed over for an academic position in favor of a less-qualified male. Could the rare book that was Evie’s motivation in applying for this job hold an answer to the ambitions of the three women in a masculine world?
All three women have dreams and goals as they live among the literary figures who show up at the store - Daphne Du Maurier, Ellen Doubleday, Sonia Blair (widow of George Orwell), Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, and others. Then there is Evie’s good friend, the movie star Mimi Harrison. The setting of the bookstore and the interaction of the people who frequent it drive the plot.
This is a book for anyone who likes an English novel that does nothing more than take one away for an afternoon to a fascinating time and place.