As you’ll know by now, the lovely bloggers Kaggsysbookishramblings and Stuck-in-a-book run “year weeks” two times a year, and this week, 10-16 April we’re reading books published in 1940. I’m working my way through the books Ali and Emma gave me for my birthday (from my very tightly controlled wishlists made up mainly of books published in 1940!) and have so far read and reviewed D. E. Stevenson’s wartime spy/family novel, “The English Air” and Susan Scarlett’s escapist (but realist vision of children) “Ten Way Street”. All three of these have the distinction of being published by the lovely Dean Street Press.

Margery Sharp – “The Stone of Chastity”

(21 January 2023, from Ali)

Everything was propitious. The University term had just ended, the Long Vacation stretched gloriously ahead. The idea of actual field-work, after years spent on texts, was positively intoxicating. The freshness of the evidence (only a hundred and thirty years old) filled him with hope. He did not quite imagine – delightful dream – that the ceremony of the Stone was still alive, that in the year 1938 suspected trollops, stockinged by Woolworth, were set up to prove their virtue on a relic of Norse legend; but he did expect hearsay evidence. If the Blodgett (or Blodger) line still existed, the girl’s great-grandchild might be yet alive … (p. 5)

Professor Pounce, his sister-in-law, her son Nicholas and a seemingly random voluptuous assistant, Miss Carmen Smith, all descend upon the manor house of a muddy and charmless village in 1938, lured there by the promise of an old folk tale about a stone which throws the unchaste into the river when they step on it. Professor Pounce got busy on a weekend house party, poking around in the attics and finding a manuscript of a journal dated 1803 (hence the dating above) which mentioned this stone, and did not hesitate in stealing it for his research and putative monograph.

Culture clashes galore ensue, between the incomers and the villagers, but also splitting the village along a fault line that’s to do – of course it is – with who runs the WI/village, the vicar’s wife, the wife of the main farmer or the wife of the publican. Nicholas falls in love at least three times during the course of the book, but he needs some let up from having to cycle around giving out questionnaires and asking about people’s grandmothers’ morals; he also encounters, allowing Sharp to satirise, a very “Bloomsberry” young woman who’s taken (of course she has) an isolated cottage on the outskirts of the village. Will the Professor’s questionnaires be filled in or will the Scouts round them up? Will anyone turn up to have their chastity tested, and just why IS Miss Smith there?

A charming and hilarious, unputdownable novel which would have been another lovely escapist read in 1940!

Although they’re sadly not now republishing any more new books, all of Dean Street Press’s books are very much available while they still have the copyrights – so you can buy this book here – maybe pick up a copy to read and discuss in Dean Street December, which I will be running again this year. And Scott at Furrowed Middlebrow reviewed the book here in 2020, just before it was republished. This was my third read for #1940Club, which I think is the best I’ve ever done for any of these Weeks!