Fenny [antikvár]

Born of Yorkshire parents in Lancashire in 1897, Lettice Cooper has had a writing career that has confidently spanned more than sixty years. What at once emerges from any retrospect not merely of her novels but of her two detective stories, her biographies of Robert Louis Stevenson and Dickens, and her fourteen books for children, is a consistency of style, of moral outlook and, above all, of quality. The works of her eighth and ninth decades are in no appreciable way different from those of her fourth and fifth. Long before it had become fashionable to say that the Two Nations in Great Britain were not the rich and the poor but the North and the South, Lettice Cooper had used this division as a recurrent theme—contrasting the stolid, reliable, emotionally reticent people among whom she had grown up and worked for a while in the family business (her father was a constructional engineer), with the more demonstrative, flighty and exuberant Londoners among whom she went to make her career as a novelist, reviewer and, briefly, associate editor of Lady Rhondda's Time and Tide. (The implication of the title—4'Time and Tide wait for no man"—was of course far more defiantly controversial in the Thirties than today.) In Fenny Lettice Cooper extended this theme of the division between North and South, no longer applying it to her native Lancashire and her adopted London but to England and Italy. In this, she was following the lead of a number of novelists before her, most notably E. M. Forster. But whereas in Where Angels Fear to Tread Forster constantly juxtaposes the emotional deadness of his "Sawston" with the emotional vivacity of his "Monteriano", Lettice Cooper's Italians differ from his in all too rarely feeling the emotions to which they lay such extravagant claim—at one moment eliciting from Fenny the comment "How boring it is sometimes when there is such a gap between how people feel and how they say they feel!" But if Lettice Cooper cannot be regarded as being any more in love with her Lucrezia or her Erinia—each a selfishly manipulative Italian woman—than her Fenny is, there cannot be any doubt that, like her Fenny, she is in love with Florence in particular and with Italy in general. v