Constance Beresford-Howe
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947
240 pages
A second novel, Of This Day's Journey followed the author's debut by a little over a year, during which she earned her MA and had begun work on a PhD. Beresford-Howe was all of twenty-four years old when it was published.
Camilla "Cam" Brant, the novel's protagonist, is also all of twenty-four. The earliest pages take place as she's preparing to leave Blake University, somewhere in New England, for her Montreal home. Cam had been hired a year earlier as a seasonal lecturer in English and has been living with the wonderfully-named Olive Pymson, spinster secretary to Andrew Cameron, Blake's tall, lanky president.
Of This Day's Journey is divided into three parts – Morning, Afternoon, Evening – each featuring a different narrator; plain Miss Pymson, the most endearing and attractive, is the first. It was quite unlike her to open up her home to Cam, but she'd been taken by a sudden urge to shake up her life. The two hit it off from their first meeting, an unlikely duo with a shared taste for dry humour.
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| The Gazette, 10 May 1947 |
The only possible happy ending to such a scenario would have Marny succumb to her infirmity, thus freeing Andrew to be with Cam. But Beresford-Howe, all of twenty-four, was already too good a writer for such contrivance. Of This Day's Journey is far superior to her debut, The Unreasoned Heart (1946).
Beresford-Howe's third novel, The Invisible Gate, was published the month she turned twenty-seven. She'd almost completed her PhD by that point. Given her trajectory, I'm betting it's the best of the three.
Object and Access: A hardcover bound in grey boards with uncredited dust jacket. I purchased my copy, the American first edition, five years ago from a Rochester, New York bookseller. Price: US$9.94 (w/ US$18.00 shipping).
A British edition was published in 1955 by Hammond & Hammond (above). There has never been a Canadian edition.
As of this writing, two copies are listed for sale online, the cheaper being a jacketless copy of the Hammond & Hammond being sold at £17.50. The other is an inscribed edition of the Dodd, Mead edition:
Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Poor. 1st Edition. HARDCOVER W/dj; NF/poor, 240pp. SIGNED.inscribed by author ffep. Newspaper sad [sic] for this title laid in. First edition. Please email w/questions or to request picture(s); refer to our book inventory number.Tempting, but at US$49.00, with a further US$53.00 for shipping, I'm taking a pass.
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Until I read this, I had no idea (though I should have) that Constance Beresford-Howe had written anything before The Book of Eve.
ReplyDeleteSusan, I was introduced to Constance Beresford-Howe's work in CEGEP - not in any course, rather though Carol, my first serious girlfriend. She pushed The Book of Eve into my hands, along with The Women's Room by Marilyn French, and Nancy Friday's My Mother/My Self. My own teenage self liked them all.
DeleteLooking back, I find it odd that neither of us thought to explore further. Beresford-Howe had by then followed The Book of Eve with two novels: A Population of One and The Marriage Bed.
Beresford-Howe's bibliography is intriguing: four novels published between 1946 and 1955, followed by an eighteen-year silence. After her 1973 return with The Book of Eve, the author published a book every three or four years until she hit her seventies.
In my my twenties, shortly after the publication of A Serious Widow, her final novel, I met Constance Beresford-Howe at the opening of a new Toronto bookstore. This would've been around the time of her seventieth birthday. I thought of her as a nice old lady.
Must say, seventy doesn't seem at all old today.