An Imaginative Experience
A house-guest of ours advised Irina to read Mary Wesley: she suspected that Irina would love her books. Little did they expect that _I_ would love her works, too. An Imaginative Experience is a love story, and a very fine one, written with mildness and love for the dramatis personae.
The story is quite convoluted and is glued together with coincidences. And near the end of the book, the hero indeed remarks to the heroine that he thinks he would never be able to write a book about their experiences, because they are altogether too coincidental.
The hero is a wonderful man; a man who dares to say 'no' to a woman, and the heroine is equally wonderful. A woman who manages to snatch the good moments from a horrible life. They thoroughly deserve each other, and the way he proposes to her ('I want to wake up on a Sunday morning next to you, and hear the Sunday papers fall on the mat, and then decide not to read them') touches a chord with me.
As do some of the other people. The delightful Patel family, the little girl who gives the hero a small toy — that turns to have a role in the story, Hamish and his mother Calypso. I love them all.
The antagonists are very antagonistic, except perhaps for Rebecca, but she hitches up with a horrible, completely, absolutely disgusting person, so she gets her dues, too. I read this book between six o'clock in the evening and half past two, on a day when I was ill and miserable because I had just had a piece of thoroughly bad news, and it was very good for me. I've re-read it twice since then.
There are a few weak points: sometimes, I had the feeling that I was listening to the author's opinions, instead of dialogue as spoken or thoughts as thought by a character; sometimes I wondered how a girl who ran away from home at 16 and went to live as a charlady could be as well-educated as Julia. But those are quibbles, really.
Good stuff, in short; Mary Wesley is on our to-buy list now.