The Flame of the Forest

This pseudo-autobiographical novel, published in 1955, is largely set in Kolkata. The narrator has left university and is looking for work; among his jobs is contributing to an American-style weekly called Life in Technikolor. At the same time, he's pursuing an interest in Myna, a dancing girl termed ‘the Flame of the Forest’. He is torn between urban modernity with international culture and the rural traditional culture. This traditional India is impersonated by Myna; she attracts him away from Western intellect and towards mystery and myth.

The author, Sudhindra N. Ghose (born 30 July 1899), grew up in West Bengal. After studying at the University of Calcutta, he moved to Europe to study for a doctorate at the University of Strasbourg. He subsequently was a research scholar in universities in England, France, Germany and Switzerland. Alongside his studies, he served as a foreign correspondent for The Hindu newspaper from 1924. In 1931, he joined the information secretariat of the League of Nations. He fled to England with his Jewish partner in 1940 and lived there until 1957. Though he spent his entire writing career outside of India, all of his books were set in his home country. He is best remembered for his tetralogy of autobiographical fiction comprising And Gazelles Leaping (1949), Cradle of the Clouds (1951), The Vermilion Boat (1953) and The Flame of the Forest (1955). R.K. Narayan regarded the quartet as an allegorical work; a “20th-century Pilgrim's Progress”.

Myna, one of the central character's of the novel, believes that “no one dies... save on his own choice and in his own time”. “Only when a man supplicates for death then alone does he receive the visitation of Death’s messenger. And he must call out for his own dissolution not once, nor twice, but three times.“ In her mind, “death... comes to him as a solace, a benediction to him and his relations.” This prompted me to think of wounded soldiers on the battlefield who plead for death.

Children at the Shop

This novel, published in 1967, is set in Kent. Although presented as an autobiography, it is for the most part a fictional memoir. The 'shop' referred to in in the title is the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. Although the author did live near Woolwich for some of her childhood, her depiction of a childhood in this military setting was informed more by her imagination than by experience. The narrator befriends a cadet called Myers, son of a doctor in Salisbury, and she gives an account of his experiences in the First World War: "He survived the perils of the First World War, won the D.S.O. and bar, married a daughter of a rich industrialist, eventually became a brigadier-general, and retired to the south of France." With the exception of that snippet, the account ends in August 1914 with mobilisation interrupting a family seaside vacation.

The author, Ruby Ferguson (née Ashby, born 28 July 1899) was the daughter of a Methodist minister. She grew up in Yorkshire and was educated in Bradford. Her first cousin, Spencer Ashby, of the Middlesex Regiment, was killed in action on 2 July 1916. She studied at Oxford, where she did a degree in English. She started work as a secretary in Manchester but quickly began writing as a sideline. Her first novel was published in 1926; it and most of her early output were in the crime genre. Her ninth book, the 1937 romantic novel, Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary, was her most successful novel for adults. She is best known for her Jill Crewe books, a series of nine pony-riding books primarily written for her step-granddaughters, published between 1949 and 1962.

One of the novel's minor characters is Astrid, a Danish student who lives with them in an arrangement similar to an au pair. She agrees to marry a German and the narrator is horrified:
“Golly, Astrid. Do you have to go and marry a German?”
“That I cannot help. I meet him, we loff, it is fate. He is so nize.”
“When you get married, will you have to go and live in Germany?”
“In Bremen, yes.”
The narrator later mentions that Astrid wrote from Bremen to describe her new home —
“That was in the summer of 1914 and the last we ever heard of Astrid.”

The Quest

This novel, published in 1950, is set in the midsummer of 1945. It describes the journey of seven people leaving behind the devastated city of Berlin. They set off as individuals or in pairs but come together on the same eastward road outside the city and have a common destination (a village convent). The novel draws heavily from Greek mythology (its original title was Märkische Argonautenfahrt). Their journey is towards the village of Anastasiendorf, which is effectively a New Jerusalem. The object of their quest is wisdom; a way of understanding the meaning of life when coming from such devastation.

The author, Elisabeth Langgässer (born 23 February 1899) grew up in the Rheinhessen region of west-central Germany. She was educated in Darmstadt and qualified as a primary school teacher. Her first book, a poetry collection, was published in 1924. Having taught in the region for almost ten years, she moved to Berlin in 1929. She was active as a freelance writer of poetry and drama. She was awarded the main literature prize for German women in 1932. Her first novel was published in 1936. Being half-Jewish, she had to do forced labour for much of the Second World War. Her daughter, Cordelia, considered a full Jew, survived Auschwitz and was liberated to Sweden. In 1946, her major novel, The Indelible Seal, was published after nine years of writing. Several short story collections followed. Her final novel (this one) was published in 1950, soon after she had died of multiple sclerosis. She was posthumously awarded the Georg Büchner Prize, one of the two foremost literary prizes for German literature.

The depiction of the war-ravaged country is almost apocalyptic:
“The metropolis did not end, it shredded at the periphery. It became frayed like a flag, flapping and snapping in the wind, which ought long ago to have been taken down from its pole because the cause was lost which it had served... Remains of the tank blockades were still standing at the openings of the streets, mocking themselves. Army trucks — looking as though they had been mashed by the fist of some giant who had then shoved them up the embankment onto a heap of munitions — reared their horrible, charred posteriors. Still others, like cadavers disembowelled by jackals and vultures, had been so despoiled of their original substance by the fire of battle and the beaklike blows of the artillery that their skeletons, when one bumped against them, could bring forth only a rattle. Amid the fresh deposit of miserable old rubbish scarcely a speck of earth worthy of the name  was anywhere discernible.”

Lament for Agnes

This semi-autobiographical novel, published in 1951, is largely set in Antwerp. The narrator and central character is an alter ego of the author: whereas many of the events described in the novel occurred in the author's life, there are also many deviations from autobiography. The narrator is the second child of his parents, his sister Agnes having died before he was born. When as an adolescent he meets at the cinema a young woman called Agnes and experiences love at first sight, he merged the two Agneses in his mind: “She was Agnes. She was my dead sister. I do not know how I worked out this transference of the dead child into the living girl within myself. Just because of the name?”

The author, Marnix Gijsen (né Jan-Albert Goris, born 20 October 1899) grew up in Antwerp. He studied at the local Jesuit school but was effectively expelled in 1917 due to his Flemish nationalist activities. He subsequently studied at universities in Leuven, Freiburg, Paris and London. He worked in the civil service, at first in his home city and then for the Belgian state in Brussels. His first publications were expressionist poems. From 1939 to 1954, he served in the Belgian diplomatic service in New York. The majority of his published writings are works of non-fiction. His first novel was published in 1947. It was followed by several novels set in America. In 1974 he was awarded the Prijs der Nederlandse Lettren, the most prestigious accolade in Dutch literature.

The first five chapters of the novel are set during the First World War. Chapter 6 opens with an account of the aftermath:
“The war had ended without having affected Agnes’s family or mine seriously. We stood together on the market square when the foreign flag came down from the tower and our national colours were run up. Old people, who had waited six years for their sons who were stationed away at the war, burst into tears... Peace to us simply meant greater freedom of movement.”

Stuart Little

This children's novel, published in 1945, is set in New York City. The central character is the son of ordinary human parents but has the appearance and stature of a mouse. He proves to be “a great help to his parents, and to his older brother George, because of his small size and because he could do things that a mouse can do and was agreeable about doing them”. His father thinks it important that Stuart should in his childhood be shielded from references to violence against mice, insisting that his wife tear from the nursery songbook the page about blind mice. He felt strongly that he didn't want Stuart to “grow up fearing that a farmer’s wife was going to cut off his tail with a carving knife”.

The author, E.B. White (born 11 July 1899) grew up in New York City. He studied at Cornell University and served as editor of the student newspaper. In October 1918, he joined the university's training corps in preparation for service overseas but the armistice meant he was quickly discharged before seeing any action. After university, he started work as a journalist. When The New Yorker was founded in 1925, he submitted articles and was later taken on by the magazine as a staff writer. He married the magazine's literary editor, Katharine Angell (née Sergeant), in 1929. In the same year, his first collection of poems was published. Although he went on to write a wide variety of books, he is best remembered for his three novels for children, one of which, Charlotte's Web, was a Newbury Medal finalist. In 1970, he won the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, a lifetime-achievement award for contribution to children's literature.

The adventures of the plucky central character include a naval contest on a pond in Central Park. Dressed in a sailor suit, he volunteers to go ‘to sea’, telling the owner of a model boat “I'm looking for a berth in a good ship and I thought perhaps you might sign me on. I'm strong and I'm quick”. The owner asks him to race against another boat and Stuart details how he intends to defeat the other boat:
“I'll catch the sloop broad on and rake her with fire from my forward gun”. The owner argues that he wants it to be “a boat race, not a naval engagement”. Stuart, therefore, promises to “sail [the boat] straight and true”.

Against a Darkening Sky

This novel, published in 1942, is set in a semi-rural community south of San Francisco in the 1930s. The central character, Mary Perrault, is a Scottish immigrant married to a Swiss gardener. The focus of the novel is on her parenthood and her role as friend and leader in the local community. It's an account of survival in the Great Depression and is shaped by the author's own experience and that of her friends living in the same context.

The author, Janet Lewis (born 17 August 1899), the daughter of a professor of English literature, grew up in Chicago. Her brother, Herbert, served in the army during the First World War. Her first appearances in print were contributions to a high-school literary magazine alongside those of Ernest Hemingway. She studied at the University of Chicago and as a student was an active member of the city's poetry club. Chiefly a poet, her first collection of poems was published in 1922. She had married a fellow poet, Yvor Winters, in 1926 and they moved to California when he was appointed to a position at Stanford. The two ran a literary magazine, which they had founded, from 1929 to 1931. Her first novel appeared in 1932 and she went on to write a further four novels, the most acclaimed of which is the historical novel The Wife of Martin Guerre, published in 1941.

When a friend of the family is killed, the Perraults, even though they have endured hardship, feel unaccustomed to this kind of event:
“Tragedy such as this was unreal to the Perraults, and doubly unreal since it was in the paper. The newsprint gave it, for them, the quality of fiction — something read of, not experienced. They were not able to believe that something so dreaded had actually happened to someone whom they knew. So they watched the papers through the ensuing days...”

All Alone

This children's novel, published in 1953, is set in a small mountain community in the French region of Savoie. The central character, Marcel Mabout, as a ten-year-old boy is sent from the village to the highland pasture to stay with his family's three cattle during the months of summer. The tradition in the village is each man for himself and his father warns him against having anything to do with the other boys looking after cattle in nearby mountain pastures. In his own gently courageous way he brings about a socialist revolution for the village.

The author, Claire Bishop (née Huchet, born 30 December 1898), was born in Geneva. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris but dropped out of university to pursue hr interest in storytelling. In 1924, she opened France’s first library for children. After she married Frank Bishop, an American pianist, she moved to New York City. There she oversaw the children’s reading room of the city’s public library. Her first book for children was published in 1938 and more than 20 further books were published. Two of her books were shortlisted for the Newbery Medal: Pancake-Paris (1948) and this book.

Marcel, the young hero of the story, tells his fellow herdboy Pierre that he wants to change the behaviour of the people of the village:
“When I'm a man, I'll say to everybody in Monestier, ‘Let's do everything all together!’  He opened his arms wide in a large gesture.”
His actions convince the people:
“We began to see that there is a better way of life than each man for himself and the state for all. We began to see that if we would get together of our own accord, life might be better in Monestier.”