Word: bagnold
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...LOVED AND ENVIED (288 pp. Enid Bagnold-Doubleday...
Ever since British Novelist Enid Bagnold warmed the hearts of thousands of readers with her smoothly told little story about an English girl who wanted to become a jockey, her admirers have been waiting for another National Velvet. They got their first disappointment in 1938 when Novelist Bagnold published The Door of Life, a sentimental tale of childbirth. They are not likely to be much encouraged by her latest novel, an ambitious but brittle portrait of international nobility as it slowly succumbs to the ravages of death and taxes in postwar France...
Young (26) Author Timothy Angus Jones is the son of Sir Roderick Jones, onetime chairman of Reuters news agency. His tightly written novel is smooth and credible. But his mother, Enid (National Velvet) Bagnold, could teach him a thing or two about storytelling...
...think of English squires as ruddy, irascible old gents, more or less akin to Kentucky Colonels. So when they read about the squire picking up her sewing, putting on her evening dress and performing other distinctly feminine duties, their surprise tends to make them miss the point of Miss Bagnold's story. The squire, it turns out, is so called because in the absence of her husband she runs the household. Waiting for the birth of her fifth child, she watches over her three sons and her gentle, intuitive daughter, takes no nonsense from anybody: "Nonsense and a trouble...
...healthy son without too much trouble, there is such confusion downstairs -the cook leaves because she cannot stand childbirth, another turns out to be immoral, the butler hates women, his substitute is a drunk and a maid is discharged for theft-that readers are likely to forget that Author Bagnold is picturing the fortitude of English mothers, not the corruption of English domestics...