Word: manly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gasp. In Loving, the first Henry Green novel to be published in the U.S. and perhaps the best of his seven, readers will see for themselves just what the "rudimentary" trap of blended yearning, lust, selfishness and self-sacrifice, i.e., love, looks like in the hands of an experienced man with a musical ear, an impressionist painter's eye, and a poet's obsession with life's hidden undercurrents and emotional mysteries...
Ellen never comes to his call, and the rest of the castle staff, all of whom are English except Paddy, the silent peacock-keeper, are mostly too preoccupied to comfort the dying man. For World War II has started and these English men & women are nervous exiles in a neutral but silently hostile land, half relieved, half ashamed when they think of what they are escaping...
...daughter-in-law, Mrs. Jack, and tries to talk about the only two things that interest her-her son and the reliability of the servants. But Mrs. Jack hardly answers; unknown to her mother-in-law, she is a mass of nerves trying to conceal her love for another man...
...with love for-Housemaid Edie, who is herself pining for First Footman Charley Raunce. "I love 'im, I love 'im," she cries to Housemaid Kate (who is obsessed by the mere idea of being in love). "I could open the veins of my right arm for that man." But Footman Charley is momentarily too busy to take Edie seriously. He is hovering outside the dying butler's bedroom, waiting for the brief coma between life and death when he can safely order young Albert to pop in and swipe the old man's private notebooks, priceless...
With a last cry of "Ellen!" the old man dies, and with him, unknown to the castle servants and Mrs. Tennant, dies the groaning old world of aristocratic England. Stuffing the precious notebooks into his striped-pants pocket, Charley Raunce boldly seats himself in the dead man's high chair at the head of the servants' table, determined to carry on a way of life that actually has ceased to exist. He is now "Mr. Raunce," butler-king of the castle; as he surveys the long table-the older servants mourning the dear departed, the housemaids...