Audiobook of the Week
Everard Wemyss spots Lucy Entwistle, looking lost, gazing over the gate of her Cornish cottage. Her father had died just that day. Everard has problems too; he is desperately lonely, shunned by society after his wife died having fallen from an upper window of their home. Naive and adoring, Lucy is swept into marriage by him, only to find herself expected to live in the Surrey house where Everard’s first wife died, surrounded by memorials to their marriage. ‘Wuthering Heights written by Jane Austen,’ was the essayist John Middleton Murry’s description of this 1921 novel; ‘witty and well-constructed, a sort of sparkling Euclid,’ wrote the novelist Rebecca West.
Vera is utterly different from Elizabeth von Arnim’s gently amusing novels The Enchanted April and The Caravaners (though that too featured a bombastic, narcissistic husband); it is blackly comic, keeping the listener agog with anticipation as Lucy begins to understand her predecessor’s desperation and her aunt tries desperately to intervene. Wemyss was an instantly recognisable caricature of Von Arnim’s second husband Frank Russell, a peer and older brother of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. The ensuing media scandal when he threatened to sue her for libel distracted from Vera’s literary merits.
Lucy Scott has an agreeably low, immensely expressive voice. Avoiding the overemphatic narration that mars so many audiobooks, she skilfully brings out to the full the novel’s unusual combination of humour and tragedy.