Stanley and Elsie by Nicola Upson #Review @Duckbooks @nicolaupsonbook

 Today's featured book is a work of literary fiction which centres on real people and events during the life of painter, Sir Stanley Spencer.  If you want to find out more about the painter, you can follow this link: Tate.

It’s 1928 and Stanley Spencer arrives in a quiet Hampshire village ready to create the commission of a lifetime. Hired as his housekeeper, Elsie quickly becomes so much more: a muse and a friend for whom he develops a deep, lifelong affection. A joy in the ordinary things bonds them, a simple love of life which is crucial to Spencer’s art but which his wartime experiences and growing celebrity have all but destroyed.

Elsie becomes a vital part of the Spencer family, sharing in the creation of Spencer’s masterpieces and the daily dramas of his life: his marriage to the painter Hilda Carline and the artistic rivalry between husband and wife; the continuing impact of the First World War on all their lives, and the scandal over Spencer’s personal and artistic attitudes toward sex. As the years pass, Elsie does her best to keep the family together even when love, obsession and temptation seem set to tear them apart...

Spencer painted the women in his life with a combination of ruthless honesty and nostalgic idealism, but their voices are tantalisingly absent from history. Stanley and Elsie turns the tables and gives full lives to the women who shaped Stanley Spencer’s life.

My Thoughts

I found that this novel was driven through with the atmosphere of the time and loved the relationship between Stanley and his Hilda and their maid, Elsie. The glimpses you got into Elsie's homelife were illuminating and I loved how she developed as she was put in to the artists' daily lives.  You see her reaction to the art of both Stanley and Elsie, in contrast to some their middle class friends. Elsie is such a strongly imagined character that by the end, you feel you know her.

    The effects of the First World War on Stanley, seen through his paintings resonates. Also striking are the references to real life people and events, such as Virginia Woolf.  The unconventional relationships are seen through Elsie's eyes and you cannot help but contrast them to her own family and friends. Her reaction to the decision which Stanley and Hilda make concerning their elder child puts her firmly on the reader's wavelength and emphasises how on the edge and self-indulgent Hilda and Stanley's behaviour seems. 

    Nicola Upson's writing style is fluent and understated and completely strikes the right tone for the age she is depicting. This is a really classy read.

In short: evocative writing which delves beneath the surface of relationships.

 

About the Author

 

Nicola Upson was born in Suffolk and read English at Downing College, Cambridge. She has worked in theatre and as a freelance journalist, and is a regular arts

contributor to a number of radio networks. Nicola’s debut fiction, An Expert in Murder, was the first in a series of novels to feature the real-life author and playwright Josephine Tey, one of the leading figures of the Golden Age of crime writing. The book has been dramatised by BBC Scotland for BBC Radio 4, and was praised by PD James as marking ‘the arrival of a new and assured talent’. Nine Lessons, Nicola’s most recent novel, was shortlisted for the 2018 CWA Historical Dagger. Nicola lives with her partner in Cambridge and Cornwall.

You can follow Nicola here:  Twitter

Book link: Amazon UK

Thanks to Nicola Upson and Duckworth Books for a copy of the book and a place on the tour. 

                                                                Catch the rest of the tour!