📚 🚶Introducing our October book

Discover more about Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell

Dear walking book clubbers,

Mrs Bridge! Wow! If I were cleverer I would write this newsletter in biting vignettes with apt headers like Evan S. Connell does in this quietly devastating novel. No spoiler but the ending is the the most perfect image - and goes up there in my top five endings (along with Joyce’s “The Dead” and perhaps Journey by Moonlight and … well I’ll give it some thought).

Thanks so much to Mari for pointing out my mistake in all the blurbs saying this book is about a 1950s housewife. Of course the novel was written in the 1950s but set in the 1930s (and into the 1940s). One of the key aspects of its brilliance is having the Second World War very much in the background. My apologies for the error.

Please read on to find:

• Details of our October events

• Discussion points to get you thinking

• Links to read and listen on

• News of November - tickets are now on sale.

Oh and thank you so much for all the lovely emails about my new On My Reading Radar monthly newsletter. So glad you enjoyed it, and thanks so much to those who have emailed in their own recommendations, very gratefully received. Do keep em coming! Here is last week’s post in case you missed it:

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Our October Mrs Bridge events

Please note that for the benefit of your fellow walkers, you need to have read the book before coming along to a walking book club. If you’ve not read the book, you are very welcome to join the zoom instead.

Emily’s Regent’s Park Walking Book Club: Friday 11th October, 12-1.45pm, setting off from Daunt Books, 84 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW, £8-15

Emily’s Hampstead Heath Walking Book Club: Sunday 13th October, 11.30-1pm, setting off from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, £8-15

Emily’s Zoom Book Club: Monday 14th October, 8-9pm, £1-15

Buy Mrs Bridge from Daunt Books HERE and receive 10% off using the code WBC at checkout, or just tell them you’re in Emily’s Walking Book Club if you’re buying it in the shop.

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Introduction & Discussion Points

Mrs Bridge is a housewife and mother in 1930s Kansas City, raising her children and making a home for her husband. She follows all the rules: putting out special hand towels for guests (although she hopes they won’t use them, and is furious when her son does), judges people by “their shoes and their manners at the table”, and has never met a socialist. In a series of beautifully drawn, subtly ironic and yet devastating vignettes, Connell catches the contradictions, narrowness and fear that can shadow a life of comfort.

There’s so much to discuss in this slender novel. Here are a few ideas to get you thinking:

Of its time … and more thoughts on time

I think the reason that I got so muddled in my head on dates with this book is that the particular phenomenon it describes of a housewife in a gilded cage feels very much a 1950s thing. I think of The Feminine Mystique (inspired by research from 1957) and Revolutionary Road, set in the 1950s. This book was written in the late 1950s but it’s intriguing that Connell set it twenty years’ earlier. Was he suggesting that the contemporary phenomenon was more deep-rooted? So much has changed today, o f course, but are there any elements of the book that still resonate? Is there something timeless in the feeling of existential angst, crystallised for instance in the paraphrase of the passage in Conrad: “some people go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain” (p.160)? And time in the book does such weird things - both whizzing past as the children grow up in a flash, and also remaining absolutely stagnant with nothing to do to fill it - Joshua Ferris talks about this very well in his Open Book interview (link below). So much to think about with time in this book!

The War

The thing that really anchors this book in a particular time is The Second World War. I love the way that Connell has shifted the focus of the book so much to the claustrophobia of suburban life that the major event of the War basically translates to an inconveniently early end to a holiday. Even the potentially horrific moment when Mrs Bridge bumps into a friend of her children, who has lost his arm in the War, gets anaesthetised into small talk, ending with her saying: “You’re looking quite well.” !!! This will make an interesting companion and comparison to our next book, The Past is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg which shows the Second World War having a great deal more impact on domestic life.

Irony and connection

The book is written as a series of vignettes - keenly observed minutiae of domestic life. The narrator maintains a certain distance from Mrs Bridge, describing her and her goings on with a certain detachment that invites judgement. There is a gap between what the narrator describes Mrs Bridge doing and his implied judgement that is where the irony lies. I think. It’s quite hard to puzzle it all out on a sentence by sentence level, but somehow Connell creates this wonderfully restrained tone of irony, of gentle teasing in the bigger picture of despair. At times it can be very very funny. It makes me wonder, though, how do we feel about the character Mrs Bridge? Do we empathise with her, or do we share the narrator’s distance from her? Does the author create a bridge between his reader and character, or does he - ironically - isolate her from us?

Looking forward to sharing more thoughts about the book at our meet ups!

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Discover more about Evan S Connell

Read an obituary of the writer, who died in 2013, HERE.

I really enjoyed this piece in the Spectator by Oliver Soden about Evan S. Connell HERE, and there is also the rave Guardian piece by Tom Cox HERE.

Listen to Evan S Connell talk (briefly) about the book, along with some great input from Joshua Ferris and Mariella Frostrop on Radio 4’s Open Book, HERE.

Ten years’ after this book, Evan S Connell wrote Mr Bridge as a companion. Bonus points if you read that one too! There is also a 1990 Merchant Ivory film of the two books, Mr and Mrs Bridge. I can’t see a place to stream it in the UK, but you can find out more about it HERE and watch the trailer HERE.

Finally, there is rather an endearing little video HERE from a bookseller at Ann Patchett’s indie bookstore Parnassus Books about why she loves the book, and also the book it went on to inspire.

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November ***tickets now on sale ***

The Past is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg

In 1934, a young English woman, Christabel Burton, married a German man, Peter Bielenberg, and adopted German citizenship, thinking that Hitler was a bad joke: ”I can assure you,” said Peter, “the Germans won’t be so stupid as to fall for that clown.” What follows is a compelling portrait of daily life in Nazi Germany for an Englishwoman who despised Hitler, while knowing that dissent meant death. She raises children, shelters from devastating Allied bombings, and pleads with the Gestapo to release her husband after he’s caught in a plot to bring down Hitler. This is a fascinating and unique perspective on life in Nazi Germany, which also raises important questions about what goes unsaid.

Intrigued? Read THIS by Amanda Theunissen in the wonderful Slightly Foxed.

In Regent’s Park: Friday 15th November, 11-12.45pm, setting off from Daunt Books, 84 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW, £8-15 **Please note the earlier time this month!!**

On Hampstead Heath: Sunday 17th November, 11.30-1pm, setting off from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, £8-15

On Zoom: Monday 18th November, 8-9pm, £1-15

Buy The Past is Myself from Daunt Books HERE and receive 10% off using the code WBC at checkout, or just tell them you’re in Emily’s Walking Book Club if you’re buying it in the shop.

You can buy the beautiful Slightly Foxed hardback edition HERE with 10% off using the code EMILY24.

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Happy reading,

Emily