Off the blocks and running in the 2025 Reading Stakes. I’ve finished 3 books so far this year – all fiction, and one of them was even a recent, Australian, literary fiction title. A good start, since I struggled with literary fiction last year.
Last year! It was so horrifying in the big bad world, with the general enshittification of everyday life for us here in Oz, and overseas the violence and horror of war, and a global posse of wannabe strong men doing their usual smash and grab and lie and bullshit with no shame… Sorry, ranting. I am trying to say that unapologetic comfort reading has become my …well, my comfort.
There’s a small pile of sure-fire novels that work that magic, opening a door into a place of well being and familiarity and pleasure and forgetfulness. Pride and Prejudice is one of them, and the Damerosehay books of Elizabeth Goudge. The Sarah Kelling/Max Bittersohn crime novels by Charlotte Mcleod. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons and The Republic of Love by Carol Shields. And Margaret Yorke by Kathleen Norris.
I’ve written about Kathleen Norris (1880-1966) before, way back in 2016. She was the bestselling American author in her day, with a staggering output of close to 90 novels, plus short stories, journalism and feature articles. Margaret Yorke belonged to my Nan; it was on the shelf with a dozen or so mild romances from the 1910’s to the 1930s, and from the age of about 12, I was allowed to take them home, one at a time, to read. My favourites were Margaret Yorke and Jemima Rides by British writer Anne Hepple. I tried Jemima a couple of years ago, and the spell had been broken; her naivety, which I think is supposed to be piquant and charming, now seems simply idiotic. But Margaret Yorke still does the trick.
First published in 1931, it’s set in an enclave of wealthy Californians who live in lovely houses surrounded by lovely gardens near San Mateo, not far from San Francisco. They have maids and cooks, chauffeurs and nannies, social secretaries – and companions.
Margaret is one of those. She’s a reserved, thoughtful, conscientious young woman with a
mystery in her past, and the perfect employee for faded Mrs Cutting. Mrs Cutting is a wealthy widow with an adopted toddler son, and a handsome, charming and thoroughly decent nephew, Stan, who runs the family lumber company. Of course, Stan and Margaret are increasingly attracted to each other. But (again, of course) Margaret has made a mistake in her late teens, a disastrous marriage, and she can’t move forward. Their relationship develops against a background of country club, bridge games and trips to the family ranch; the two characters come to know and respect each other, growing in maturity and understanding until they deserve their happy ending.
A pretty standard romance, actually. So what do I find so comforting about it? It’s the mesmerising flow of description, of adjectives and nouns in the service of clothes, food, gardens, faces, bodies. Margaret wears ‘a thin old white muslin with an untrimmed leghorn hat’ to walk around the milking sheds on the farm. On a hot afternoon, ‘a dark soft flowered gown in dull blue and brown; it was almost transparent, it was limp and soft, and seemed just fitted to the heat and brilliance of the day’. In the evening, ‘a frail black lace gown that made her gypsy coloring more brilliant than ever’ with ‘old gold and enamel earrings dangling almost to her shoulders’.
Not only do I want to ransack her wardrobe, I’d like to shove her out of the way at the dinner table, join her in a wicker chair in the drowsy autumn garden among bees and flowers or in the shaded cement swimming pool on a breathless hot summer morning. I want to ride in the limousine or the roadster and take tea (wearing a dotted swiss dress, a close-fitting navy blue hat and small pearls in my ears) at a fancy San Fransisco hotel.
Moreover, I want to waft through my days with nothing more to worry about than my beastly husband whose divorce from me is not legal though he thinks it is, who married and divorced and then re-married the devious flirt who was engaged to Stan but ran off with a married older man who died of a heart attack, and doesn’t know that my employer’s adopted son is his. And mine. Are you with me? Oh, did I forget to mention that he (beastly husband) is the child of her (employer’s) second cousin and they share the same lawyer? And that the devious flirt is engaged to Stan (again)?
Yes, there are plot twists and turns in an improbable Days of Our Lives manner but if you don’t think about it, it holds together. Almost. So it’s just as well the plot is the least important element of the book. I can read Margaret Yorke again and again and simply lose myself in the sensual fantasy. It’s sheer, blissful, undemanding, reliable comfort.