![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() There’s Albert, the pantry boy, naïve, kind, and touchy. ![]() There’s old Nanny Swift, who took care of Violet as a girl and now looks after her girls. Welch, the alcoholic and suspicious cook. There’s Agatha Burch, the much put upon head housemaid, who oversees Edith and Kate, the two lovelorn under-housemaids. There’s Charley Raunce, recently ascended from the position of footman to butler, full of bluster and fear and the occasional kindness who finds himself out of his depth when a flirtation becomes something more. Instead the servants are front and center, and we follow their sometimes rancorous, sometimes affectionate relationships. In classic upstairs-downstairs fashion, the masters are not particularly important in the book (indeed, they are off in England for much of the time). Tennant lives with her daughter-in-law, Violet, Violet’s two small children, and a large group of servants. Tennant is dead his son is fighting in the war. Kinalty is owned by the ironically named Tennant family fittingly, the Tennants are newcomers who have purchased rather than inherited the property. Loving is set during WWII at a sprawling estate in Ireland called Kinalty Castle. This new edition-part of a welcome plan to reissue his works in the US-is cause for celebration. The English novelist Henry Green wrote nine beautiful and elliptical novels, all worth reading, but Loving (1945) is the best of them, indeed, one of the best English novels of the 20 th century. ![]()
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