Books - Book Review - The Victorian Chaise- Lounge - Marghanita Laski

This is one of the first books that I selected at Persephone Books on Lamb’s Conduit St (don’t you love the name?) in London.

If you buy directly from the bookstore, you not only get a great novel, but a lovely bookmark and a postcard painted by David Gentleman, which shows Fife Terrance, a mansion in Islington, another section of London, which I would love to live for a few months, when I win the lotto.

This is a creepy novel, initially set in the 1950s London. Melanie, who just gave birth and is recovering from tuberculosis, is being attended by Dr. Gregory. He observes, “..she is simply the purely feminine creature who makes herself into anything her man wants her to be. Not that I’d call her clever, rather cunning .. to know that Melanie was loved and protected and, in so far as anyone could possibly be sure, safe.”

In her modern home, the Victorian chair was the only antique. The doctor gave into Melanie’s pleading to spend part of the day there as part of her recovery.

A little later, Melanie woke up in the chaise-lounge in the same house but in another time and another body. “I don’t like her hands, whispered Melanie to herself, and as she thought this, she slowly lifted one hand .. she was flooded with that same memory that had stirred in her when she first saw the chaise-lounge off Marylebone High Street, only now it was a deeper, truer, and intolerably painful, a memory of a passionate love of a body that crushed and broke into hers, pressed down on the Victorian chaise-lounge.”

She figured out that she was trapped in another body in the 19^th century. She tried to prove to others that she was from the future. “Wireless, she screamed in her mind, television, penicillin, gramophone-records and vacuum cleaners, but none of those words could be words could be framed by her lips.. Can I introduce nothing into this real past? And if I cannot, then even these thoughts I am thinking, has Milly though them before?”

This work is a modern day gothic novel. It doesn’t have overt violence but it’s still creepy to read. Read this work in the day and not close to Halloween!