Review by Rob Spence
Ada Leverson should really be better known than she is. Born in 1862, she is probably best remembered now as a devoted friend of Oscar Wilde. She was there to greet him when he emerged from prison; her memoir of their relationship, and his letters to her, are preserved in Letters to the Sphinx From Oscar Wilde, published in 1930. Leverson was considered to be as witty as Wilde, and her early writings consisted of anonymous pieces for Punch, The Yellow Book and other late nineteenth-century publications. Her career as a novelist spanned a relatively brief period: ten years, during which she produced six novels. These novels, though well-received at the time, have long been out of print. Virago issued the last three, which form a trilogy, in a single volume in 1982, but there seems to have been no reissues since then until recently. Michael Walmer has now republished all of her novels (see the Shiny review of Bird of Paradise here). However, the last of these, published in 1916, is the one under consideration here.
Love at Second Sight is the final volume in the trilogy about Edith and Bruce Ottley, an upper-class married couple living fashionably in turn of the century London. It is not necessary to have read the previous volumes, Love’s Shadow and Tenterhooks, to understand the characters and the setting here, as Leverson fills in the background economically and unfussily. The Ottleys live in what is described as a small flat, which nevertheless can accommodate them, their two children, the children’s nurse, a cook, a maid, and still have room for the unexpected arrival of Madame Frabelle, a widow, who has returned from France to her native England, and has been rather foisted upon the Ottleys by an old friend. The novel was issued in 1916, and the First World War is a constant, if subdued presence in the narrative, including providing an important plot point. The tone is not, however, sombre, at least for the most part. Leverson is an acute observer of personal foibles, and her characters are presented mainly from a detached, ironic viewpoint. I was reminded at various points of Jerome K. Jerome, P.G. Wodehouse and Jane Austen.
Madame Frabelle is the catalyst for some dramatic changes in the lives of the Ottleys, whose marriage has become very humdrum. The reader can’t help but speculate that Leverson was very much using her own experience, since her burst of novel-writing creativity coincided with the demise of her own marriage. Bruce Ottley, who works at the Foreign Office, is a valetudinarian (his “neurotic heart” prevents him from enlisting) and an irritating bore. Edith, refined and beautiful, has stuck with him, despite a previous infidelity, and busies herself with war work, and a circle of amusing friends. Madam Frabelle, who arrives with a letter of introduction from Edith’s friend Lady Conroy, is a splendid creation: a woman completely sure of her own judgment, but who is spectacularly wrong in every assessment she makes. Leverson makes much comic mileage out of this, as she also does out of Bruce’s self-obsession, and Lady Conroy’s terminal forgetfulness. She can also manage set-piece scenes with great skill. Here, Bruce is taking Madame Frabelle out on a day trip by train, but he cannot find the platform:
They wished to know where it started, but nobody appeared interested in the subject. Guards and porters, of whom they inquired, seemed surprised at their questions and behaved as if they regarded them as signs of vulgar and impertinent curiosity. At Waterloo no one seems to know when a train is going to start, where it is starting from, or where it is going to. Madame Frabelle unconsciously assumed an air of embarrassment, as though she had no responsibility for the queries and excited manner of her companion. She seemed, indeed, surprised when Bruce asked to see the stationmaster. Here things came to a head. There was no train to Kingston at 11.10; the one at that hour was the Southampton Express; and it was worse than useless for Bruce and Madame Frabelle.
That passage, which might have been from Three Men in a Boat, is one of several where an air of genteel farce animates the plot. At other points, contemporary issues are aired, as when Edith visits the wounded soldier who is in love with her, and the respective merits of the futurists and the post-impressionists are discussed.
The novel is light, but never frothy: the emotional lives of the characters are examined with steely precision. The minor characters, such as the Italian composer Tito Landi, play their part in bringing the narrative to a satisfying conclusion. This is a novel which, as much as any by Jane Austen, deals with love, betrayal, honour and sacrifice in a world where conventions and societal expectations are changing rapidly. I enjoyed it immensely, and will now seek out Leverson’s other works.
Rob Spence’s home on the net is at robspence.org.uk
Ada Leverson, Love at Second Sight (Michael Walmer, 2025). 978-1763565661, 305pp., paperback.
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