The internationally bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society returns with a compelling and heartwarming story of post-war London, a century-old bookstore, and three women determined to find their way in a fast-changing world.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt for Natalie Jenner’s Bloomsbury Girls, which is now available!
Bloomsbury Books is an old-fashioned new and rare book store that has persisted and resisted change for a hundred years, run by men and guided by the general manager’s unbreakable fifty-one rules. But in 1950, the world is changing, especially the world of books and publishing, and at Bloomsbury Books, the girls in the shop have plans:
Vivien Lowry: Single since her aristocratic fiance was killed in action during World War II, the brilliant and stylish Vivien has a long list of grievances – most of them well justified and the biggest of which is Alec McDonough, the Head of Fiction.
Grace Perkins: Married with two sons, she’s been working to support the family following her husband’s breakdown in the aftermath of the war. Torn between duty to her family and dreams of her own.
Evie Stone: In the first class of female students from Cambridge permitted to earn a degree, Evie was denied an academic position in favor of her less accomplished male rival. Now she’s working at Bloomsbury Books while she plans to remake her own future.
As they interact with various literary figures of the time – Daphne Du Maurier, Ellen Doubleday, Sonia Blair (widow of George Orwell), Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, and others – these three women with their complex web of relationships, goals and dreams are all working to plot out a future that is richer and more rewarding than anything society will allow.
Prologue
Cambridge, England
December 19, 1949
Evie Stone sat alone in her tiny bedsitter at the north end of Castle Street, as far from the colleges as a student could live and still be keeping term at Cambridge. But Evie was no longer a student— she remained at the university on borrowed time. The next forty minutes would decide how much she had left.
The room’s solitary window was cracked open to the cool December air, which was about to vibrate with the sound of Great St Mary’s striking two o’clock from precisely three miles away. The interview with Senior Fellow Christenson was for twenty minutes past that— exactly as long as it would take her to arrive at Jesus College. Evie always had her walks perfectly timed.
Christenson scheduled his appointments for twenty minutes past the hour, one of many famous eccentricities for which he was known. The students jokingly referred to this arrangement as CMT or Christenson Mean Time. Resounding bells of St Mary’s or not, Evie could have guessed the exact minute almost down to the second. She had honed this skill as a servant girl at the Chaw-ton Great House, where for two years she had secretly catalogued the family library. Without the benefit of a clock, she had passed hours every night going through all 2,375 books, page by page. At a clear two- foot distance, Evie could now eyeball anything from a Gutenberg- era tome to a carbon- copy document and not only predict how long it would take her to summarize the contents but to quickly skim each page as well. These were skills that she kept to herself. She had long known the value in being underestimated.
The male faculty around her only knew Evelyn Stone as a quiet, unassuming, but startlingly forthright member of the first entry class of women to be permitted to earn a degree from Cam-bridge. After three years of punishing studies at the all-f emale Girton College, Evie had been awarded first- class honours for her efforts, which included a lengthy paper on the Austen contempo-rary Madame de Staël, and become one of the first female gradu-ates in the eight- hundred- year history of the university.
Christenson was the next hurdle.
He needed a research assistant for the upcoming Lent term, and Evie had applied before anyone else. She also needed the job more than anyone else. Since graduating with a First in English, she had been assisting Junior Fellow Kinross with his years- long annotation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 novel, Vanity Fair. With this project finally at an end, Evie’s current stipend was scheduled to dry up on the very last day of 1949. As Christenson’s newest research assistant, Evie could continue to spend countless days on her own, without supervision, methodically working her way through the over one hundred libraries at the university— a prospect that remained more exciting to her than anything else at this stage of her academic career.
The minute the bells started to ring out, Evie— already clad in her thick woollen coat for winter— stood up, grabbed her leather bag, and headed for the door. Twenty quick steps down to the street, five and a half minutes until she passed the Castle Inn, and then a clear ten before she saw the bend of the River Cam. There the Bridge of Sighs loomed above the river, Gothic and imperious, the stonework tracery in its open windows designed to keep students from clambering in. This was the type of campus foolery that Evie would never seek to join— or be invited to.
