Author: Lynn Reid Banks
Book: The L-Shaped Room
Character: Jane Graham
Lynn Reid Banks also wrote the Indian In The Cupboard books for children, and several other books - including Saving Stacey, about a girl who is sent to live with her grandmother in the Australian outback - , but this was her first. Although born in the UK, she was evacuated to Canada during the war. She also spent 8 years on a kibbutz in Israel, where she met and married her husband, but they now live in Dorset.
Jane Graham is a middle class girl in late 1950s/early 60s London, whose father throws her out when she discovers she is pregnant. She goes to live in a seedy boarding house in Fulham (the L-shaped room being her room at the top of the stairs), where she meets a variety of interesting characters, including a Jewish writer, a gay black musician, and two prostitutes who live in the basement.
The doctor whom Jane consults tries to persuade her to have a (then illegal) abortion, but she decides to keep the baby and to suffer the huge social disapproval that this decision will being. Eventually, after having her baby, she is left a cottage in the country by her late aunt, and goes to live there.
The film of the book changed Jane into a French girl (Jane Fosset), played to great acclaim by Lesley Caron. The boarding house was relocated to Notting Hill (better than Fulham, but nothing like as fashionable as it is today). At the end of the film, Jane returns to her parents in France.
The book addresses social issues of the time, particularly the terrible treatment meted out to "unmarried mothers", but still contains quite a bit of homophobia and some antisemitism, both of which were presumably still considered normal when Reid Banks was writing. It emphasises that women as well as men are entitled to sexual pleasure, but the fact that, at the end of the book, Jane effectively "falls on her feet" with the inheritance of the cottage, shows how class will still out in the UK - the other characters in the boarding house, all of them far more "outsiders" than Jane, do not receive any such handy gifts.
I gave this book to my daughter to read when she was about 14, and she liked it so much that she did a study of it for a school project. The English teacher was apparently quite taken aback, but I feel that it is the ideal novel for teenage girls to read, enabling them to see what women still went through only 50 years ago. It ties in with Oranges & Sunshine, and also with the film that Roshanarose mentioned, Vera Drake, another brilliant depiction of 1950s London.
Sorry if my clues were too difficult! Can somebody else take over now?
Rosemary
