'I've come,' announced Mr Joyce, 'to talk about Martha.'

That's a real suck-you-in sentence which had me loving Martha without knowing a dang thing about her. I imagined that she'd run rings about Mr Joyce and that she'd make me laugh in the process.

Margery Sharp again manages to combine sheer elegance of language with heroines that are anything but. Martha is fat and plain, but she doesn't give a toss - or not even that, it's more that she hasn't even ever thought about such trivial matters. She's an artist, obsessed with shape, and then with colour. Nothing matters to her apart from that. Oh, she likes a good bath, and she eats like she is built. But if she had the least reason to think that either of those habits were bad for her art, they'd be out on their ear. Just like Eric.

In fact, just like her baby. She gets pregnant to Eric. Drops him without his knowing that - he had plans to marry and obviously then she'd give up art. She has the baby in secret, and then leaves it with a note at Eric's front door. It's the spitting image of him. He lives with his mother. She left formula for the baby. Sorted. Back to painting.

rest here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2020/02/25/martha-in-paris-and-the-e... ( )

Martha goes to Paris to study art at a good studio with a French master. Quite as an afterthought, she loses her virginity and while she enjoys the sex, the young man isn’t anything special. Naturally she becomes pregnant. The fellow wants to marry her anyway, but she was just using him for his bathtub. She has the baby and leaves it on his doorstep to rear, so she can get on with her art career. Martha does not disappoint. Usually a book like this would end the other way, and it was so refreshing that it didn’t. ( )

From the front flyleaf:


In this “portrait of the artist as a young woman,” Margery Sharp uses all her individual observation – humorous, tender and astringent – to recount a climacteric twelve months in the life of eighteen-year-old Martha, who was sent to Paris to learn to paint, and learned a great deal else besides.

Readers who first met Martha as the stolid, matter-of-fact and altogether memorable child in The Eye of Love and wondered what would happen to this truly independent spirit when confronted with Life now have an opportunity to find out.

Oblivious to the glamour and temptation of Paris, Martha’s single-minded pursuit of creativity and her matronly appearance seem to protect her from her Aunt Dolores’s delicately-put fear that “Martha might come to some harm…” Once called the Young Pachyderm by a friend back home near Paddington Station, perhaps because he glimpsed something tough-carapaced about her even then, Martha is now Mother Bunch to her fellow art students. Apparently the threat of Paris is to be lost ton her as she at once sets herself up in a doggedly methodical routine of working, eating and sleeping.

But Paris has an outrageous joke to play on Martha. It all begins with her somewhat unconventional adoration of deep, hot baths, after which she always looked her most attractive, or as the French say, “appetizing.” Nice hot baths involve Martha in an experience with a young Englishman (City of London Bank, Paris Branch) which would challenge the resources of a far more sophisticated girl than Martha. How she triumphantly copes with the resulting situation is the them of this engaging novel.

That about sums it up. I greatly enjoyed this next installment in Martha’s life-journey. Margery Sharp has settled into her story nicely; she champions Martha’s artistic cause and incidentally tramples over the gender-based lines of common behaviours; Martha is a true feminist, or perhaps we should say humanist; she has zero tolerance for the conventions which govern the behaviours of more conventional beings. Such as, for instance, her would-be lover Eric, and his doting mother. Their persistence in viewing Martha through their own rose-tinted spectacles of wishful thinking as to her personality and motivations lead to an ironically comedic situation, which Martha single-handedly sorts out in a most pragmatic way.

Martha is a deeply unusual heroine; regardless of her lack of sentiment and socially acceptable behaviour I found myself fully on her side in her Parisian adventures, and have no doubt that her ambitions will be fulfilled.

Highly recommended. If you can at all manage to find these three titles, read them in order. This is the middle book of a trilogy. The preceding book is The Eye of Love; the following book is Martha, Eric and George.

The Eye of Love is presently in print, in softcover from Virago Press. Martha in Paris and Martha, Eric and George are readily available and generally reasonably priced through ABE. ( )