![]() ![]() ![]() If I were to happen along the following advertisement, as Mrs Wilkins and Mrs Arbuthnot do at the beginning of The Enchanted April, I too would long to go: We all could do with a nice long holiday. Nearly a century later, not much has changed. ![]() Or in Illyrian Spring by Ann Bridge there is Lady Grace Kilmichael, who is fed up with her husband and children and wants to travel around the Mediterranean and paint. In The Enchanted April there is young, beautiful Lady Caroline Dester, worn out from too many parties. This dire need of a holiday was not, however, just a middle-class thing it was also felt by wealthier ladies. Forster’s earlier middle-class women Lilia Heriton and Caroline Abbott from Where Angels Fear to Tread, and Margaret Kennedy’s Florence Creighton from The Constant Nymph. We could add to Mrs Wilkins and Mrs Arbuthnot, E.M. Going into town to buy fish for their husbands’ dinners is more-or-less the highlight of their days. Mrs Wilkins and Mrs Arbuthnot are miserable middle-class Hampstead wives, stuck in loveless marriages. Why, it would really be being unselfish to go away and be happy for a little, because we could come back so much nicer. As Mrs Wilkins explains to Mrs Arbuthnot in The Enchanted April: ![]() It would seem that English women in the 1930s were all in desperate need of a holiday. ![]()
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