Kitty by Warwick Deeping (Knopf, 1927)

 

I enjoyed reading this book very much, although my opinion of it sank lower and lower as I read more and more.  It's not a terrible book by any means -- just not very well-written and melodramatically conceived and executed.  But it is a good, engaging story with a large collection of vivid and colorful characters.  So a good read on a purely narrative level.  I can understand why Deeping was a popular author in his time (this book belonged to my grandmother, who also had a few other Deepings in her library).

Kitty is the story of the risky courtship and troubled marriage of two young English people of slightly but irrevocably different classes.  Kitty is 24 -- small, pretty, charming.  She lives with her mother and sister above the tobacco shop they own and successfully run in London.  Her mother, "Mrs Sarah," was married to a doctor but has been widowed for quite some time, and is wealthy and independent, merry and life-loving.  She is proud of her two beautiful and sensible daughters.

Alex is the only son of Mrs St. George, a widowed upper-class woman who has a house in both the town and the country.  She is a hateful person: cold, mean, humorless, and vindictive.  When Alex meets Kitty a few days before he is to be sent to fight in France (it's 1918) and falls in love with her, he marries her without telling his mother, because he knows she will not approve.  He's right -- she doesn't, and when she learns of her son's marriage she tries everything possible to destroy it.  She hires a lawyer and personal investigator and lying, tells her son (who's still in France) that she has proof that Kitty is a prostitute and that the tobacco shop is really a brothel.  Alex receives this news the day before he is wounded in battle.  He suffers both paraplegia and amnesia and returns to England and his mother's powerful and unyielding clutch.  Mrs St. George foibles any attempt Alex and Kitty make to communicate or reunite, and Kitty, despairing, decides she must establish a home to which she can bring and care for her paralyzed, addled-brained husband.

And so with the help of her formidable mother, Kitty buys an inn/shop/boatyard on the Thames outside of London and sets about restoring it and creating a tea and dance hall for weekend trippers.  She finally manages to cleverly kidnap Alex and settle him in their new home, where, despite, regaining his identity and memory, he becomes terribly depressed because he feels useless.  Kitty gives him a stiff talking-to and tells him to buck up, and he learns that although he is unable to walk, he is capable of many tasks (including interior decorating).  Together Kitty and Alex make a success of their establishment.  Kitty decides that a shock to his system may restore her husband's mobility so she capsizes a punt and pretends to be drowning, whereupon Alex leaps out of his wheelchair and rescues her.  Mrs St. George is summoned to come and behold the miracle that Kitty has performed, but her enmity has caused her to wither and her health to fail.  She arrives and is reunited with her restored son, but is it too late to make amends?