Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

"Cheerful Weather for the Wedding" by little-known Julia Strachey was originally published in 1932 but has been sorely overlooked until it was reprinted last year as a Persephone Classics paperback. I honestly had never heard of Strachey but after reading the following snippet of a description of the novel, I was intrigued:

"Waylaid by the sulking admirer who lost his chance with her, an astonishingly oblivious mother, and her own sinking dread, the bride-to-be struggles to reach the altar with the help of a bottle of rum" (taken from the back cover of the 2009 print).

This bride-to-be is Dolly, a privileged young woman preparing to marry the Hon. Owen Bigham and follow him to South America where he is in the diplomatic service. The novel takes place all in one day, Dolly's wedding day.

"Cheerful Weather" is in turns amusing and somber. Dolly's family are ridiculous characters that produce quite a few laughs with their silly antics. The somber part is that Dolly obviously is not in love with the man that she's about to marry and must drink almost a full bottle of rum before she can bring herself to walk down the aisle.

The "sulking admirer" is Joseph who Dolly spent a euphoric summer with on his private boat. Joseph never declared his love for Dolly though and struggles with this fact throughout the book. If you have ever liked someone but not had the guts to tell them so, you will easily relate to Joseph's troubles.

Strachey wrote only two novels, "Cheerful Weather" and "The Man on the Pier." She led a very interesting life, working as a model, photographer and writer. She married two times, each one ending badly. Besides her novels, Strachey also wrote an autobiography with her best friend Frances Partridge.

I fairly enjoyed this small novel at 119 pages. There were Virginia Woolf-esque descriptions, laugh-out-loud sections and romantic intrigue, enough to keep me turning the pages. The one thing that just didn't fit was a surprise thrown in towards the end that in some ways shed more light on the main character but with such blurry details that it was more of a shock than anything else.

Although this was by no means my favorite novel, it was well worth reading for its excellent character studies and apt descriptions of the time. I may even have to check out Strachey's autobiography "Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey" to find out more about the eccentric woman behind the novel.