The Raft

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Pages: 355

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About this book

Marriage looks like a rescue to Jehane, the daughter of an Oxford scholar, who watches university men enjoy freedoms she and her friend Nan Tudor cannot share. At twenty-five, she fears that her chance of a home and children is slipping away. Nan meets these worries with a quieter faith in Providence. Their conversations, set among college streets and a rectory garden, give Coningsby Dawson's novel an opening concerned with the pressure to be chosen and the hopes attached to married life.

Another side of the book appears through Peter and Kay, whose tandem tricycle carries them into games of fairyland with their friend Harry. When they encounter Eve and the man Peter thinks of as the Faun Man, children's make-believe meets adult longing and tenderness. Readers interested in domestic fiction will find both the social rules surrounding courtship and the imaginative language children use to understand the grown-up world.

About the author

Coningsby Dawson

Coningsby Dawson was a British-born novelist and poet whose writing moved between lyric reflection, romance, and the social dislocations surrounding the First World War. The Worker appeared in the fuller 1906 collection The Worker and Other Poems, an early book that established poetry as part of his career rather than a sideline to his fiction.