Reviews

The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault

sere_rev's review against another edition

4.0

The plot is slim, but the characters are vivid and lifelike and Renault operates a psychoanalyst's minute examination of their feelings and impulses. This book has some really funny moments too, perhaps unsurprisingly as Renault states in the afterword that it was written in response to the doom and gloom of The Well of Loneliness (which I am now very curious to read).

medievaljenga's review

funny sad fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated

4.0

libraryofcalliope's review against another edition

3.0

I have conflicted feelings regarding this book. The story is engaging as are the characters so I really enjoyed reading it but there are some areas that I am unsure of. The plot follows Elsie, a young naive girl who is encouraged to run away from her combative and claustrophobic parents by a handsome and manipulative doctor who just wants to “cure” her. She goes to stay with her older sister, Leonora (Leo), who had run away several years before. Leo is living on a houseboat with her “friend”, Helen. The doctor visits Elsie here and takes particular interest in the peculiar couple and tries to insert himself into the narrative. Despite being a “lesbian” book, the relationship between Helen and Leo exists mostly in innuendo, partly because it was published in 1943 and this use of innuendo is very effective, especially when used to demonstrate Elsie’s naïveté. Leo and Helen share a bed and their lives, Leo dresses in men’s clothes and engages with “masculine activities”, Helen’s room is merely the room they “call Helen’s”. However, the climax of the novel is given to a one night stand with Leo’s close friend Joe, a man. This is why it is hard to review for me. I thought the relationship with Peter (the doctor) was done well with Helen and Leo both understanding the kind of man he is from the start but the Joe subplot seemed a little out of place. I didn’t know what she was trying to achieve by including it. The afterword, written by Renault in 1983, clarifies that the novel was written in response to the pessimism of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness but I think in that mission it didn’t succeed. Renault had a life long “close friend” (as it says in the author bio) but she had some conflicts with the contemporary gay rights movement. It didn’t feel like she was trying to establish Leo as a bisexual character especially when in the Afterword she states her opinions on labelling sexuality; “People who do not consider themselves to be, primarily, human beings amongst their fellow-humans, deserve to be discriminated against, and ought not to make a meal of it”, but the fact that only the non straight relationship was reduced to innuendo alone speaks volumes. That was something The Well of Loneliness refused to do despite being published many years before. I would be more sympathetic as despite being published after The Well, it was still 1943, except Renault also says in the Afterword “I have always been as explicit as I wanted to be”. But that being said, I really enjoyed this book. It’s written well and I really enjoyed the characters.

carryanneb's review against another edition

emotional funny reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

magnetgrrl's review against another edition

1.0

I read this in 2005 and found it to be incredibly frustrating. For one thing, don't believe any of the blurbs on the back of the book - this book is neither a romance nor a comedy. It doesn't really have much at all to say about artists communities in the '30s. And for that matter, it doesn't really have that much to say about lesbian relationships either. The characters are mostly either dispicable or tragic.

After reading this, I wrote a long exposition of my problems with this book here: http://magnetgrrl.livejournal.com/1324.html

It's very spoilery.

thesewoventales's review against another edition

3.0

i feel that this book had so much promise at the beginning which wasn’t realized. the middle lagged so much and i didn’t really care about most of the events that were unfolding because of how confusing it was. peter and elsie had very little to no character growth and elsie basically ended up where she began. there wasn’t much of a resolution of the plot either that made me wonder what the whole point was.
one redeeming factor that made me give it 3 stars are the characters that ended up loving: helen, joe and norah. i hated peter with a passion though. the writing itself was very beautiful and there are couple sentences that would stay with me for a long time.

bridgetww's review against another edition

funny lighthearted slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

michelleshinee's review against another edition

challenging mysterious reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? N/A
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Misogyny and Racial slurs

avrilhj's review against another edition

4.0

Having read this book in a little under twenty-four hours I feel as if I've over-eaten. The Friendly Young Ladies has a lot of over-wrought emotions for a book that was apparently meant to be a lighter response to the equally over-wrought The Well of Loneliness. And if The Friendly Young Ladies is meant to be a less despairing book than The Well, I'm not quite sure I can see it.

The characters of Elsie and Peter are humorous in their absolute inability to understand anything that goes on around them. I'm not sure whether the reticence with which they're treated by everyone is because Renault was writing in 1944, when some things were unsayable, or because a certain reticence was just characteristic of the English middle-class, but I did long for someone to speak to them with a bit of blunt honesty.

As for the lesbian relationship at the centre of the book, it's depressing. I understand that Renault did not see herself as 'lesbian' and was appalled by anything that approached a 'gay rights' movement. But I'm not convinced by her comparing sexual intercourse to mountain-climbing, and the idea that sometimes you just have to go on 'with someone you trust at the other end of the rope'. I'm horribly afraid that the central message of the book is that a lesbian just needs the love of a good man in order to become a real woman.

Renault's afterword to this edition, written in 1983, acknowledges that the ending didn't work and that the idea of Leo and Joe living happily ever after was ludicrous. But I wish Leo and Helen could have lived happily ever after which, some eighty-odd years later, would now be possible because of the gay rights movement that Renault despised.

I've given this four stars as a useful historical source. But I'm glad that 'congregated homosexuals wav[ed] banners' - even if Renault turned her back on them.

maia_cat's review against another edition

funny hopeful lighthearted reflective medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.75