Book at Bedtime

It’s been on Radio 4 for as long as I can remember; hardly surprising since it started in 1949.

I still call it A Book at Bedtime, although the indefinite article was dropped thirty years ago. Books are abridged and usually read in ten instalments on weekdays. It has always been broadcast in the same slot: 10.45 – 11.00 pm. I sometimes heard it and if it was good found it frustrating not to find it convenient to listen every night.

It has come as a revelation that I can now listen “on demand” and it couldn’t have come at a better time. This week, and next, the book is Miss Buncle’s Book, published in 1934. You may not have heard of it or its author, DE Stevenson. She, for the DE stands for Dorothy Emily, was born in Edinburgh in 1892. She was not a one-book wonder, writing more than forty novels and some poetry but I reckon Miss Buncle is a good taster of her light and substantial as a fluffy soufflé style.

“The storyline of Miss Buncle’s Book (1934) is a simple one: Barbara Buncle, who is unmarried and perhaps in her late 30s, lives in a small village and writes a novel about it in order to try and supplement her meagre income. In this respect she is at one with Miss Pettigrew and Miss Ranskill, two other unmarried women who, not having subsumed their existence into that of a man, have to find a way of looking after themselves. There are some serious moments, for example when the doctor’s children are, very briefly, kidnapped (as a way of trying to force their mother to admit that she wrote the book; which she did not). But the seriousness is minimal – mostly this is an entirely light-hearted, easy read, one of those books like  Mariana, Miss Pettigrew, The Making of a Marchioness and Greenery Street which can be recommended unreservedly to anyone looking for something undemanding, fun and absorbing that is also well-written and intelligent.

DE Stevenson had an enormously successful writing career: between 1923 and 1970, four million copies of her books were sold in Britain and three million in the States. Like EF Benson, Ann Bridge, O Douglas or Dorothy L Sayers (to name but a few) her books are funny, intensely readable, engaging and dependable. Miss Buncle’s Book was the most popular of her novels because it has a completely original plot and a charming and delightful central character.” (Persephone Books)