Hadley is a writer who majors on family life, sometimes historical, always domestic focusing on relationships. They tend to be what I call ‘quiet’ novels where events do happen but as they are so often domestic, they do not reach dizzying highs and lows for the reader as if on a roller coaster. They are often, however, no less dramatic for the people involved. The Party is in a similar vein.

Set in the 50s, The Party is a novella of three parts, the first of which was written as a short story. This was then developed with two further sections reflecting the ripples of attending the party. Held in a seedy, dockside pub full of students, musicians and other creative types, sisters Moira and Evelyn attend. It’s the sort of party that your parents probably wouldn’t let you go to if they knew about it.

Who knew that you could be a Sunday School teacher one minute, asking children to crayon in pictures of Jesus holding up a lantern, with a lost lamb tucked under his other arm, and then lie to your parents with such perfectly calibrated innocent sweetness?

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What is so special about this party?

That’s the tricky part of this book. We start with younger sister quizzing Moira, older, about Vincent who has asked them to a party. Evelyn states that she thinks he is handsome but Moira prevaricates and then says he isn’t attractive to her even though he has ‘all the ingredients’. This give Evelyn food for thought and she agrees with Moira. Here she is testing what she thinks about men against her older sister and found that they don’t quite agree. Can you then chase after a man that your sister has told you isn’t that special?

At the party Evelyn finds her sister sitting with two men who stand out because they are wearing ties and one, Sinden, is slightly older than most in the pub. Paul, his companion, whilst drunk is very handsome although Evelyn uses her knowledge of poetry to judge him as ‘corrupted’. We never find out why these men are in the pub, like fish out of water, but Evelyn realises that Sinden is most interested in and frightened by Vincent’s bohemian friend Josephine. Nothing happens with the men but eventually Moira and Evelyn leave the party by the back door because they want to get away from these ‘hideous’ men.

For Evelyn, this is a coming of age story where she learns about men from her sister’s judgements, first-hand experience and what poetry in particular say about them.

What about the men at home?

Moira and Evelyn’s father is an absent figure for most of the time in the second section. He has a girlfriend and comes home infrequently. Their mother is a mess of emotions based on her husband and how much attention he gives her and so the girls learn how to distract their mother, reassure her and dampen down their mother’s all too frequent outpourings. She is, however, expected to turn up at a do alongside her husband for appearances sake. ‘He liked to command whatever scene he was in.’

There is also their younger brother, twelve years old, and interested in chemistry, blowing things up and generally being a nuisance around the house.

And then there is Robert Cassidy who might have been Moira’s boyfriend who went out to Malaya and was killed. We are told almost nothing about Moira’s feelings – some guilt maybe – but the event is relayed at the second gathering when Evelyn realises that she didn’t know about Robert.

The second party or gathering

Moira and Evelyn are invited to Paul’s house for a gathering or small party of unusual individuals. There is much drinking, many games and then there is sex. Evelyn, longing to lose her virginity has sex with Sinden and then early in the morning sets off to find her sister in the vast house. Find her she does, in bed with Sinden.

How could she? Why couldn’t Evelyn have anything all to herself, even Sinden? Or in this case not actually first but last, which was worse.

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And right there is one of the key elements of this book. The dependence on your sister but desire to be independent. Wanting things for yourself, not having to share them and to share a man with your sister is really a big no-no. Said by a sister!

-What if he’s made us both pregnant? Would that technically be incest or something?

-Christ, Evelyn. Just don’t. He won’t have. He wasn’t that sort of man: he didn’t even look fertile. I expect he knew what he was doing. And anyway even if he didn’t, and we were, I’d know where to go to take care of it.

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Ah. That older sister knowledge rearing its head again. Although I love the idea of being able to see if someone is fertile by their looks!

This is a story of two sisters who desperately want to escape the constraints of their home life and live differently. Hadley has much to say about sex and marriage and also about how young women learn about these things. But there were several elements of the novel that I found unsatisfactory. We were never really given any information or motivation for Paul and Sinden to be in the pub and so we don’t know where they came from or what they wanted. Hadley did say in an interview

. . . in a short story you can be deliciously careless, you can throw out ideas irresponsibly, without needing to ever see them through

and that is how I felt about these characters.

When I looked more closely at the picture on the back of the book, it became clear that the front cover tells us about the story. There is the winter scene, probably representing post-war Britain, and then at the edge what looks like a border of a sunny tropical place with women peering out representing the sisters. On the back it is clear that the sunny element is a curtain to draw over the winter scene but quite depressingly despite the escape the sisters desire, that is not what they achieve. They are still stuck in that winter landscape of class and social expectations.