I knew of Margery Sharp as a children’s author who wrote the series of books about The Rescuers and Miss Bianca (although Wikipedia says that The Rescuers was originally meant for an adult audience?). However that may be, Ms. Sharp also wrote twenty-five other novels for adults as well as numerous short stories. Cluny Brown is one of Ms. Sharp’s adult novels, published in 1944, and not to be taken over by children. (It has a few mild expletives, and the characters are all grown up people, not mice.)

The novel takes place just before WWII in the late thirties. One of the characters says repeatedly that Europe is headed for war, but no one takes him too seriously. Instead of war or impending war, the atmosphere in the book is one of halcyon days in which there is time and mental space enough to pursue rather leisurely growing up and romance in the English countryside.

Cluny Brown is a London girl, an orphan, who is a puzzlement to her guardian plumber uncle and to all of her friends and neighbors in a working class neighborhood in London. She’s tall and plain, but on second or third glance rather striking in some undefinable way, and she has ideas “above her station”. These strange ideas of Cluny’s, such as her taking herself out to the Ritz for tea one afternoon, cause her uncle to worry, and eventually he decides to send Cluny “into service” as a maid.

Cluny ends up in Devon at Friars Carmel, the country home of Sir Henry and Lady Carmel. In an atmosphere reminiscent of Downton Abbey, although not so large or exalted, Cluny wreaks havoc by just being Cluny. She doesn’t do anything too shocking by today’s standards, but in the eyes of the English country villagers and lords and ladies and maids and butlers, Cluny is definitely an anomaly, an odd bird. She asks if she can keep a dog. (The answer is no. Maids don’t keep pets.) She talks to her employers as if she and they are all people, on common ground so to speak, not disrespectfully but as an equal.

Anyway, the book is basically a romance, and Cluny eventually does the thing that is the most shocking of all: she chooses her own husband and runs away with him. I thought this story was a nice little glimpse into British mores and changing times of the 1930’s, and it was fun to think that Cluny and her free ways were only the harbingers of a great deal of change and freedom (and license) very soon to come with the war.

A serial version of Cluny Brown appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal, and made into a Hollywood film by Ernst Lubitsch in 1946, with Academy Award winner Jennifer Jones in the title role. Recommended for fans of Downton Abbey and Miss Reade novels and pre-WWII light English romances.