The White Ladies Of Worcester

The White Ladies of Worcester (1922)
By Florence L. Barclay | G. P. Putnam’s Sons
ISBN: none (too Edwardian to be numbered)
Condition: Fair (faded romance, functioning spine)
Offered by: Crappy Old Books

Step delicately into a world where emotion is high, hemlines are low, and everyone has far more feelings than modern life normally allows.

This is The White Ladies of Worcester (1922), by Florence L. Barclay – purveyor of earnest romance, noble self-sacrifice and the kind of spiritual suffering that pairs beautifully with a pot of tea.

What’s it about (in the vaguest, most dramatic terms)?

Imagine:

• Medieval(ish) Worcester, cloisters, convent walls and atmospheric stone corridors.

• White Ladies – not ghosts (probably), but religious women dealing with vows, duty and inconvenient hearts.

• Heroic, tortured people trying to decide whether they love God, each other, or simply the idea of being very noble and unhappy.

There will be:

• Deep sighs.

• Lofty principles.

• Long internal monologues about honour, sacrifice and doing The Right Thing in a dramatically inconvenient way.

It’s the sort of novel where someone can stare out of a window for a page and a half and you just know their life will never be the same again.

About this particular copy

• Condition: Fair – which in Crappy Old Books dialect means:

  • The book is absolutely readable.

  • The binding is still doing its job, even if it occasionally grumbles.

  • The cover and pages show visible age and wear – rubbing, possible foxing, maybe a name inscribed in the front by someone who believed books should never be anonymous.

• Not falling apart. Not pristine. Squarely in the “I have lived on shelves and in bedrooms and maybe in a box for a bit” category.

If “Near Fine” is your natural habitat, this copy may give you palpitations. If you find charm in scruffy survivors, you’re among friends.

The aesthetic

This is 1922 melodrama in book form:

• The prose: rich, slightly old-fashioned, absolutely sincere.

• The mood: devout, emotional, wholesomely intense.

• The atmosphere: half gothic, half Sunday sermon, with bonus romance.

It’s a world where:

• People make life-altering decisions based on conscience and duty rather than text messages.

• Honour is a real thing, not just a word deployed in awkward corporate mission statements.

• Feelings are discussed in sentences longer than modern tweets.

Why you might secretly want this

• You enjoy romantic drama with religious overtones, preferably involving cloisters and moral crises.

• You like the idea of reading something that no algorithm has recommended to you, ever.

• You’re fond of novels where everyone is extremely sincere, sometimes slightly absurdly so, and yet you find yourself emotionally invested anyway.

• You believe that if you’re going to read about painful self-sacrifice, it may as well be written by someone from the early 20th century who really means it.

Fair, not flawless

This copy is:

• Perfectly suited to being read in an armchair, on a train, in bed, or in a mildly draughty room with a blanket.

• Not remotely suited to being locked in a glass case and admired with a monocle.

• The ideal sort of book to acquire when you want experience, not exhibition grade.

You can dog-ear a page (we won’t tell), slip in a train ticket as a bookmark, and generally treat it like a book and not a relic.

Offered by Crappy Old Books, where the romances are old, the condition is honest, and the White Ladies of Worcester are still quietly suffering in Fair-but-readable hardback.

Keep browsing: See more Romance books Other books by Florence L Barclay