All I Desire

Hermia was discovering how inconveniently small the world was and wondered fretfully how it was that the very people she would have wished to avoid if she had remembered their existence should happen to inhabit the small and insignificant neighbourhood which she and Jeremy had selected for its remoteness from the world.Readers might also wonder at the odds of not one but two figures from romance writer Hermia Carlisle’s slightly scandalous past in India turning up in the small English village of Holm Street, to which she has retreated with daughter Jeremy (there’s a story behind that name) for a quiet life of writing. But who could fret about implausibility with such entertaining results?Hermia’s disruptions appear in the form of Major Piers Southcote, whose heart she once broke, and the terrible Mrs. Fenwick, who 'had long been regarded as a blight and a pestilence by her children' and who, alas, has a long memory in regard to Hermia’s interactions with Mr. Fenwick in India. An array of other villagers play their roles: the requisite vicar and his wife; Mr. Marsh, a wealthy shop-owner, and his family, including a predatory daughter Chrissy, referred to locally as 'the Marsh Mallow'; and the irresistible Mrs Maycock, proprietor of the village shop, who is proud of Mrs Carlisle’s achievements and hopes her fame will lead the village to glory like Byron did the Lake District ('or it might have been Tennyson'). Through it all, Hermia-who gets ensnared in the W.I.’s Shakespeare Festival because she’s working out a 'situation' for a novel in her head and just keeps absentmindedly saying yes-is surely a very funny caricature of Lambert herself, à la Agatha Christie’s Ariadne Oliver. First published in 1937 and out-of-print for more than 80 years, All I Desire is perhaps the funniest of Dorothy Lambert’s light-hearted romances.Originally published in 1936, this new edition features a new introduction by twentieth-century women’s historian Elizabeth Crawford.'A fanciful story of village life ... skilfully related.' The Chronicle