War comes to England

It is the unexpected note that makes the poem.

Helen Simonson, The Summer Before the War

A major war impacts everyone in a country at war, and one thing Helen Simonson's fine second novel The Summer Before the War (following the popular Major Pettigrew's Last Stand) accomplishes is to show this impact at every level of society in England in 1914, from the upper classes to the outcast Gypsies.

It seems a perfect summer when Beatrice Nash, Simonson's central character, comes to Rye in Sussex to become the new Latin teacher. Agatha Kent, wife of a British diplomat, has stuck her neck out advocating for Beatrice, when others favor a male teacher. And Beatrice is prettier than the ideal female teacher, for women are tolerated as teachers at that time only if they are spinsters. Beatrice promises to remain unmarried, a promise she regrets after she falls in love with Hugh, one of Agatha's nephews who is training to become a surgeon.

Another nephew, more favored by Agatha than his cousin, is Daniel, a promising poet with a reputation for getting into trouble and, with Hugh's help and his own charm, getting out of it. Of course, we readers know before they do that these bright young men will soon be going to war, as will others of Simonson's characters. Despite what the title suggests, war comes before the midway point of the novel.

Rye was something of literary hotbed at the time this story takes place, the area being home to Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, E.F. Benson and others. Simonson's Henry James stand-in is  Mr. Tillingham, an aging American writer who has been living in England for many years. Tillingham outlives James, who died in 1916, but otherwise seems closely modeled after the great writer. Beatrice herself is an aspiring writer, so along with the poet Daniel, Simonson's characters capture something of the flavor of that time and place.

Simonson gives her readers one major surprise and a few minor ones. Yet on the whole her novel, as enjoyable as it is to read, seems predictable. The "unexpected note that makes the poem" may be the only thing lacking.