‘Are you sure you’re well advised to undertake the running of a business?’ he asked. Other inhabitants are blunter, like Milo who has a job at the BBC in London: So she’s rightfully irritated by this suggestion. And like me, Florence, who used to work before her marriage, liked having a job, colleagues and being out of her house.

Since the fare depends on your earnings, she had all the documents about our financial situation and she asked me “Given what your husband makes, why don’t you just stay at home?” Hello, flash news, working is not all about the money. This reminded me of the director of a crèche I met when I was looking for a daycare solution for my daughter. ‘ You live by yourself, don’t you? You’ve just moved into the Old House all by yourself? Haven’t you ever thought of marrying again?’ Some think her enterprise is inappropriate for a woman : ( The word in Hardborough for ‘mad’ was ‘not quite right’, just as ‘very ill’ was ‘moderate’.)

After all, you’re in the kingdom of the legendary English sense of understatement. Her opponents are quite vocal albeit polite in surface. It has a second building that she intends to use as a warehouse.įrom the beginning, Florence is against a wall of people who’d rather she abandoned her project. She decided to purchase the Old House, a building that has been empty for years and that nobody really wanted. In 1959, when there was no fish and chips in Hardborough, no launderette, no cinema except on alternate Saturday nights, the need of all these things was felt, but no one had considered, certainly had not thought of Mrs Green as considering, the opening of a bookshop.įlorence’s idea comes as a surprise to her fellow villagers. Hardborough is still a very rural town who needs the basics… Florence Green is a middle-aged widow who intends to open a bookshop. The Bookshop was our Book Club choice for July, along with Rendezvous in Venice, so my billet is a bit late but I didn’t manage to write it before going on holiday.Īlthough it was published in 1978, The Bookshop starts in 1959 and is set in Hardborough, a small seaside town in East Suffolk.

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald