An Inch of Candle

"The prospect of being declared outrageous gave her an inward, warm, suffusing smile", So it was for 16 year old, wildly romantic Dora, growing up in a straight-jacketed, self-consciously methodist household at the onset of World War I. A novel which in its themes echoes Marjorie Darke's A Kind of Courage. Conscientious objection, embodied in soppy brother Richard, and myopic jingoism, embraced by much adored Humphrey Bosanquet, tangle and merge to perplex and yet to illuminate the thoughts and emotion of a young girl struggling to comprehend her own emergent femininity and to establish her own separate identity. The history doesn't seem to matter here, it is the character of Dora that shines brightest and her final conviction that "Death - yes, it was horrifying, nightmarish. But before it came, was not life something to be seized and lived and gloried in?" This is a novel that will probably be sadly and undeservedly neglected unless we make every effort to commend it, especially to older readers.