Mariana

Mariana (1940) is the first novel by Monica Dickens. Mariana is a coming of age novel, which describes the growth and experience of Mary Shannon, a young English girl in the 1930s as the first hints of war begin to permeate English domestic life. First published by Michael Joseph, it was reprinted by Persephone Books in 1999 and is the second in their collection. The title is a reference to the poem of the same name by Alfred, Lord Tennyson Plot outline The novel starts with an adult Mary spending a weekend in an isolated cottage on the Essex marshes during World War II. She hears on the radio that her husband's ship has been sunk with many many lives lost, her phone line was dead and it was too late to travel back to her home in London that night, where she dreaded a telegram may be waiting so she resolves to leave first thing the following morning. She thinks back over her life, the events which lead up to her present crisis. As a child Mary attended school on Cromwell Road, Kensington, living with her mother and Uncle Geoffrey, an actor in a flat near Olympia, West Kensington, her father having been killed at Thiepval in 1916. But it was her holidays spent at her paternal grandparents' house near Taunton in Somerset for which she had her fondest and most vivid memories. Especially of her cousin Denys, studying at Eton, who was her first love until he disappears with another girl at his first Oxford college ball.