The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Evie Woods
- Language: English
- Genre: Women’s Historical Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
London, 1921
I let my fingers run along the spine of the book, letting the indentations of
the embossed cover guide my skin to something tangible; something that I
believed in more than the fiction that was playing out before me. Twentyone years of age and my mother had decided that the time had come for me
to marry. My brother, Lyndon, had rather unhelpfully found some dimwitted creature who had just inherited the family business; something to do
with importing something or other from some far-flung place. I was barely
listening.
‘There are only two options open to a woman your age,’ Mother
pronounced, putting down her cup and saucer on the table beside her
armchair. ‘One is to marry, and the other to find a post in keeping with her
gentility.’
‘Gentility?’ I echoed, with some incredulity. Looking around the
drawing room with its chipped paint and faded curtains, I had to admire her
vanity. She had married beneath her station and had always been at pains to
remind my father, lest he forgot.
‘Must you do that now?’ my brother Lyndon asked, as Mrs Barrett, our
housemaid, cleared out the ashes from the grate.
‘Madam requested a fire,’ she said in a tone that showed no inflexion of
respect. She had been with us for as long as I could remember and only
took orders from my mother. The rest of us she treated like cheap imposters.
‘The fact of the matter is that you must marry,’ Lyndon parroted as he
limped across the room, leaning heavily on his walking stick. Eighteen
years my elder, the entire right side of his body had been warped by
shrapnel during the war in Flanders and the brother I once knew stayed
buried somewhere in that very field. The horrors he held in his eyes
frightened me, and even though I didn’t like to admit it, I had grown fearful
of him. ‘This is a good match. Father’s pension is barely enough for Mother
to run the house. It’s time you took your head out of your books and faced
reality.’
I clung tighter to my book. A rare first American edition of Wuthering
Heights, a gift from my father, along with a deep love of reading. Like a
talisman, I had carried the cloth-covered book, whose spine bore the
duplicitous line, tooled in gold, ‘by the author of Jane Eyre’. We had come
across it by complete chance at a flea market in Camden (a secret we could
not tell Mother)
I would later discover that Emily’s English publisher had
permitted this misattribution in order to capitalise on Jane Eyre’s
commercial success. It was not in perfect condition; the cloth boards were
worn on the edges and the back one had a v-shape nicked out of it.
EPUB