The L-Shaped Room

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The cinematic L-Shaped Room was on the top floor of 4 St Luke’s Road W11, adjoining St Luke’s Mews, now one of the most well-maintained properties on the street. If Doris could have held on until the film Notting Hill came out in 1999, she would have been a very rich old landlady. For Jane now faces a familiar situation. It is her father she is running away from, a distant, awkward man, who, like most English males of his generation, has survived Depression and two World Wars without ever expressing his feelings. The combination of confessing her plight to him and the situation surrounding her own birth invoke emotions in Jane too terrible to bear. By contrast The L-Shaped Room doesn't have any malevolent nasty hypocrites, which gives the book an inherent charm. The book is a gem that captures the mood and character of the late 'fifties early 'sixties. Despite this story's time-based deficiencies, this story is real, showing the dilemma of a young woman who has to find her own way after an unwanted pregnancy changes her life in ways it no longer does today.

little fledgling that had fallen out of its nest, but I very soon realised there was more to him than that.” She forms friendships. With John, the affable musician who lives in the room next to hers. With Mavis, the elderly spinster who lives in the room below hers. And with Toby, a struggling writer, who could maybe become more than a friend. Jane hides her pregnancy (she thinks) very well from those around her, feeling that to avoid the discussion at all is better somehow than lying about it. Jane eventually loses her job when her condition becomes too obvious to further ignore, but she finds solace in her growing friendships with her fellow tenants, and in a blossoming love affair with Toby. Lynne Reid Banks is a British author of books for children and adults. She has written forty books, including the best-selling children's novel The Indian in the Cupboard, which has sold over 10 million copies and been made into a film.

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For a while, I was unable to put down The L-Shaped Room and I really liked it, but those feelings faded for a multitude of reasons (most of which I can't shape into coherent thoughts). I have been searching for this title for a couple of years now!!! (Could not remember the name of the author, and for a while there I thought the room was actually circular, ha ha!)

My rating: 5/10. Just barely. It had a few good moments, but I generally did not care for this one. On the credit side, Jane does grow somewhat as a person as the story progresses; I found myself wondering if the author made Jane’s inner voice so critical and offensive to highlight how far she had to travel to approach a more tolerant and accepting point-of-view. She hassn’t quite gotten there by the end of the novel, though. Perhaps she progresses more in the next two books of the trilogy? Jane immediately decides she will keep and raise the baby, without telling her ex-lover, as she feels this is strictly her own affair, and she wants the child to completely belong to her. She is offered an opportunity for an abortion by the doctor whom she consults to confirm her pregnancy, but with high moral purpose, Jane indignantly turns the suggestion down.

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The L-Shaped Room tells the story of Jane, a single young woman who falls pregnant. Jane is a brave character who decides to bring up the baby by herself, after her father throws her out of home. Her feelings of determination are also saturated by shame. To punish herself she rents a sordid L-shaped room at the top of a run-down boarding house in Fulham. To say more would be to ruin a story that initially felt incidental but became more compelling towards the book's conclusion. Taking pity on Jane’s obviously reduced circumstances he finally finds a little heart, directing her to his friend Frank’s café for a decent cuppa. ‘Pity they don’t divide cafés off into salon and public, if you ask me. People like to be with their own sort. Not as how you’d find many of your sort around here…’ Who Shall I Run To? - Sally recalls how she and ex-husband Jeremy celebrated their 35th wedding anniversary with a romantic trip to Paris. Read by Siân Phillips. ever have been fond of it...' She glanced round with distaste. At the same moment her foor was unconsciously straightening the The tarts in the basement offer Jane a window on another forbidden world. When she makes a tentative visit downstairs, in an attempt to measure her own fall from grace against those that sell sex professionally, she finds that her older namesake Jane is not so hard-bitten as she had imagined. Both this Jane, and her Hungarian roommate Sonia, have fallen into a way of life more by accident than design. The former takes on the resigned demeanour of a hard-pressed social worker: