{"product_id":"the-other-day","title":"The Other Day","description":"\u003cdiv data-mce-fragment=\"1\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"\u003e\n\u003cimg data-mce-fragment=\"1\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/7642\/5795\/files\/theotherdaycover_480x480.jpg?v=1665827975\" alt=\"\" style=\"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\" data-mce-src=\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/7642\/5795\/files\/theotherdaycover.jpg?v=1665827975\u0026amp;width=700\" data-mce-style=\"display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;\"\u003e\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e256pp\u003cbr\u003eISBN 9781910263341\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe Other Day\u003c\/strong\u003e was commissioned in 1935. The literary agent Michael Joseph told Dorothy Whipple that ‘he was going to set up as a publisher and wanted me to write a book – an autobiography – for him to publish. I kept on saying I couldn’t do it and he kept on saying I could’ (\u003cstrong\u003eRandom Commentary\u003c\/strong\u003e p. 60).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDespite her misgivings – a few weeks later she wrote ‘I hate my autobiography. How can I drivel on like this for 80,000 words?’ – she had finished by the New Year of 1936. Michael Joseph was delighted. ‘He says \u003cstrong\u003eThe Other Day\u003c\/strong\u003e is far the best thing I have done yet [she had by then published \u003cstrong\u003eYoung Anne\u003c\/strong\u003e,\u003cstrong\u003e \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHigh Wages\u003c\/strong\u003e, \u003cstrong\u003eGreenbanks \u003c\/strong\u003eand \u003cstrong\u003eThey Knew Mr Knight\u003c\/strong\u003e]. He says I don’t know what a good book I have written. I glowed with sherry and happiness.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is indeed a wonderfully entertaining book, describing in a charming and insightful way DW’s first twelve years (she was born in 1893). Each chapter describes her at a different age, from three years old to twelve, with her large and very happy family in the background and foreground. Her parents were sensible and loving, her siblings affectionate and rumbustious, her grandmother kind and understanding (she is evoked in \u003cstrong\u003eGreenbanks\u003c\/strong\u003e).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn her Preface to \u003cstrong\u003eYoung Anne\u003c\/strong\u003e, Dorothy Whipple’s first and most autobiographical novel published in 1927, Lucy Mangan writes: ‘Like Dorothy Whipple, Anne is the youngest child of a respectable, middle-class Lancastrian family, sensitive yet unsentimental, and alert to the nuances of human behaviour, even if she struggles at times to understand their full meaning.’ It was this theme of the sensitive child trying to understand and adapt to the tyranny of grownups, of adults and children living side by side in mutually inaccessible worlds, that would be explored in even more depth in \u003cstrong\u003eThe Other Day\u003c\/strong\u003e a decade later.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA very ‘noticing’ child, from an early age DW had the acute eye for domestic detail which would be used to such superb effect in her novels; because one of the most extraordinary things about \u003cstrong\u003eThe Other Day\u003c\/strong\u003e, especially for those of us who do not remember much about our own childhoods, is DW’s total recall. Here is the passage about the death of Queen Victoria in 1901: ‘A bell tolled. The bell tolled again. “She’s gone,” said my mother in a strange voice…I leaned against the sofa, listening. The air was like a jelly slapped by the bell. At each slap the jelly wobbled violently; then less and less; it merely quivered; but before it could set into stillness the bell slapped it again. I waited for each bell. “The Queen is dead,” I said to myself. It had a solemn sound. The bell was solemn too. It was the most majestic solemn moment I had known. I was conscious of it, but I was also conscious that the Good Queen had died just in time to save Mrs B’s baby from falling into the coal-box, and me from a severe scolding, or worse.’\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDorothy Whipple was clearly an outstanding and admirable person – perceptive, funny, kind, lacking in vanity, someone whom every single Persephone reader would love to have known. \u003cstrong\u003eThe Other Day\u003c\/strong\u003e will tell Whipple admirers a great deal about her as a child and how she became the adult and the writer that she did. And now we have published and adored every single one of her books and with great sadness we must accept that fact and that there is nothing more to come.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"layoutArea\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEndpaper\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe Other Day\u003c\/strong\u003e endpaper is a 1900 printed linen textile with stylised tulips and ogee leaf frames.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dorothy Whipple","offers":[{"title":"None","offer_id":54098794774835,"sku":"feq1789694832268","price":28.4,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Tissue\/Endpaper","offer_id":54098794807603,"sku":"gva1789694832269","price":29.76,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Cambridge Imprint paper","offer_id":54098794840371,"sku":"aig1789694832270","price":39.78,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Reusable fabric napkin","offer_id":54098794873139,"sku":"tih1789694832271","price":48.91,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0989\/0578\/4627\/files\/the-other-day_1.jpg?v=1789694843","url":"https:\/\/sandstepclad.shop\/products\/the-other-day","provider":"My Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}