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The L-Shaped Room (Jane Graham #1)

Lynne Reid Banks

Paperback | Pages: 269 pages

Rating: 3.96 | 2633 Users | 166 Reviews

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Original Title:	The L-Shaped Room
Edition Language:	English
Series:	Jane Graham #1

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It’s such a drag being an unwilling member of the PC Police, scanning fiction from the 1950s for standard racism and homophobia and grilling authors about their gender politics, so that when you choose to read a novel published in 1960 about a 27 year old woman having an illegitimate baby you feel you want to lay all the righteousness to one side and jump into this different pre-swinging time, just as you would a Jane Austin crinolinefest. But this author doesn’t make it easy to do that because she shoves the racism right in your face with her various Jewish characters and her big friendly loveable black jazz guitarist.

Lynne Reid Banks did a 50-year anniversary-of-the-L-Shaped-Room radio programme for the BBC and said that when she reread it for that programme the racism shocked her. “The prejudices existed and they came out in this book and I find them shame-making” she said.

Here’s an example - sorry, but we need to see exactly what we’re talking about. So here’s young Toby explaining to Jane who’s just moved into the grotty Fulham top floor flat that she needn’t be alarmed by her black neighbor John :

You mustn’t mind old John. He’s just naturally inquisitive. Like a chimp, you know, he can’t help it. He could no more resist having a look at you than a monkey could resist picking up anything new and giving it the once-over.

And now Jews. James is Jane’s boss and jumps to a conclusion about the father of the baby here:

How the hell did it happen? Why didn’t you phone me? How dare that little bastard do a thing like this? That slimy, devious little kike, I’d like to break his scrawny Yiddish neck! Don’t get me wrong, Jane, I’ve nothing against the Jews, I like them.

These casual or not so casual racist insults pop up so frequently that it’s like Lynne Reid Banks had some kind of Tourette’s Syndrome – she didn’t have to make her characters Jewish or black, and it almost seems that she did in order to get in passages like this one:

“Say coloureds don’t smell different from us. That one did. Smelt like a polecat.”
“Oh come now, father,” I said, not able to help laughing. “Polecats smell vile. John doesn’t smell like one at all.”

Well, I think there’s something more awkward and unnerving happening here than just the expression of racism. The characters, and I would suggest, the author, are all in various ways trying or being made to realise and perhaps change their ugly attitudes. Just as the whole book is working out a way that a single woman could have a baby and not be socially ostracized, or that a woman having a baby need not automatically grab the nearest guy to be a substitute husband and father. So the whole novel is this desperately uncomfortable fifties-about-to-become-the-sixties time when changes are only just beginning to happen. This means you get Jane veering between sod these men, I am on my own now and that’s okay by me and :

You darling blackbird! I thought, yearning for him, my treacherous female arms longing to imprison him forever.

The L-Shaped Room is a total time capsule, and fits right alongside A Taste of Honey, A Kind of Loving, Alfie and Georgy Girl (all of which are festooned with illegitimate offspring). Two final points : LRB says the movie with Leslie Caron is a travesty, and she also said that the book is totally not autobiographical, leading her mother to ask her if she shouldn’t publish it under a pseudonym as most people would assume it was. (I assumed it was!)

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Title	:	The L-Shaped Room (Jane Graham #1)
Author	:	Lynne Reid Banks
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 269 pages
Published	:	(first published January 1st 1960)
Categories	:	Fiction. Classics. Novels. Literature. 20th Century

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Ratings: 3.96 From 2633 Users | 166 Reviews

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I read this when I was 22 and living in London. It made me search all Lynn Reid Banks books for a while. Just thinking about this book is causing a rush of memories and remembered emotions. If just thinking about a book can cause that much internal activity, I feel justified in the five stars.

It must be more than 10 years since I read this book, originally bought for me by my mother but lent out somewhere on life's path. It was appropriate though that on a wet day in March I happened across a battered old hardback edition in my local library and took it home for a happy re-read.This book exudes the feel of the early sixties, and is surprisingly honest about taboo subjects at the time - single mothers, prostitution, abortion, racism, and homosexuality. Jane is in her late twenties and

Really enjoyed this book. I was hooked from the start by the narrator, Jane, who has a compelling voice. Some of the interest for me is in how much times have changed. Jane is unmarried and pregnant and experiences huge amounts of prejudice as a result, which is hard to imagine now (thankfully). This could be a depressing book, but actually is mostly about the unexpected kindness of the people she meets and therefore isn't. It is a first person narrative and there are some unpleasant remarks

This was published before the sixties swung (1960) and is the story of Jane, an upper middle class girl of 27 who finds herself pregnant and single. She moves out of her fathers house, into an L-shaped room in a dodgy house in a dodgy area.Her self-awareness and the way she analyses her feelings and those of people around make the novel transcend its period although she dislikes Tobys useless fund of self-knowledge. At times she wants to punish herself, and telling her father was like a

...I learned that 'confession' doesn't ease the soul, but challenges it.This book was a time capsule.I agree with Paul Bryant, it was often awkward and unnerving. I didn't know that the 50-ties in the UK had prejudices still 'flowing in the veins'. I am tempted to quote some ridiculous opinions about homosexuality or Jews (or people with darker skin), just to show you their absurdity, but it is better to bury them. By the way, mentioned Paul Bryant wrote that (50 years after the novel was first

Jane's struggle to cope is a journey of self discovery and independence..... a wistful and haunting period piece.You can almost feel the squalor of the stark dingy L shaped room where Jane goes when her father threw her out after he discovered she was pregnant.Set in 1950's London where life was very different and unmarried mother's were frowned upon!Jane ends up in a bed sit in a house in Fulham.Beset by bed bugs, dirt and morning sickness.Her neighbours bring comfort to her, John the black

Stars Lynne SeymourCategory:Dramaafter 5 episodes I have firmly decided that the subject does not appeal.