Eve in Egypt by Jane Starr (1929)

This is an emanation of its era in a few ways. It is light and funny in the style that is now seen as 'classically' twenties, but with the underhang of the erudition and gravitas of the period directly before it lending it a sense of artistic balance. It has a little of what is now known as casual racism scoring through it, defining its belonging to the colonial era. In a literary sense, it is also an example of that much-discussed thing between the wars, the essay-novel, astonishingly giving it the cred of being at the very outside edges of modernism! Jane Starr was the pseudonym of Stella 'Tennyson' Jesse, sister of the well known novelist and crime writer F. (Fryn) Tennyson Jesse (the 'Tennyson' is an adoption based on their father's name). It could so very easily have been sluggish in comparison, less 'professional' than her sister's work, simply a vanity project. It is thankfully nothing of the kind; Stella was as much of a born writer as her sibling. Her project is to translate a travelogue into fictional form. Based upon an actual journey undertaken by the sisters, Fryn's husband and a bachelor uncle a few years before, it is the story of four people who take a journey in a dahabeah up the Nile, visiting sites of significance and learning about the culture as they go. Stella translates the original four into two couples where the women are indeed sisters, but the other man is now an eligible, knowledgable and capable young bachelor who has to come to terms with the fact that he's in love with Eve, the younger unmarried sister. She has a spirited and fizzing character, and is captivated by Egypt, wanting to learn all he knows and more besides. She also has to come to terms with the fact that he has captured her affections. The slow progress of this familiarity is offset by the continual change of scene, and some quietly delightful witty dialogue and situations, as well as genuine reverence for the fascinations of Egypt. The aspect that marks this out as more than just froth is the writer's understanding of balance. It would be very easy to simply hash material like this together; she wrote it as a ten pound bet with Fryn's husband, the playwright H. M. Harwood, after all. But there is some instinct in her which knows how to pluck charm from each episode, in a flowing run of greater or lesser impact, which gives enormous satisfaction to the reader. It also gives the lie to all the agonising over whether or not the essay-novel was a viable experiment; it was, if the writer knew their stuff.