The L-Shaped Room

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Oh, I've met them,' she said. 'You can't help it. That John. He looks after me like he was my mother or

I read this as a teenager, and it was probably the first teenage book I read. As such, it made a huge impression on me and made me think about gritty social issues which I had never before considered: abortion, teenage mothers, poverty. These were all things which I had no actual first-hand experience of, and the idea of the multiracial society was worlds away in my provincial town. I didn't realise that there were sequels to 'The L-Shaped Room'. It would be interesting to read the whole series to see how it progressed and to examine the issues again, thirty-something years on. In 1950s London, Jane Graham, pregnant after a one-night stand she regrets, is thrown out by her father, takes a room for thirty bob a week on the top floor of a squalid house in Fulham and starts to meet her fellow housemates. I read this and liked it in 1993, and was not disappointed this time around. It’s an engaging, readable book that had me living and breathing the 1950s, and isn’t overly sentimental, which it could have been. There were moments, particularly near the end of the book, when things fell into place a little too well. But I was caught up by them and so I accepted it. 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: The feelings of dread and dislocation stirred by the initial observations of the book’s narrator, twenty-seven-year-old Jane Graham, are heightened by the mentions of these working girls and the memory of Doris’s gaze resting on her waistband as she shows her the crudely partitioned room of the title. Jane is in a position that no unattached career girl would want to find herself in as the Sixties began. Seven years before abortion was made legal and a year before the pill first arrived in Britain, she is one month pregnant.

She was too proud, too independent, to go home and so she took a job in a cafe. And she made a success of it, working diligently and intelligently, standing her ground against a boss who would have been all too ready to take advantage of her, and rising above the gossiping customers who wonder why the actress is working in a cafe.

She was watching me now. 'It must be funny for you, seeing me in this place. Though I don't know how you couldDespite 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. My rating: 5/10. Just barely. It had a few good moments, but I generally did not care for this one. a b "The L-shaped Room (1962)". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 28 February 2016.

The L-Shaped Room brilliantly evokes a grim era when women were routinely patronised and made to feel guilty, and when being single and pregnant exacerbated this treatment. It also perfectly chronicles the lives of people on the fringes of society thrown together in a boarding house. I realise this might make the book sound depressing, and it contains plenty of downbeat sections, however ultimately it is a novel about courage, friendship, self-discovery, family, and redemption. I thought it was a great read. The analogy of turning a corner in one’s life and the shape of the room could be banal, but is never laboured. I think the main flaw is that most of the major points in the plot are annoyingly easy to spot in advance and although Jane is intelligent and often quite perceptive about people, she doesn’t anticipate any of them. Nevertheless, it generally avoids moralising and sentimentality, even when talking about the “spiritual bleeding” when lovers have to separate too soon after making love. Early on in the novel when she was working within an acting troupe she describes her antagonistic relationship with a gay actor who fancies her boyfriend Terry. She and Terry make out in front of this gay man to show him that they are “normal” and that he is not. Later on she visits a curry house and remarks how the Indians who serve her smile “in an enigmatic Eastern way.” It’s interesting thinking how progressive it must have been at the time to portray homosexuals and racial minorities in any way within a novel. However, no one could write such descriptions now without being considered bigoted. But, in a way, I’m glad that Jane’s provincial point of view is so blatant as it highlights her unconscious prejudices and how they contrast so sharply against the prejudice she receives as an unmarried pregnant woman in this time. She’s sympathetic and friendly with the racial and sexual minorities that she meets in the novel, but she was probably totally naïve about the way her attitude denigrated these people. Interestingly she seems more conscious of the effect her ex-boyfriend Terry’s anti-Semitic attitude has on her Jewish neighbour Toby.

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Jane herself is ashamed at the beginning of this story. Over the next 9 months, she matures and grows. She becomes aware of her own insecurities, phobias, fears, prejudices....and their irrelevance. remembered again to ask what I'd come for. As I wasn't very clear about it myself, it was naturally difficult to think what to tell her; but I managed to falter something unconvincing about Anyhow. The L-Shaped Room. In my opinion, not nearly as good as Margaret Drabble's The Millstone which is a similar book. (Both novels tell tell the story of an unmarried woman who becomes pregnant in a time when it was still unacceptable in most circles.) It's hard to imagine (thankfully) a 27-year old woman being thrown out of her parental home for getting pregnant and being called a "tart".

This is, after all, just one woman’s story. Others, in the same situation at the same time, must have encountered far more difficulties.The L shaped room is where Jane retreated to after her Father, her only hope, threw her out on the street. I'll admit, that made me feel pretty angry, but Jane Graham was a surprisingly capable and wonderfully strong character, that was unfiltered and unapologetically, herself. I liked her character, and her will to survive. She had been an actress, with a touring company, and she was doing well. She didn’t have much money, but she managed, she was happy doing what she wanted to do with her life. But Jane got on the wrong side of a difficult actor, and was ‘let go’.