This thought had often occurred to her father, and he had to blame himself. She was wondering why, among so many disadvantages, they had to endure the daily annoyance of hearing their names mispronounced, when there were so many which could have been uttered without offence. Next door – in another house of lodgers lives the vicious Miss Jewel, jealously guarding her lodger the curate Mr Sproat and watching Louisa with delicious disapproval, noticing farmer Thomas Grimshaw’s weekly visits and spying on Jenny and Dahlia too. Dahlia is more laid back, but Jenny is acutely embarrassed by her mother, and lives in horror of her mother’s older sister Sarah descending on them. Now Jenny and Dahlia feel the sharp glances of their neighbours who see the still beautiful Louisa as not respectable and assume her daughters are no better. Jenny and Dahlia are socially superior to their mother, taking after their gentleman father who had previously protected them from their mother’s common ways and the gossip surrounding a supposed affair years earlier. Here their mother has installed the first of her lodgers, young Mr Cummings, who knows about antique furniture and has ambitions for a shop of his own. Jenny and her older sister Dahlia Rendall have recently moved from their old home at the white farm, in the countryside to a house in Upper Radstowe. Some of them are flat fronted, a few are bow-windowed and some have flimsy, roofed balconies outside the first floor windows, and these, even when in need of painting, give an effect of diminished but persistent gaiety to a terrace built in an age of leisure and of privilege.” “In the sloping, one sided street called Beulah Mount, no two houses are alike. It's a more complex book than may appear. Jenny Wren herself holds this together - an unreal character, feeling sexual desire and social unease in a toxic combination.

The marriage of the Rendall parents at the heart of the book is one where sexual attraction overpowers propriety - and this marriage infects all of the other relationships and individuals in the book - from the desiccated women who see Louisa's sensuality as some kind of unspoken threat, to the men who cast their eyes over the Rendall women. And she is also in the business of love and marriage. Like Jane Austen, she is acutely aware of the minutiae of the English class system. Like Jane Austen, the book delights in opposites and contrasts, and also in picking them apart at the seams to show that they are often not quite what they seem. Jenny and Dahlia are the daughters of sensual countrywoman Louisa, and an academic, intellectual, socially superior, and now deceased father. Jenny Wren is Jenny Rendall - one of two sisters living with their mother in a boarding house in Upper Radstowe (Bristol, for those interested in imaginary topography).

Jenny wren