Martha, Eric and George by Margery Sharp

Richard Hogg, with his motherless daughter, had lodged two full years in Hasty Street but a landlady never does these things so wholeheartedly as relations, even with the Burial Club paid up and the next week’s rent in hand.)' (As Doctor Johnson might have said, it wasn’t a funeral to invite a man to: only one bottle of sherry and fish-paste sandwiches. – A dozen or so of Richard Hogg’s ex-colleagues from the post office stared inquisitively this meeting between the two chief mourners provided a touch of drama, something to talk about afterwards, otherwise conspicuously lacking. 'She had never seen the child until an hour earlier she had never before visited the shabby Brixton lodging-house in whose shabby parlour the thinly-attended wake was being held. It is 1929 Miss Dolores Diver’s widowed brother Richard Hogg has just died, leaving behind nothing of worldly value to his six-year-old-child, Martha, now a bona-fide orphan with an uncertain future. It had been wonderfully kind of Miss Diver to save her brother’s child from an orphanage, but not surprising what was surprising was how well the arrangement had worked out.' 'Ladies of ambiguous status have by convention hearts of gold, and Miss Diver was nothing if not conventional but a child in an irregular household is often an embarrassment.

I am surprised that these do not appear in an omnibus edition that would be kindest to the reader, and not unmanageable, as the three books are individually short and quick reads.

These definitely need to be read in order to get a full appreciation of the journey of our unlikely heroine Martha. Margery Sharp wrote a trilogy of sorts between 19: The Eye of Love, Martha in Paris, and Martha, Eric and George. She has the baby in secret, and then leaves it with a note at Eric's front door. Drops him without his knowing that - he had plans to marry and obviously then she'd give up art. But if she had the least reason to think that either of those habits were bad for her art, they'd be out on their ear. Oh, she likes a good bath, and she eats like she is built. She's an artist, obsessed with shape, and then with colour.

Martha is fat and plain, but she doesn't give a toss - or not even that, it's more that she hasn't even ever thought about such trivial matters. Margery Sharp again manages to combine sheer elegance of language with heroines that are anything but. I imagined that she'd run rings about Mr Joyce and that she'd make me laugh in the process. That's a real suck-you-in sentence which had me loving Martha without knowing a dang thing about her.

'I've come,' announced Mr Joyce, 'to talk about Martha.'

Martha, Eric and George by Margery Sharp