This book was not terribly good, but I really enjoyed reading it, because it is a wonderful microcosm of life in Glasgow in the early 20th century. The details of neighbourhoods (Langside is very dull and respectable) and attitudes and activities of Ellen Carstairs provide an undeniably authentic look into the past, because, for all the sophomoric claims about what makes true writerly imagination, this is an undeniably heavily autobiographical book. I suspect that the internal musings of young Ellen have little to do with Carswell's desire to create a character, and are instead serving as a mouthpiece for Carswell herself. This is autofiction from a half century before the term was invented (1976, according to the OED). And if these musings are genuinely the thoughts of Carswell herself, then I don't think she was a terribly nice person. Ellen is constantly making quite snide, unkind remarks about the people in her life, which seem to me entirely uncalled for -- and, given the narrative gimmick that this diary is simply notes for letters to her friend, seem quite gossipy. It's one thing to make private remarks in a private diary of this sort, but if you're instead writing a draft of letters to a friend, it becomes awfully catty and mean. 

There was, however, a very good extended metaphor about marriage for a woman being like walking to a destination on foot, rather than taking a car in traffic. What is so laborious for the foot traveller is complicated further by the rapid, easy passage of everyone in cars blocking road crossings; how it is easier to trust one's progress to a driver, and look out in ease and comfort at the world from inside a car; and yet, if the driver goes in the opposite direction from where you want to go, you'll never get somewhere that on foot you would eventually reach. 

I think there's a real authenticity about young Ellen's internal agonies about her engagement that wouldn't work in a modern book written today, but set in the same era. The way she genuinely wants to have her own career and independence, yet at the same time fully buys into all sorts of gender essentialist claptrap, reads very differently from the pen of an author who genuinely lived that life, compared to an author who imagines one living that life, while having in fact grown up in a world whose public Discourse has evolved from a century's converation of those ideas. A modern writer would probably try to take Ellen on a journey in which she realizes that she can have a fulfilled life that does not depend on carrying out her expected role as a wife and mother; but from Carswell's pen, it seems like Ellen is genuinely giving up something that she wants and believes in. The sacrifice is realer, and cannot be turned into a #GirlBoss parable.

I think if the quality of the writing had been better, I would have been very moved by this book. But as it is, it's not a terribly good book, and interesting more as an artifact of the literary history of my city, than as a piece of literature.