"Bloomsbury Girls," by Natalie Jenner

A very enjoyable novel about bookshops and about feminist struggle? I couldn’t resist that! “Bloomsbury Girls” (St. Martin’s, 2022), is by Natalie Jenner, the author of the wonderful “The Jane Austen Society,” which I wrote about here on 7/18/20. That novel was about a group of friends who were able to restore Jane Austen’s home in Chawton. (I still get chills when I think about Chawton, which I visited many years ago, and where I was overcome with awe and even became a bit tearful, knowing that I was standing where my idol had lived and written.) Some of the characters in the current novel were also in the earlier one, which took place a few years before, although readers of the current novel do not at all need to have read the earlier one. “Bloomsbury Girls” takes place in London in the post-World War II years, and focuses on the bookstore where most of the characters work, Bloomsbury Books. The three women who work there love books, and have many good ideas, but are frustrated by the sexism of the male managers and co-workers. So this is a feminist book, one of my favorite kinds! It is also full of intrigue, suspense, love, and secret relationships. Several famous women, including the author Daphne du Maurier, assist the women who work in the bookshop, and there is a palpable sense of women helping women to deal with the obstructions they all face, to one degree or another. There is, near the end of the book especially, a bit of delicious conspiracy among the women -- those inside and outside of the bookstore -- to bring about a triumphant major change in the situation at the bookshop. A truly satisfying and enjoyable novel!