Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Morley, Christopher

Morley, Christopher

Parnassus on Wheels, [12] 53; The Haunted Bookshop, [85] 47

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20250301100030 Richard Platt on Parnassus, SF Issue 85

The Noblest Profession

Richard Platt on Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels & The Haunted Bookshop

Helen McGill has a problem. A self-described ageing spinster – she is, good heavens, approaching forty – Helen is feeling unappreciated by the Sage of Redfield, her brother Andrew, whose books about life on the farm and the virtues of pastoral living have made him a literary celebrity – and to Helen’s thinking, very much at her expense. For it is Helen who bakes the bread and collects the eggs and cooks the meals on her wood-fired stove and cleans the house and darns the socks so that the Sage may amble down country roads and come home to lean on his fence, light his pipe and think big thoughts. Then, having handed his sister his dirty laundry, the Sage will retire to his study, warm and well-fed, to spin yarns about his adventures in ‘the bosom of Nature’ and reflect on the Simple Life. When Roger Mifflin, a caravan-driving itinerant bookseller, appears at her door hoping to meet the great man, who yet again has wandered off on ‘some vagabond jaunt to collect adventures for a new book’ and left Helen to run the farm, Helen decides she has had enough.

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