An Author You Might Have Missed - Elizabeth Cadell

 

Years ago, browsing the downtown library shelves I came across an incredibly large number of books by an author I'd never heard of — Elizabeth Cadell. I was soon hooked on these gentle, humorous novels. Sometimes there is also a mystery involved but they invariably have enjoyable conundrums of everyday living which must be figured out by the people in the books so that everything can come out okay in the end.

These novels are often called romances but they are much more than that. They weave everyday life, mystery, and romance with likable characters who you want to succeed. A fair number of them are set in Portugal which made me aware of that country in a new way. These are books for which you can often predict the story line but which you enjoy reading and rereading nonetheless. They fit into the whatever the category is where you'd find Cold Comfort Farm, Enchanted April, and Miss Buncle's Book.

I like the independent mindset always provided for at least one protagonist, although usually against what is generally considered to be "independent" in modern times. In the book Out of the Rain, for example, everyone keeps lamenting that the beautiful young widow is perfectly content to stay at home tending to her three children. She keeps asking these lamenters why being absorbed in her children is a bad thing. None of them can answer except to say she should be getting "more" out of life. This quote is from the widow's grandfather, who she lives with, but sums up the underlying mentality of the novel pretty well.

I can't help feeling that people ask too much [of life]. They don't keep up with the Joneses any more--they outstrip them. What people call happiness, today, isn't happiness. It's enjoyment. It's pleasure. And between happiness and pleasure there's a very large gap.

The question, I suppose, is what makes us genuinely happy. That is at the bottom of all Cadell's novels.

They are witty, well plotted, and leave you in a good mood. I return to them again and again for light reading.

The covers I've included are from some of my favorites but you can hardly go wrong. 

Many of them are now on Kindle and on Audible, some of which are narrated charmingly by Cadell's granddaughter.