Herself Surprised

by Joyce Cary

Book Overview

Herself Surprised is the story of Sara Monday, a former housemaid who tells of "her grand days" and of all her "coming down days since."

Looking back from a prison cell on a life that covers the first half of the twentieth century, Sara introduces a gallery of vivid characters: her timid and doting husband, Mr. Monday; Rozzie, her hard-boiled friend; her various lovers including the brilliant but dangerously violent painter Gully Jimson and the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1839013761
• ISBN13: 9781839013768
• Release Date: December 2021
• Publisher: Lume Books
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

This is truly a great book

My take on Sara Monday is very different from what I'm reading here. I believe that she loved life and indulged herself in its pleasures. At the same time she was a nurturing soul. Read it for yourself to decide about her character. Gulley Jimson is also a great character. The descriptions in this book are wonderful. She describes the sea as being like oven glass one day and the edges of knives another. It is so good that I didn't want it to end, and now I'm going to read the other two books in the trilogy.

One of the most enjoyable novels of its period

Cary's Sara Monday has often been compared--quite rightly--to Moll Flanders, another irresistible, irrepressible woman of highly suspect morals. Sara's odd adventures in marriage and love make for a highly entertaining read, but you should also pay close attention to her observations of her society; for a woman of little apparent reflection, there's very little that seems to escape her notice. All three books in the Gulley Jimson triptych are remarkable, but this one has a special poignancy.

Cary's triptych

I have just reread Cary's three novels, Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim and The Horse's Mouth. It is amzing that books written during the second world war should be so secure in their tone about a vanishing England and its history. Cary uses his three entirely diffeent voices - tricky sensuous woman, nervy religious dirty old man, obsessed manipulative artist- better than anyone else i know uses the limitations of the first person to show what we do and don't know about each other. His descriptions of places and things are delicious. Also I shd like to say what beautiful books the New York Review paperbacks are to handle and read. Most people know The Horse's Mouth, and many know Herself Surprised . I'm not sure To Be A Pilgrim isn't the best and most surprising of the three- which is saying something.