Loving [Paperback]

Drama unfolds between the servants and masters of an aristocratic Irish household in this “classic upstairs-downstairs story” set during World War II—for fans of Downton Abbey (Time)
 
The war has led to a scarcity of experienced staff at the vast hereditary house of an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family. When Eldon the butler dies, Raunce—the head footman—is assigned his job. The other servants are taken aback by this irregular promotion, but lovely young Edith, a recent hire, is quite attracted to the
older Raunce and a flirtation begins. And it is Edith who discovers Mrs. Tennant’s daughter-in-law, whose husband is fighting at the front, in bed with a neighbor one morning, scandalizing the whole household.

When the Tennants depart for England, Raunce is left in charge of the house and struggles to control its disputatious inhabitants as well as to secure the love of Edith, especially after a precious family jewel disappears. In Loving, Henry Green explores the deeply precarious nature of ordinary life against the background of the larger world at war.“No English novel of the 1940s has better stood the test of time. Indeed Loving has gathered power, the way photographs and very few novels do, simply by outlasting the people in it. The characters we meet seem so real, so attended to, so beautifully themselves, that it is a question whether we can forgive them for ever having to die.”
—Lorin Stein, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Loving is dominated by what it excludes—as much by the war as by the interior lives of its characters. For both the war and the interior life remain a void within the novel, which Green’s settl³R