Don't Look at Me Like That Book

Veteran editor Diana Athill's novella Don't Look at Me Like That, first published in 1967, is a polished tale of a young woman's sentimental education in the 1950s. Meg Bailey, the daughter of a poor rural vicar, is first introduced as a 16-year-old into "polite" society by her wealthy, glamorous school friend Roxanne Weaver. As the years pass, Roxanne settles for marriage and respectability, while Meg drifts in a somnolent haze through art school and tentative jobs as a freelance illustrator in London. Despite taking lovers and becoming part of a bohemian, free-spirited household, Meg remains aloof, her hesitant personality buried beneath that of the confident showiness of Roxanne and of Roxanne's manipulative mother--until she smashes the accepted mores of her upbringing and of society by embarking on an affair with a married man. Echoing such coming-of-age novels as Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets and Elizabeth Jane Howard's The Beautiful Visit, Don't Look at Me Like That evokes a London of rain; grimy bedsits, plush, hushed restaurants, illicitness and despair. Eschewing sentimentality for the precision that distinguished her later memoir, Stet, Athill skilfully blends diffidence and pathos to produce a story at once all-too familiar and unique. --Catherine TaylorRead More