The fourth of 12 volumes in Powell’s roman-fleuve entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, this novel continues the first-person point of view narration of Nicholas Jenkins, a writer, as he begins his adult life in London.

In the overall structure of the series, At Lady Molly’s is positioned at the beginning of the second of four “movements,” following The Acceptance World and preceding Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. This portion of the series focuses on the theme of love, including affairs, marriages, and divorces.

Nick becomes an increasingly frequent visitor at Lady Molly’s. She has come down somewhat in the world, having divorced her aristocratic first husband and married Ted Jeavons. They keep a large house in London that seems to be continually filled with visitors. There one may find the most extraordinary assortment of guests, some temporary and some permanent, in a setting of pleasant, homey disorder.

Anthony Powell

Among the visitors are the many members of the Tolland family, and his acquaintance widens as he meets more and more of them; by the end of the novel, Nick is on the verge of marrying into this aristocratic group.

Sometime later, Nick runs into J. G. Quiggen and is invited to visit him in the country. The ungainly Quiggen had stolen Peter Templer’s beautiful wife Mona in The Acceptance World; now this unlikely couple is living together, and Quiggen has acquired a mysterious patron who shares his leftist ideology. More important, Mona has taken a notion to become a film star, and since Nick is writing screenplays, he seems the ideal person to assist her in making the right contacts.

While Nick is visiting, the mysterious patron drops by and turns out to be Lord Warminster (called Erridge), the head of the Tolland family and master of Thrubworth, a grand old estate somewhat the worse for Erridge’s management of it.

In an eccentric family, Erridge wins the prize for strangeness: his title is wasted on him, and he sometimes wanders in the countryside taking manual labor in the manner of a tramp (a characteristic he shares with George Orwell) in order to better understand the laboring masses. Erridge invites Quiggen, Mona, and Nick to dine with him in the little apartment that is the only part of Thrubworth not mothballed. At the modest dinner, Erridge proves to be a competent host, and Mona begins to flirt with him in subtle ways.

Unexpectedly, as dinner concludes, two young women arrive who turn out to be more Tollands. They have dropped by to tell Erridge that Susan, the elder of them, has just gotten engaged. Of greater interest to Nick, however, is the younger sister, Isobel: when he sees her, he knows he has found his future wife. By a lucky stroke, they have a car, and they offer to give Nick a lift home.

Everyone in Nick’s circle is pairing up, settling down, or splitting up, and by the novel’s end he decides it is time for him to marry. The week that his engagement to Isobel is announced, Erridge unexpectedly departs for a tour of China, taking Mona with him. More sensational events absorb all the conversational attention at the party Lady Molly throws for Nick and Isobel to celebrate their engagement.

Nick’s old school friend Mark Members, a Freudian and a poet, is there and shares some details about Mona’s desertion of Quiggen, including the crucial fact that the two of them were never legally married. The Tollands are eager to know whether their bachelor brother is likely to beget an heir to Thrubworth and the family titles; that future might come to pass if Mona can maintain her hold on him.

One phase of Nick’s life closes and another begins in this section of A Dance to the Music of Time. In the bright whirl of apparently random social encounters, he finds the permanent partner he has lacked up to this point. He is fully mature, ready to move from the fringes of the marriage dance to the very center. In the remaining two books of this movement, love and marriage continue to be the dominant theme as couples in likely and unlikely combinations try their luck at matrimony. Nick’s own choice proves to be the right one, and he and Isobel stay together for a long and amicable marriage.

Bibliography

Joyau, Isabelle. Understanding Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Selig, Robert L. Time and Anthony Powell. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1991.
Spurling, Hillary. Invitation to the Dance: A Guide to Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Boston: Little, Brown, 1977.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell, Anthony Powell critical analysis, aristocracy in fiction, At Lady Molly’s, British class system in novels, British fiction family dynamics, character-driven fiction, English novel sequence, English social novel, Erridge character study, fictional screenwriting, interwar London fiction, Isobel Jenkins, Lady Molly Jeavons, literary character development, literary series analysis, literary themes of love and marriage, marriage and relationships in literature, modernist literature series, Mona and Quiggen, Nicholas Jenkins, Powell's narrative structure, roman-fleuve, surreal social satire, Thrubworth estate, Tolland family, Twentieth Century British Literature