Small Pleasures

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 5

Chapters 6-15

Chapters 16-19

Chapters 20-29

Chapters 30-Afterword

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Background

Geographical Context: Kent County, England

Small Pleasures takes place in Hayes, a town in Kent County in England—the town where Clare Chambers currently lives. Her knowledge of and experience with the town and its history shape the novel; most importantly, the train derailment in the novel is a historical fact of Kent history. Chambers explains in her afterword that, though she resided in Kent for many years, she never knew of the Lewisham railway disaster until she started researching the novel, even though this 1957 accident was “the second-worst peacetime railway disaster in British history” (339). Stumbling on this event helped Chambers frame the setting for her novel.

For research, Chambers relied on multiple magazines, newspapers, and novels about Kent and Britain in the 1950s. Studying ephemeral like this rather than history written after the fact allows the novel to have a sense of immediacy, immersing readers in the local culture and daily life of Kent as it was experienced by people living at that time. Chambers’s narrative tightly fits into the trappings and customs of the 1950s, featuring the time’s attitudes toward women’s independence and domestic responsibilities, LGBTQ+ relationships, intellectual disability, and sexual assault.

Chambers uses historical articles and interviews to enhance world-building and characterization—and includes such articles in the novel itself, a literary element explored later in this guide.

Historical Context: 1950s England

Life for women in 1950s England was largely shaped by the political reforms and cultural change sweeping across England after World War II. Much like the post-war United States, post-war Britain placed pressure on women to relinquish any gains in the public and professional sphere and to return to the domestic sphere, working in homes as wives and mothers to solidify the nuclear family—then touted as the foundation of a strong, unified country.

Unlike in the United States, however, women in Britain had more opportunities to enter the workforce, with equal pay in some professions. Feminist writers of the period highlighted the necessity of combining domestic work with professional work. In the novel, this tension is explored when Jean finds success as a journalist, but struggles to balance her identities as a professional and a woman when she begins to pursue “small pleasures”—romance and courtship. Nevertheless, Jean’s workplace is not fully egalitarian. At the Echo, she writes articles specifically directed toward women described as “housewives,” which suggest the normative pull of domesticity. Also, professional success does not mean financial comfort. Post-war Britain was economically depressed, and food and other goods were rationed until the early 1950s and coal until almost 1960. In the novel, the stash of small luxuries that Jean feels unable to use and instead saves for an undefined future time points to the privation of the previous two decades.

Jean and Gretchen offer differing versions of 1950s women—Jean, who wears trousers and very little make-up and Gretchen, who presents as immaculately feminine, both in dress and in her ability to bake sweet goods to perfection. However, both women are negatively impacted by the strict feminine roles imposed upon them. Jean, unmarried in her 30s and dealing with sexism in the workplace, compares herself negatively to married women. Gretchen cannot live as an out lesbian, cannot openly declare her love for Martha, and cannot raise Margaret out of wedlock without external condemnation.

The main tension of the novel—whether Gretchen is lying about Margaret’s conception—also adheres to the harsh criticism women endured in this time period with regard to sexuality. Proper womanhood demanded sexual purity—so much so that even sexual assault was often seen as shameful for the victim rather than the perpetrator.