First published in 1957 (London: Heinemann, New York: Little, Brown)
After somewhat lagging behind his contemporaries in the first three volumes of A Dance, in At Lady Molly’s Nicholas Jenkins enters fully into adulthood with his marriage to Lady Isobel Tolland. Although, as Nicholas Birns writes in Understanding Anthony Powell, the marriage is referred to so obliquely it’s “easily missed.” Though the marriage is only mentioned in passing, though, Isobel’s impact on Nick is not. “I knew at once I should marry her,” he admits — caveating this bold statement, in typical Jenkins fashion, that it might be “too explicit, too exaggerated.”
Nick’s meeting Isobel is a perfect example of the portentous coincidences peppered throughout the series that act as catalysts for many of its dramatic developments. Now working as a script-writer (although Nick’s work is more accurately termed scenarist, since his treatments are several steps away from shooting scripts), he fails to meet Isobel when he first accompanies his studio workmate Chips Lovell to Lady Molly Jeavons’s house. Chips has his eye on Priscilla Tolland, whom he later marries (unhappily, as it develops). Through a chain of meetings, Nick ends up at the small country house where J. G. Quiggin has set up house with Peter Templer’s ex-wife Mona, but it’s only when Lord Warminster — Alfred Tolland, but referred to by all as Erridge — drops by and offers to have the three of them to dinner at Thurbworth, his family home, that the opportunity for Nick and Isobel to meet materializes, itself a happy accident of Isobel and Susan Tolland drop in unannounced. The steps from start to finish in this part of the dance would require a choreographer to reproduce.
At Lady Molly’s introduces a considerable number of characters who will play significant parts in A Dance, particularly through the central six volumes. Enough, in fact, that the first of many calls for an index to the characters were heard. Some are part of the extended Tolland family into which Nick marries: Chips Lovell, who becomes brother-in-law as well as acquaintance; Erridge, who comes and goes from the scene randomly and usually to his family’s bewilderment; Lady Susan Tolland and her husband, the Tory backbencher MP Roddy Cutts; Lady Molly and Ted Jeavons, her second husband. These characters serve Powell as new colors of thread and the intricacy of the Dance’s social tapestry increases considerably with this volume. (Though perhaps he’s being coy when he has Nick comment that Widmerpool’s appearance at Lady Molly’s “helped to prove somehow rather consolingly, that life continued its mysterious, patterned way.” Now the scope of Powell’s project becomes clear: easily two dozen narrative arcs of greater and lesser length are begun in At Lady Molly’s, some of which will not see completion until Hearing Secret Harmonies.
Five chapters comprise At Lady Molly’s. Powell has settled into a comfortable structure, centering each chapter on an episode or gathering:
- Chapter 1. Nick recalls General Conyers from childhood memories. These include Nick’s being taken by the brash manner of Mildred Blaides (later Haycock). Then to the present, where Nick accompanies Chips Lovell to Lady Molly’s (Jeavons, , where he meets Mildred again … with her fiancé, Widmerpool.
- Chapter 2. Nick lunches with Widmerpool, whose purpose is revealed, with great awkwardness, as seeking advice on whether to sleep with Mildred before marriage, and if so, how to go about it discreetly. Nick then visits the Conyers for tea, where he meets Lady Frederica Budd (neé Tolland), with whom he then goes on a visit to Norah Tolland and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson. There, Nick runs into J. G. Quiggin, who invites him to the country for the weekend.
- Chapter 3. The country weekend, which starts at the house where Quiggin and Mona are staying and ends up with a dinner at Thrubworth, seat of the Tolland family, where Erridge’s inept hosting is soon overlooked when Nick meets Isobel Tolland, who has stopped by with her sister Susan.
- Chapter 4. At Lady Molly’s again, Nick reflects on the odd but hospitable atmosphere and the odd but companionable marriage of Lady Molly and Ted Jeavons. A month or so later, Nick meets Ted Jeavons while in Soho and Ted enlists him in one of his periodic pub crawls, during which he relates of a wartime weekend affair he had with Mildred. Unexpectedly and uncomfortably (another Powellian coincidence), Ted and Nick run into Mildred and Widmerpool. She is giddy; he is quickly becoming unwell and makes an abrupt exit.
- Chapter 5. Nick’s engagement to Isobel is announced. Erridge and Mona are said to have taken off together for China. Rumor has it that Widmerpool has called off his plans to marry Mildred Haycock — a rumor later confirmed by General Conyers, who was privy to Widmerpool’s disastrous attempt to sleep with her. Nick then hears a much different story from Widmerpool.
In Invitation to the Dance, Hilary Spurling dates the events of the book as follows:
- Chapter 1. Early in 1934, though with an opening flashback to his acquaintance with General Conyers through the general’s friendship with Nick’s parents.
- Chapter 2. A few days later, during the week.
- Chapter 3. The weekend of the same week.
- Chapter 4. Several months later.
- Chapter 5. Autumn 1934.
The timeframe of At Lady Molly’s and the character of Lady Molly herself mark turning points in English social life. Though she spent most of her first marriage, to the Marquess of Sleaford, at Dogdene, a noble and historic family seat (St. John Clark calls a weekend there the “zenith” of his career), but a ugly and outdated house she can no longer afford and deeply dislikes. A noblewoman, she seems happy to be rid of most of the trappings and responsibilities of the nobility. The certainties and power structures that had endured through Queen Victoria and King Edward VII (“absolutely mad on primogeniture,” says Chips Lovell of the Sleafords) are soon to be shaken to their foundations by the affair of King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson and his abdication. Former car salesman Ted Jeavons (“of rather unglamorous background”), Maisky the monkey, and the odd lots who roll in and out of Lady Molly’s house. “She will put up with anyone,” says Lovell, which makes Molly went suited to the kind of social adaptations underway in English politics, economics, and society. Her eclectic tolerance offers a pleasant alternative to Widmerpool’s relentless gamesmanship in quest of power.