Miss Mole, a woman in her forties, takes centre stage in this novel and challenges our view of what we expect from a heroine. Miss Mole is neither inherently good or bad, she’s has good qualities which she sometimes tries to suppress, and has faults such as slyness and laughing at others – she is somewhat subversive.
The novel (set in the 1920’s) starts with Miss Mole having a jaunt out when she should be mending her employers dress. As a consequence she needs a new position and her snobbish and rich cousin reluctantly helps her out. Between positions she takes a room cheaply and finds the landlady good company and the other lodgers mostly entertaining. The real action takes place when she starts her new position as the housekeeper to The Reverend Corder, a Non-Conformist minister, and his family. Corder is pompous and constantly needs to be appeased, then there’s his children; Anxious Ruth – the youngest, moralising Ethel, George -the eldest, at university, and Corder’s nephew, Wilfred, a handsome and teasing rascal. Miss Mole doesn’t like to get close to anyone but feels the pull of the Corder household particularly to Ruth who needs her help, with Wilfred who she finds a fellow teasing spirit and someone to talk to, even Ethel she feels compelled to help. The family blossoms under her care and produces a change in them all.
But her past is catching up with her and may destroy the life she’s built up with the Corder’s and the friendships she’s built up with two different men.
Miss Mole is a complicated character, maybe somewhat cynical so that she lies or tells stories and makes fun of others to cover up her pain. But although she’s pushed people away in the past, at the Corder’s she feels the pull of affection for Ruth and to friends nearby. The ending was definitely a big surprise that I didn’t see coming. A quirky story revealing a conflicted heroine with spirit and her affect on a household and they on her.
Readable 
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