The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club

Helen Simonson

Dial Press 2024

In her latest novel, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club, Helen Simonson has picked up the beat from her previous WWI novel, The Summer before the War, following its brutal ground battles. Simonson’s new historical fiction lifts our sights to the skies, in the year 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the Great War fought by fighter pilots in their nimble aircraft, the famous Sopwith Camel. This theme of air flight with its inevitable loss of limb and life propels the story even while it centers on the young women who fought in a multitude of ways at the home front, but who, now made redundant after a taste of independence, struggle to find ways of employing themselves however they might, here with a ladies motorcycle club and taxi service. In a dismissive backhanded shunting and shaming, the British society reverts to the traditional men-first, top-down hierarchy, refusing to hire women, a subject that remains uppermost in the narration.

Born to an English farming family, Constance Haverhill has been placed under the wing of a titled, wealthy family with all the condescension of a Jane Austen baron and baroness of the manor. She has lost both her parents, as many did, to the influenza epidemic that depleted the British population, and her brother has inherited the farm. The narrator follows her heroine’s perceptions and actions as an elderly lady’s companion, assigned for only one summer at a seaside resort town and hotel. Soon she will be turned out to earn a solitary living under the sociocultural restraints of 1919. For a single woman of no means that is a high bar. The New Woman of the early twentieth century is still a very novel and verboten idea in a class-driven England.

Even as signs of modernity erupted, an early-twentieth-century woman’s desire for independence could be diagnosed by (male) doctors as a nervous disorder (hysteria), and during this time when women’s rights (England would not see the women’s vote until 1928) were perceived as a threat to male power, a kind of sexual anarchy was also alleged to be rising in the culture. But there’s always infighting among the upper classes, as well as a young woman’s search to secure a husband, to feed and sustain a romance. Simonson also explores other frontiers of modern thought underscoring the romance with the restrictive social topics of labor, race, and miscegenation, as she did in her previous novels. 

Human loss from war and influenza are on display throughout Simonson’s third novel, love is found among the ruins, and a sentimentality is mined for expressive affect. Descriptive passages fill the pages between plot points and at times elevated language: “Perhaps the ephemeral nature of the bloom alongside the poison only makes it more poetic. . . . to contemplate both the divine and the darkness.” Offsetting its grand tone, much of the novel’s action scenes, including the motorcycle and airplane rides of the title, are visceral and physical: “Constance realized her scream was real . . . she could smell the tar and hot, dry stones of the road . . . waiting to tear her skin from the bones. . . . The wind buzzed hard in her nose . . . and her breath caught at scream’s end.”

Just as the scenery changes a bit and the pacing lags midnovel, new characters are introduced and the cogs turn once again. Plotting through character is a writerly virtue; frequent description of landscape, weather, clothing, and food, less so. Certain characters leap from the page: impulsive Poppy (“bright-faced and pretty in a jolly, athletic sort of way”), the motorcyclist, leans against the status quo of her upper class with a certain brilliance and tenacity; her fighter pilot brother, Harris, injured from the war, suffers quietly in body and spirit (“his unfocused stare and slumped shoulders,” “in the voice of affectionate condescension that men sometimes use to convey love”). Mrs. Fog, a remnant of the Victorians, holds onto a lifelong secret until even she grabs her last chance at love, and a sympathetic German hotel waiter made to endure the WWI internment camp on the Isle of Man is ultimately treated in the tragic mode. Peace Day celebrations on the beach, ironically sited among stranded remains of a German U-boat and under a climactic semi-mock air battle, continue to remind everyone of the recent war. Even after hero and heroine experience the thrills of flying together they have yet to overcome their personal and psychological barriers, and in this novel each saves the other through honed skills and bravery superior to those of their peers.

Best known for Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Simonson wove the remaining threads of the British colonial empire into this comedy of manners and late-in-life love story, charming many readers. I know of no book reviewer, however, who remarked on the connecting plot line of the young Muslim man struggling with reconciling his fundamentalist religious tenets amid daily life in the contemporary “decadent” West, while trying to usurp his own British-Pakistani aunt’s property and business rights. This 2010 debut novel made its mark among bloggers and reviewers who highlighted the love story set within the British class system but did not appear to notice that its cultural clash unleashes the force of the story’s climax and resolution. Much of the internal machinery and drive of Major Pettigrew’s plot resembles the plotting in the Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club. The latter observes a traditional worldview—that money matters in the material world and equally so does marrying for love—while also delivering the feminist argument for sexual equality and parity in the work force at the cusp of its new and changing world.

Christina Nellas Acosta is managing editor of the journal 19th-Century Music, copyeditor for Oxford University Press, and book reviewer for the Historical Novel Society.