Miss Weeks
An ugly girl of twenty in a white overall, an assistant at a chemist's shop, with a sallow honest face and powerful spectacles that distort her eyes, who walks with a gait as clumsy as a bear's. She is the only customer in the library who says plainly what she wants: a good hot-stuff love story, because she cannot bear Deep books.
A modern love story with plenty of sex in it and nothing in it she has to work at. She asks for one in those terms and turns down the first thing she is offered.
The book
At a glance
- A lending-library subscriber; the only one who says plainly what she wants
- Twenty
- Assistant at a chemist's shop
- Seven Scarlet Nights, for twopence
- Chapter 1, one afternoon in the shop
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMiss Weeks works behind the counter of a chemist's shop and borrows novels from the cheap lending library at the back of the bookshop where Gordon Comstock works. Gordon Comstock is the poet at the centre of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the novel George Orwell published in 1936, and the library is the part of the shop he most dislikes — George Orwell writes that he eyed the novels with inert hatred: eight hundred of them, twopence to borrow one, no deposit required.
She comes in during the November afternoon that opens the book, still in her white work overall and without a hat. Orwell gives her a hard physical description and a warm one at the same time. She is twenty and he calls her ugly. Her face is sallow, blithering and honest, her spectacles are powerful enough to distort her eyes into two pools of black treacle, and she walks with a gait as clumsy as a bear's.
She matters to the chapter because she is the one customer who does not perform. The other borrowers that afternoon are competing over which of them has better taste. Miss Weeks tells Gordon exactly what she wants, in the words she would use to a friend, and Gordon drops the literary manner and finds her the book.
How the book draws them
- Straight from the chemist's shopShe arrives hatless in a white overall, twenty years old, with a sallow honest face and spectacles so strong that her eyes behind them look like black treacle. She beams at Gordon trustfully. Her purse is a shabby leather one that lives in the overall pocket.
- The walkOrwell says she follows Gordon into the library with a gait as clumsy as a bear's. It is the only movement he gives her, and he gives it twice.
- What she asks forShe clutches the front of her overall while she gets it out. "Well, what I'd REALLY like's a good hot-stuff love story. You know — something MODERN." Pressed on what modern means, she says: sex-problems and divorce and all that.
- Why she turns down the recommendationGordon suggests Almost a Virgin by Barbara Bedworthy. "Oh no, not her. She's too Deep. I can't bear Deep books." It is the one firm opinion she expresses, and she means it as a description of what she wants, not an apology for it.
- The book she leaves withSeven Scarlet Nights, found among the three hundred hot-stuff modern love stories the library keeps. Gordon books it on her ticket and she pays twopence out of the leather purse.
- The manner Gordon uses on herWith the other borrowers he plays the man of letters and agrees that Galsworthy is universal. With Miss Weeks, Orwell writes, he speaks as lowbrow to lowbrow, and it is the easiest conversation he has all afternoon.