HHR’s brilliance in depicting the emotional states of her characters is at its best in showing Cuffy’s distress at how things turn out. He was an unforgettable character in Ultima Thule but he will haunt the emotions of any reader who meets him in this short story.

And therein, for me, lies the limitation of the short story. I do so want to know what becomes of little Cuffy. Instead the collection goes on with Sketches of Girlhood, Two Tales of Old Strasbourg and three others which strained my patience altogether. These stories, do, as the blurb says, offer themes of separation, loss and acceptance through childhood, adolescence, marriage and ultimately death but I found most of them unsatisfying. ‘The Life and Death of Peterle Luthy’ and ‘Mary Christina’ are maudlin, while ‘The Coat’ tests credulity, and most of the girlhood stories are really rather mundane. Only ‘Two Hanged Women’ with its veiled lesbian storyline, and ‘Sister Ann’ exploring the neglected emotional life of a sister raising a horde of younger siblings, held any interest for me.

The collection was first published in 1979, when HHR had been dead for over 30 years, and I can’t help feeling that this was a case of resurrecting some stories which were not really her best work. Some of them are just sketches, as if preparatory for some other project and others read as if they are sorting out some long suppressed sexual feelings.

To see the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2016/10/22/the-adventures-of-cuffy-mahony-and-other-sto... ( )