The Fountain Overflows was published by Macmillan in London and Viking in New York in 1956. West was sixty-four, famous primarily as a journalist and political writer, and this novel — warm, comic, deeply felt — surprised readers who associated her with the fierce intelligence of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon rather than with domestic fiction. It is based closely on her own childhood: the Aubrey family are the Fairfields (West’s birth name), and their father — brilliant, charming, financially catastrophic — is a portrait of West’s own father, Charles Fairfield.
Piers Aubrey is a journalist of genius: his writing is extraordinary, his political insight prophetic, his personal finances a continuous disaster. He gambles, speculates, loses money that the family cannot spare, and periodically disappears. Clare Aubrey, his wife, is a gifted pianist who abandoned her career for marriage and now holds the family together through talent, will, and an unshakeable conviction that art is the only thing that matters.
The novel is narrated by Rose, the middle daughter, also a pianist — and much of the book concerns the family’s musical life: practice, performance, the distinction between genuine talent and mere accomplishment (embodied in the conflict between the gifted Aubrey sisters and their cousin Rosamund, who plays violin competently but without the inner fire that transforms technique into art).
West’s method is to render childhood consciousness with complete fidelity — not the prettified childhood of nostalgia but the actual experience: the terror of parental conflict, the boredom of lessons, the ecstasy of music, the cruelty of other children, the discovery that adults are fallible. The novel is plotted (there is a mystery involving stolen money and a spiritualist cult) but its real subject is the texture of a family’s daily life, rendered with a vividness that makes the Aubreys among the most fully realized fictional families in English literature.
Collecting The Fountain Overflows
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1956; Viking, New York, 1956): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- Viking first US edition in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Macmillan first UK edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Signed first edition: $100–$250
- Without jacket: $10–$20
West’s most accessible and emotionally generous novel. The two posthumous sequels (This Real Night, 1984; Cousin Rosamund, 1985) are less successful but sought by completists.