Play Book Tag discussion

I picked this for another challenge where I needed to re-read something I'd been forced to read at school. I'm not sure why I picked this one as there were plenty of others!

This is the story of two vastly different families living at the start of the twentieth century. The Schlegels, Margaret, Helen and Tibby, are intellectuals with a comfortable income and a social conscience - well, Margaret and Helen, anyway; Tibby is almost an afterthought. In various ways, Margaret and Helen come together with the Wilcox family comprising practical men of business and their women - well, except for Paul who is also pretty much an afterthought. In my view Margaret Schlegel and Henry Wilcox are the main characters even though Helen causes the most trouble. The story follows the two families as they become tangled up together with little actual understanding of each other except on the part of Margaret who seems to understand everybody else only too well.

Initially the Schlegels irritated me with all the nonsense chatter about the meaning of life and love and whatever all the time. However, I did come to like Margaret, probably because she became more pragmatic as time went on. It's a bit shaming to think that their intellectual prattling is probably what generations of young people do, thinking how clever we are!

I like it more than I did originally and that's probably a result of age. It's certainly not what I enjoyed reading as a teenager which was mostly horror and detective fiction. However, I do now understand that I completely missed the point at the time. My only real memory of the book was the theme "only connect" and my understanding was that this meant human beings should connect with each other. Now I've re-read that particular passage I think it actually meant connect the heart and the mind, or the intellect and the practicality, to get the best of both.