Member-only story
A Wedding Boom Is Coming in 2022. Try This Novel If You Can’t Wait.
A clueless mother ignores her daughter’s fears about her marriage in ‘Cheerful Weather for the Wedding’
Bridal consultants say big weddings have roared back after a pandemic lull.
After a year of delays, couples are scrambling to find the services they need — venues, caterers, florists, and more — with a surprising number of vendors fully booked for this year. Many brides-to-be won’t be able to walk down the aisle until 2022, when the consultants expect to see a boom in lavish weddings.
What if you need a wedding fix — or at least a vicarious one — right now?
You might like Julia Strachey’s Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, a novella by a niece of the Bloomsbury Group’s Lytton Strachey. Virginia Woolf rightly called it “extraordinarily complete and sharp” when she and her husband published it under their Hogarth Press imprint.
One of the most unusual aspects of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding is that Strachey gives away its ending in her first line: She tells you that on March 5, Mrs. Thatcham, a middle-class widow, married her 23-year-old daughter to the Hon. Owen Bigham, a diplomat eight years her senior. She makes clear soon afterward that Dolly has married the wrong man.
