Bright Day
First edition
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| Author | J. B. Priestley |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | William Heinemann Ltd |
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Publication date
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1946 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
Bright Day is a novel by J. B. Priestley, first published in 1946. One of his better-known works, it combines nostalgia for the northern England that existed before the First World War with an optimism inspired by the conclusion of the Second.
In 1946, an English screenwriter, Gregory Dawson, goes to a seaside hotel in Cornwall to finish a screenplay. An accidental meeting with two people from his distant past prompts him to explore his memories of his youth in 'Bruddersford' (a fictional town conflating Bradford and Huddersfield) between October 1912 and June 1914.
Gregory Dawson is an English screenwriter in his fifties, who fought in the First World War, and who has spent most of the Second World War in Britain after ten years in Hollywood. He has retreated in the spring of 1946 to the Cornish village of Tralorna to finish the screenplay for a film called The Lady Hits Back. An oldish couple staying at his hotel, the Royal Ocean, seem strangely familiar. They are identified to him as "Lord and Lady Harndean". In the hotel's restaurant Dawson is condescending to the musicians, who attempt to impress him by playing the slow movement of Schubert's B flat trio. The music triggers Dawson's memory, and he realises that the couple are Mr and Mrs Nixey, whom he has not seen since 1914. He approaches and introduces himself.
Back in his hotel room he recalls the Bruddersford of his youth, where he moved after the death of his parents to live with his maternal uncle. Lonely and missing his family, he finds himself charmed by a certain prosperous family he often sees on the tram and at concerts. He obtains a job at Hawes and Company, a wool firm, under the stentorian Joe Ackworth, and on the first day he is surprised to find that he recognises Ackworth's co-worker, Mr Alington, as the head of that happy family.
In December, Mr Alington's daughter Joan stops by at the office, looking for him. She talks to Greg and invites him to a concert at Gladstone Hall. After the concert he is delighted to find himself accepted without question as one of their social circle: the Alington children, Joan, Eva, Bridget, Oliver and David, and their friends Ben Kerry and Jock Barniston.
Ackworth quarrels with the cashier Croxton for sending samples away without his permission. Gregory enjoys Christmas 1912, which includes many visits, and a trip to the pantomime Cinderella; in May 1913, Greg accompanies the Alingtons to the village of Bulsden, on the edge of Broadstone Moor, for a picnic and a game of cricket. He meets the old painter Stanley Mervin. On arriving back home, the Schubert trio is played, but it is interrupted by the first arrival of the Nixeys.
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