1920s

The White Riband by F. Tennyson Jesse – #NovNov Day 15

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A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse has just come out as a British Library Women Writers title, and I think it’s probably the book for which she is best known – but it is far from her only book. I have two or three others on the shelves, including The White Riband from 1921. Even for a novella, it is extremely short – 121 pages in my edition, but with not many more than a hundred words per page.

I couldn’t work out quite when it was set – it might be contemporary, but it has a feeling of being rather older, and is set up like an eighteenth-century story with chapters labelled ‘In which Loveday sees one magpie’ and similar. The ‘heroine’ is, indeed, Loveday – a young and impoverished girl, whose local reputation has been permanently coloured by her parents not being born. Being conceived before marriage is a common trait in the community, but the parents are expected to marry – ideally before the baby is born. Loveday’s misfortune is twofold: that her father is foreign, and that he is dead. And the mother, of course, is more damaged by the gossip. As Tennyson Jesse amusingly puts it, ‘the female partner in crime would be one of the unmentionable women about whom other people talk so much’.

Loveday has a chance encounter with a wealthy and beautiful young woman, Miss Le Pettit, who takes a fancy to Loveday’s striking looks. She suggests that they could dance together at the Flora dance – a local custom that everybody attends. And with her artistic eye, Miss La Pettit envisages Loveday’s red lips and dark hair being set off by being dressed entirely in white.

Loveday was left with that most dangerous of all passions – the passion for an idea. Though she was ignorant of the fact, it was not Miss Le Pettit she adored, it was beauty; not silk underskirts that rustled in her ear, but the music of the spheres; a new ideal she saw not in the angelic visitant, but in herself. She, too, would be all white and dazzling, was accounted worthy to follow in the same steps, were it but in those of a dance. She made the common mistake of a lover – she imagined she was in love with another human being, while in reality she was in love with those feelings in herself which that other had evoked. 

She becomes beset with the idea of getting hold of a white sash, to accompany the slightly yellowed white dress that had once been destined for her mother’s wedding. She doesn’t have long to secure what she wants, and her quest takes over most of the rest of the story.

It is, of course, a very slight novella. It could probably have been a short story, given the scope – but I do think the novella length suits the emotional weight of the character and plot. And probably it wouldn’t have had the same effect if it had been substantially longer or shorter.

The White Riband is simple and rather poignant, and I really liked it. There are hints of the empathetic author who wrote A Pin To See The Peepshow, similarly examining the limits of women’s lives and seeing how their emotional life can overflow these imposed boundaries. The canvas is much smaller, but I think the portrait is equally compelling.

The Poor Man by Stella Benson – #NovNov Day 9

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I first read Stella Benson when I was writing about witches for my DPhil – Living Alone is perhaps her best known novel, and is certainly well known in particular academic circles. I was so beguiled by her quirky worldview and witty writing style – and so I was delighted when Michael Walmer started reprinting her novels. He has done The Poor Man, I only just realise, though my copy is a paperback from the 1940s. The novel was originally published in 1922.

The poor man of the title is Edward Williams – a Briton in California, overlooked and ignored by all. He is self-pitying and feeble, and on the outskirts of a society made up of fashionable bohemian types who speak authoritatively and often stupidly about any manner of art. There is a glorious scene where he hosts a party at which each guest submits a poem anonymously – they are read in turn, mocked and disparaged by everyone except the poet in each case. The only one which meets with wide approval turns out to be a letter that had been submitted by mistake. And how could anyone resist this portrait of Rhoda:

Rhoda Romero never asked people what they thought of her pictures. She thought she knew. They were mostly studies of assorted fruits in magenta and mustard-colour running violently down steep slopes into the sea. They were all called still life, curiously enough. Rhoda Romero also, I need hardly say, wrote poetry. It was, of course, unrhymed and so delicately scanned that often there was not room in a line for a word unless it were spelt in the newest American manner; the poems were usually about dirt or disease, and were believed in Chicago to have an international reputation.

You either love this sort of thing or you do not – and I emphatically do. In all the novels I’ve read by Benson, she has that cutting authorial voice undermining all her characters – including her ‘hero’. Edward falls for a woman called Emily – self-assured and impressive, though not obviously besotted with Edward.

She doesn’t hang around when he has a sudden illness – unclear exactly what – which requires immediate operation on his brain and some time of recovery. Indeed, she heads off to China to be the assistant of a noted journalist. And, when recovered, Edward decides he must follow her there.

He doesn’t have any money (the ‘poor’ of the title has multiple applications), and so we enter perhaps my favourite section of The Poor Man: where Edward tries to raise money to travel to China. And the most glorious way in which he tries to do this is with ‘a company that seemed inexplicably anxious that young America should become acquainted with the works of Milton’ – albeit in prose because poetry is ‘unhealthy for children, unmanly for Our Boys’. I have been giggling about the ‘inexplicably anxious’ line most of the day. Just perfect.

Edward does eventually get to China, and so the adventure continues, but that’s probably enough of the plot for now. The main thing with Benson’s writing in the exuberant ridiculousness of the prose, particularly the way that everyone’s intentions and impressions of themselves are consistently proved to be absurd and false. I loved The Poor Man, and I think it’s a shame that such an astonishing tour de force ever fell out of print. Thank goodness Michael Walmer is restoring her works steadily, and fingers crossed he is going to bring us the next of her books soon…

British Library Women Writers 11: The Love Child by Edith Olivier

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When the British Library Women Writers series was first suggested, one of the titles I thought about first was The Love Child (1927) by Edith Olivier. Not only is it one of my favourite novels, – novellas? – it was one of the key texts in my DPhil on middlebrow, fantastic novels. I’ve read it many times, and have pressed it into many people’s hands. I’ve written about it on here more than once. But it wasn’t in print, and I really wanted it to be.

Or… was it in print? While you wouldn’t have been likely to find it in bookshops, there was a print-on-demand version available – along with all the rest of Olivier’s novels. The editions weren’t beautiful, but they were great at making the books available. And yet I really, really wanted it between beautiful British Library covers… luckily I was like the persistent widow of the Bible, and finally the British Library agreed. (It wasn’t quite like that, of course, but I am delighted that The Love Child made it!) It was possible because Olivier died more than 70 years ago, and so the novel is out of copyright.

The Love Child was Olivier’s first novel, written when she was in her 50s – she described the idea as coming to her in the middle of the night, and feverishly writing the beginning in her bed. And that idea is this: what if an imaginary friend became real?

What makes this such a 1920s novel is that the heroine is an unmarried woman who feels herself on the shelf in her 30s – and, with so many men lost at war, she has far fewer options for marriage. While many women have always been happy without marriage and children, Agatha Bodenham is not one of those women. Not having a child is clearly an aching gap in her life.

As the story begins, she is mourning her mother – her final close family connection. Agatha starts thinking about Clarissa, her childhood imaginary friend – whom had been a wonderful (if illusory) companion until a governess poured scorn on her. She remembers the joy of playing with her, and starts to do so again.

Then one day, when Agatha was quietly sitting on the white seat at the end of the green walk, darning a black woollen stocking to wear in church the next day, and for once more absorbed in darning than in dreaming – then, all of a sudden, Clarissa came and sat on the seat beside her. She was smaller even than Agatha had imagined her, and she looked young for her age, which must have been ten or eleven.

Clarissa has materialised! From here, The Love Child looks at the delight of this miracle – but, as time goes on, the problems that come with it. Clarissa is increasingly visible to others, and Agatha has to deal with that. And, as she grows earlier, Clarissa begins to yearn for independence herself…

This is a short masterpiece, far better than anything else Olivier wrote. It’s sophisticated and complete, and I think ranks as one of the most perfect novellas of the 20th century. As it’s so short, this new British Library edition also includes a selection of excerpts from Olivier’s autobiography, Without Knowing Mr Walkley, which I think is a really helpful addition to the book. And, of course, my afterword – which is largely about the introduction of the first adoption law in the UK, referred to in the novel.

If you haven’t read this gem before, I very much recommend it! And don’t miss the different posts about the series appearing across blogs, YouTube and Instagram during the ongoing #FarMoreThanFiction blog tour (of which this is, I suppose, an unofficial entry!)

None-Go-By by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick

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In Mrs Alfred Sidgwick’s 1923 novel, None-Go-By is the fanciful title of the Cornish cottage that Mary and Thomas decide to move to, to escape the hustle and bustle of relatives, friends and neighbours and their lives in London. Mary is our narrator, and describes how their lives have been taken over by the demands made by others – and this is intended to be something of an escape.

The cottage was so small that Thomas and I never quite got over the impression of living in a doll’s house; but, if Thomas was careful, he could stand upright in the rooms. He is a thin, tallish man with a saint-like expression that he thinks must have come on him gradually through being married to me; and even when he is out at elbows he has a way of looking presentable. What he ought to have done was entertain Mrs Lomax while I escaped upstairs and made myself tidy; but on the wrong occasion Thomas will often act with disconcerting suddenness. In this case he threw open the door of the room that contained our visitor, and there we were confronting each other. My first thought was that the room could hardly contain anything else. However, we squeezed in.

Thomas writes books with titles like The Physiological Correlate of the Instinctive Process. Mary doesn’t pretend to understand his work, but has her own interests – including less niche books and gardening. The novel opens amusingly, and the tone reminded me rather of Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield – justifiably a classic, and perhaps a touchstone for a certain sort of middle-class, middlebrow humour that I love from the period.

As is perhaps inevitable in a comic novel where a couple are trying to avoid demanding relatives and neighbours, they are continually inundated with both. There is a succession of nephews, nieces, and the like who come with their all-important personal problems or a need to be distracted. A niece has left her husband, or so she believes; a young nephew floods the garden while supposedly convalescing after illness. Each comes with their own trials that Mary, as narrator, relates as comedies rather than tragedies. There is no genuine pathos in None-Go-By, nor is there intended to be.

Mary and Thomas get to know the neighbours, of whom or two are not objectionable. A snobbish character tries to hector them into keeping certain company; another unpleasant character thinks they aren’t artistic enough to remain where they are. The stakes remain low because Mary doesn’t take anything too seriously – the reader can’t really feel genuine emotions when the characters don’t seem to.

I quite enjoyed reading None-Go-By, but I did have a couple of pretty big reservations that stopped me loving the book – as I’d thought I might, when I started it. The first is hinted above – relatives and friends come and go, neighbours are introduced and sidelined, and it gives the novel a really episodic feel. We don’t really get to know a visitor until their little crisis is resolved and they’re on their way. It all emphasises the fact that Mary and Thomas can’t truly escape the maelstrom of their lives, but I found it meant the novel lost something in the way of momentum.

The other thing was Thomas. Jane wrote a very enthusiastic review of None-Go-By seven years ago, and in it she writes ‘I had to smile at gentle marital bickering between Thomas and Mary; for all that each tried to have the last word it was clear that they were two very different people who loved each other and accepted each others little foibles.’ They certainly bicker, but I have to say I found Thomas too infuriating to smile at it. Where the Provincial Lady’s husband Robert is oblivious, Thomas is astonishingly selfish and thoughtless. He often blames Mary for the chaos he causes, disregards her expressed wishes, and never thinks of anything except his own contentedness. Mary does rather roll her eyes and move on, but I think Sidgwick overplayed the card of ‘aren’t husbands absent-minded?’. It was hard to see why Mary would even want to remain married to him.

So – I started off really loving this novel, and thought it could be a real winner. And I ended up a little disappointed.

This is my second novel by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick, and I enjoyed Cynthia’s Way – and there is enough that I liked in the tone of this novel that I’m keen to read more by her. There was just some elements to this one that jarred, while also feeling a little drab. But I feel curiously confident that there will be a book waiting for me among her output that will hit the sweet spot and become a cherished favourite. Now I just have to keep exploring…

Anne Severn and the Fieldings by May Sinclair

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It’s not the first time I’ve said it, but there is always such a sense of achievement in reading a book that has been on the shelves for a long time. Particularly if it turns out to be a good’un. I bought Anne Severn and the Fieldings (1922) back in 2009 and it has been patiently waiting for me ever since.

Anne Severn had come again to the Fieldings. This time it was because her mother was dead.

She hadn’t been in the house five minutes before she asked “Where’s Jerrold?”

“Fancy,” they said, “her remembering.”

And Jerrold had put his head in at the door and gone out again when he saw her there in her black frock; and somehow she had known he was afraid to come in because her mother was dead.

Anne is ten years old, and has been a regular visitor to the Fielding family. She has a cautious, fragile connection to the three brothers – who are different from one another, but not in the ‘ticking boxes of different types’ that often happens in novels about young siblings. Jerrold is kind, wise, and almost parental; Eliot is sporty and intelligent and confident; Colin is the youngest and quite anxious. As for their parents – Mr Fielding is a bit distant and very well-meaning, and Mrs Fielding is the opposite of these things. She needs Anne to need her. She is overly attached, and uses emotions as weapons.

As the novel progresses, Anne spends most of her time as part of this family that isn’t related to her, but has sort of adopted her. It’s worth noting that the novel was published a few years before adoption was legally formalised in the UK, and the opening is set a decade or two earlier still. She grows older and Sinclair develops a convincing heroine – loving, uncertain of herself, a combination of spontaneity and regret. Her moral decisions are very interesting for the period. Early in the novel, she says she would do anything for somebody she loved. This prophecy comes true before the end of the novel. The relationships she has with the three brothers in turn, and that with their mother, are all drawn interestingly and convincingly. Sinclair shows us the different facets of one individual that come out in three different friendships, which are indeed quite different, despite all being under the same roof.

Anne Severn and the Fieldings reminded me a lot of The Tree of Heaven – in the sense of showing the important events of the early twentieth century through the lens of one family unit. While they naturally consider themselves of utmost importance, we also get a good sweep of the period – particularly the war.

I found the whole novel involving and psychologically interesting, but it’s the war sections that are the jewel in the crown. Anne goes to the front, working as a nurse. Colin goes too, despite everyone saying that he is too ‘highly-strung’ for it – and, indeed, he suffers appalling shell-shock – or PTSD as we would call it now. Sinclair avoids tropes of ‘our brave troops’ – and, if the actual fighting is a little sanitised, the psychological impact of trauma is dealt with clear-sightedly.

I think Anne Severn and the Fieldings might be better than The Tree of Heaven, though perhaps too similar for me to nominate for the British Library Women Writers series, at least just yet. It’s a novel to luxuriate in, nothing moving quickly but everything capturing the attention. The only thing that prevents it becoming an all-time favourite for me is Sinclair’s tendency towards melodrama, which rather spoils the effect at times. The dialogue, in heightened moments, feels a bit like a b-movie. It’s unsurprising for the era, perhaps, but it’s at odds with the nuanced understanding of human relationships that Sinclair is rightly known for.

Sinclair is in danger of being remembered for coining ‘stream of consciousness’ as a literary technique, one or two novels, and not much else – but if her prolific output holds other books as enjoyable and rewarding as Anne Severn and the Fieldings, then it’s time to get digging.

The Privet Hedge by J.E. Buckrose

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A few weeks ago, I decided to do a mystery book haul – picking four books I knew absolutely nothing about, from mid-century female authors I’d never heard of, to see if I could find some hidden gems. It’s all part of scoping out for future British Library Women Writers titles – hard work, but someone has to do it(!!) If I were canny, I’d find a way to write these off in my taxes, but I don’t understand at all what that means. It is embarrassing how financially illiterate I am.

ANYWAY. Of the four, I decided to start with The Privet Hedge by J.E Buckrose, from 1922, depending whom you ask. The reason I chose this one to start with is because it opens with a description of a house, and books-about-houses are among my favourite things. Here’s the first paragraph:

At the far end of Thorhaven towards the north was a little square house surrounded by a privet hedge. It had a green door under a sort of wooden canopy with two flat windows on either side, and seemed to stand there defying the rows and rows of terraces, avenues and meanish semi-detached villas which were creeping up to it. Behind lay the flat fields under a wide sky just as they had lain for centuries, with the gulls screaming across them inland from the mud cliffs, and so the cottage formed a sort of outpost, facing along the hordes of jerry-built houses which threatened to sweep on and surround it.

In this house live Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford, as the narrative tends to refer to them. They are sisters, past middle age, who have always lived with each other except for the brief two years while Mrs Bradford was married. Quickly widowed, she returned to their life together – and, though a gentler soul than her sister in many ways, also always makes clear her sense of superiority from having once been married. She gives the impression of having lived an awful lot of life in those couple of years, and it is a superiority that Miss Ethel recognises and accepts.

Those ‘jerry-built houses’ of the opening paragraph are causing a change. A distant relative of theirs owns the land separating their little house from the encroaching housing estates – and he has just sold it for development. Swathes of housing estates on greenbelt land in villages feels like a very contemporary concern, but it was clearly equally pressing in the 1920s. The sisters, particularly Miss Ethel, are horrified that new houses might crowd in the other side of their privacy-ensuring privet hedge – blocking out the view and destroying their tranquillity.

If that weren’t all, their maid has also just left to get married. Luckily her younger relative Caroline has been put up for the role. She is a teenager, recently out of school, and has been ‘promised’ to Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford ever since their maid announced she was leaving. But Caroline has a last-minute change of heart. Like many young women of her generation and class, domestic service no longer looked so promising. “I’d starve before I’d ask permission to go to the pillar-box, and spend my nights in that old kitchen by myself,” she says. Instead, she can earn money by manning the box on the promenade – for Thorhaven is a seaside town.

In the end she compromises by working there and helping out the sisters, though not as a live-in maid. It’s a really interesting look at the new job prospects of the 1920s for a certain type of young woman – and I particularly enjoyed all the details of life by the coast, and the society that lives there together out of season (and moves out of their house during season, to get some tourist income). Caroline’s main story is something of a love triangle, though, between the reliable but dull Wilf – and a man who is engaged to another woman. I tend not to find romance storylines very interesting in books, and this one did lean a bit into love-at-first-sight territory. It isn’t badly handled, but for me it was the least interesting element of an otherwise very interesting novel.

What helps The Privet Hedge rise above other novels of its type is Buckroses’s writing. The initial scene-setting paragraphs are rather lovely, showing a good eye for detail that brings the town and its inhabitants alive. Here is a dance scene, for instance:

Still the evening came with no sign of rain; the band stationed at the edge of the green played cheerful dances with a will, and it was no fault of theirs that the music sounded so lost and futile amid the roaring of the sea – rather as if a penny whistle were to be played in a cathedral while the organ was bombing out solemn music among the springing arches. Perhaps the visitors and the Thorhaven people felt something of this themselves, for they put no real zest into their attempts at carnival, but they danced rather grimly in the cold wind, with little tussocks in the grass catching their toes and the fairy lamps which edged the lawn blowing out one after the other.

Overall, I really liked The Privet Hedge. If it had predominantly been about Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford, I would have wholeheartedly loved it – but as the novel progresses, their story becomes less prominent than Caroline’s. I suppose that was the market for this sort of book at the time – and it’s certainly enjoyable. But the older couple of sisters, anxiously watching modernity come literally and figuratively closer to their door, is what really sold this novel to me – and they are its greatest success.

The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley

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For #ReadIndies month, I had to pick up one of the many unread British Library Crime Classics I have on my shelf. Or, more precisely, piled high on top of a bookcase. Quite a lot of people have recommended The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) by Anthony Berkeley as one of the best ones, and I’ve had it for yonks.

It’s a great premise for a detective novel. Roger Sheringham, who apparently appears in other Berkeley novels, has assembled a group of people to help him solve a murder. I did have to make notes about who they all were, because he does a slightly unhelpful thing of telling you about them before he tells you their names – but it includes a dramatist, a detective novelist, an avant-garde writer, a solicitor, and a sort of timorous nobody.

The police have given up the case as lost. Can the Crime Club help? The dead person is Joan Bendix – poisoned, as the title suggests, by chocolates. The chocolates in question were given to her by her husband, but only because he bumped into Sir Eustace. He received them in the post, purporting to be from the chocolatiers, looking for a sponser. He rejects them – handing them to Graham Bendix. Later that night, both Bendixes – Bendices? – eat some chocolates, but Joan eats more. By the end of the evening, she is dead.

The brilliant thing about The Poisoned Chocolates Case is that each chapter gives a different solution, as the group take it in turns to present their detection and their conclusion. And, of course, the person they’re accusing of murder.

A couple of pretty unlikely solutions are given in the first chapters – but I have to admit that the third culprit/solution was the one I’d guessed from the outset. Oops! In the later chapters, Berkeley is very good at giving extremely convincing deductions – and then, in the next chapter, revealing why they were false conclusions and how the characters take false steps. Berkeley is clearly enjoying teasing the genre and exposing the tricks that detective novelists play. How often they use false syllogisms to make the denouement convincing. All of that.

Which does mean that the novel’s final solution is arguably no more convincing than any of the others – and the two extras at the end, contributing in the 70s by Christianna Brand and for this edition by Martin Edwards, are certainly not the most convincing – but it’s one of those rare detective novels where the satisfaction doesn’t come from the solution. It comes from seeing behind the curtain, at the construction of detection.

Riceyman Steps by Arnold Bennett

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Arnold Bennett is perhaps one of those names who is more remembered than read nowadays, though I know there is a very active Arnold Bennett Society that always seems to notice when I review one of his books. Hello! And I have read a small number of them now – Buried Alive, The Old Wives’ Tale, A Great Man. Now I can add Riceyman Steps (1923) which was given to me by my friend Simon when he was sorting out his late mother’s library.

Riceyman Steps is, I discovered, a real flight of steps in London – though without that name, I believe. George has done a lovely blog post, retracing the different places that are featured in the novel – but what I can’t quite understand, either from contemporary or contemporaneous photos, is the ‘tiny open space (not open to vehicular traffic) which was officially included in the title Riceyman Steps’. In the novel, this space is home to various domestic residences and, more importantly to the plot, a second-hand bookshop and a confectioner’s.

The bookseller is a man with extraordinary name Henry Earlforward, a man heading towards middle age whose abiding passions are running his bookshop and economy. His every move is motivated by saving pennies, whether that be underpaying the maid who comes to clean or in ensuring fires are only lit in rooms which absolutely cannot do without them. At the same time, he is not avaricious. He is content to make a profit on a book – to sell for two shillings something that cost him one, even if he suspects it is worth ten times as much. His miserliness is combined with a sense of decency.

His thoughts, as the novel opens, are also occupied with the woman who runs the confectioner’s. As Bennett’s witty narrative mentions, it is only some rather unloved chocolates in a display case that make the shop warrant the name ‘confectioner’s’; it is otherwise rather a standard corner shop, though I don’t think the term would have been used then. Mrs Arb is a widow of about Earlforward’s age, and they have in common the services of the maid Elsie.

For much of Riceyman Steps, this is a rather sweet novel of middle-aged love. Neither is demonstrative, and you get the sense that either of them would have managed quite well if romance had never knocked at their door – but, together, their straightforward competence finds something quite lovely kindling. Their admiration for each other begins with a recognition of the other’s good sense of economy. It never gets to any great belting passion – but it does lead to one of the more touching marriages that I’ve read in fiction. Mrs Arb moves into the bookshop – as does Elsie, now that she can be the live-in maid for a married couple – and life continues.

I love any descriptions of bookshops, perhaps particularly from this period. Much like the opening pages of Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell, I enjoy the shorthand of early 20th-century authors telling you who customers are. And I also love Bennett’s affectionately wry glances at the house of a bookseller who, in his bachelor days, had allowed the stock to run rather wild. Even his bath is filled with books.

Mrs Arb had to step over hummocks of books in order to reach the foot of the stairs. The left-hand half of every step of the stairs was stacked with books – cheap editions of novels in paper jackets, under titles such as ‘Just a Girl’, ‘Not Like Other Girls’, ‘A Girl Alone’. Weak but righteous and victorious girls crowded the stairs from top to bottom, so that Mrs Arb could scarcely get up. The landing also was full of girls. The front-room on the first floor was, from the evidence of its furniture, a dining-room, though not used as such. The massive mahogany table was piled up with books, as also the big sideboard, the mantelpiece, various chairs. The floor was carpeted with books. Less dust in the den below, but still a great deal. The Victorian furniture was ‘good’; it was furniture meant to survive revolutions and conflagrations and generations; it was everlasting furniture; it would command respect through any thickness of dust.

Bennett is out of fashion, but I think his prose is wonderful – he gives all those details that Woolf mocked him for in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, but he also has a dry sense of humour, and a genuine affection for the people he’s created. I enjoy him most when he sees their foibles but wishes them well, and as a god he dispenses small joys and small agonies equally.

The agonies get greater as the novel progresses, and I would have preferred something that didn’t veer quite so dramatic. But it is a drama that stems from his characters’ weaknesses – specifically their pecunious natures. The good sense that brought them together also threatens to pull them apart when it is taken to extremes. It’s a shame – for me, at least – that Riceyman Steps couldn’t just have been a sweet novel about a couple finding compatibility later in life than they might have imagined. Perhaps that wouldn’t have been as popular at the time. But there is enough of that in the novel, and of a depiction of a corner of London at a specific time, to relish and enjoy before hearts start beating faster and trouble enters this particular version of unshowy paradise.

The Indignant Spinsters by Winifred Boggs

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Last year, Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs was one of my favourite reads, and I’ve made no secret about the fact that I’d love it to be a British Library Women Writers title at some point. But it wasn’t the first of her books that I read. The reason I got interested in Boggs in the first place was The Indignant Spinsters (1921). I figured I couldn’t help but love an author who would write a book with a title like that.

I love a slightly ridiculous premise, particularly if it involves convoluted lying and disguise, and that’s what The Indignant Spinsters provides in spades. The first section of the book tries to get the reader comfortable in what’s going on, and I’ll admit I had to re-read bits of it several times. The long and the short of it is that there are three unmarried sisters, the Miss Smiths – Kit, Doll, and the narrator whose name I can’t find. Maybe unnamed? They have lived oppressed lives with an uncle who, when he dies, leaves them with a fair chunk of money but not enough to live on forever.

How easy to be good on a few thousands a year! How difficult on a hundred or so! Oh, the daily grinding sordid things that threaten to make us sordid too! We may manage, a few of us, to afford a heart; we know we cannot afford a soul. We have got to ‘make two ends meet’ instead, perhaps spend fifty years at it – and fail at the last. I also told myself that there were few things I would not do to get a chance at the big things of life.

The Miss Smiths have some tangled connection with the housekeeper of a house where the son moved to Australia and cut ties with the Wanstead family – and had three daughters, all of whom died. As luck would have it, these three daughters are about the same age as the three Miss Smiths. They decide to announce themselves as the missing women, and move into the ancestral home.

The plan is concocted in order to find them eligible husbands, as they no longer wish to be indigent spinsters – or indignant, as is misheard, for such is the origin of the title. They know that wealthy women are far more likely to find men who want to marry them. Their plan is not cruel, as they don’t want to take anything away from the Wansteads. And there is no emotional manipulation at play, since nobody they’re meeting has any fondness for the absent son, or any personal knowledge of his three daughters. Boggs does a good job at keeping us on side, and sympathetic with them.

But – oh, of course – things go wrong. The missing women’s uncle John – also believed dead – turns up, and he is rather dubious about their claims. And that’s just the first of the obstacles that gets in their way, as they deal with their plan crumbling and their moral resolve following suit.

In all of this, there are a few delightful character-types – like straight-talking Aunt Susannah:

”I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I was discussing spinsters. Be good enough not to interrupt and to speak when you’re spoken to, Miss Pert! I say spinsters are maligned. If half of them are ‘couldn’ts’, the other half are certainly ‘wouldn’ts’, and when one sees what some of their fellow women pick up and endure with complacency one hardly wonders or blames them. In the old days they had a regrettable taste in curates; now they prefer motor cars, and again I don’t blame ’em!”

So, it’s a ridiculously silly plot and it’s good fun to read. And it’s not an awful lot more than that, but sometimes that’s all one needs. There isn’t much emotional depth to the characters, and the stakes feel relatively low. Which is why I found it a surprise when I read Sally on the Rocks which is so much more impactful – a genuine feeling of the desperation of unmarried poverty, and characters who are so well drawn. I found a lot to enjoy for a few frivolous afternoons. It was only when I saw what else Boggs was capable of that I realised this wouldn’t be the one of hers that I would be pushing on everyone.

The Land by Vita Sackville-West [or a bit of it]

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File:Victoria-mary-sackville-west-vita.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

I am trying to be the sort of person who likes poetry, and picking some of the poems off my bookshelves. If I’m honest, it hasn’t been an enormous success yet – though I did enjoy some of the Yeats I read, and felt pretty unenthusiastic about quite a lot of it.

One of the poems I’ve been keen to try is The Land by Sackville-West – a book-length poem from 1926. It is perhaps best remembered now, at least to the non-poetry read fraternity, for Virginia Woolf’s teasing of it in Orlando. In that novel, published a couple of years later and inspired by Vita Sackville-West, Orlando spends years writing a long poem called The Oak Tree that is later lampooned by a noted Elizabethan critic.

So that is quite a starting point for trying The Land! And I can see why it might be lampooned. It’s essentially a rustic and atavistic take on nature, filled with farmers doing ancient things with scythes etc. etc. I’m going to be honest, most of it didn’t really work for me. That ‘poetic shepherd’ genre always feels a bit improbable and fey to me. BUT I am glad I read it for this small section alone, which I really liked.

Long story short – I don’t think I’m the right audience for The Land, but I love two particular pages. So, if you’re like me – here, I’m saving you some time and just sharing this bit, on comparing poets and artisans.

The poet like the artisan
Works lonely with his tools; picks up each one,
Blunt mallet knowing, and the quick thin blade,
And plane that travels when the hewing’s done;
Rejects, and chooses; scores a fresh faint line;
Sharpens, intent upon his chiselling;
Bends lower to examine his design,
If it be truly made,
And brings perfection to so slight a thing.
But in the shadows of his working-place,
Dust-moted, dim,
Among the chips and lumber of his trade,
Lifts never his bowed head, a breathing-space
To look upon the world beyond the sill,
The world framed small, in distance, for to him
The world and all its weight are in his will.
Yet in the ecstasy of his rapt mood
There’s no retreat his spirit cannot fill,
No distant leagues, no present, and no past,
No essence that his need may not distil,
All pressed into his service, but he knows
Only the immediate care, if that be good;
The little focus that his words enclose;
As the poor joiner, working at his wood,
Knew not the tree from which the planks were taken,
Knew not the glade from which the trunk was brought,
Knew not the soil in which the roots were fast,
Nor by what centuries of gales the boughs were shaken,
But holds them all beneath his hands at last.