a gallimaufry

Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, by Francesca Wade

Glossing over my long absence from the Internet, I am back to enthuse about a book that most of you have already heard of and maybe read. (If you have read it, write your Thoughts in the comment section below this post!) I shall have to write about it from memory, because I do not actually have a copy, I borrowed my mother’s while I was in Britain. Perhaps this is no bad thing, it will curb my propensity to ramble on. (Or will it?)

Quite by chance, Francesca Wade discovered that between the two world wars five women writers lived in Mecklenburgh Square in London: HD, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power and Virginia Woolf. (I hadn’t ever heard of Harrison and Power: Harrison was a brilliant classical scholar who left Cambridge University in her seventies to set up house with Hope Mirrlees and translate and promote Russian literature; Power was a distinguished mediaeval historian who argued the importance of economic and social history, as well as being a Sinophile, prominent socialist and pacifist, and holder of wild parties.) At that time, Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a middle-class woman of modest means could rent a room of her own, alongside artists, radicals and poor families; a little rackety and Bohemian though not too much, certainly quite cheap and in close proximity to the British Library and University College, London.

A group biography of this sort explores the ways in which five women found, and then fought to keep, their rooms of their own. Not all of the women lived in Mecklenburgh Square very long – Woolf hardly at all – so Wade explores her five lives by moving back and forth in time around their sojourns there. She also uses the geographical centre of Mecklenburgh Square to pull together numerous threads of cultural life between the wars. Certain preoccupations absorbed all five. How did talented, curious and clever women navigate a world which denied them equality? Harrison and Power had to work for an institution, Cambridge University, which refused to award degrees to women; Woolf wasn’t even permitted a proper education and had to teach herself. Was it possible to marry – or have a fulfilling relationship – without sacrificing one’s work, if one was a woman? For HD and Sayers, pregnant outside wedlock, this involved particularly painful choices.

Shaping one’s own story was also important. HD wrote and rewrote versions of her autobiography many times over her life, as if trying on different dresses; Woolf skived off labouring away on her biography of Roger Fry to dash out ‘A Sketch of the Past’, scatterings of childhood memories. During the Blitz she watched London’s physical past being bombed to smithereens; eventually her own home and many of her possessions were also obliterated, tangible links with her youth and family gone for ever. Harrison and Power both destroyed their papers (Harrison burnt hers almost gleefully when she left Newnham), with terrible consequences for their posthumous reputations, their radical contributions to history forgotten or reattributed to men.

(Photograph of Mecklenburgh Square, ca 1930; Camden Local Studies and Archives, found here)

Other interests were more particular. Power was a socialist and her story encompasses developments in socialist thought as well as the rise of the League of Nations Union, pacifism and internationalism, all of which shaped post-WWI society. Both Power and Woolf became increasingly uncomfortable with the knowledge of their privileges and their reliance on the labour of working-class women. Through Harrison, we learn about the Russian diaspora and its influence on western European culture. Through HD, we learn about the Imagists and the difficulty of living a truly Bohemian life. (Also: that HD was a total slob who never emptied her ashtrays or washed up her wine glasses.)

Square Haunting is a book which has deservedly won a lot of praise. It is a marvellous group biography, full of detail and perceptiveness. It not only brings to life five women and their era; it also reminds us of the importance of taking the time and having the space to think, as imperative now as it was one hundred years ago.

 

the detective novels of Joan Smith

The most unexpected way in which the past few months have affected my reading is that it is completely dominated by whim and obsession. There’s no discipline any more and no urge to read anything even remotely demanding. If I want to read something, I REALLY want to read it and I want to read it right now and then I want to read EVERYTHING like it. I have completely eschewed the literary equivalent of a wholesome balanced diet in favour of stuffing my face with chocolates. I owe two reviews and Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week looms and I am sticking my fingers in my ears and singing.

(June will be the Month of Responsibility.)

(Felix Vallotton, A Woman Reading, 1922; oil on canvas, private collection; found here)

So, first there was the Frances Hardinge obsession. Then the Diana Wynne Jones. Then the Dorothy L. Sayers. (Actually, that is continuing, I just ran out of her work and so am awaiting three more at the point of whose arrival the obsession will resume.) And then I saw my copy of Joan Smith’s A Masculine Ending, which I bought about twenty years ago in a charity shop and quite liked. Suddenly, it was the ONLY book in the house I wanted to read. And then I wanted to read ALL the rest of the books in the series, so I ordered them and read them in less than two days.

Joan Smith is a respected British journalist and in the late 1980s and early 1990s she published a series of five ‘detective’ novels featuring a lecturer in English literature at London University, Loretta Lawson. I’ll list them all, not least because the titles are so good:

• A Masculine Ending (1987)
• Why Aren’t They Screaming? (1988)
• Don’t Leave Me This Way (1990)
• What Men Say (1993)
• Full Stop (1995)

I freely admit that for me much of their appeal is nostalgia. They cover the years of my late teens and early twenties, and during that time I studied English literature at university and went on to live in London for a while (as Loretta does). Detective novels are often concerned with the minutiae of everyday life, what people were doing and when, and so are full of reminders of things we did and technology we used. Smith’s novels focus very intensely on a few days and there is plenty of minutiae to please. Loretta sends faxes and uses answerphones, word processors and floppy disks – upgrading to a laptop in the last novel. There are a few fashion moments – a shocking pink handbag, a tube skirt, harem pants. There’s fresh pasta from the deli and Habitat sofas. There’s a sobering reminder of the casual sexism that still abounded at the time. And there’s plenty of politics: Why Aren’t They Screaming? is set around a women’s protest at a US air base similar though smaller to Greenham Common, the academics in What Men Say scoff about the government’s cutbacks to education and insistence on courses’ ‘relevance’.

But politics is not just a surface issue to the novels. As a series, they examine the often brutal nature of the power imbalance between men and women. Most significantly, they demonstrate how men’s potential for violence impacts women’s behaviour (and, in some cases, ability to live) while women’s concerns are easily dismissed as hysterical or unimportant. Against the macho world of the police forces she has to deal with and the rarefied sexism of some academics, Loretta strives to live a feminist life. She remains on good terms with her ex-husband, John (conveniently for many of the plots, he is a journalist), although he is convinced that their marriage was destroyed by Loretta’s joining a women’s group. She is loyal to her friends, most notably Bridget, a lecturer at Oxford University whose own late marriage and high-risk pregnancy are the focus of What Men Say. In A Masculine Ending and Don’t Leave Me This Way it’s her over-developed sense of guilt – a very female trait, Smith implicitly suggests – which spur her on to investigate.

The final and probably the best novel, Full Stop, finds Loretta staying in a friend’s apartment in an oppressively humid New York. She starts receiving obscene telephone calls. Gradually, her judgement is undermined. Is she being followed? Can she trust the police? Was the man in the theatre just being friendly or did he have another motive? She even starts to distrust her ex-husband. How can you navigate the world in this state of constant suspicion and alertness – and yet, how can you not? The discombobulation of being in a slightly alien culture adds to the sense of menace.

Smith is pretty meta in her approach and plays around a bit with the conventions of detective novels. Her heroine is not a detective (although this is nothing new in the genre) and not always very good at detecting. Still, the identity of the murderer is usually pretty clear and Smith isn’t interested in sudden twists – outwitting the reader is not her aim here. Every novel denies the reader a comfortable ending. The guilty often profit from their crimes; sometimes, the innocent are imprisoned.

Crime fiction is not really perceived as ‘women’s fiction’ and yet some of its greatest practitioners have been women. Perhaps, Loretta suggests, that is why it is looked down upon. In Don’t Leave Me This Way one of her lovers, Robert, sneers when she tells him she’s going to set up a course on female crime writers: he doesn’t believe that Agatha Christie is a fit subject for academic study (now that dates the novel! Things have moved on a lot since then). Later, she discusses the writers she’ll include on the course with a colleague:

‘[...] If it’s Americans you’re after, how about Sara Paretsky?’
‘I’ve got her. She’s wonderful.’
‘Amanda Cross?’
‘Oh, maybe.’ The conversation was having a calming effect on Loretta, and she elaborated. ‘I’m not so sure about academic mysteries. I tried one by Joan Smith the other day and she got all the details wrong...’

Guffaw. These novels aren’t great forgotten masterpieces, though I miss the characters, but I can only say that they hit the spot for me and if you see them, try them.

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers

(I love this painting. I saw it first on someone’s Twitter, I forget whose, so please accept my apologies if it was you. I feel it beautifully expresses my mood for much of this restricted period. After Breakfast (1890) by Elin Danielson-Gambogi, a Finnish artist whom Wikipedia tells me is best known for her portraits and realist paintings; found here)

Somewhat to my surprise, I haven’t stuck terribly well to my initial coronavirus reading plans. Spending most of your time at home is not so very different to normal life for me, and I’d eagerly thought of it as giving me three extra evenings a week for reading instead of travelling to school and teaching: ideal for tackling some longer and more demanding books I had never quite felt up to. But somehow, it hasn’t worked out quite as I had anticipated. Switching to distance learning has been quite stressful; it’s involved more administration, adaptation and learning than I expected and furthermore a need to reconcile the very differing needs and capabilities of my students with the requirements of the school and the system. And there’s been other stuff too, which isn’t my business to write about here but which has been a struggle.

Still, the pleasant thing about reading plans is that you can toss them aside whenever you fancy and thus although I started No Name as soon as it arrived and love it, I had a bad patch the other day and suddenly the only book in the world I wished to reread was Gaudy Night. Fortunately, I have a copy and it was just the ticket.

I should say here that I am not an unqualified fan of Lord Peter Wimsey. I read quite a few of the Wimsey novels in my early twenties and while I enjoyed them I preferred the more silly-ass incarnation of Lord P to the character he had developed into by Gaudy Night, throwing out quotations from Latin and Elizabethan poetry and being nobly Right about everything. And don’t try to remonstrate by pointing out he has ‘faults’ – they’re the sort of ‘faults’ people claim in job interviews:  ‘And what would you say are your weaknesses, Helen?’ ‘Well now I am a perfectionist and find it difficult to stop working outside office hours.’ In fact, far from accepting any of Wimsey’s ‘faults’ that Dorothy Sayers might attribute to him, I have always secretly felt that he was deeply emotionally manipulative. And that marriage proposal! Ew.

However, this was the novel I now felt impelled to read and so I read it. Am I going soft in my old age? Was I unfair to Lord Peter all those years ago? By the end I felt actually affectionate towards him. It was a volte-face to compare with revising my opinion of Raskolnikov* and to be fair to Sayers is a tribute to her talent to write a complex and convincing character who can bear different interpretations.

I also thought that Gaudy Night was a splendid novel. Nominally a piece of detective fiction, the crime or series of crimes is seamlessly interwoven with Harriet’s central dilemma – the dilemma of educated women of her time. Career or marriage? In the 1930s, it was more or less impossible for a woman to have both. So Harriet Vane, still suffering from the notoriety of the murder for which she faced trial, returns to Oxford for her old college’s gaudy. Not all of her encounters with former friends and teachers are happy, but she falls back under the spell of her alma mater and the pleasures of scholarship. When a malicious prankster starts running amok the following term, Harriet is invited back by the fellows to investigate on the rather tenuous strength of her previous brush with justice and her detective novels giving her an insight into this sort of thing. Harriet, charmed by the beauty and intellectual rigour of the academic life, is happy to oblige and as a cover starts researching the gothic novelist Sheridan Le Fanu. But the prankster proves elusive as well as increasingly macabre and Harriet begins to wonder if she can unmask her before something truly terrible happens.

(Undated photograph of women studying at Somerville College, Oxford, I would say roughly contemporary with Harriet Vane’s sojourn; from here)

Sayers uses the spookiness of a college at night, to increase the novel’s creepy atmosphere. The prankster seems driven by a startling malevolence but is unpredictable and directs her hatred at everyone. Fellows, students and staff begin to suspect each other and fear that they will fall victim to the almost supernatural rage. The authorities being unwilling to expose the college to scandal leaves the community isolated and turned in upon itself. The pranks defy any rational, scholarly interpretation. Far from being cerebral, the place simmers with suppressed hysteria.

(Photograph of Somerville College, from here)

And Harriet is also wrestling with the problem of Lord Peter Wimsey, whose annual proposal I have to say still strikes me as borderline stalkerish – although Harriet never entirely dismisses him, either. This time, however, he strikes me as more sensitive, even uncertain, than manipulative, and more natural than poseurish. More than just Wimsey, though, Harriet’s problem is what sort of person she wants to be. Staying at Shrewsbury College allows her to explore an alternative existence, Harriet the Scholar. Like all fantasies, it proves more complex when put into practice. It will also demand sacrifices, which she may not want to make.

There is a beautiful Chinese chess set in a nearby antique shop, which Harriet admires every day as she passes it. When Wimsey begs her to allow him to make her a gift, a proper gift, she chooses that. It’s an interesting moment because Harriet has been struggling for years with her gratitude to Wimsey and the obligations it brings, the complication to their relationship. Can she ever love him if she always has to be grateful to him? By choosing an expensive gift, she seems to relinquish that sense of obligation and allow herself to receive something valuable from him. And she chooses something of high quality, to show that she appreciates him too. Yet, it is something she has no need for and will not really use as she’s hardly a chess player: it’s decorative, even a little showy. Is she accepting his greater wealth? Allowing more frivolity and pleasure into her life? Still holding something back? Perhaps she’s choosing it partly to please him; realising that in receiving, she can give too.

Every part of the novel reflects this central question of mind or heart, and it’s compellingly done, with all the charm of the Oxford backdrop and the drive of detective fiction. I appreciate this novel much more than I did before, I think it’s one of the best detective novels I’ve read. And yes, I like Wimsey better too.

Have you ever changed your mind about a character in a novel?

* When I read Crime and Punishment in my late teens I thought he was a romantic tortured hero. Revisiting the book some twenty years later I discovered he was a spoilt, selfish brat. What will I make of him in my old age?