Nava Atlas's Blog, page 37

How to Create Memorable Characters (with Inspiration from Classic Novels)

Characters are the lifeblood of your creative writing, and you want them to power your stories to the end. Here you’ll find some actionable tips on how to create memorable characters for your fictional works, with a few case studies of famous literary heroines to guide and inspire you.

While the world you create in your fictional works is important, readers are more likely to remember the characters that populate it. Indeed, a well-developed central character (or characters) will stay with readers long after they’ve turned the final page.

Strong characters are a must if you want people to stay invested in your story! After all, if readers don’t care about the characters themselves, why should they care what those characters do or say?

 

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Allow your characters to be flawed

A perfect character is hardly a relatable one, and unrelatable characters are destined to be shunted to the side and forgotten. To create complex and believable characters your readers will root for, you need to incorporate some character flaws.

Not only do flaws intrigue readers from the get-go, but they also make for a much more dramatic and exciting story, as they demonstrate that your protagonist isn’t invincible.

Louisa May Alcott‘s most beloved character, Jo March of Little Women is a classic example of a beloved heroine who has plenty of human foibles. While there’s much to love about Jo — her ambition, her drive, her bravery — it’s her less-than-lovable traits that make her a well-rounded and realistic character. Her quick temper and propensity for bluntness are natural extensions of her more admirable traits, creating a balanced personality that’s grounded in believability.

Jo’s flaws also leave space for conflicts with her close friends and family that are crucial to the plot and the development of her character. Thanks to her flaws, Jo is a real person, and we want her to succeed all the more because of it.

 

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Give your characters real agency

Many authors approach creative writing from a plot-driven perspective: they establish the story’s sequence of events first, then build outwards from this spine by fleshing it out with characters and settings. This can be a useful way to shape a story, but one potential pitfall is the creation of characters who are perfunctory, rather than real actors in your tale.

If a character has no say in how the story unfolds, it can create a sense of predetermination — and not in the fun, magical prophecy kind of way, but rather in the “if the course of events is already fixed, why am I bothering to read on?” way.

It will seem as if the story’s simply happening to the character, a passive non-participant in its events. Strong characters aren’t like that — rather, they impact the world around them by making choices with real consequences, producing the kind of genuine, nail-biting stakes that readers love.

While the ending of Charlotte Brontë‘s Jane Eyre is often criticized for its deus ex machina-style resolution, Jane is nevertheless a classic example of a character who makes their own decisions and whose actions have weight in the plot.

Her willful nature and spiritual strength drive her to leave Mr. Rochester and refuse to marry St. John, twice going against the life path seemingly laid out for her — and significantly rerouting the plot. Though it may not always seem like it, Jane is a character who makes choices in line with her own desires, rather than merely being along for the ride.

 

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Allow the plot to affect the characters

It might seem counterintuitive to follow up my last tip with this one, but even active characters with agency should still be affected by what happens around them. If you want your character to feel true to life, they shouldn’t be impervious to the events of the story, but rather responsive to their environment and experiences.

Indeed, when faced with new situations, a character might even choose to be different from before. This can be an excellent way to create satisfying character arcs over the course of your story.

One character who is clearly impacted by narrative events in powerful, realistic ways is Gone With the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara. The devastation of the Civil War and her family’s subsequent financial ruin provoke a notable shift in Scarlett’s character: she becomes more mercenary and desperate, hardening as a person and going to more extreme lengths to protect and provide for her family. Margaret Mitchell allows readers get to witness her change in direct response to the altered circumstances of her life, making her story and arc feel far more authentic.

 

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Have your characters self-reflect

You may have a well-defined sense of your character’s mindset and personality, but have you ever thought about what the character thinks of themselves? Considering this might be where you strike gold in terms of character development. Your hero or heroine doesn’t need to be preternaturally self-aware, but some level of self-reflection (even only on occasion) adds another dimension to them and brings the reader closer to their psyche.

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a masterclass in building a believable psychological world. The eponymous protagonist is constantly grappling with the disconnect between what she wants and what is expected of her. She reflects on her past and the choices she’s made, and constantly questions her happiness. This psychological drama gives readers insight into Mrs. Dalloway as she moves through an otherwise regular day in her life.

 

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Challenge expectations

One important lesson every writer must learn is to resist adhering to stereotypes, subconsciously or not. And while you don’t want characters who subvert expectations in superficial, ineffective ways (we’ve probably had enough “not-like-other-girls” heroines to last several lifetimes), it’s helpful to be aware of what readers have been conditioned to expect.

Then, rather than conforming to these expectations, you can attempt to create characters that challenge them — whether they’re aware they’re doing so or not.

One great example of a literary heroine going against type is Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. In a genre dominated by fictional men (including Christie’s own iconic Hercule Poirot), this female detective allowed the author to explore a brand-new space. Miss Marple also challenged the “spinster” image of unhappy, even bitter, unmarried women that had dominated (and still dominates) the media.

Miss Marple frequently uses the tendency of people to underestimate her to utmost advantage; Christie doesn’t ignore societal expectations and constraints on her characters, but plays with them, highlighting how they can be turned on their heads.

Ultimately, the secret to writing good characters is making sure they engage with the world around them (and our own) in interesting, thoughtful ways. Armed with these tips, and with these examples of remarkable literary women by your side, you’ll soon be creating characters so vivid they practically leap off the page.

Contributed by Savannah Cordova, a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects indie authors with the world’s best publishing professionals. In her spare time, Savannah enjoys reading fiction and writing short stories. 

 

See more writing advice inspired by classic women authors here on Literary Ladies Guide.

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The New Atalantis by Delarivier Manley (1709)

Many women authors have been criticized and even ostracized for their writing but very few have been arrested for it. The New Atalantis by Delarivier Manley (1709) was considered so scandalous that its publisher, printer and author were all arrested for scandalum magnatum.

This introduction to the best-known work by Delarivier Manley (1663 – 1724) is excerpted from Killing the Angel: Early Transgressive British Woman Writers by Francis Booth ©2021, reprinted by permission.

Manley herself considered that it was her gender that most upset the censors; in the follow-up book The Adventures of Rivella, 1714, she says, very much as Aphra Behn had said earlier:

‘If she had been a Man, she had been without Fault: But the Charter of that Sex being much more confined than ours, what is not a Crime in Men is scandalous and unpardonable in Woman.’

The New Atalantis was partly a thinly disguised autobiography but, like the earlier, equally scandalous Urania by Mary Wroth, was mainly a scalding, scathing attack on contemporary society, aimed at the corrupt courtiers, politicians and aristocrats of the time, transgressing any idea of the woman writer as only concerned with romance and manners.

Like Urania, New Atalantis is a kind of early roman à clef, where the names of real people are replaced by fictitious ones, which is why Lady Mary Wortley Montagu told her friend she believed she could find the Key. The central character is Astrea (you may remember that Astrea was Aphra Behn’s pseudonym; this was a deliberate homage on Manley’s part). She is a semi-divine woman who comes back down to earth and meets characters called Virtue and Intelligence, rather as Christine of Pizan met Reason, Rectitude and Justice.

‘Once upon a time, Astrea (who had long since abandoned this world, and flown to her native residence above) by a new formed design, and a revolution of thought, was willing to revisit the earth, to see if humankind was still as defective, as when she in a disgust forsook it.’

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Killing the Angel on Amazon US*
Killing the Angel on Amazon UK*
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Astrea doesn’t like what she finds as she is guided round the world by her mother, Virtue. Between them, they rail at the corruption around them. Here they are discussing the corruption in the navy.

If some great good man should stand up and fearlessly regulate these disorders, as is reported there is now such a one at their head; if corruptions were not above, these inconveniences would not be below. Did only service and true merit recommend to office; were not bribery, and the solicitations of friends, preferred to duty and worth: were severe penalties inflicted upon these blasphemers (the commanders themselves first is a listing from the use): were dice, cards, and an exorbitant love of wine, and the hotter liquors taxed: were faithful commissioners appointed to inspect the provision of the Navy: were matter of lawful complaint made free to the meanest seamen, provided (upon pain of exemplary punishment) he advance nothing but the truth: were it made capital to take a bribe in the service of their country – the regulation might be made easy, if the leading men and commanders gave them but examples of sobriety, justice and morality. But all is nothing but oaths, drunkenness, burning lust, riots, avarice, cruelty, and disorder; they have got the better of a bad reputation, and do not so much as care to dissemble a good.

Manley was involved in a circle of women writers that included Aphra Behn, Catherine Trotter and Katherine Philips; Manley even provided a poem for Trotter’s play version of Behn’s Agnes de Castro in praise of her predecessors and women poets in general. (Orinda is Philips’ pseudonym, Astrea is Behn’s.)

Orinda and the fair Astrea gone
       Not one was found to fill the Vacant Throne:
Aspiring Man quite regained the Sway,
Again had taught us humbly to obey;
Till you (Nature’s third start, in favour of our Kind)
With stronger Arms, their Empire have disjoined,
And snatched a laurel which they thought their Prize,
Thus Conqueror, with your Wit, as with your Eyes.
Fired by their bold Example, I would try
To turn our Sexes weaker Destiny.
O! How I long in the Poetic Race,
To loose the Reins, and give their Glory Chase;
For thus encouraged, and thus led by you?
Methinks we might more Crowns than theirs Subdue.

Manley was probably the editor of a collection of poems on the death of Poet Laureate John Dryden in 1700, including one by Sarah Fyge Egerton. The two women were friends, though their politics were very different, and their friendship ended when Egerton gave evidence against Manley in a forgery trial.

The Dryden memorial volume The Nine Muses also included poems by Trotter and Susanna Centlivre. But despite her admiration for and solidarity with her fellow female authors in The New Atalantis Manley satirizes all these women – the attacks hidden behind fictional names of course.

Her spite was partly due to their Whig politics – Manley was a fervent Tory – but also for what she saw as various betrayals of her friendship; women can be scolds to each other as much as to men. Manley seems however to have been entirely in favor of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea and reprints two of her poems, complete but unattributed, in The New Atalantis.

Delarivier Manley was highly prolific in many areas, including political journalism, pamphlets and magazines – she briefly edited Jonathan Swift’s Tory journal the Examiner – as well as plays and novels, most of which were what we now call scandal novels, the English equivalent of the French chroniques scandaleuses. Manley’s own life was indeed quite scandalous: she entered into a bigamous marriage with her cousin (which is why her maiden name and her married name are the same).

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After that failed, she came under the patronage of Charles II’s mistress Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland. That relationship failed too and thereafter she supported herself by her writing; she was another early professional female writer though she insisted throughout her life that she never received enough financial recompense for her writing on behalf of the state.

Most of her political writings were published anonymously but Manley never attempted to hide her many affairs and indeed featured them extensively in her fiction which is mostly at least semi-autobiographical.

Her affairs seem to have been mostly heterosexual, although she moved in circles where lesbian relationships were not uncommon. The New Atalantis, which of course is not entirely fictional, heavily features the Cabal, a group of upper-class women, many of whom are in various artistic fields, who reject family and heterosexual relationships. They tend to dress as men: ‘they do not in reality love Men; but dote of the Representation of Men in Women. Hence it is that those Ladies are so fond of the Dress En Cavaliere.’

This kind of crossdressing society was very unusual in England, though much later in France there were female to male cross dressers like George Sand, the female societies that Colette described so vividly, the Monocle club in Paris and salons like that around Natalie Clifford Barney.

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You may also enjoy:
5 Early English Women Writers to Discover
Elizabeth Cary, Early English Poet, Dramatist, and Scholar
The Matchless Orinda: Katherine Philips
The Scandalous, Sexually Explicit Writings of Aphra Behn
Olympe de Gouges: An Introduction
Susanna Centlivre, English Poet and Playwright
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The women of the Cabal in The New Atalantis do occasionally have affairs with men which are indulged as temporary lapses by the other members; their main aim is of a higher kind of friendship between women, transcending the merely physical. Nevertheless, physical love between women is by no means considered shameful within the ranks of the Cabal if not in the rest of society.

Two beautiful Ladies joined in an Excess of Amity (no word is tender enough to express their new Delight) innocently embrace! for how can they be guilty? They vow eternal Tenderness, they exclude the Men, and condition that they will always do. What irregularity can there be in this? ‘Tis true, some things may be strained a little too far, and that causes Reflections to be cast upon the Rest.

Manley’s narrator, Astrea, is not a member of the Cabal and does not entirely approve; for Astrea friendship between women is perfectly acceptable as long as it does not lead to anything physical:

But if they carry it a length beyond what Nature designed and fortify themselves by these new-formed Amities against the Hymenial Union, or give their Husbands but a second place in their Affections and Cares; ‘tis wrong and to be blamed.

Even Manley is not so transgressive as to suggest that women should neglect their duty as wives.

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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Marguerite Yourcenar, Author of Memoirs of Hadrian

Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour (June 8, 1903  – December 17, 1987) was a French short story writer, novelist and essayist known as Marguerite Yourcenar. Best known for her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, she was the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française.

From the beginning of World War II, she lived in the United States with her partner, the American professor Grace Frick. She took American citizenship and died in Maine at the age of eighty-four.

 

A nomadic childhood

Marguerite was the child of a Belgian mother, Fernande de Cartier de Marchienne, and a French father, Michel-René Cleenewerck de Crayencour. The family lived in Brussels, Belgium, where Marguerite was born at home. Ten days after her birth (which Marguerite later described with characteristic unsentimentality: “the pretty room looked like the scene of a crime”), her mother died from puerperal fever.

Not long afterward, her father took her to his family estate near Lille, France, where she lived until the age of nine. She remembered these as largely happy years, with nature on the doorstep, a pet lamb and goat that she adored, and a devoted nursemaid called Barbe.

According to Marguerite’s first biographer Josyane Savigneau, she later scandalized French readers by claiming that she never regretted not having a mother. Barbe, together with her loving but largely absent father, was a good enough substitute — at least until Barbe was sacked for taking Marguerite with her to ‘houses of assignation,’ where she went to supplement her income. It was a shock for the young Marguerite, who was not even allowed to say goodbye. After this, her father sold the family château and moved the two of them to Paris.

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Michel was a man of leisure and a prolific gambler, who was very rarely at home. Marguerite was mostly left to fend for herself in the city, wandering the streets and visiting museums and bookstalls. She was educated sporadically at home with a succession of tutors, but it was through her own reading that she became proficient in Latin, ancient Greek, English, and Italian.

This self-styled education was augmented by extensive travel with her father: in a later interview, she recalled several months lived in Richmond, near London, when she would spend days walking in the park or visiting the London museums. “I saw the Elgin Marbles at the British museum. and went to the Victoria and Albert frequently. I used to drop my sweet wrappings in a porcelain dragon there…”

She anticipated a literary career and was encouraged in this by Michel. They moved to Monte Carlo in 1920 so that he could further indulge his love of baccarat, and Marguerite recalled reading English and French classics together in the heat of the Riviera, passing the books back and forth between them.

It was Michel who helped her work out the pen name of Yourcenar (an imperfect anagram of Crayencour), who wrote to publishers under her name to submit her writings, and who paid for her first two books of poetry to be published. He also gave her the first chapter of an unfinished novel of his own, telling her to do what she wanted with it: the result was “The First Evening,” a short story about a joyless wedding night.

 

A writing career and a tangled personal life

Michel died in 1929, having gambled away much of his fortune and leaving Marguerite nothing. She did, however, have a small inheritance from her mother, which she used to support a continuation of their nomadic and dissipated lifestyle. She drank a little, traveled a lot, slept with both men and women, and wrote prolifically.

Later, she said that everything she ever wrote was already in her mind by the age of twenty; all that remained was for her to polish her method and put the words onto paper. “Books,” she claimed, “are not life, only its ashes.”

It was during this period, then, that she refined the style that would become her own: a classical style that was considered old-fashioned, with a lack of sentimentality and deep psychological insights, that drew comparisons with Racine.

Her first novel, Alexis, was published not long after her father’s death in 1929, followed by Denier du Rêve (translated as A Coin In Nine Hands) in 1934. Her work was largely well-received, although critics tended to comment that she wrote like a man: one wrote that her words were “clasped by an iron gauntlet,” and that he could not find in her work “those often charming weaknesses … by which one identifies a feminine pen.”

Marguerite’s personal life was no less colorful. During this period, she fell for her homosexual editor at Éditions Grasset, André Fraigneau, who loved her intellectually but had no interest sexually.

Her passion for him, though, lasted for several years and overlapped the start of what would be a lifelong relationship with American English professor Grace Frick. The two women met in the bar of the Wagram Hotel in Paris in 1937, where Marguerite was drinking with a friend and discussing the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Grace, so the story goes, overheard their conversation; she walked over to Marguerite’s table and proceeded to correct them on aspects of Coleridge that she felt they had misunderstood.

It could have been an inauspicious start to a relationship, but later that year Marguerite sailed to the U.S. to spend the winter in New Haven with Grace, who was working on her dissertation at Yale. On returning to France in the spring, Marguerite faced a choice between her unrequited love for Fraigneau and her blossoming passion for Grace, which was very much reciprocated.

The short novel Le Coup de Grâce was largely a product of this situation (the storyline involves a love triangle between two Prussian soldiers, Erich and Conrad, and Conrad’s sister Sophie).

Shortly after the novel was published in 1939, Marguerite returned to the U.S. Later, she claimed that she only planned to spend another winter with Grace, but the war prevented her from returning and by the time it was over she had decided to stay. For the next forty years, Grace Frick would be her secretary, translator, manager, lover, and companion.

For the first few years in the U.S., Marguerite found herself unable to write. She turned to teaching instead: she and Grace lived near Hartford in order to be near to Grace’s work at Hartford Junior College and Connecticut College, and Marguerite commuted to teach French and Italian at Sarah Lawrence, just outside New York.

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Marguerite Yourcenar page on Amazon*
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Memoirs of Hadrian

In 1949, a trunk of possessions belatedly arrived from Lausanne, Switzerland, where Marguerite had stored them when she left Europe at the outbreak of war. Most of the valuables were missing and all that was left were old papers, most of which she burned. While sorting through them, she came across a draft of a novel about the Emperor Hadrian that she had started when she was twenty-one and later abandoned. At that moment, she later said, her mind “more or less exploded.”

In a state of “controlled delirium,” she wrote Memoirs of Hadrian from this early draft in two years. It was a formidable feat considering the amount of research it entailed. There were seventeen pages of bibliographical sources appended to the novel, including histories in English, French, and German, archaeological treatises, and ancient Latin texts — plus the time to physically write the book.

Published in 1951, Memoirs of Hadrian was her first big success, but it was a book that she did not think she could have written when she was younger. “There are books,” she said later, “which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.”

She regarded historical novels generally as, “merely a more or less successful costume ball,” and believed that recapturing the spirit of the past required rigorous and detailed research, alongside a kind of spiritual identification that was hard to pinpoint. She described her own historical writing as the “passionate reconstitution, at once detailed and free, of a moment or a man out of the past.”

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Marguerite Yourcenar in 1982, photo by Bernhard De Grendel

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Writing success, and life in Maine

During the 1950s and 1960s, Marguerite wrote several critical essays, many of them linked to her research on Hadrian, and collected them in The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays (1962). Here, as with Memoirs of Hadrian, the extent of her reading and self-directed learning is apparent. The essays deal with subjects as wide-ranging as Constantine Cavafy and Michelangelo, the venerable Bede, and James Joyce.

Her main project during the 1960s was another novel. The Abyss, published in 1968, is an imaginary biography of a 16th-century scholar and alchemist, and although it is another historical novel the tone is very different from that of Memoirs of Hadrian. Marguerite felt closer to the main character Zeno than she had ever felt to Hadrian, and described him as a brother to her: once, she even recollected ‘leaving’ him at a bakery, and having to go back to collect him. Like Memoirs of Hadrian, the novel was a great success.

Much of this writing work was done at Marguerite and Grace’s house on Mount Desert Island, Maine; an old weatherboarded house that they called Petite Plaisance. Moving here entailed giving up their teaching jobs in Hartford and New York, but Marguerite was busy writing and Grace soon took over everything else, including translating Marguerite’s work into English.

Marguerite spoke fluent English, and translated several English and American novels, including Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, into French herself, but refused to write in English; she remained devoted to her native French tongue until she died. At Petite Plaisance, they would sit facing each other across a large custom-made table in the study, surrounded by books, writing, and translating together.

But life in this isolated part of the world was not easy. Marguerite developed cancer in 1958, and fought it, on and off, for the next twenty years. She still had a passion for travel, a pursuit that was curtailed more and more by her illness.

Unable to visit Europe or other parts of the U.S., as she had been used to doing, she found herself feeling trapped and bored, and her relationship with Grace suffered as a result. When Grace died, also suffering from cancer, in 1979, Marguerite took up the nomadic lifestyle of her younger years and never lived in Maine again. With the final love of her life, a twenty-nine-year-old American photographer called Jerry Wilson (she was seventy-four when their relationship began), she traveled to Europe, Asia and Africa.

 

French honors, and later years

In 1980 Marguerite was elected to the Académie Française, an exclusive French literary institution that had existed since 1685 without ever including a woman in its number, and to which nomination and election required French citizenship. Marguerite had taken American citizenship in 1949. To get around the problem, the president of France granted her a dual U.S.-French status in 1979.

It was a huge honor that didn’t escape the media, and the attention surrounding her election prompted a resurgence of interest in her early works, none of which had yet been translated. She was happy, after some revision, for most of this work to be published, but none of it (in the critics’ view, at least) measured up to Memoirs of Hadrian or The Abyss.

Despite the recognition of her achievements, Marguerite never really settled to writing again. Her last big project, a three-volume biography of her family entitled Le Labyrinthe du Monde, was never completed.

While packing for a trip to Europe, she suffered a stroke and was taken to hospital. She never recovered and died the night of December 17, 1987. She was buried next to Grace in Somesville, across the sound from Petite Plaisance, with a memorial marker alongside for Jerry Wilson, who died of AIDS in 1986.

Her obituary in the New York Times described her as a “cosmopolitan, versatile woman of letters,” and President Jacques Chirac said that “French letters has just lost an exceptional woman…[who] used a very personal tone to find, thanks to history, the occasion for a strong reflection on morality and power.”

Petite Plaisance is now a museum, and home to a conservation fund for the maintenance of the building.

Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is an author, poet, and artist with a serious case of wanderlust. She is originally from the UK, but has spent time abroad in Europe, the United States and the Bahamas.

When not traveling or working on her current projects — a chapbook of poetry, “The Cabinet of Lost Things,” and a novel based on the life of modernist writer and illustrator Djuna Barnes — she can be found with her nose in a book, daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Visit her on the web at Elodie Rose Barnes.

More about Marguerite Yourcenar

Many of Yourcenar’s works are still only available in French, although some of her essays and short stories have been posthumously translated and collected. See her full bibliography here.

Selected works available in English

The Abyss (1982)That Mighty Sculptor, Time (1992)A Blue Tale and Other Stories (1995)Memoirs of Hadrian (2000)

Biographies

Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life by Josyane Savigneau (1993)Marguerite Yourcenar: A Biography by George Rousseau (2004)

More information

Wikipedia Becoming the Emperor: How Marguerite Yourcenar Reinvented the Past The Art of Fiction No. 103 on  Paris Reviews Reader discussion on Goodreads

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*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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The Revenue Stamp – An Autobiography by Amrita Pritam

Amrita Pritam (1919 – 2005)  was a poet, novelist, and essayist, with a huge body of work to her credit. So it’s surprising that her autobiography is just under two hundred pages, and it’s curious why she chose this particular title — The Revenue Stamp.

Behind the name is the exchange between Amrita and the famous author and journalist, Khushwant Singh, who told her that her life was of so little consequence that it could be written on the back of a revenue stamp (‘Raseedi Ticket’ in the original).

When choosing the name for her autobiography, Amrita recalled this banter and opted for this name. Credit must be given to the English translator, Krishna Gorowara, who seems to have picked up on all the nuances and depth of Amrita’s thoughts.

Pritam was born in an area that was then British India, now part of Pakistan. She wrote in Punjabi and Hindi, and her work has long been beloved by readers in both India and Pakistan. The autobiography (first published in 1977; published in English translation in 2015) doesn’t follow a linear style. Rather, it provides wonderful insights into the mind of a woman poet who was far ahead of her time, in both her thinking and how she conducted her life.

The book touches on her life with Imroz, a painter with whom she has a live-in-relationship at a time when such things were far from the norm. Her early marriage to Pritam Singh ends in a divorce. The reasons for their parting and how it affects their two children are covered.

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Learn more about Amrita Pritam
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Parental influences

Amrita writes of her parents, Raj Bibi and Kartar Singh. The latter had chosen a life of renunciation as a child Sadhu, but one glance at Raj Bibi changes all that, and they are married. Amrita writes, “The most remarkable thing about father was that a life of riches or renunciation came alike to him.”

When Amrita loses her mother at the age of ten, this sense of renunciation comes to haunt her. She senses that her father is torn between his love for her and a complete withdrawal from life. She writes poignantly that she “used to cry out in anguish because I could not tell whether I was accepted or not. I was both accepted and rejected in turns.”

Amrita’s father dabbles in verse and teaches her about rhyme and rhythm hoping that she will find expression in poetry. Amrita writes, “It seems to me I wrote because I wanted to forget those moments of rejection I felt in him.”

Interestingly, half a century later, Amrita expresses the idea that she has inherited her father’s way of looking at the world, “I feel that both riches and renunciations have taken twin births in me as well.” She also states the philosophy that stays with her throughout, “I am not in the least mindful of what others think of me. My only desire is to be at peace with my innermost self.”

After her mother’s death, Amrita loses her interest in religion, feeling that all her prayers didn’t serve to keep her mother alive. Still, spiritual experiences do come into her now and then in her later life and she gives expression to them.

 

Rebellious years and the Partition

Some tidbits from her formative years reveal Amrita’s questioning and rebellious streak. Her grandmother was the reigning matriarch of the kitchen. Amrita’s father aided her in her efforts to revolt against her grandmother’s regime.

One issue arose relating to three glass tumblers that were kept aside to serve buttermilk only to the Muslim visitors to the house. The tumblers became a “cause” for Amrita, who would insist on drinking only from those glasses, with her father’s aid. She writes, “Thereafter not a single utensil in the house was labeled ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim.’ She continues, “Neither Grandmother nor I knew then that the man I was to fall in love with, would be of the same faith as the branded utensils were meant for.”

In her sixteenth year, the author starts questioning all the regimentation of her life, her school years, parental authority: “What I had so far learnt was like a straightjacket that gives way at the seams — as the body grows. I was thirsty for life. I wanted living contact with those stars I had been taught to worship from afar.”

Amrita compares this rebellious time of her life with the era of the Partition of Undivided India in 1947, “when all social, political and religious values came crashing down like glass smashed into smithereens from the feet of people in flight.”

For those of us born after the Partition into a free India, Amrita’s autobiography offers heartbreaking insights into what it did to people — families, who found themselves separated, friends who were suddenly expected to be sworn enemies, and saddest of all, women who were abducted and raped and faced untold horrors.

She writes, “The passion of those monstrous times have been with me since, like some consuming fire — when I wrote later of a beloved’s face; of the aggressors from neighboring countries; of the crime of the long Vietnamese night, or, at one stage, of the helpless Czechs … In the haunting image of beauty and in the anger at wrong and cruelty, my sixteenth year stretches on and on …”

 

Unrequited love and friendships

Amrita writes of her (probably unrequited) love for the Hindi poet and lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi, which the man in her life, Imroz, understood and joked with her about. She says, “The curse of my lonesome state has been broken through — by Imroz.”

She is so candid in her description of how she picked up her habit of smoking. Sahir would visit her and smoke, leaving the cigarette butts behind. After his departure, Amrita would pick up the butts and smoke them, just to feel close to something that had touched Sahir’s lips. She also describes how the character of Sahir makes an appearance in some of her novels.

This is the kind of candidness and honesty that appear time and again in this autobiography, including the instances where she writes about fellow writers and poets. She names those whose writings she enjoys and doesn’t mince words about the pettiness of others who leave her essays out of anthologies, bar her from organizations, or prevent her from being part of poetry delegations that are invited to travel abroad.

A section called ‘The Cycle of Hatred’ details all this. One also gets an idea of the trials and tribulations of a woman writer, in a world of men wishing to dominate the writing world.

Her friendship with a Pakistani poet, Sajjad, whom she has known before the Partition, results in her getting flak for mentioning his name publicly. Sajjad asks her to stop doing so, and she mourns the fact that the Partition left no space for recognition of a friendship.

Still, her heart-rending poem on the Partition where she invokes Waris Shah (writer of the romantic poem, Heer-Ranjha), touches many Pakistani poets. During a BBC interview in London, the poetess Sahab Kizilbash, exclaims, “Arre! So this is Amrita…the writer of those lines. I ought to be embracing her…”

As the feted writer that she is, Amrita receives her share of invitations, where she forges bonds of friendship with poets across the world. After meeting Ho Chi Minh (President of Vietnam) in Delhi, Amrita writes a poem, ‘Aashma’, and later dedicates it to him when it’s published as part of an anthology. As a result he sent her a personal note of “admiration and kindest greetings.”

 

Conclusion

Often, The Revenue Stamp seems full of abstractions, and it almost seems as if the author strings together a bunch of random thoughts, including dreams from her past and present, in a hurry to get the book quickly completed for publication. Yet, they are full of the profundity that haunts Amrita’s other writings.

This reader flagged page after page to go back to and re-read. Despite being a slim book, it’s rich with glimpses into the brilliant mind of Amrita Pritam. The honesty in which she conducted her life, and the pain and trauma of the Partition that seared itself into her writing, are all reflected in this autobiography. It’s a book that should have universal appeal to literature lovers around the world.

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The Revenue Stamp on Amazon*
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RELATED CONTENT BY MELANIE KUMAR

10 Classic Indian Women Authors
Remembering Meena Alexander, Indian Poet & Scholar
A House with Four Rooms by Rumer Godden
Reminiscences of Enid Blyton

Melanie P. Kumar is a  Bangalore, India-based independent writer who has always been fascinated with the magic of words. Links to some of her pieces can be found at gonewiththewindwithmelanie.wordpress.com.

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10 Fascinating Facts About Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998) was an American writer and environmentalist who famously fought to protect the Florida Everglades, and also used her talents to advocate for women’s rights and racial justice in Miami and beyond. Here you’ll discover 10 fascinating facts about Marjory Stoneman Douglas, whose multifaceted accomplishments shouldn’t be forgotten.

Marjory’s long life was full of adventure, heartbreak, loss, discovery, and – ultimately – impact on the health and preservation of the wetlands critical to South Florida’s survival. This unconventional woman helped shape the future of South Florida at a time when Miami was barely more than a frontier town and the “swamp” to the west of it was considered there for the taking by developers, speculators, and agricultural industrialists.

Marjory’s most notable work, The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), startled readers into an awareness of the beautiful and fragile intricacies of that wetlands’ ecosystem and warned of the dangers of not taking action to protect the Everglades in its “eleventh hour.”

In 1969, Marjory founded the non-profit organization Friends of the Everglades, whose original mission was to stop construction of a jetport in the Big Cypress region of the ecosystem. Friends of the Everglades still exists today with the broader mission to “preserve, protect, and restore the only Everglades in the world.”

Born on April 7, 1890 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Marjory Stoneman Douglas spent her childhood years in Providence, Rhode Island and Taunton, Massachusetts. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1912 and was briefly married before moving to Miami, Florida in 1915. She had no siblings and no direct descendants, but her legacy lives on through the richness and lasting influence of her work.

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Among the Beautiful Beasts, a novel by Lori McMullen, presents the untold story of the early life of Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Among the Beautiful Beasts is available on bookshop.org*, Amazon*, and wherever books are sold.

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From the time she was six years old until she was twenty-five, Marjory didn’t see her father. As a young child, Marjory was very close with her father, Frank Stoneman. He encouraged her love of stories and read books to Marjory every night before bed. When Marjory was six years old, her mother, Lillian Trefethen Stoneman, experienced a mental health crisis and became convinced that Frank was trying to steal Marjory from her.

With the belief that she was protecting her child, Lillian took Marjory from the home they shared with Frank and moved to her own parents’ home in Taunton, Massachusetts. Lillian and her family would not let Marjory see Frank or have any contact with him, though Marjory desperately wanted to do so. By the time Marjory was old enough to pursue a relationship with her father on her own, she had lost track of his whereabouts and did not know how to find him. It was Frank’s persistence and concern for Marjory that ultimately led to their reunion in 1915.

Marjory was briefly married to a criminal. Soon after graduating from Wellesley, Marjory met Kenneth Douglas through an acquaintance in Newark, New Jersey. Although Marjory knew little about Kenneth, other than the fact that he was at least thirty years older than her, the pair married within three months of meeting and settled in Newark.

Not long after, Kenneth was arrested for what he claimed was a minor offense, though he pled guilty and served six months in the Caldwell Penitentiary for the crime. Marjory stayed married to Kenneth during his incarceration but grew wary of the relationship when Kenneth’s criminal activities continued after his release from prison.

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Marjorie Stoneman Douglas on National Park Service
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Marjory became an increasingly important journalist at the Miami Herald. When Marjory moved to Florida in 1915, her father was the editor of a small daily newspaper called the Miami Herald. Marjory began writing for the paper by filling in for the editor of the society pages, then took over that position full-time. When society news was slow in the summer, she supplemented her work by writing general news articles and eventually became an assistant editor with her own column called “The Galley,” which gave her a platform for sharing her views on local and national issues.

 

A nervous breakdown almost killed her. In the late 1920s, Marjory experienced a second nervous breakdown. As with her first breakdown, in 1924, she found herself outside in the middle of the night, but this second time, she wore only her dressing gown and screamed so uncontrollably that the neighbors alerted her father.

The doctor who treated Marjory that night prescribed the wrong medication, and she nearly died from complications. A different doctor, who specialized in nervous conditions, was brought in to help Marjory recover, and he counseled her to reduce the stress she put on herself in order to prevent further breakdowns. As Marjory improved, she discovered the healing power of writing short stories. 

 

Marjory built her house in Coconut Grove story by story. In 1924, Marjory began construction on a small cottage in the Coconut Grove area of Miami. She loved this part of the city because it was full of lush vegetation and interesting people and was not far from the waters of Biscayne Bay. This was where she wanted to build a small place of her own.

When construction costs exceeded the amount she’d borrowed, Marjory developed a system of talking to the builder each Saturday and telling him whether she had sold a short story to a magazine, which would mean work on the house could continue. The cottage was completed in the fall of 1926, just before the great unnamed hurricane hit Miami. Marjory’s beloved home survived the storm with minimal damage, and for the rest of her life, she lived in the little cottage that her stories had built.

Women’s rights and racial justice were also deeply important to Marjory. Although Marjory is best known for her environmental activism, she also fervently supported other progressive causes. From the time she was in college, Marjory was involved in the women’s suffrage movement, a passion that eventually led her to argue, in 1916, before the Florida legislature in favor of giving women the right to vote. Though her appearance at the capitol was ineffective and Florida remained one of the last states to ratify the 19th Amendment, Marjory found value in working with outspoken women and developed an interest in public advocacy.

She was also one of the first people in Miami to speak out against the deplorable and unequal living conditions in the city’s Black neighborhoods, which, among other problems, had no sewers or water mains. Her advocacy in this area contributed to the passing of a referendum requiring all houses in Dade County to have indoor plumbing and the establishment of a fund to help Black homeowners borrow money to build bathrooms.

 

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Marjory never planned on writing The Everglades: River of Grass. This book turned out to be her most important written work. Marjory was sixth months into writing a novel when her friend, the editor of a series of books about rivers, asked her to write a book about the Miami River. She responded that the Miami River was “only about an inch long,” and asked if she could look into whether the river was connected to the Everglades instead.

Marjory, who at that point had only a very basic understanding of the Florida wetlands, learned through research that that the movement of water from Lake Okeechobee south to the Ten Thousand Islands was flanked on either side by ridges that could be considered banks, which meant that the Everglades fit the technical definition of a river. She then coined the phrase “river of grass,” which fundamentally changed the public’s understanding of the ecosystem and became the title of the book that forever linked Marjory Stoneman Douglas to that land. 

 

Marjory lived to be 108. Much of Marjory’s most significant work took place in her later years, and as she aged, she embraced — and even relished — growing older. She felt that, with fewer responsibilities, old age allowed more freedom and time for contemplation than middle age did, and she counseled older people to remain interested in a variety of things so that they wouldn’t bore others. Marjory’s philosophy on longevity is best reflected by this statement from her autobiography: “I believe life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or of a longer life, are not necessary.”

Marjory received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1993, when she was 103 years old, Marjory Stoneman Douglas received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton. The citation for this award read, in part, “An extraordinary woman who has devoted her long life to protecting the fragile ecosystem of the Everglades, and to the cause of equal rights for all Americans.” Marjory donated the medal to her alma mater, Wellesley College.

 

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Everglades National Park U.S. Postage Stamp, 1947
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Marjory didn’t actually like to spend time in the Everglades. In her autobiography, Marjory states that “To be a friend of the Everglades is not necessarily to spend time wandering around out there. It’s too buggy, too wet, too generally inhospitable.” Marjory’s recognition of the fundamental importance of the Everglades, paired with her acknowledgment of the realities of spending time there, communicated to the broader public that the ecosystem is worth saving, even if people have no interest in visiting the place themselves.

 

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Contributed by Lori McMullen. Lori grew up in unincorporated Dade County, outside of Miami. Growing up, her family took an annual trip to the west coast of Florida. McMullen was inspired by the scenic drive along Route 41, a two-lane, pot-hole ridden stretch of road that bisected Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve. South Florida found its way into her heart and into her writing, even after she left Miami to attend Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. McMullen currently lives with her husband and three daughters in Chicago. Her short stories have been featured in the Tampa Review and Slush Pile magazine. “Among the Beautiful Beasts” (2021) is her first novel. For more information, visit Lori McMullen.

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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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9 Poems by Rachel Field, Rediscovered American Author

Rachel Field (1894 – 1942) was a National Book Award winning novelist and a Newbery Medal winner. Her plays were produced all over the country, and she was a sought-after writer in Hollywood by the time her life ended abruptly in 1942. But when interviewers asked her which of her writings she liked best, she always said it was her poetry. I have to agree and perhaps you will, too, after sampling these poems by Rachel Field.

It was Rachel Field’s poetry that first caught my interest when I moved into her old summer house on an island in Maine in 1994, partly because so much of her poetry referenced both interior and exterior island scenes that were intimately familiar to me. She lived eight months of the year in New York City, and her urban poetry sparkles with the same genuine delight as her verses about the seaside. Rachel’s reverence for beauty ran deep.

She saw beauty equally in mossy woods and twinkling, nighttime skyscrapers, in a white gull’s wing and a sea of umbrellas dancing like a toadstool parade on a rain-spattered street. Whether her characters are elves and fairies, or the local seamstress and postman, an uplifting spirit presides in her early poetic collections: The Pointed People, Taxis and Toadstools, and Branches Green.

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Learn more about the life of Rachel Field
and 21 fascinating facts about Rachel Field
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And yet, Rachel Field’s beauty shimmers especially for its fragility. Life’s ambivalence – the juxtaposition of pain and beauty – often fueled the power of Field’s poetry. There are perpetual yearnings in Field’s poetry, often in conflict with each other –simplicity vs. adventure, the conforming good child vs the wild bad witch, a quiet church pew vs dancing barefoot in the grass.

But that doesn’t cover the breadth of Rachel’s poetic voice. She reveals profound wisdom through the simplicity of daily life. A spider spinning its web on a city clock, a dog chasing fireflies, the promise of an unexpected doorbell chime – all these things reveal some particular essence of human nature.

 

Rachel’s later poetry, particularly her collection titled Fear is the Thorn, published in 1936, reveals her greatest depths, the pain of romantic rejection, infertility, and the heartache of time’s relentless passage.

As Rachel Field’s biographer, I relished her poetry, which often mirrored events and conflicts expressed in her contiguous letters. Her archived writings and poetry taken together created a treasure trove of insight into the life of this gracious, delightful, deep-hearted writer and woman. I ache to think of the work she might have produced, had she been given more time.

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The Field House is the first full-scale biography of Rachel Field
Read this Q & A with Robin Wood and find the book:
The Field House on Bookshop.org* and The Field House on Amazon*

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 If Once You Have Slept on an Island

If once you have slept on an island,
You’ll never be quite the same;
You may look as you looked the day before
And go by the same old name,
You may bustle about in street and shop;
You may sit at home and sew,
But you’ll see blue water and wheeling gulls
Wherever your feet may go.
You may chat with the neighbors of this and that
And close to your fire keep,
But you’ll hear ship whistle and lighthouse bell
And tides beat through your sleep.
Oh, you won’t know why, and you can’t say how
Such change upon you came,
But – once you have slept on an island
You’ll never be quite the same!

Illustration by Rachel Field for If Once You Have Slept on an Island
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Good Green Bus

Rumbling and rattly good green Bus
Where are you going to carry us?
Up the shiny lengths of Avenue
Where lights keep company two by two;
Where windows glitter with things to buy,
And churches hold their steeples high.
Round the Circle and past the Park,
Still and shadowy, dim and dark,
Over the asphalt and into the Drive –
Isn’t it fun to be alive?
Look to the left and the River’s there
With ships and whistles and freshened air;
To the right – more windows row on row,
And every one like a picture show,
Or little stages where people play
At being themselves by night and day,
And never guess that they have us
For audience in the good green Bus!

 

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Sandwich Men

There’s something about Sandwich Men
That makes me want to cry:—
Not just because they’re mostly old
And dreary round the eye,
Or stooped between those painted boards
Their shoulders carry high,
It’s something that you seem to feel
When Sandwich Men go by.
You always know that they are there
No matter how you try
To turn your head the other way;
It’s not because they sigh
Or beg. They haven’t things to sell
And so you cannot buy.
You have to watch them shuffle past
In rainy streets or dry,
And feel that something that you feel
When Sandwich Men go by.

Illustration by Rachel Field for Sandwich Men
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Something Told the Wild Geese

Something told the wild geese
It was time to go.
Though the fields lay golden
Something whispered, — “Snow.”
Leaves were green and stirring,
Berries, luster-glossed,
But beneath warm feathers
Something cautioned, — “Frost.”
All the sagging orchards
Steamed with amber spice,
But each wild breast stiffened
At remembered ice.
Something told the wild geese
It was time to fly,—
Summer sun was on their wings,
Winter in their cry.

 

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For A Dog Chasing Fireflies

Why do we smile at one who goes
With eager paws and pointing nose;
With rolling eye, and frantic rush
On these small lights mysterious?
Are we more sensible or wise
Because we call them fireflies?
Because from our superior height
We watch you charge each phantom light,
Incredulous, and half afraid,
That such can shine and also fade
Out of your reach to reappear
Ever beyond and never near.
By what sure power do we place
Ourselves above such futile chase,
Who seek more fleeting lights than these
That glitter under darkening trees?

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A Rhyme for Greenwich Village

I walked on Eight Street in the Spring,
I thought I didn’t care.
I bought French pastry by the L,
Arbutus in the Square.
By Patchin Place I lingered
Beneath the Tower clock,
I had forgotten how lost things
Can throng a city block.
At Christopher and Gay Streets
My knees began to shake,
And I gave the organ-man a dime
For old time’s sake.

 

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October 14th

It was too much to ask
I know it now;
That slantwise light of afternoon
On the swamp maple bough;
That hump-backed, russet hill
And far white spire;
That smell of apples in the grass
And dry-leaf fire –
These should have been enough,
But, oh, my dear,—
If you had touched my hand or drawn
One step more near.

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Petition in Spring

Heaven help me now,
And every Spring, to bear
These too bright shapes
That throng the earth and air, —
The petal snow on bough,
The scillas’ early blue,
The wisps of straw and twigs
That nesting robins strew.
Help me past cowslip’s god
Fringing each marshy pool,
Past other people’s children
On the way to school.

 

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Not Every Bud…

Now that April is over;
Now that May is begun
I must bind my heart with sober thoughts
Lest petals in the sun
Should prove too prodigal and frail;
Lest flowering plum and pear
And peach trees wrapt in rosy mist
Should take me unaware.
I must remember roots in the dark,
And, even as I stare,
Whisper, —“Not every bud that blows,
Not every bud may bear.”

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ROBIN CLIFFORD WOOD has a BA from Yale University, an MA in English from the University of Rochester, and an MFA in creative writing from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. During twenty-five years as a full-time mom, she published local human-interest features in New Hampshire, New York, and Massachusetts and spent seven years as a regular columnist, first in Massachusetts, then for Maine’s Bangor Daily News. She began teaching college writing in 2015.

Her articles have appeared in Port City Life magazine, Bangor Metro, and Solstice literary magazine, which published her powerful essay “How Do You Help Your Parents Die?” in its spring 2019 issue. Her award-winning poetry received national recognition from the 2020 Writer’s Digest Competition. Wood lives in central Maine with her husband and dogs. The Field House is her first book. For more information, visit robincliffordwood.com. 

 

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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith (1936)

This analysis of Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith (1936) is excerpted from Amongst Those Left by Francis Booth. Reprinted by permission.

‘This book is the talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts come, the way I said, and the people come too, and come and go, to illustrate the thoughts, to point the moral, to adorn the tale.’

Born Florence Margaret Smith, in Kingston Upon Hull, England,  Stevie Smith (1902 – 1971) is now better known and loved as a poet than as a novelist. All her novels were written relatively early in her life and are all unconventional. Smith was brought up, along with her sister, by her feminist aunt Madge Spear, whom she called ‘The Lion Aunt’ and with whom she lived all her life.

“Dear Auntie Lion, I do so hope you will forgive what is written here. You are yourself like shining gold. When I think of what some women are like, I am full of humble gratitude and apprehension that I have you to live with.”

Smith lived a creative and intellectual life largely independent of men. She knew personally many artistic and creative women and corresponded with many others. However, she did not make a living from her writing and worked in the very male world of publishing; like Ann Quin a generation later she worked as a secretary, from 1923 to 1953.

Smith had been writing poetry for ten years when she first submitted her poems to an agent, who suggested she should write a novel instead; Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), was the result. After that she published her first volume of poetry, A Good Time Was Had By All (1937), which was followed by more poetry and two more novels.

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Smith’s three novels – Novel on Yellow Paper; or, Work It Out For Yourself, 1936; Over The Frontier, 1938; The Holiday 1949 – are all decidedly internalized and autobiographical: the world of externals only seems to exist through the narrator’s rather eccentric view of it and her flowing, rambling chatter, which seems to have no ordering principle other than that of the association of ideas.

After the last novel was published in 1949,  she concentrated on her poetry. Having left her secretarial job in 1953 she reviewed books, published sketches and read her poetry in public, becoming well-known especially for the poetry collection Not Waving But Drowning, published in 1957. 

The narrator of the first two novels, Pompey Casmilus, is a thinly veiled version of Smith herself; in the first novel she talks entirely about herself, her opinions and her life at work and in her small social circle. Over The Frontier starts in similar vein but Pompey then goes to Germany and the novel (which was published just before the Second World War) turns into a parody of a certain kind of jingoistic thriller written by John Buchan and others.

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Novel on Yellow Paper on Bookshop.org*
Novel on Yellow Paper on Amazon*
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Whereas Novel on Yellow Paper had been concerned with anti-Semitism, Over the Frontier is concerned with German militarism. Smith’s third novel, The Holiday, published more than ten years later, is more conventional and though it has characters – the central figure Celia is in many ways like Smith herself – and a frustrated love story, it is mainly concerned with post-war Britain and its role in the world and many of the characters speak as if merely voicing Smith’s own views.

Novel on Yellow Paper is so titled because the narrator is said to be composing it on office paper while she is at work:

“I am typing this book on yellow paper. It is very yellow paper, and it is this very yellow paper because often sometimes I am typing it in my room at my office, and the paper I use for Sir Phoebus’s letters is blue paper with his name across the corner ‘Sir Phoebus Ullwater, Bt.’ and those letters of Sir Phoebus go out to all over the world. And that is why I type yellow, typing for my own pleasure.”

The narrator, who, like Smith herself, is a private secretary who lives with her aunt, makes it clear that this is going to be an experimental novel:

“But first, Reader, I will give you a word of warning. This is a foot-off-the-ground novel that came by the left hand. And the thoughts come and go and sometimes they do not quite come and I do not pursue them to embarrass them with formality to pursue them into a harsh captivity. And if you are a foot-on-the-ground person I make no bones to say that is how you will write and only how you will write. And if you are a foot-on-the-ground person, this book will be for you a desert of weariness and exasperation. So put it down. Leave it alone. It was a mistake you made to get this book. You could not know.”

Despite the apparent frivolity and lightness of tone of most of the book, Pompey (and therefore Smith) are well aware of world politics and have serious things to say, especially about German fascism. Pompey has been to Germany and stays in the house of Jewish friends in Berlin. ‘Oh how I felt that feeling of cruelty in Germany, and the sort of vicious cruelty that isn’t battle-cruelty, but doing people to death in lavatories.’

It is important to remember that this was at a time when the British government and monarchy still had full diplomatic relations with Germany and that the policy of appeasement would continue for several years.

No one had yet predicted the horrors of war or the Holocaust and, although a few committed writers like George Orwell, Christopher Caudwell and Ralph Fox were leaving to fight fascists in Spain just as Novel on Yellow Paper was being published, Smith’s political insight in this novel is far in advance of the great majority of the writers of the time.

But despite the seriousness of this message, the novel keeps its lightness and its constant reminders that it is indeed a novel, addressing the reader and talking about literary technique. Pompey discusses her friend Harriet who is a poet but wants to write a book about fashion. Harriet does not know how to keep the book to a reasonable length.

“But with me, I shall have no such difficulty. I shall know when to stop. And whatever I write then will be Volume Two.

But Harriet in her writing form has a very exact and precise sense of form. And that is a thing I am not able to come by. Reader, it is a fault.

People have said to me: If you must write, remember to write the sort of book the plain man in the street will read. It may not be a best seller – but it should maintain a good circulation.

About this I pondered for a long time and became distraut [sic]. Because I can write only as I can write only, and Does the road wind uphill all the way? Yes, to the very end. But brace up, chaps, there’s a 60,000 word limit.

Oh how irritated I am by this funny idea of keeping your feet on the ground. Spoken like an officer and a gentleman, Sir People. Spoken like a prig and a nincompoop.”

 

More about Novel on Yellow Paper Book of a Lifetime: Novel on Yellow Paper Reader discussion on Goodreads The Modern Novel

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith (1936) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

When the Present Clashes with the Past: Reminiscences of Enid Blyton

Quite often in life, the innocence and idealism of one’s childhood years are intruded upon by the realities and pragmatism of adult life. But when one is forced to reckon with the labeling of a favorite author of one’s childhood, one will necessarily need to have a dialogue with the past to find a balance with the present. The author in question is Enid Blyton, who was called “a racist, sexist homophobe and not a well-regarded writer,” by the members of the Royal Mint, who in 2019 blocked attempts to give her a commemorative coin.

Recently, the issue resurfaced when the UK-based charity, English Heritage, in the light of the Black Lives Matter movement, decided to update its website with information on Enid Blyton. Their Twitter account stated:

“Our 1997 Blue Plaque to Enid Blyton is back in the news along with our online bio of the children’s author, whose books are loved by many. We can fit about 19 words on each plaque. Our website provides a fuller picture of the person’s life, including any uncomfortable aspects.”

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The plaque in question; photo: BBC
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Reassessing an author’s reputation

The website now states that Blyton’s work has been criticized during her lifetime and after, “for its racism, xenophobia and literary merit.”

Born in 1897, Enid Blyton is well-known for her Famous Five and Secret Seven adventure stories, as also the stories revolving around schools, not to forget the picture tales of Noddy, the wooden boy, created by a carpenter, just like Pinocchio, which comes alive.

Apart from the recent hullaballoo, Blyton’s works have always courted controversy with libraries across the world removing her books from their syllabus and the BBC refusing to dramatize her work, between 1930 and 1950, and terming her a “tenacious second-rater” in their internal correspondence.

Blyton was also accused of gender bias, as tasks were clearly divided between men and women, with the men doing the brain work whilst the women cooked and dished out picnic lunches and the girls washed up afterward. But again, these need to be seen in the context of the years (1928-1960) that Blyton wrote the majority of her stories — a time when a life of domesticity was the lot of most women.

 

A reader’s reminiscence

For my siblings and me, and other children growing up in India, Enid Blyton has almost been a rite of passage, where none of the above messages even took hold. This author was among the first to open up the love for reading in me and occupies a very special place in my heart.

To Blyton goes the credit of opening up a magic world, which we tried to recreate in our own lives. During summer holidays, a chicken coop would be converted into a Club House just like the one that the Five Find-Outers had. We emulated them even in the password that had to be uttered before being allowed into the Club House, by the designated leader of that week.

Whilst Blyton might have allotted the powerful roles to the boys, this was not the case with us, as we chose not to take her literally. This apart, a plank nailed on to a mango tree doubled up as a Tree House. When we tired of these two options, there was always the Tent House to crawl into, made up of a large tarpaulin sheet, which was actually a cover for our Dad’s Ambassador car.

The parleys in these three “Houses” would also lead to some real adventures, where we headed out to a junction where two rivers met, some distance from our home. We were accompanied by a few friends, all fueled with the same sense of adventure as the Secret Seven. There were even some not very successful attempts at lighting makeshift fires to cook some beans etc., which we forced ourselves to eat, just for the thrill of doing what our adventurous idols would do in Blyton’s stories.

The other event that caused excitement from Blyton’s tales were the midnight feasts planned by the “Naughtiest Girl in the School,” Elizabeth Allen or the girls from the St. Claire’s series. The tuck that these girls shared — scones, potted meat, clotted cream, etc. were so far removed from any food that Indian kids were used to, that we truly longed to sample them.

On a visit to Oxford, when a friend took us for a drive to a scenic spot beside a river, she also ordered some refreshments, for us to snack on. When she said, “clotted cream,” my mind transported itself back to the Enid Blyton tales and all I could think was, “I wish I could tell my friends from back then that I had actually tasted something that we had all drooled over, in our imagination.”

So, thoughts of Enid Blyton can only bring back memories of an idyllic childhood, devouring her books, reading them in the order that they were meant to be read, and comparing notes with siblings and friends, about how far they had progressed. At that point in time, nothing in those books struck me as being negative towards any character, except regarding behavior at school, or attitudes towards teachers and friends.

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Books by and about Enid Blyton on Amazon*
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Weighing harm against benefits

No doubt, Enid Blyton, as an adult, could be accused of using politically incorrect terminology, which may not pass muster in books for children today. But I am almost certain that most of us just took the character descriptions at face value, without thinking of skin color or anything along those lines. Mentions of golliwogs were just accepted as props to a story, as we as children inhabited a world of innocence.

This piece is written more in defense of a childhood that was spurred by the world of imagination that Enid Blyton managed to create for generations of children. Even my daughter started her days of reading with Noddy books, moved on to the other adventures, and seems none the worse for it.

I wonder if any of the racism or xenophobia that prevails in my country or the world today can be attributed to Enid Blyton. There are war heroes like Winston Churchill, Robert Clive, and others who have done much more damage to my country and were inherently racist and xenophobic — and whom Britain has glorified. One has to wait and see when English Heritage will think of removing the whitewash surrounding such people.

Contributed by Melanie P. Kumar: Melanie is a Bangalore, India-based independent writer who has always been fascinated with the magic of words. Links to some of her pieces can be found at gonewiththewindwithmelanie.wordpress.com.

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More about the Enid Blyton controversy Why it’s Important to Note Enid Blyton’s Failings, Not Erase Her Work Enid Blyton Fans React to ‘Racist’ Label Enid Blyton: Heritage Bosses Respond to Racism, etc. English Heritage Has No Plans to Remove Plaque

See more of this site’s Literary Musings.

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Antonia White, author of Frost in May

Antonia White (born Eirene Botting, March 31, 1899 – April 10, 1980) was a British author best known for her autobiographical novel Frost in May.  In addition to producing other novels and short stories, she was an accomplished translator from French to English.

Her well-documented struggles with mental health resulted in her being committed to an asylum in her early twenties, an experience that she used as the basis for some of her fiction. Other notable themes in both her life and work were religion, particularly Catholicism, and her difficult relationship with her father and daughters.

 

Early life and introduction to religion

Antonia’s early years were spent at the family home in Kensington, and at Binesfield, the Sussex cottage owned by her paternal grandparents. When in London she spent most of her time either alone with her beloved toy dog Dash, or in the care of the already busy housekeeper.

Antonia’s father, Cecil Botting, was a renowned classics scholar and teacher, and it was he who unilaterally chose the hated birth name of Eirene Botting, spelled in the classical Greek way, for his only daughter. (She would change it later, using her mother’s maiden name of White and her childhood nickname ‘Tony’ as the basis for the more feminized ‘Antonia’.) Nevertheless, Cecil assumed an importance and dominance in Antonia’s life that far outweighed that of her mother, Christine. Biographer Jane Dunn wrote that he ‘looms as the most imposing, demanding, and threatening male figure in Antonia’s life.’

Cecil’s interest in his daughter was more intellectual than emotional, and he started teaching her Greek when she was just three years old. However, it was Cecil’s religious epiphany and conversion to Catholicism that had the greatest, and arguably the most damaging, effect on the young Antonia.

At just seven years old, she was obliged to follow her father into the Church, and for the first time was exposed to the concepts of religious sin and guilt; she later said: ‘I never did feel free again.’ She felt that the religion had been imposed on her, and would spend the rest of her life in the spiritual conundrum of having been neither born to Catholicism nor irrevocably drawn to it herself, unable to abandon it completely and yet also unable to accept the fundamental tenets of a faith that she never wholeheartedly believed in.

 

The Convent of the Sacred Heart

In September 1908, Antonia was enrolled as a pupil at the Convent of the Sacred Heart Roehampton, a well-established Catholic boarding school that drew an international group of students, mostly from high-ranking European families. She felt out of place, both as a middle-class girl and as a recent convert who hadn’t yet learned (and never really would learn) how to wear her religion casually.

‘I could not boast of having been dedicated to Our Lady and dressed exclusively in blue and white for my first seven years; I had not even a patron saint,’ she recalled. The spiritual regime under the nuns did little to encourage her. Bright, talented, and eager to learn, her enthusiasm and natural pride in her achievements were crushed and dismissed as sinful. It was not her will that counted, she was taught, but God’s, and her desires must be broken in order to be remade in God’s own fashion.

It was at the Convent that Antonia’s tortured relationship with creativity and writing began. She credited her time there with inspiring her to write; she genuinely believed that without the nuns’ education, she would never have picked up her pen. On the other hand, it was also at the Convent that she received a cruel blow to her burgeoning creativity, one that she would also later blame for her lifelong writer’s block.

She had fallen ill during the spring term of 1914 and started a novel during her convalescence, both as a way of passing the time and as a way of winning her father’s approval (which she was forever seeking and usually failing to find) for her piety. The plot involved the heroine becoming a Carmelite nun and the hero becoming a Jesuit, both sinners reformed by faith. Unfortunately, the manuscript was discovered at the sinning stage, before she had had a chance to write their conversion.

On her fifteenth birthday, she was summoned to face her father, who accused her of perversity and indecency and gave her no chance to explain or defend herself, and ordered that she leave the Convent immediately. Antonia would always maintain that this episode had traumatized her to such an extent that she was never able to write from pure imagination again.

All of her work would be heavily based on real events, and her first novel Frost in May was essentially an account of her time at Roehampton with all her conflicting feelings about it, the vivid and narrative told through the voice of young Nanda Grey.

 

Teaching and a first marriage

After finishing her schooling at St Paul’s Girls School, Antonia rejected her father’s ambitions for her to go to university and instead took a series of jobs, first as a governess to a wealthy Catholic family and then as a teacher at a boys’ school. The money was a key factor in her decision; she considered her own income vital for her independence, and her finances (or lack of them) would preoccupy her for the rest of her life.

Although she had always rebelled against the idea of becoming a ‘schoolmarm,’ Antonia found that she enjoyed it. She taught Latin, French, and Greek, but struggled to control her classes and had to negotiate the boys’ good behavior by agreeing to tell them ghost stories halfway through the lesson if they had completed all their work. She was asked to leave after two terms when the headmaster walked in at the climax of a particularly gruesome story. This period of her life was later fictionalized in her second novel, The Lost Traveller.

During this time she met Reggie Green-Wilkinson. They were ill-suited: Antonia later described the two of them as Hansel and Gretel, two doomed children wandering in the woods of London, but they became engaged when Antonia was just turning twenty-one.

After their marriage, they set up home together in Chelsea, where Antonia felt free of the constraints of her Kensington childhood, and that she could become the artist she wanted to become. It was here that Antonia first experienced the mental illness that would afflict her for the rest of her life.

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The asylum

Her third novel, The Sugar House, details this difficult time with an acute and harrowing awareness; on rereading it later, Antonia commented, ‘… all that queer, horrid Chelsea time leading up to the asylum…How painfully well it described this state of mind which I first knew in 1921.’

It began with a feeling of depression and isolation, a state which quickly escalated into oppressive fear and disorientation. She felt non-existent, to the extent that she was surprised to see letters addressed to her, and once rushed into the sitting room full of mirrors expecting to see nothing reflected in them.

Reggie was also unhappy, drinking heavily, and their poor financial situation did not help her state of mind. In summer 1922 she began the process of annulment, an excruciating process that took two years to complete and involved an interview and a physical examination.

Her mental health declined rapidly, and the period of depression was followed by a mania so severe that she felt it was almost supernatural. Later, in her fourth novel Beyond the Glass, she would write of this experience: ‘It was difficult sometimes not to burst out singing or laughing from sheer ecstatic joy’, and she explained this fictionalized episode to her friend Emily Coleman by saying that, ‘She [Clara] is going mad without knowing it, and this false ecstasy is the sign.’

By November 1922, Antonia’s health had deteriorated to such an extent that her father had her committed to Bethlem Royal Hospital. Violent, fearful, free of any inhibitions, she was unable to communicate properly and was deemed a risk to herself and others.

She stayed there for nine months, during which time she was subjected to padded cells, strait-jackets, icy cold baths, force-feeding, and a regimen of strong sedative drugs, all often experienced through hallucinations and psychosis. It was an experience that was both rich and terrifying. She was finally discharged in August 1923 and returned to her parents’ house in London.

 

Family life of sorts

In April 1925, Antonia married her friend Eric Earnshaw Smith. He was a homosexual, and their love — although very real — was purely platonic, which suited Antonia. She was terrified of sexual relations and had never found any pleasure in them.

A talented poet who also worked for the Foreign Office, Eric was probably the most important man in Antonia’s life after her father. He gave her the intellectual stimulation and companionship she craved and was able to deal with her continued violent tempers and mood swings. His gentle questioning and debate around spirituality were also influential in her gradual estrangement from the Catholic Church. Both had affairs but never strayed too far from the other.

By 1928, however, Antonia felt that she was ready for a relationship that encompassed sexual love as well. It was at this time that she met Silas Glossop, a mining engineer who wrote poetry and loved reading. Initially, the affair was simply one more in her open marriage to Eric, but in December 1928, Antonia discovered that she was pregnant. Her subsequent decision to leave Eric for Silas was, she claimed, one of the hardest she ever made, and one that she often regretted.

During her pregnancy, Silas took a mining job in Canada, hoping that he would have the opportunity after his contract to complete his doctorate at Harvard. He needed the job to provide for his unexpected family, and despite Antonia’s unhappiness over the separation he left in May 1929. On August 18, after a long and difficult labor, their daughter Susan was born, but with the little family still separated and Antonia’s mental health still precarious (especially after the death of her father in November 1929), she was quickly sent to a private residential nursery at Roehampton and remained there for almost a year.

During this time, Antonia had supplemented her allowance from Silas with part-time work at an advertising agency, Crawford’s. She had previously worked freelance as a copywriter, and while she did not enjoy the work (believing it to be routine and in direct opposition to her creative ambitions) it paid well, and she was good at it. It was here that she met Tom Hopkinson. From the start their relationship was unbalanced; she was much more romantically attracted to him, while he was more sexually attracted to her.

But when Silas finally returned to London in September 1930, Antonia was forced to make another choice. This time it came down to money, and after several months of turmoil, she settled on Tom: ‘I believe I wouldn’t marry Si because he had no money. I believe I married Tom because he had a regular job and a hundred pounds or two…’

Her decision was settled when, in November of that year, she discovered she was pregnant again. Given the confusion of the past weeks could not be sure who the father was, but with Tom’s relatively stable financial situation it suited her to have him believe it was his child. For several years she also allowed Susan to believe that Tom was her father too. Tom and Antonia were married in November 1930 in Carlisle Cathedral, and another daughter, Lyndall, was born in July 1931.

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Frost in May, and the end of another marriage

The following years were ones of highs and lows for Antonia, both professionally and personally, and defined by continued mental health struggles. Her relationship with Tom was a difficult one: both felt used by the other in the marriage but were encouraging and supportive to each other in their writing.

It was with Tom’s support that, in November 1932, Frost in May was finally finished. It was accepted for publication by the fledgling Harmsworth, with later editions published by the Nonesuch Press, and its success was such that it upset the delicate equilibrium of Antonia’s relationship with Tom, who felt that he was fast becoming the inferior partner in an already unequal marriage. In December of that year, he signed a letter to her, ‘your foolish, incompetent, ill-writing, conceited, detestable, unintelligent and worn-out husband, Tom.’

Tom embarked on an affair with a married woman, Frances Grigson, signaling the beginning of the end of the marriage and the start of a cycle of mental illness for Antonia which would never really end. Sojourns with friends (such Emily Coleman, Peggy Guggenheim, and Djuna Barnes) left her more exhausted than refreshed, and a trip to Brittany with Tom in 1934 was cut short after Antonia suffered recurring and terrifying hallucinations and nightmares.

She became desperate, attempting to describe ‘the beast,’ as she called it, to Tom: ‘This perpetual inner torture is a disease and productive of no good to myself and no one else. But no act of will can destroy it … this meaningless suffering is like a cancer, making one repulsive to oneself and everyone else.’ She pleaded with him to kill her, saying that, ‘It would be much the best thing for you to do.’

The episode left Antonia feeling lonely, isolated, and tormented with guilt. By 1935 her relationship with Tom broke under the strain. She moved out of the family home, leaving him with the children and a nurse for help, and began a course of intensive psychoanalysis with Dr. Dennis Carroll that would last four years.

 

The start of a troubled relationship

Antonia’s mental breakdowns were mirrored in her eldest daughter Susan. It was the first of many in which the struggles of the mother would be echoed in the daughter. Tom was sufficiently concerned that he arranged for Susan to have a course of psychoanalysis. It was also arranged that he should move out of the family home to allow Antonia to move back in, a surprising suggestion from Dr. Carroll. It was intended to make both Antonia and Susan feel more secure, but given the children’s closeness to Tom, and Antonia’s delicate state of mind at the time, it wasn’t entirely a success.

In 1937 Antonia instigated a divorce from Tom. Although in future years she would have affairs—- notably with Eric Siepmann, Bertrand Russell, and David Gascoyne — she would never marry or have a lasting relationship again. She also finally told Susan that her real father was Silas.

Silas, although now deep into a love affair with Djuna Barnes, was happy to take Susan to tea once a week, and Susan appeared to like the idea of having a father all to herself. The emotional impact, however, of feeling as if Tom was no longer hers (and also that Lyndall was now somewhat estranged from her) increased Susan’s already apparent feelings of loneliness. The impact of Antonia’s moods and mental state began to affect her more directly. It was the start of a difficult and troubling period in Antonia’s relationship with her eldest daughter that would last for several years.

 

War work, and return to Catholicism

As Britain prepared for war, Antonia’s mental state improved markedly. In 1939 she wrote to Emily Coleman, ‘Funnily enough I’ve never had such a peaceful life as I’ve had since Sept. 1st…I feel very calm, only fretting in inaction.’

In December, her mother died and she inherited Binesfield, the Sussex cottage that had given her so much pleasure in her childhood. She hoped to be able to live there with the children, but concerns about bombing delayed the move. When Antonia got a job with the BBC, working on their American and Canadian programs, it was put off altogether. 

Susan was hurriedly packed off to boarding school in Salisbury, while Lyndall was sent to live with Tom and his new wife, Gerti. Antonia thrived in the high-pressure atmosphere of London during the Blitz and attempted to maintain some semblance of family life by visiting Susan some weekends. She didn’t, however, bother to visit Lyndall, who after 1942 was a boarder at Headington School near Oxford.

In 1943 she left her job at the BBC and began working at PID, the secret Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office, where she worked with Americans on propaganda operations in France.

The work was intense, often six or seven days a week and long hours each day, and while at first, Antonia loved the busyness of it she soon became burnt out. The demands of wartime took their toll, and she struggled with the old symptoms of depression, weeping, and lethargy. 

She found some consolation in her religion, to which she had returned quietly at the end of 1940. She had been engaging in correspondence with a Joseph Thorp, known as Peter, who had first written to her about Frost in May. Their letters concentrated on religion and Catholicism and turned into an acute analysis of Antonia’s shifting intellectual and spiritual beliefs. This correspondence was eventually published in 1965 as The Hound and the Falcon.

 

Domineering women

At the end of the war, two women came into Antonia’s life who would dominate her mentally, emotionally, and spiritually for some years afterward. In 1946, she met Benedicta Bezer, a recent convert to Catholicism who had previously led a wild life of drugs and clubs in London and Paris, and who was known as a lesbian.

The two women became very close very quickly, and even Antonia would later look back and view their relationship as one of the more bizarre episodes of her life. Benedicta herself was close to insanity, and her manias presented themselves as religious fervor, saintly delusions, and prayer sessions that could last for days.

Both Antonia and eventually Susan (who had followed her mother into Catholicism, and been baptized at Brompton Oratory in August 1945) were drawn into a toxic web of hysteria that bordered on madness. Antonia admitted that her attraction to Benedicta was partly sexual, and Susan felt spellbound, entranced by Benedicta’s attractiveness and religious passion. But it was not long before the fervor sparked a crisis and collapse in Susan and a subsequent similar collapse in Antonia. The relationship with Benedicta was over, but the shared experience of infatuation and loss brought Antonia and Susan closer together than ever before.

Antonia, however, immediately fell into the circles of Dorothy Kingsmill, a self-styled, untrained psychoanalyst, who used her ‘intuitive gift’ to manipulative ends. Antonia turned to her for treatment after the debacle with Benedicta, and although she did not pay in money for their sessions (since Dorothy considered it her vocation) a relationship of control and obligation developed.

In August and September of 1947, Antonia suffered a series of psychological crises, alternating between severely heightened anxiety and the ‘downers’ of complete lethargy. At the same time, Dorothy experienced a nervous breakdown which she blamed on the strain of dealing with Antonia’s “shadow side”. The relationship with Dorothy finally broke down in 1949 with letters from Dorothy accusing Antonia of being ‘depraved’ and ‘monstrous,’ leaving Antonia exhausted and mentally fragile. 

 

The Lost Traveller, translation, and estrangement from Susan

In April 1950, The Lost Traveller was published. In it, Nanda Grey’s name had been changed to Clara Batchelor, but her character and the story were essentially continuations of Frost in May, and the book was just as autobiographical; a powerful evocation of the adolescent struggle Antonia herself had faced between the spiritual life and the attractions of the outside world.

She felt eased by the publication and the positive reviews and was able to start work almost immediately on the next book in the sequence, The Sugar House. It was at this time too that she started translating from French, beginning with Guy de Maupassant’s Une Vie for Hamish Hamilton. Over several years she would translate hundreds of books, including Colette’s entire oeuvre, into English.

While her professional and artistic life was looking up, Antonia faced increasing difficulties with her daughters. Susan had returned home from Oxford University in spring 1948, on the verge of a nervous breakdown. While Antonia was very happy to nurse her, grateful for the opportunity to try and make up for some of her failings as a mother during Susan’s early years, her diaries at this time are full of uncompromising analysis of Susan’s character, and the perceived failings in her personality that had led her to this point.

Antonia, ever her own worst critic, could not help but dole the same out to her daughter. Susan returned to Oxford to finish her degree, but in spring 1951 attempted suicide by swallowing one hundred codeine tablets. ‘It was a dull job’, she later wrote, ‘and I read Of Mice and Men most of the night to pass the time.’

Her future husband, Thomas Chitty, found her in time and rushed her to the Radcliffe Infirmary. On her release from the hospital she moved back in with Antonia, only for Antonia to throw her out a few weeks later in a row over furniture. Within three weeks, Susan had married Thomas Chitty in a secret ceremony to which only Lyndall, Silas, and Silas’s new wife Sheila were invited.

Both Susan and Thomas sent Antonia letters informing her of their wedding, posted so that they would arrive when they were away on honeymoon. It was the beginning of estrangement, on Susan’s instigation, that would last for almost six years. Not until 1957 was some semblance of a relationship re-established.

Lyndall, meanwhile, had always felt that Antonia was jealous of both her and Susan, resenting both their beauty and any happiness that they might find with other people. But with Susan estranged, Antonia and Lyndall began to spend more time together and for a while, the shift comforted and healed them both. Lyndall later wrote that she ‘began to realize this person I had always feared as a monster was also a human being.’

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Antonia White page on Amazon*
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The Sugar House, Beyond the Glass, and cats

The Sugar House was finished by the end of 1951 and published in summer 1952. Antonia felt it was her strongest book, with a vivid psychological understanding of her mental disintegration during the early 1920s. However, she was less sure about how it would be received, especially since the literary landscape was changing so rapidly.

Opinion seemed very set against religion in general and Catholicism in particular, and with the emergence of authors such as William Cooper and Kingsley Amis, the struggles of a young middle-class girl with sex and spirituality seemed outdated. She was proven somewhat correct when reviews were mixed; in her mind, they were some of the ‘most hostile I have ever had.’

The writing of the next novel began slowly, but by April 1954 she had finished Beyond the Glass. It was completed through a period of continued depression, and also while Antonia was incredibly busy with her translation work. This time the critics responded positively, and Antonia was pleased that the book brought her the recognition she felt she deserved.

But Beyond the Glass ended with Clara hesitating on the edge of life, just released from the asylum and unsure of where to go next, still entranced by the intensity of life in the grip of ‘the beast’ and unconvinced that a so-called sane world had anything comparable to offer. Antonia would struggle for the rest of her life to write the next stage of Clara’s journey, but was always unable to; at times the effort would drive her to the brink of madness again.

Her next literary endeavor were two children’s books starring her two Siamese cats, Minka and Curdy, acquired at the end of 1954. Antonia had always loved cats, and their antics provided her with joy and amusement for almost eighteen years.

 

‘Schoolmarm’ in America

In August 1958 Antonia received an unexpected invitation: to teach creative writing at St Mary’s, a Catholic girl’s school in South Bend, Indiana. Antonia agreed to go for a term, beginning in September 1959, and teaching a select group of twenty students.

Her time there, she wrote to Lyndall, opened her eyes to the possibilities of teaching; she came to love and admire her students and was admired and respected in return. She embraced the American way of life and was keen to try everything, including hot dogs and watching American football (for which she developed an unlikely but lasting passion).

‘I’m just immersing myself,’ she wrote to Emily Coleman, ‘love it, get bewildered, don’t mind, can hardly remember England…’ But by the end of term, she began to find that institutional life suited her less. She was uneasy around the nuns, and although they tried to persuade her to stay on, she left after the agreed term. After a period of traveling and sightseeing, she returned home in February 1960.

 

Ill health and writer’s block

Back in London, Antonia found herself unable to write, unsettled when her landlord forced the sale of her flat and was beset by health problems. By 1965 she was forced to see her doctor with swellings around her eyes, and further mental health issues resulted in a course of antidepressants (which she had never had before), and a stint as an outpatient at the Cassel Hospital in Richmond. But despite the pills and analysis, her depression would not lift, and grew worse after she had to have Curdy, one of her beloved cats, put down.

In October 1968 she endured the first operation for cataracts. She continued to try and work on translations that were due, conscious that she needed the money, but other health problems dogged her. She was now completely deaf without a hearing aid, and her sight never recovered sufficiently for her to feel confident walking out and about on her own.

A bout of double pneumonia sent her to hospital in December 1969. Although both daughters were abroad — Susan in Boston where Thomas had an academic job, and Lyndall in Italy — friends and old lovers, including Tom and Silas, rallied around. Her second cataract operation, unable to be postponed any longer, was scheduled for October 1970, but she contracted an eye infection afterward, which exacerbated her pain and prolonged her stay in the hospital.

In April 1971, after the vet diagnosed Minka with cancer, she also had to put her down. She was further depressed by seemingly constant news of the death of friends, but it was the deaths of Eric Earnshaw Smith later in 1971, and Emily Coleman in 1974, which affected her most deeply. In her grief, she turned once again to writing, accepting translations as they came along (including Voltaire and Simenon). She didn’t find much solace in her religion, only attending church on Sundays and Holidays of Obligation instead of her previous three times a week at Mass.

 

Virago and a resurgence in popularity

At the beginning of 1977, Antonia was introduced to Carmen Callil, a young Australian publisher who was running the feminist publishing house Virago and who would become a close friend to Antonia for the rest of her life. She was on the lookout for new publishing ideas, and a mutual friend (Michael Holroyd) suggested that she reissue Frost in May.

Carmen was enthralled by the book, and the idea for Virago Modern Classics was born. Frost in May was reissued in summer 1978, and was a brilliant success: television and radio rights were sold, and Carmen decided to also reissue the trilogy of Clara books. However, when she asked Antonia to write the introduction, writer’s block took hold once again and Antonia was unable to write even a sentence. Carmen, attempting to interview her to help the process along, ‘sat opposite her … and I watched pain so great overcome her it twisted her body.’ The interview was eventually completed, Carmen wrote the introduction herself, and Clara enjoyed the same resurgence in popularity as Nanda.

 

The final breakdown

In July 1978, Antonia suffered a mild stroke that affected her memory and her ability to talk, and further health problems followed in January 1979 when she was confirmed as having bowel cancer. She commenced intensive radiotherapy treatment, but her physical condition deteriorated rapidly.

Conscious of the state she was in, she decided that she wanted to rewrite her will; it had changed several times over the years as her relationship with her daughters first declined and then improved. Now, given the resurgent success of her books, she wanted to determine once and for all the issue of who would act as literary executor.

Previously, the choice had been Susan, but she now changed it so that Carmen, Susan, and Lyndall were joint literary executors. Lyndall, however, renounced most of her claim to Antonia’s financial estate, saying that Susan now had four children and needed the money far more. This reworking of the will, although well-intentioned, caused huge problems later on when the executors couldn’t agree.

In October 1979, Antonia moved from her London flat into a Catholic nursing home in Sussex, close to Susan and Thomas’s home. There, her mental and physical condition went rapidly downhill. The old guilt and fear associated with her Catholicism violently resurfaced, and friends who visited were shocked at the terror they saw in her eyes. She no longer recognized either of her daughters and died in her sleep, on April 10, 1980.

 

Two daughters, two memoirs

After Antonia’s death, her literary legacy was assured thanks to Carmen and Virago. Her personal legacy, however, was not such a happy one. Both Susan and Lyndall embarked on memoirs of their mother, which inevitably generated competition between them and dredged up old, painful, and often very different memories.

When Susan’s memoir Now To My Mother: A Very Personal Memoir of Antonia White was published in 1985, Lyndall wrote to a couple of newspapers to point out some inaccuracies in quotes from Antonia’s diaries, and also to deny Susan’s claim that Lyndall, too, had hated their mother in childhood.

By the time Lyndall’s memoir was published (Nothing To Forgive: A Daughter’s Life of Antonia White, 1988), the relationship between the sisters had broken down completely. Only one task remained, the editing of Antonia’s diaries for publication, and they could not agree on who should do it.

Lyndall and Carmen argued that Susan was clearly too biased and that no daughter whose relationship with her mother had been so troubled could possibly undertake such a monumental task. Susan argued that she wrote biographies professionally, and besides, couldn’t afford to pay someone outside the family to do it. Eventually, Susan took legal action, and as the sole financial beneficiary under Antonia’s will, won her case. The diaries, edited completely by her, appeared in two volumes in 1991 and 1992.

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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is an author, poet, and artist with a serious case of wanderlust. She is originally from the UK, but has spent time abroad in Europe, the United States and the Bahamas.

When not traveling or working on her current projects — a chapbook of poetry, “The Cabinet of Lost Things,” and a novel based on the life of modernist writer and illustrator Djuna Barnes — she can be found with her nose in a book, daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Visit her on the web at Elodie Rose Barnes.

More about Antonia White

Major works (selected)

Frost In May (1933; republished by Virago 1978)The Lost Traveller  (1950; republished by Virago 1979)The Sugar House  (1952; republished by Virago 1979)Beyond the Glass  (1954; republished by Virago 1979)Strangers: Short Stories  (1954; republished by Virago 1981)The Hound and the Falcon  (1965;  republished by Virago 1980)As Once in May (1983)

Biographies

Now To My Mother: A Very Personal Memoir of Antonia White by Susan Chitty (1985)Nothing To Forgive: A Daughter’s Life of Antonia White by Lyndall Passerini Hopkinson (1988)Antonia White: Diaries (Vol.1 1926-1957, Vol. 2 1958-1979), ed. by Susan Chitty (1991-1992)Antonia White: A Life, by Jane Dunn (1998)

More information

Wikipedia Reader discussion on Goodreads London Review of Books A Gimlet Eye Beneath a Chapel Veil (a review of Frost in May)

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*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden (1956)

This analysis of Rumer Godden’s 1956 novel, An Episode of Sparrows, features its tenacious young heroine, Lovejoy Mason. Excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel  by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.

Growing up in the colonial era, like the family in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows are the sisters Bea and Harriet in The River, 1946, set in what was then Bengal by Rumer Godden (1907–1998), who herself grew up partly in India. Like many of the girls in these semi-autobiographical novels, Harriet wants to be a writer when she grows up.

“The middle finger of Harriet’s right hand had a lump on the side of it; that was her writing lump; she had it because she wrote so much, because she was a writer. ‘I am going to be a poet when I grow up,’ said Harriet; and she added, after another thought, ‘Willy-nilly.’ She kept a private diary and a poem book hidden in an old box that also did as a desk in an alcove under the side-stairs, her Secret Hole, though it was not secret at all and there was no need to hide her book because she could not resist reading her poems to everyone who would listen.”

 Is it meant to be a children’s book?

But despite having been educated at what is now the very posh Roedean School on the South coast of England and having then spent much of her working life teaching dancing in India, Godden wrote a coming-of-age novel about the contrast between middle-class orthodoxy and poverty on the streets of wartime London: An Episode of Sparrows, 1956, which was made into the film Innocent Sinners, 1958. An Episode of Sparrows has been reissued several times as a children’s book, though it is not obvious that this is what it is meant to be. In her introduction to the Virago edition, Jacqueline Wilson says:

“I’m not sure if Rumer Godden wrote An Episode of Sparrows for children or for adults. It was originally published on an adult list but I read it when I was about ten, Lovejoy’s age. She’s the heroine of this book, a small, strong-willed little girl with the tenacity and determination of twenty adults.

She’s got a feckless mother, no father at all, and scarcely any friends. It’s not perhaps surprising. Lovejoy is fierce and selfish because she’s had to learn to be tough to survive. She snatches, she steals, she’s witheringly scornful if she doesn’t like anyone. I knew as I read the book that I’d be very wary of Lovejoy in real life – but even so, I cared about her passionately.”

 A post-war London setting

An Episode of Sparrows is set in post-war London, on the borderline between a genteel, middle-class area and the much poorer houses nearby. Catford Street is on the poorer side, though it has working-class solidarity, making it rather like an urban version of the villages in Peyton Place by Grace Metalious and Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall. ‘Though Catford Street was in London it was a little like a village; to live in it, or the Terrace, or Garden Row, off it, or in any of the new flats that led off them, was to become familiar with its people.’ The children are a particular feature of the street, and especially of the novel.

“It was a strange thing that up to the age of seven children were noticeable in Catford Street; the babies in their well-kept perambulators and the little boys and girls in coat and legging sets were prominent, but after the age of seven, the children seemed to disappear into anonymity, to be camouflaged by the stones and bricks they played in; as if they were really the sparrows the Miss Chesneys called them they led a different life and scarcely anyone noticed them.

At fourteen or fifteen they appeared again, the boys as big boys that had become somehow dangerous – or was it that there was too much about them in the papers? – the dirty little girls as smart young women, with waved hair, bright coats, the same red nails and lipstick as the dancer in the bus queue; they wore slopping sling-back shoes and had shrill ostentatious voices.”

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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon*
Girls in Bloom on Amazon UK*
Girls in Bloom in full on Issuu
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Lovejoy Mason and her indifferent mother

As Jacqueline Wilson says, Lovejoy Mason, although only eleven years old, is a terrific character. Her mother is a musical singer on the stage, a coloratura, as Lovejoy says and is almost constantly away. She has left her daughter in the hands of the kind and caring but financially imperiled Mrs. Combie, whose husband is ruining them by attempting to open a gourmet restaurant in entirely the wrong part of London.

It is clear to the reader and to Mrs. Combie that Lovejoy’s mother prefers the company of men to that of her own daughter; she promises to come but doesn’t and promises to send money but doesn’t do that either. Lovejoy for her is very much out of sight and out of mind.

“It would have surprised Lovejoy’s mother, Mrs Mason, to be told that Lovejoy never had any pocket money; Mrs Mason was always going to give her some but, somehow, it was always spent. ‘I meant you to have an ice-cream,’ she would say to Lovejoy in the teashop or café, ‘but, look, I’ve only got sixpence for a coffee. Never mind. You can have the biscuit.’”

On the rare occasions the mother does come to see her, she brings a man whom Lovejoy is told to call ‘uncle’ and is gone again almost as soon as she came. Lovejoy has still not learned how to turn herself into stone, how to live without a mother in her life, still hopes her mother will come back permanently. When she stops, this will be her coming of age.

“The room still smelled of her mother; when Lovejoy burrowed her face against that spot on the armchair, instead of hard plush she seemed to be burrowing against the warm soft flesh she knew so well, that smelled of scent …”

 

Thievery and gardening

To make up for her loss, Lovejoy cynically and ruthlessly steals things, quite prepared to fight boys if she has to, though even she has her limits. ‘Lovejoy did not steal big things, nor money; she knew that to take money was wicked; nobody had told her that ice-creams and comics were money and she was adept in taking a parcel out of a perambulator while she pretended to rock it.’

But Lovejoy is no tomboy and is very fastidious in her dress, keeping her room and herself immaculate at all times, though her clothes have grown too small for her and her mother refuses to buy her any bigger ones. However, Lovejoy is not a pretty girl.

“She knew perfectly well she was not pretty; she had studied herself too often in the mirror to have any doubts about that; she had a certain fineness and lightness, dear little bones, thought Lovejoy, but her slant eyes and flat nose were not pretty.”

All protagonists in novels need a goal or quest; Lovejoy’s is to build a garden in the bombed out ruins of London, a private garden that no one else will have access to; a place for herself in the world, somewhere she will be found and not lost, if only by herself. (The symbolism of her garden is reminiscent of that of the tree growing in Brooklyn in Betty Smith’s novel.)

“She had never heard of a vortex but she knew there was a big hole, a pit, into which a child could be swept down, a darkness that sucked her down so that she ceased to be Lovejoy, or anyone at all, and was a speck in thousands of specks . . . She knew how easily that could happen because once she had been lost. I was only six then, thought Lovejoy; she was nearly eleven now but she had not forgotten it. She was lost and she was a speck and there was no-one. It had been when her mother was out of work and they were moving restlessly about.”

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An Episode of Sparrows on Bookshop.org*
An Episode of Sparrows on Amazon*
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But even the few pennies Lovejoy needs to buy seeds and the most primitive of garden tools are hard to come by; she resorts to stealing from the candle box at the Catholic Church but she comes to be frightened of the statue of the Virgin Mary staring down at her; ‘it never looked at her, always into her, and she wriggled uncomfortably because, unaccountably, it seemed to find something in Lovejoy that matched it. How did it know that inside the hard tough Lovejoy was something as gentle as those eyes?’ Tip, the boy Lovejoy gets to help her, forces Lovejoy to repay the money as penance.

The first garden Lovejoy makes is destroyed by the boys who think she is encroaching on their territory but she and her friends find an enclosed, secret space behind the church and start to build again; ‘Lovejoy had never heard the word “sanctuary” but she knew she had found a safe place.’

“To Lovejoy it was very far from play. When the last bucket was tipped out and she saw the two flowerbeds filled with fine black earth, good garden earth, she had a feeling of such triumph and satisfaction as she had never known. ‘Who plants a garden plants happiness,’ says the Chinese proverb. In that moment Lovejoy was absolutely happy.”

But things soon take a turn for the worse. First, Tip is arrested for stealing the earth for the garden. His family prevent Lovejoy from seeing him.

“Lovejoy had thought she knew what it was like to be shut out; she had been alone when she was lost, alone lying waiting for her mother in bed, and sitting on the stairs while the gentlemen were in the room; she had learned to manage without her mother, for a long time now she had ‘counted her out’, thought Lovejoy, but there had always been someone, Vincent, Mrs Combie, then Tip. Tip! Lovejoy twisted her hands together as she looked at the closed door, gave a strangled little gulp and fled down the Street.”

 “Mary, make me cocky and independent”

And then it turns out that Lovejoy’s mother is not coming back; she has not been with the singing troupe she claimed and owes money everywhere, even to her own agent. The Juvenile Court very kindly try to find Lovejoy somewhere to live as Mrs Combie refuses to keep her on, now knowing that there will be no more money from her mother.

”It’s not that she’s not a good child, sir,” said Mrs Combie, coming back to the Chairman, “she is, but she has ideas.” Mrs Combie spoke as if that were a disease.’ Lovejoy must go to the Home of Compassion, a home for orphan girls run by nuns, but makes one last attempt to persuade Mrs Combie, and in particular her sister Cassie, who has always disliked Lovejoy.

     “‘I’d work for you,’ said Lovejoy hoarsely. ‘Even when I’m grown up. I’d work and give you all the money.’
       ‘Shouldn’t we think of the story of the good Samaritan?’ Mrs Combie had asked Cassie, and Cassie had said, ‘In the story of the good Samaritan Lovejoy would have been the thief.’
        Mrs. Combie stirred her tea and looked firmly at the tablecloth, but in spite of Cassie a great lump came in her throat.
       ‘Please keep me,’ said Lovejoy.
       ‘We can’t even keep ourselves,’ said Mrs. Combie incoherently and she burst into tears.”

And they can’t. The restaurant her husband so lovingly built up is closed and all the furnishings sold. In the Home of Compassion the nuns are quite kindly towards Lovejoy, but she does not have her own room and hates the clothes they give her. Lovejoy sells the clothes and buys fashionable new ones but they are taken away; ‘“that spirit must be broken. . . You must learn to do as you’re told,” Angela told Lovejoy. “You’re far too cocksure and independent.”. . . “Hail, Mary,” prayed Lovejoy between her teeth. “Mary, make me cocky and independent.”’

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More about An Episode of Sparrows Wikipedia “The First Book that Made Me Cry” Reader discussion on Goodreads Original review on Kirkus Reviews

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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