A Suppressed Cry

by Victoria Glendinning

I always wanted everything so frantically, and I'm just the person that can't have them.' Based on family papers and memories, this picture of middle class life at the end of the nineteenth century tells the poignant story of Winnie Seebohm, Victoria Glendinning's great-aunt, who in 1885 was one of the early students at Newnham College, Cambridge. Though much loved by her family, Winnie was stifled in her desire for life and died at the age of twenty-two.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

British biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. She is President of English PEN, a winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was awarded a CBE in 1998 and is Vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature.

Glendinning read modern languages at Oxford and worked as a teacher and social worker before becoming an editorial assistant for the Times Literary Supplement in 1974.

She has been married three times, the second to Irish writer, lawyer and editor Terence de Vere White, who died of Parkinson's disease in 1994.

Reviews

[Lucinda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is Victoria Glendinning's first book, written in her back bedroom when she had young children. She wrote the introduction to this 1995 Virago edition nearly 30 years on, as an acclaimed and highly accomplished writer. The contrast in writing style and confidence is really interesting.

A suppressed cry tells the story of the short and tragic life of Winnie Seebohm, an ancestor of Gleninning's. Winnie lived in the late 19th century and was a very bright young woman, of middle class background who longed to live a useful and productive life, rather the life of boredom and hypochondriasis many women of her class endured. Yet she was dutiful and firmly rooted in her family. She attended Newnham College, Cambridge but suffered terribly with brittle asthma, which killed her at the age of 22. This was almost certainly exacerbated by her immense anxiety about leaving the family and succeeding at Cambridge.

As Glendinning says in her introduction, with more research, more years behind her and a more modern understanding of the pathophysiology of asthma, this could have been a different book. It is a poignant story of a small and ordinary life, which I found most interesting and revealing. As Glendinning writes in her opening paragraph:

"Do not be misled into thinking that because it is history it has nothing to do with you. 1885 is yesterday. It is probably tomorrow too."

[Anne Fenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Biography of the author’s great aunt. Bit of a sad story, Winifred was intelligent and interested in study, got to Oxford at a time when women could attend classes, go no further really. Her prospects were further limited by her health. It’s very readable, short but engaging.

[Val Robson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Suppressed Cry, written in 1969, is Victoria Glendinning's first book and is an account of the short life of her great-aunt Winnie Seebohm. Winnie lived with her parents and five siblings in the Hermitage in Hitchin. The Hermitage was an agglomeration of houses of different periods with seven acres of garden and a lot of staff. They were a Quaker family who took their Quaker roots very seriously.

Winnie was very bright and secured herself a place at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1885 - just fourteen years after the first girls were able to study at Cambridge University although none were permitted to receive degrees until 1948. Her only brother, Hugh, went to King's College, Cambridge at the same time.

Winnie suffered very badly with asthma. I was rather unhappy with the sentence 'Physicians since Hippocrates have understood that asthma is a psychosomatic disease' but do appreciate that this edition I read is the original 1969 one when asthma was less understood. Poor Winnie did not get a lot of help in relieving her asthma as there were presumably no medicines available at the time but the general attitude appeared to be 'do nothing' and let your emotions calm down. Although, for poor Winnie, I think this was may have had the opposite effect as doing nothing was the most boring thing imaginable for her constantly curious brain.

Winnie's life is recorded in great detail often via letters she has written and received. Her prolific letters written from Newnham go into immense detail of everything she has done in the days leading up to the letter with a lot of her innermost thoughts and emotions poured into them. It is a fascinating history of the times.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting, short, biography of a young woman's fight (against poor health and the times) to attend Newnham College, Cambridge, in the early years of women's University education in the UK.

[Liz Muir · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sad tale of a young woman hemmed in by social norms of her day. And a reminder that female oppression, in different forms, still exists.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting from the perspective of a young, intelligent, upper middle class woman of the 1880s- not many options available to them...