Gosh I've been waiting for the bank holiday to be over and done with so I could dash down to the post office and pick up my latest offering from Amazon. I found this by reading a review of it in the Times, flashed over to Amazon and bought a copy in a shot - needless to say, I then had to wait for the whole of the bank holiday weekend to get my hands on it - all because my postal delivery person doesn't ring the bell and try to deliver stuff to us. No, they just put cards through the door, and I then have to wait more or less a week to get my sorting office to deliver it to the local post office where I can collect it from. I'd be more inclined to go and pick it up myself if it actually opened for normal office hours, but no, they don't seem to be able to manage that.
Anyhow here it is -
It might look like a romantic novel or some sort of trash like that, but I promise it's a biography. So far I've read about three chapters - it opens with Dorothy's account of Williams' marriage. Interestingly, she didn't attend the ceremony herself, but stayed at home in a state of some collapse - laid upon her bed. It's Frances Wilson's (the author) contention that this marked a pivotal point in Dorothy's life - which of course it must, from which her life spiralled downwards towards madness. Mind you I say this, and I've only read three chapters so far. It's packed full of exciting ideas about Dorothy's life, and of course, Wordsworth's too. In fact, so many ideas that I'm hard put to list them here - they're all still bubbling away in my head. If you're interested in it, I'd google the book, and look for the review in the Times a few weeks ago, because it was excellent, although of course as the permeation goes on inside my noggin, no doubt I shall spill some of my opinions onto this blog!!
I have been doing a bit of thinking about what I was writing below, the Patricia Wentworth book. It occurs to me that I've been quite unfair to it, probably because I didn't really care for it, but nevertheless I feel I should revise some of my opinions. Firstly, the central character, Hilary Carew.
Given this book was written in the late 1930s, she's pretty unusual. In fact, it may well have been a pretty good portrait of a new sort of woman that must have been beginning to appear in reality back then. It's not fair to say that she goes and does nothing unless she's being rescued by the stolid fiance. She does actually set off to some strange and outlying village in search of information, and hires a bicycle to go off searching for a cottage that might have been rented by the Butler and wife who may (or may not) be the villains of the piece. Needless to say she runs into trouble, and gets run down by the villains in a car and has to make her way on foot across some fields. Essentially she's not helpless, in the way you would have expected a woman to be helpless say even ten years before. At that point female characters would simply be cyphers for the male action to revolve around - Hilary does take decisions for herself. Having escaped being run down by rolling into a hedge, and forcing her way through it, she then returns to the main town, goes to the local hotel where she then telephones the aforesaid stolid fiance, who turns up to rescue her. So I'm in a quandry as to exactly how helpless Hilary is. But I'm reasonably sure that you could see her as a forerunner of a female action figure within the crime genre. She's not a "Yes Henry" girl, she's a girl who undoubtedly loves Henry, and misses him - at the commencement of the story they've had an argument and parted. But she absolutely isn't crawling back to him, she's absolutely determined that if she has him back it will be on her own terms. She has an interesting phrase for women who aren't capable of sustaining themselves with fortitude - dreeps. At the start of chapter 14, Hilary outlines her thoughts on dreeps, having had another argument with Henry the stolid fiance, who doesn't believe that Geoff, the cousin in prison, didn't commit the murder.
"If she once let Henry down her, her spirit would be broken and she would rapidly become a dreep. Like Mrs Mercer. Like Mrs Ashley. Horrible and repellent prospect. They had probably started quite young and pretty - the Ashley daily help certainly had - and some man had downed them and trampled on them until they had just given up and gone quietly down the drain. She could imagine Mercer breaking any woman's spirit if she was fool enough to let him, and the other woman probably had a husband who trampled on her, too. That was the matter with Henry - he was a trampler born and bred, and burned right in. But she wasn't going to be the person he trampled on. If he wanted a door-mat he could go and marry a door-mat, and it wasn't going to be Hilary Carew."
Nevertheless of course, after all this sterling declaration of independence, in the very next paragraph, Hilary is regretting her thoughts. She puts the argument down to the fact that Henry has probably eaten breakfast, whilst she hasn't - in other words, although she doesn't say it, she takes the blame for the argument onto herself. She blames this on Henry for not feeding her - taking her out to lunch -thus leading to her being unable to do anything but argue. Hilary goes to get a bun and some milk for lunch, whilst Henry dines more substantially, thinking over the second argument.
"He felt a kind of gloomy satisfaction in having held his own. Once he let Hilary think that she could take her way without reference to him and in disregard of his opinion and of his advice, and their married life would become quite impossible. {sic} The trouble about Hilary was that she always wanted her own way, and just because it was her own way it had to be the right one. "
Henry goes on in this tone for a good page or so, until he finally gets round to admitting that there's something fishy in the story that Hilary has told him, and that it would be best to investigate them.
I guess what I'm really going on here is that this is pulp fiction, mass produced at the time for the mass market. Many many people would have read this, and taken it into their consciousness. It must have reflected the thinking and feelings of the time. Here in this common or garden little book is evidence of the changing of the times, the emotional connotations that would fuel the numbers of women shortly about to work in armoury's and manufacturing whilst husbands brothers etc went to war. I'm sure a good number of them would have read this book, probably during the war too, and it would have been lying in the subconscious when the war ended and all of them at the time (or a good number certainly) willingly gave up those jobs and made an attempt to return to their pre-war lives. These were the mothers of the girls born in the fifties - my mother. My mother expected to spend her life looking after her mother and aunt, and had a typing job locally to where they were living until the war broke out. She joined the Wrns, and ended up being posted out to India of all places - so she had five or six years of a reasonably independent life. She was expected to return to looking after her mother and aunt on returning to the country - it's no wonder she took a leap of faith and decided to marry my father. (He proposed to her the very night he met her and she accepted.) I don't think there was any blinding flash of love or anything ridiculous like that. I think there was a blinding flash of this is my way out of that. I think it was a calm and practical decision. It was a way out of dreep-hood!
