Forgotten vs somewhat neglected novelists

I was recently brought up short during a re-read of Dorothy Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, when Wimsey scans Ann Dorland's bookshelves: 'Dorothy Richardson—Virginia Woolf—E. B. C. Jones—May Sinclair—Katherine Mansfield—the modern female writers are well represented, aren’t they?' I think Richardson, Woolf, Sinclair and Mansfield would be familiar names to anyone with some acquaintance with women writers of the early decades of the twentieth century - but E. B. C. Jones?

In fact, Emily Beatrix Coursolles ("Topsy") Jones (1893-1966), has a remarkably substantial Wikipedia entry, which says her novels

focused on the social and psychological traumas of World War I, on large-family dynamics among young adult siblings, and on relationships among the young "liberated" middle-class intelligentsia of the Twenties. She was also known in the interwar period as a reviewer of contemporary fiction in British literary journals.

provides a useful biographical summary and plot outlines of the novels. She also has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 

I have managed to gain a sight of a few of her novels, Quiet Interior (1920), The Singing Captives (1922), and The Wedgwood Medallion (1923), well worth reading and would like to read the others.

I shall now be adding Jones to my webpage British Women Novelists, 1910s-1960s: The 'middle-brows' along with some additional updates - I discover that there is interest being taken in Romer Wilson, and that Sarah Salt's Sense and Sensuality (1929) has lately been republished by Cutting Edge Books.

But considering these works and authors which can reasonably described as having been 'forgotten' at least for a signficant length of time, made me think of certain works and authors claimed to have been 'rediscovered' e.g. by Virago Press, but I wonder if they had ever been truly entirely lost.

There is a difference between a book which may have made a great sensation in the 1920s and then vanished, and other books which may never have gained enormous critical cred but have gone on not only being read, enjoyed and recommended, but continuing to be republished. Books which appeared in cheap reprint editions and in Penguin and later mass-market paperback formats (a substantial portion of my Winifred Holtby collection consists of the Corgi paperback editions issued, one suspects, in the wake of the success of the Yorkshire TV South Riding) - and also circulated in public libraries.

The popularity of certain works with library patrons led to the production by Cedric Chivers of Bath of New Portway Reprints, robust hardbacks specifically for libraries of works that librarians knew would be much borrowed. Paula Byrne notes in The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym that Pym was a little cheered during her years in the wilderness of publishers' lack of interest by reprints of four of her earlier books as 'Library Association reprints by Chivers of Bath'.

I surmise that there may be studies to be done on these books which are neither critically-acknowledged  'classics' nor perennially popular genre bestsellers but go on having what was perhaps a word of mouth reputation. 

Just possibly these might be what Stella Gibbons was alluding to as ' the minor classic, a type of book that has perhaps given more pure pleasure to more readers than any other kind'? (In My American, 1939).

 

Lucy Bland, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester University Press, 2013)

I have fallen sadly behind in writing up my reading of recent months, but hope to repair this omission. Starting at perhaps the wrong end, i.e. the most recent book bearing on my general research interests read.

Lucy Bland's long-awaited follow-up to her classic and pioneering Banishing the Beast, Modern Women on Trial, does not disappoint. While some of the material may be familiar from the various articles and chapters she has previously published, this is not just one of those volumes which appear to consist of lightly-edited articles put together within one cover, and with the gentle reader apparently expected to draw out the connections between them. It is  a very good thing to have Bland's insights altogether in one volume and not to have to chase up  the original articles, but this book is a good deal more value-added than that. Modern Women on Trial effectively links the matter in the separate chapters together throughout, not just in a brief covering introduction or conclusion, by emphasising the common themes and threads that join these scandals and causes celebres of the period 1918-1924.

It is a very good read: I was reading it in the interstices and the aftermath of a fairly intense conference but still found it compellingly engaging.

The various cases dealt with are the Maud Allan 'Cult of the Clitoris' libel suit against the sleazoid journalist Pemberton Billing; the flurry of concern, focusing around the drug-related, or allegedly drug-related, deaths of two young women, the actress Billie Carleton and the dancer Freda Kempton, over 'white women' associating with 'Chinamen' as well as narcotic use by women; the well known trial of Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters for the murder of her husband; the shooting of her Egyptian husband by Madame Fahmy; and the extraordinary convolutions of the Russell divorce case. Several of these have been the subject of rather sensationalist popular accounts, but Bland provides a deeper analysis of the responses to these cases across a range of voices, and the resonances with wider social concerns of the time, in particular the changing roles of women, the allure and the threat of modern life, and the continuing impact of  the Great War upon British masculinity.

Ann Oakley, A Critical Woman: Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (2011)

I'm woefully behind about posting about things I've been reading recently. I was behindhand enough with actually reading A Critical Woman, because between one thing and another I had it on my to-read pile but was not feeling in the right headspace for a big fat biography of twentieth century woman economist, social scientist and activist.

Even though it did, in fact, turn out to be very readable on the whole (and I did have a few historian-type niggles, like occasionally feeling a need for more chronological anchoring than I was getting). I was very struck by the family origins - far from coming from generations of Cambridge scholars or intellectuals her father came from a humble background yetended up a renowned classical scholar.

It's got a bit of an uphill struggle given that Wootton was obviously a very reserved and private woman and it probably quite hard to get know to know her beyond the formal level even when she was alive. I wondered, however, how much of that reserve and forbidding air was a necessary stragety, given that, while still quite young she was widely regarded as an outstanding economist, and as a result was interacting with a lot of much older men, many of them of considerable political or social distinction. How far would her being  a war widow would have discouraged displeasing attentions, quite apart from a reasonable desire to be taken seriously? Her surprise marriage to a much younger man (and the occasional hint at other affairs) makes one wonder if there was a friskier aspect that she kept well-concealed.

I was very taken by Wootton's firm line that the death and devastation caused by the motorcar was a much greater evil it was than many menaces against which contemporaries fulminated,  and her insistence upon on having actual evidence-based data  in order to produce government report on cannabis.

Given her troubled relationship with her mother, and her lack of interest in feminism, I think there's probably a whole study waiting to be done about generations and feminists and suffragist/suffragette mothers and their daughters and how the second generation do or do not consider themselves feminists or different kinds of feminists.

Probably about as thorough an account of a rather opaque woman as one is likely to get, paying particular attention to what she would have considered most important, i.e. her intellectual work and her politics.

Trial by Jury

There has been a lot of jeremiah polemicising following the recent dismissal of a jury for failing to reach a conclusion after asking what were reported as questions displaying a disastrous lack of understanding of the process, and certainly this episode did not cast a glorious light on this great British tradition.

However, it did make me think of those cases in which juries reached a conclusion perhaps rather different from the one they were expected to, and indeed was possibly considered desirable, in certain historic trials over issues of obscenity.

Possibly the verdict that Knowlton's birth control tract Fruits of Philosophy was indeed calculated to deprave public morals, but that Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant had had no corrupt motive in publishing it in 1877, was a somewhat spurious compromise. However, in a later birth control case, that of Henry Young, prosecuted under the Post Office Act in 1891 for sending out Malthusian pamphlets, a note on the file in The National Archives records official relief that the case was dealt with in the magistrates' court, rather than brought before a jury, because it was the kind of case where juries tended to sympathise with the defendant. It may be noted that the case against Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) was heard before a magistrate who refused to admit any of the line-up of potential defence witnesses.

However, in the 1942 case of the prosecution of Eustace Chesser's marriage manual Love without Fear and the even more famous 1960 prosecution of Penguin Books for publishing a cheap paperback edition of D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, gambling on the likelihood of the jury being impressed by the sincerity of the defendant or bringing healthy demotic commonsense to bear undoubtedly paid off in not-guilty verdicts.

Angus McLaren, Reproduction by Design: Sex, Robots, Trees, and Test-tube Babies in Interwar Britain (2012)

I am woefully behindhand in writing up this book, which is very much the kind of fascinating and very accessible read we have come to anticipate from McLaren. It pulls together a number of concerns of the interwar era, predominantly in the UK, demonstrating the influence of underlying issues around reproduction, and the allied areas of sex and gender, in a range of fields not normally seen as connected.

McLaren plausibly suggests that alongside clearly speculative science fiction texts, social theorists and commentators and those producing programmes for action that should also be considered as creating 'science fictions' based in ideas about the possibilities of science and anxieties around modernity.

While eugenics in the interwar era has been the subject of much heated debate, McLaren presents us with a compelling case that broader and less focused anxieties around reproduction, population, its quantity and quality were pervasive and popping up in places where perhaps they would not be expected. It also provides a new take on the responses to 'modernity' more generally during the same period. He makes the important point that even proponents of apparently conservative agendas were not so much restoring an ancient order as creating a new one along the lines which appealed to them, however rhetorically based in notions of tradition and conservation.

As well as speaking to existing historiographical debates around science, reproduction and breeding, it also constitutes a work which scholars of science fiction, particularly British science fiction, could usefully study. I think it was Brian Aldiss who suggested that post-World War II British sf was haunted by images of senility and sterility in the era of the end of Empire. McLaren's work suggests that this theme already pervaded the British imaginary well before then.

Stephen Brooke, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (2011)

I read this book several months ago and in something of a rush, in order to be able to include some of its important insights into the final round of revisions to the new edition of Sex, Gender and Social Change, and have been meaning to do a somewhat more extended consideration of it ever since, a project significantly stymied by the arrival of various other commitments and deadlines demanding my time and energy.

This is certainly an extremely useful study. While some of the material in the earlier chapters was fairly familiar from previous work on the birth control and abortion law reform movements, Brooke brings some useful new analyses of the material by placing sexual politics in their long and often conflicted relationship to the more conventional political sphere (a nuanced and detailed working out of some of the issues I briefly delineated in my article in Socialist History, Vol 36, 2010, 'No Sex, Please, We're Socialists': The Labour Party prefers to close its eyes and think of the electorate') . Sexual Politics also provides a particularly valuable account of the rather less explored area of the various shifts taking place in political and social cultures around reproductive control, women, motherhood, and the family from the advent of the NHS to the C21st. Brooke makes some thought-provoking interventions into questions about periodisation and the place of continuities and co-existence of differing paradigms rather than abrupt hiatus and definite changes. The narrative also demonstrates shifts within political culture in response both to activism around sexual issues and to wider social change and new concepts of citizenship and what came to be included within the sphere of political activity.

Sexual Politics additionally constitutes a useful reminder of the tensions and conflicts and different levels of activity over these issues within the Labour Party itself. Although the title invokes 'the Left', the book focuses on the Labour Party, with a nod or two to the Communists, largely at the national level, though with an awareness of the significance of local groups and special interest campaigns. Brooke inscribes the importance of class in both the increasing acceptance of family planning as a licit concern of the left, culminating in the non-controversial permissive National Health Service Amendment (Family Planning) Act of 1967, and in the long reluctance, in spite of such pioneering socialist icons as Edward Carpenter, to consider homosexual law reform. This came about, arguably, more as one element within a smorgasbrod of liberalising reforms which the party, or at least, certain leading powerful figures (Brooke places Roy Jenkins as pivotal), saw as part of its agenda in the 1960s. Although most of these measures originated as private members' bills, governmental allocation of time for debate and help with drafting played an essential role in getting them through.

It would have been interesting (though this book already covers a great deal of territory) to have incorporated more about those causes described at the World League for Sexual Reform Congress in London in 1929 as the 'planks' in its 'platform': these included marriage reforms such as improved facilities for divorce as well as education for marriage, sex education of the young, and the abolition of censorship. Some of these aims were indeed achieved during the 'liberal moment' of the 1960s. But some were not. Sex education, for example, remains a contested and controversial issue. Some attention to these topics, the penumbra of sexual reform issues, might also have overcome the slight cynical feeling that occasionally arises that homosexuality could possibly have been included to extend the potential audience for the book by broadening its appeal beyond those concerned with reproductive politics (Brooke himself points out in the text that much of the territory of gay politics/left politics and their intersections since the 1967 Act has been ably mapped by Lucy Robinson in Gay Men and the Left). These were also issues which for which there is a narrative trajectory, rather than endless reiterations with little to show. There are indeed useful points of comparison and contrast illuminating the differing interests and agendas within Labour to be gained by taking these particular issues, and the choice undoubtedly pays off as the narrative is taken on to the initiatives of the 2000s.

(Many of the questions and points raised above are dealt with in much fuller detail and with greater nuance in the revised and expanded second edition of Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880, now in press.)

A question of shame

I was recently very excited by the ideas put forward in David Nash and Anne-Marie Kilday's recent book Cultures of Shames: Exploring Crime and Morality in Britain 1600-1900 (Palgrave 2010), which came to my attention frustratingly late in the day for the purposes of revising Sex Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880.

I found their critique of a prevalent assumption that a modern 'guilt' culture (in which internal constraints influence behaviour)  prevailed over an older 'shame' culture (in which community rituals of shaming enforced social norms) very illuminating. When one thinks about it, of course shame is an enduring human emotion and not just about traditional practices within small communities such as preaching over unmarried mothers or raising 'rough music' against transgressors against community standards. Within a given context, a raised eyebrow might induce tremendous social shame.

 Their argument that

Shame... could borrow from old established ideas and idioms while still using the most modern forms of communication technology and social networks with astonishing effectiveness. We would further argue that any definition of shame must clearly appreciate the importance of dynamic interactions between people, institutions and ideas within its influence.

seems compelling to me. Their recuperation of the importance of shame could engage in productive dialogue with Anna Clarke's very useful concept of 'twilight moments' in sexual behaviours (for surely a lot of that is about shame), and also cries out for further consideration of the role of the media in creating shaming narratives.

Nicky Hallett, Lesbian Lives: Identity and Auto/Biography in the Twentieth Century (1999)

This book is perfectly okay for what it does, but I'm not sure it's a book of particular relevance to my particular purposes at this moment. It's much more about lesbian representation/self-representation in various texts. In some cases I was not entirely persuaded that certain imagery clusters or tropes are quite as specific to woman-woman relationships as she suggests, or at least, I would have liked a bit of compare/contrast as to how certain metaphors played out differently in self-consciously lesbian texts.

It was published before work by Laura Doan, Alison Oram, Martha Vicinus and Deborah Cohler which have substantially nuanced our own understanding of historical understandings of female same-sex desire and relationships and lesbian self-fashioning, and significantly queried the extent to which sexological categories were in play.
 
It contains a confusing citation to a work of 1928 on Sexual Inversion by John Addington Symonds as if this were contemporaneous with The Well of Loneliness and JAS suffering from 'the paranoia of the imperialist' apropos homosexuality (rather than an early homophile advocate). Whatever text it was that was published in New York in 1928, and reprinted in 1984, if it was really by JAS it was written before 1893 (when he died) and one would like to know why, how, and by whom it was being republished at that date, given that Symonds' family and literary executors had taken enormous pains to persuade Havelock Ellis to remove the traces of Symonds' collaboration from their jointly-authored version of Sexual Inversion. It appears to have been the volume Studies in Sexual Inversion Embodying a Study in Greek Ethics and a Study in Modern Ethics published in 1928, but I am not sure what the impetus was behind issuing an omnibus edition. This was one of a number of points where I felt the close-reading focus was perhaps leaving out significant contextual matter or chronology. But that may be to do with the sort of thing I am looking for at the moment.

Marcus Collins, Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth Century Britain

Okay, it's not really an 'intimate history' in the way that Szreter and Fisher's Sex before the Sexual Revolution is, or Kate Fisher's early work on birth control, or even, dare I venture, my own Hidden Anxieties. It's a touch distanced, it's more about rhetoric and reports and representations than lived (hetero)sexual experence.

There are some good useful case-studies in this book. Collins has delved into the archives of organisations offering various forms of marital counselling to rather different constituencies in more or less the immediately post-war era (though he doesn't seem to know that the Marriage Guidance Council started in the 1930s, though it went on hiatus during the early war years),  and found some fascinating material. I also greatly liked his investigation into the phenomena of same-sex and mixed sex youth clubs and the shifts and changes and unforeseen outcomes of various developments (though is he serious about somewhat marking down girls in the 50s for not somehow militantly reclaiming the space within mixed clubs that was taken over by boys and their interests?) But there's valuable material there. His analysis of the short period in the rise of glossy soft-porn men's mags when they were pro some kind of women's lib is intriguing, particularly in the light of some of the material in Mort's Capital Offenses about new ideas of womanhood.

However, I am not convinced by his rather rigid lump categorisation of people writing about marriage. I'm not sure 'radical feminism' is a helpful way of thinking about social purity feminism (which was hardly monolithic), and I am simply bewildered by the people he plonks into the interwar classifications of 'Christian mutualists' and 'sex reformers'. Given that quite a lot of the mutualists were not Christian (Collins specifically describes the secularist, Jewish by origin, Eustace Chesser, as a 'Christian': and there were elements in Chesser's rather diverse agenda which allied him with the interwar sex reformers as much as with e.g. Griffith or Mace of the Marriage Guidance Council) and that some of the prominent 'reformers' were just as much about mutualism, but a mutualism of both partners having other lovers, this seems unduly simplistic, even as a heuristic device.

Also, it's all very hetero, which is perhaps reasonable, but if you are looking at mutualism, a case can be made that writers on marriage were often quite benign on the subject of female-female couples, who were seen as embodying an ideal egalitarian form of relationship. This focus becomes particularly egregious in the concluding section, given that the C21st has seen, it may be argued, the spreading of the mutualist couple ideal to same-sex couples via civil partnership. I also felt the work as a whole rather ignored the impact on sexual mores of STDs - the burgeoning sexual revolution of the 60s/70s was underpinned by penicillin as much as the Pill, and the retreat from it from the early 80s surely owed something to the rise of herpes, the AIDS/HIV panic, the awareness of a range of other STDs, and the development of the paradism of safe, or safer sex.

However, useful, both for the case studies, and for provoking thoughts and ideas around the subject.

Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: The Making of the Permissive Society (2010)

This was an excellent book, and I found it a compelling read (I came across a couple of reviews in the mainstream press which accused it of having swathes of academic theoretical jargon and either they have a very low tolerance for the slightest degree of theoretical analysis and just wanted more scandal and sensationalism, or I have become desensitised over the course of the years). It does some extremely useful things, not least of which is to draw attention to the continuing significance of class alongside sex and race in the issues under discussion.

It also drew attention to reconstructions of masculinity - and the continuation of certain forms of elite homosociability - in the period under discussion, which both hearked back, at least stylistically, to earlier periods, and incorporated elements of modernity. This productive intersection between the modern and tradition also feature strongly in the discussion of continuities and changes in the specific urban spaces of Soho.

Obviously there is a lot more that could be written about the 50s/early 60s, that period of apparent deadly conformity and tremblors of instability every so often shaking the complacent surface, but this is a solid and focused study that by its concentration shines spotlights into hitherto underexplored areas.

Still thinking through many of the points it raises.

Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, Unauthorized Pleasures: accounts of Victorian erotic experience

I enjoyed reading this book, but I'm not sure how useful it is likely to be for my particular purposes. Also, it has that thing I am never quite sure about, where the book is more or less several articles fixed-up into a single volume with the indication that there is a common theme. But they remain separate articles. Sometimes I want things brought into a closer and more interwoven relationship, rather than a series of case studies.

However, I do give it massive plus points for its acute awareness of the oppressive anxieties that ideologies of 'patriarchy' and  'masculinity' placed on privileged Victorian males. I haven't yet read this other book which is sitting in my to be read pile, largely because at a first glance I was already picking up what that reviewer comments on

 Yet all the protagonists are male, with the women reduced to mere quickly potted biographies. The book leaves the "new eroticism" as a masculine invention.

that it appears to be about male libertine subcultures (which I very much doubt were really that rebellious and subversive). I probably should read it, but I'm not sure it's going to bring the critical analysis to the formations of Victorian masculinity that I might like, and which Rosenman does go some considerable way with.

I was also prepossessed by her response to Walter's My Secret Life that his unexamined class attitudes are rather more noxious than his sexual desires.

Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press, 1918-1978

This really does fill in a much needed gap (which I flagged up in one of my chapters in The Facts of Life) about how sex figured in the popular daily/Sunday papers in Britain in the earlier part of the C20th, given that that was where a lot of people would have been picking up such sexual knowledge as they had.

Bingham does an excellent job, showing the ways in which newspaper proprietors and editors were well aware that 'sex sells' but also of the ways that they had to negotiate around societal taboos and the idea of being 'family newspapers' and making sure the content was suitable for the kiddies. One does get a very strong impression that sex got discussed rather a lot in the context of society scandal/divorce and criminality, although there was also a dimension of (male, heteronormative) 'healthy/normal' embodied in  the phenomenon of the extensive use of pin-up photos.

There's also interesting stuff about a moment, in the 40s and 50s and into the 60s, in which at least certain papers were taking a stance on being modern and the importance of knowledge and enlightenment around sex and there was a period in which it's arguable that there was some genuinely educational stuff going on  - note here role of women advice columnists and also the articles on e.g. abortion which were presenting the progressive legalisation case. Although this varied a lot over the range of topics and there is some very good analysis of the ways in which the popular press generally chose to deal with prostitution (as 'oldest profession' with occasional moral panics over 'white slavery', vice rings, etc).

But that moment was swept away by an increasing sexualisation and sensationalism that burgeoned in the 70s.

Useful stuff. I really ought to read his other book on Gender, Modernism and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain but it's wicked pricey. I could get it on ILL and take notes I suppose but I like to have my own copies so I can look things up when I need to.