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Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 3. Women and Fiction

The novel is the least concentrated form of art. (p.134)

Virginia Woolf’s writings about women, women and writing, women and fiction, are deeply felt and often inspiring, even if you’re not a woman or a writer of fiction. The one caveat is that, after you’ve read a certain number of her essays on the same subject, you find the same examples, anecdotes and arguments recurring. Bit samey. But then this is true of many other essayists. And if they’re good arguments and examples, why not?

Women and fiction

David Bradshaw’s selection of essays by Virginia Woolf for the Oxford World Classics is divided into four thematic areas.

  1. Reading and Writing
  2. Life-Writing
  3. Women and Fiction
  4. Looking On

This blog post summarises and comments on five of the six essays in the third section, ‘Women and Fiction’. The exception is ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (1931), which I summarise in a separate post.

  1. The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905) [book review]
  2. Women Novelists (1918) [book review]
  3. Women and Fiction (1929)
  4. Professions for Women (1931) [a talk]
  5. Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931) [introduction to a collection of letters]
  6. Why? (1934) [article for a student magazine]

Obviously there is a strong feminist tone to Woolf’s essays about women and women writers and women and fiction but in my opinion none of the six are as powerful as Woolf’s book-length essay Three Guineas. Guineas is so seismic because it brings together such a wealth of scandalous evidence demonstrating the deep-rooted sexism and misogyny operating at every level of British society, not only in the dark Victorian days, but right up to its date of publication in the late 1930s. Reading it permanently changed my view of the plight of so many women in the Victorian century and on into Woolf’s time.

1. The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905: 2 pages)

W. L. (William Leonard) Courtney (1850 to 1928) was a philosopher, journalist and sometime fellow of New College, Oxford. He wrote a book called ‘The Feminine Note in Fiction’. You can read it online. This is very short review of the book which Woolf published the Guardian, 25 January 1905 i.e. right at the very start of her career, when she was just turning 23.

On page one of his book Courtney says there is a feminine note in fiction and studies eight women writers of the day to show it, but Woolf quickly points out that he doesn’t, in fact, succeed. (The women writers in question are Mrs Humphrey Ward, Gertrude Atherton, Mrs Woods, Mrs Voynich, Miss Robins, Miss Mary Wilson, along with the diaries of six other women from history.) And anyway:

Is it not too soon after all to criticise the ‘feminine note’ in anything? And will not the adequate critic of women be a woman?

She summarises some of Courtney’s propositions, that women:

  • are seldom artists, because they have a passion for detail which conflicts with the proper artistic proportion of their work – disproved by Sappho and Jane Austen
  • excel in ‘close analytic miniature work
  • are more happy when they reproduce than when they create
  • ‘s genius is for psychological analysis

Woolf says this is all very nice but there have been too few successful women novelists to tell; we’ll need to come back in 100 years to see if any of it is true.

Courtney is surprised to find the women novelists in his study to be so varied, which is laughable.

He makes the characteristically stupid intellectual argument that his age is one of special and particular decline, the same thing idiot writers have claimed in every year of recorded history. Thus he says that more and more novels are written by women for women and that, as a result, the novel as a work of art is disappearing. What an arse, one of the legion of clever misogynist idiots Woolf cites to such powerful effect in Three Guineas.

To all of which Woolf (still a very young woman) sensibly replies:

The first part of his statement may well be true; it means that women having found their voices have something to say which is naturally of supreme interest and meaning to women, but the value of which we cannot yet determine.

The assertion that the woman novelist is extinguishing the novel as a work of art seems to us, however, more doubtful.

It is, at any rate, possible that the widening of her intelligence by means of education and study of the Greek and Latin classics may give her that sterner view of literature which will make an artist of her, so that, having blurted out her message somewhat formlessly, she will in due time fashion it into permanent artistic shape.

So this short review is really notable for this last bit, for her already feeling the need for art and artistry and ‘permanent artistic shape’ in the novel, things she was, of course, to go on and try to give it.

2. Women Novelists (1918: 3 pages)

Reginald Brimley Johnson (1867 to 1932) was a literary critic, editor, author and publisher. In 1918 he published a book titled ‘The Women Novelists’. This is Woolf’s review of it, published in the Times Literary Supplement.

She praises it. She says Johnson has read more novels by women than anyone had heard of. Also he doesn’t make sweeping generalisations, but is very cautious in his conclusions. She calls Fanny Burney the mother of English fiction. She laments the way the burden of proof remained with women authors to justify herself, and the practical difficulties they laboured under: Jane Austen slipping her papers under a book whenever anyone came into the drawing room; Charlotte Bronte leaving off work to pare the potatoes.

When she notes the criticisms of immorality George Eliot laboured under and how they continue to constrict women writers in the preset (1918) you realise it wasn’t that long since Eliot died. George Eliot died in 1880, just two years before Woolf was born. This essay is from over a hundred years ago. Many women, like Woolf, were alive who had been born in the reign of Victoria and still remembered the terrible stifled life women led.

She makes the point that Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot didn’t just adopt men’s names so as to get published; but also to free their own minds from the matrix of restrictions placed not just on women’s social, legal and financial freedom, but on their imaginative freedom.

She repeats a point made in A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas which is that, above and beyond the suppression of women, it’s making women authors self conscious of themselves as women which so often undermines their efforts to produce art. The truly independent artist is sexless; the issue of their sex doesn’t enter into it. They just create art.

She agrees with Johnson that all women’s writing must be marked as feminine but wonders what ‘feminine’ actually means. She thinks Johnson is wise in not reaching a conclusion about this but accepting that women writers radically differ. She quotes several of Johnson’s generalisations which all feel like sexist rubbish:

  • Women are born preachers and always work to an ideal.
  • Women is the moral realist, and her realism is not inspired by any ideal of art, but of sympathy with life.
  • George Eliot’s outlook remains thoroughly emotional and feminine.
  • Women are humorous and satirical rather than imaginative.
  • Women have a great sense of emotional purity than men but a less alert sense of honour.

This is why I think no-one should every generalise about the sexes: it’s impossible not to sound like an idiot.

She thinks you can immediately tell the difference between a male and a female author and, after all, this might have been true in the 1920s. She thinks as soon as they start to describe a character you can instantly tell whether it’s a male or female author.

The motive of criticising men may have motivated many women writers to take up authorship.

There are sides of each sex which are only really seen and know by the opposite sex.

3. Women and Fiction (1929: 8 pages)

Why did women suddenly start writing fiction in the mid-18th century? Why did they start producing classic after classic of English literature?

A difficulty answering this is that history is about men so that ‘very little is known about women’.

But we do know that it requires special circumstances to be able to write, time, freedom from practical worries, a space or room of one’s own, and all these for most of human history most women have lacked or, to be clearer, have been deprived of.

And then motherhood: of the four great nineteenth century women writers – Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot – none had children and two were unmarried.

Why did they all write fiction, not epic poems or plays? Easy: ‘The novel is the least concentrated form of art’ (p.134). Readers are free to pick up and put down novels in a way you can’t do to poems or plays and the same is true of their authors, and she repeats the anecdote of Austen slipping her writings under a book or blotting pad when anyone came into the room or Charlotte Bronte breaking off writing to peel the potatoes.

Banned from undertaking any profession or work, middle class women were trapped in the home where they had precious little to do except observe the minutiae of each other’s behaviour. In other words, women were trained to become novelists.

She compares the maturity of George Eliot, disapproved of by society and locking herself away in St John’s Wood, with the wild life of Leo Tolstoy, soldier, playboy, traveller, thoroughly prepared by his society to be a novelist of astonishing breadth. (The Austen, Bronte and Eliot points are all made in A Room of One’s Own; they were obviously stock examples for Woolf.)

Being women writers led, in Woolf’s view, to impurity. What she means is that reading good women’s novels you’re always aware of an element of special pleasing; they protest against restrictions and lobby for the independence of their sex. However politically valid, this compromises their artistry, the work’s integrity. It needed a very strong mind to resist ‘the temptations to anger’ at women’s wholesale oppression, a feat only achieved by Jane Austen, whose work is pure and unsullied by resentment and grievance.

And so Woolf thinks the great change that has come over women’s writing in her days is the women are no longer angry and indignant. But many challenges remain.

One is the structure of language itself, which is male, made by men for men. The male sentence is ‘too lose, too heavy, too pompous’ for a woman’s use.

Then, men and women have different values, so that the very subject of the book, all its related smaller topics, descriptions and so on, are liable to clash with the values promoted by a male society. So that male critics are likely to find what women writers write about ‘weak or trivial or sentimental’ (p.136).

Nineteenth century women’s writing was likely to be skewed and impurified by special pleading for their sex and, in the same way, tended to by autobiographical, driven by the author’s need to share her suffering. Now, Woolf reckons, having passed through this phase, women are writing more about other women.

And in so doing she discovers that so much of women’s lives has been ephemeral, the meals cooked, the clothes washed, the children raised. Looking back there are no records or monuments. Thus women’s experience is like a dark continent, unexplored.

At the same time as this is being begun, legal impediments to women in the professions were being lifted and so current women novelists have this whole new subject to record: women coming in out of the shadows and entering the male world.

Thus she sums up contemporary women’s writing as brave, sincere. It is not bitter as the writing of the nineteenth century could be, and does not insist upon its femininity.

Again the essay ends with a description of her own practice. She says now women have won the vote and are allowed to enter the professions and earn a living, some women writers will become more socially conscious and critical and political. But there will be an equal and opposite reaction by which other women writers will reject the outside world altogether and cultivate their poetic facility. Be butterflies rather than gadflies.

Then she lets herself down a bit, and indicates the weakness of her position by saying this poetic turn will lead them to ‘examine the wider questions which the poet tries to solve – of our destiny and the meaning of life’ (p.138).

It’s odd that she’s so progressive in her analysis of the sociological situation of women and yet, when questioned on her artistic goals, steps right back into the nineteenth century, venerating a notion of The Poetic, The True and The Beautiful which hasn’t changed since the death of Keats in 1821.

She ends by saying more and more women have the leisure time and little money to write and out of this will hopefully come, fiction writing that is more poetic, but also women having the time to train for slightly more demanding genres such as essays, criticism, history and biography.

4. Professions for Women (1931: 5 pages)

In 1931 Woolf was invited to address the London branch of the National Society for Women’s Service. This is her talk.

She was invited to talk about her experiences in her profession. But her profession is an odd one, literature. So many women have been successful writers because there is such a low bar to entry: all you need to make a start is a pen and some paper.

She spends a couple of pages describing how the one thing she’s really proud of is killing the Angel of The House. This was the name of a hugely popular poem by the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore which, as the name suggests, depicted the stereotypical Victorian wife: selfless, kind, self-denying, retiring, modest, meek and pure. Woolf’s point is that when she began reviewing books she heard the voice of the Angel whispering over her shoulder, telling her to be modest, to respect the male author, not to say anything unbecoming an angel.

And so, in order to become herself, to become intellectually and imaginatively independent, she had to murder the Angel inside her.

Next she describes the demanding state a novelist has to cultivate:

I hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I say that a novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. She has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. She wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. She wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while she is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which she is living–so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination. (p.143)

The second big challenge she faced was writing truthfully about women’s physical experiences, ‘the truth about my own experiences as a body’, and she stumbled here. The problem is the severity of men’s criticism of such honesty. With the result that whenever she goes near the subject she can feel her censor kicking in. She still hasn’t solved the problem of honestly describing women’s physical experiences.

And she brings the talk back to her audience of young professional women by saying the obstacles she faced, which she’s just described, were psychological, the internalisation of society’s male values which she had to combat in her head. How much must her audience of young women, the first generation moving into the male-dominated professions, also be confronting their inner obstacles. That is why it is so important for them to share their stories and experiences.

6. Why? (1934)

In 1934 women undergraduates at Somerville College, Oxford, one of the two relatively new women-only colleges, launched a new magazine titled Lysistrata. (The name refers to the play of the same name by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes in which the women of the Greek city states, sick of the endless Peloponnesian War, go on a sex strike i.e. deny their men sex till they agree to make peace. Which makes me think of the contemporary 4B movement, originating in Korea which has spread to the US.)

Anyway, the editor of Lysistrata asked her to contribute a piece and here it is. What is it going to be about? Well here Woolf indulges one of those flights of fancy which you either find charming and beautiful, or irritating and obtuse, depending on taste.

The whole little essay turns out to be premised on the idea that, like most people these days (1934), Woolf is constantly assailed by questions, but couldn’t find any place to ask them until she received this invitation from Lysistrata for an article. At which point, she says, a fleet of questions thronged her head all clamouring for expression. From this throng she chose one relevant to the start of a new term at a university, namely: why lecture and why be lectured?

Unlike the other essays, it almost feels as if she’s being paid by the word in this one. It feels like she’s writing any old rubbish to fill the space (2,000 words). Anyway, she spends the middle of this little text sharing a memory of attending a lecture on the French Revolution in some non-descript public building. The account is chiefly notable for the way she describes being bored and wandering off, losing the thread of the lecture and becoming distracted by details, the look of the room, the appearance of other students and then a fly buzzing around. (As she so often does; exactly as she describes losing interest in the speeches of the women at the English Women’s Co-operative Guild in the preceding essay.)

And this is exactly the kind of easily distracted, wandering attention she attributes to the female protagonists of Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse (Mrs Ramsay) and The Years (Eleanor Pargiter) and Between the Acts (Lucy Swithin). It seems fairly obvious – from the way it occurs in all those characters and that you meet it in so many of the essays – that she was describing herself in those characters.

And her description of it made me think of the over-diagnosed modern condition, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The central attribute of this is ‘having a short attention span and being easily distracted’. QED.

Anyway, back in the argument about lectures, Woolf’s description of how bored she becomes in lectures turns into a plea that universities should drop lecturing altogether. She tells us that at the start of every term writers like her, and experts in every field, are bombarded with requests to come a deliver a lecture to this or that college. But she hates it. Doing so sets you up as an expert, a personage on a stage, and lures you into writing a long discourse with all the formal trimmings, guaranteeing it will be staggeringly dull.

So: why not abandon lectures. Why not invite speakers down from the stage and onto the floor among the audience and talk like ordinary men and women?

Good. Sorted. But she has more space to fill so she reverts to contrived metaphor that she is assailed by flocks of questions and has to choose just a few of them to include in this lecture, and chooses another one. This one is: Why learn English literature at universities when you can read it for yourself in books?

Instead of answering this in a logical way, Woolf takes a characteristically oblique and anecdotal approach by recalling a visit to a friend who is a publishers’ reader and who assailed her with a diatribe against students learning English. Does anyone write better for it, no. In fact, in her friend’s opinion, the big increase in teaching of English literature and writing books about English literature means all the manuscripts she’s sent end up sounding the same. In the long term it will end up by killing English literature off altogether.

Did that happen? No. More books, more novels and all other types of creating writing are published now, in 2025, than 90 years ago, despite the explosion in the teaching and studying of English literature, let alone the explosion of creative writing classes over the last half century. So it’s a snapshot of a grumpy woman from 90 years ago, grumpy and opinionated as any red-faced colonel at the bar of his club blustering about “young people these days”. Sort of interesting as social history; worthless as contribution to any debate.

This was by far the worst of the essays in this section because Woolf phoned it in. She was just going through the motions. It feels like she just cobbled together some fatuous ‘questions’ and made no serious effort to answer them. The conceit of being bombarded by questions and having to select a few is sort of interesting and maybe had the potential to be genuinely interesting, but felt squandered.

This little squib was only written for a student magazine but still, it feels weak.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most though not all of the essays can be found online. David Bradshaw’s introduction can be read on Amazon.

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Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 1. Reading and Writing (2)

The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’, edited by David Bradshaw, brings together 30 of Woolf’s essays, reviews and miscellaneous prose pieces, and groups them under four headings:

  1. Reading and Writing
  2. Life-Writing
  3. Women and Fiction
  4. Looking On

Earlier blog posts give my introductory notes to the essays and summary of the first four essays in the ‘Reading and Writing’ section. This post summarises and comments on the last six essays in the ‘Reading and Writing’ section, numbers 5 to 10 in this list.

  1. The Decay of Essay-Writing (1905)
  2. Modern Fiction (1919)
  3. The Modern Essay (1922) [review of Modern English Essays 1870 to 1920]
  4. How It Strikes a Contemporary (1923)
  5. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923)
  6. Character in Fiction (1924) [a talk]
  7. ‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926) [Thomas de Quincy]
  8. How Should One Read A Book? (1926)
  9. Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927)
  10. Craftmanship (1937) [BBC radio talk]

5. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923: 5 pages)

The essence of fiction is character but the complexity of the world the Georgian novelists face means they have to reject the simplistic notions of character good enough for their Victorian and Edwardian forebears.

The story of this and the following essay are a bit confused.

In March 1923 the bestselling novelist Arnold Bennett wrote a review of Woolf’s avant-garde novel ‘Jacob’s Room’ (1922) in which he claimed her characters would never survive in ‘the real world’. This triggered Woolf to write 1) a rebuttal of Bennett’s criticisms that was published in the Athenaeum magazine in December 1923 under the title of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.

Woolf realised she was onto something and expanded her points into a 2) longer essay and, the following year, presented the expanded version in a paper read to the Heretics Society at Cambridge University, still titled ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, on 18 May 1924.

When T.S. Eliot, as editor of The Criterion magazine, asked Woolf for an article she submitted the text of this talk and it was published in July 1924 under the title ‘Character in Fiction’. This second version, the expanded version, is the essay following this one in this selection, number 6 in my list. Woolf and her husband then published it themselves, as a standalone pamphlet, in their own Hogarth Press, on 30 October 1924. What makes things confusing is that they chose to publish it under the title of the short version, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.

So this is my summary of the original 5-page review. In his selection Bradshaw follows it by publishing the longer version, as published in The Criterion and under the Criterion‘s title, ‘Character in Fiction’.

***

Woolf quotes the best-selling serious novelist of his day, Arnold Bennett, as writing in a recent essay that the foundation of good novel writing is character but that the Georgian novelists have lost interest in depicting character in preference for a blizzard of details. Woolf agrees but claims that it is Bennett and the two other successful novelists of his generation, H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy, who are chiefly responsible for drowning character in facts and details.

She claims that the characters of modern books such as Kipps or ‘The Old Wives Tale’ pale into comparison with any character from ‘the splendid opulence of the Victorian age’, notable for ‘the astonishing vividness and reality of the characters.’

For Woolf the Edwardian novelists suffer from at least three disadvantage: 1) In a sense they simply couldn’t compete with the scale and depth of the great Victorians. 2) There was also something squalid and vulgar about them. She is very rude about Samuel Butler.

No sooner had the Victorians departed than Samuel Butler, who had lived below stairs, came out like an observant boot boy, with the family secrets in ‘The Way of All Flesh’.

In the same vein John Galsworthy is accused of being overly concerned with social injustices, which was even more true of H.G. Wells and his incessant issue-mongering.

3) The impact of Constance Garnett’s powerful English translations of the Russian classic novelists, particularly Dostoyevsky. Not only the Edwardians but even the Victorians couldn’t compete with the scale and depth and complexity of characters such as Raskolnikov, Stavrogin et al.

Galsworthy gives us his sense of compassion, Wells his generous enthusiasm and Bennett his sense of time passing, but none of them match up to the great Russians.

Woolf claims that it was this, the change to a new sense of the depth and complexity of human nature, which marked the decisive break between the culture of the Edwardians and of the Georgians (King Edward VII died and was succeeded by his son George V in May 1910). This is the thinking behind her much quoted saying that ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’, which comes in the expanded version of this essay (see below).

Character, she asserts, is crucial to human beings’ sense of life, of who we are and who other people are. Hence, if we disbelieve in the characters in novels as they are presented to us, then we want to go deeper and further, to search out their real meanings for ourselves.

At this point she introduces the figure of Mrs Brown – who is to feature so largely in the expanded version of the essay – but in a very different way from her later appearance. Here she is not much more than a name Woolf gives to her notion of a deeper, more unpredictable conception of character than the Edwardian writers can cope with, a notion which breaks up and shatters traditional ideas about character.

And it is amid these ruins of the old Victorian and Edwardian notions of ‘character’ that her generation of writers, the Georgians, have to somehow construct a reasonable dwelling place. She argues that the difficulties each of the Georgian writers encountered in trying to work out their own conception of ‘Mrs Brown’ (i.e. how to depict modern character) explain both the failures but also the daring experiments of her generation.

6. Character in Fiction (1924: 18 pages)

Extended criticism of the Edwardian novelists – Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells – for their excessive naturalistic detail which swamps their characters, for ignoring the spiritual for the material, which is why her generation of Georgian novelists must reject them.

This is the text of the paper read to The Heretics in Cambridge on 18 May 1924 mentioned above. (The Cambridge Heretics was a society formed at the University of Cambridge in 1909, to oppose compulsory Christian worship and celebrate humanist values.)

Woolf actually delivered it under the title of the original article rebutting Bennett i.e. ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (see above) which was also the title she used when she published it in her own Hogarth Press edition. But in an effort to distinguish between the two versions, David Bradshaw publishes it here with the title it was given when published in T.S. Eliot’s journal, The Criterion i.e. ‘Character in Fiction’.

This explains why, when you look it up online, you find the text given here as ‘Character in Fiction’ is everywhere else given the Hogarth Press title of Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.

***

Woolf opens with a modest, self-deprecating tone. She describes herself as ‘one solitary, ill-informed, and misguided individual’ and goes on to say:

It seems to me possible, perhaps desirable, that I may be the only person in this room who has committed the folly of writing, trying to write, or failing to write, a novel. And when I asked myself, as your invitation to speak to you about modern fiction made me ask myself, what demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom, a little figure rose before me—the figure of a man, or of a woman, who said, ‘My name is Brown. Catch me if you can.’

She gets the ball rolling going by quoting Arnold Bennett as saying that the most important thing in novel writing is creating character, everything follows from that. So that’s the Mr Bennett of the title accounted for.

To the reader’s mild surprise, Woolf suddenly makes the grand declaration that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed.’ What changed? She explains. Between her generation and the Victorians there is a gulf:

All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.

Ah. So it’s an arbitrary but useful dividing line which she has airily invented.

She goes on to admit that to some extent everybody is an expert in ‘character’. To assess other people’s characters is a fundamental human need. But novelists take it a stage further:

The study of character becomes to them an absorbing pursuit; to impart character an obsession. And this I find it very difficult to explain: what novelists mean when they talk about character, what the impulse is that urges them so powerfully every now and then to embody their view in writing.

Then she makes what appears, at first sight, to be one of her bewildering digressions. She tells everyone about an incident which occurred to her recently, when she was late catching a train and hurriedly climbed into a compartment where a man and woman seemed to be having an argument. They both shut up when she got in but she could feel the tension in the carriage. being Woolf, she promptly invented names for these two unknown strangers, naming the bluff irritated man Mr Smith and the much older, visibly poor woman, Mrs Brown. So this is the Mrs Brown of the title.

Woolf then reports this pair’s inconsequential conversation, Smith leaning forward and threateningly extracting from the woman what he wanted, namely a promise to meet someone named George somewhere on Thursday. Once assured of this, the man jumps out at Clapham Junction, while Mrs Brown continues on to Waterloo station, gets out and walks – like so many of the bit characters she observes in London streets – out of Woolf’s life.

What just happened? We have just watched Woolf conjure character and interest out of an apparently chance and trivial encounter and she begins to make her point:

I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite. I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with character, and that it is to express character — not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved.

She reminds us that Arnold Bennett claimed that fictional characters must be ‘real’ to make a book work, but Woolf asks the obvious question: what is reality? One man’s reality is another man’s nonsense.

For instance, in this article he says that Dr Watson in Sherlock Holmes is real to him: to me Dr Watson is a sack stuffed with straw, a dummy, a figure of fun.

Anyway, her point is this: Why are there no plausible characters in contemporary (1920s) fiction? She has another go at Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy, saying their books lack the completion and closure of, say, Jane Austen. They miss something, they are incomplete.

To make her point she entertainingly speculates what Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett would have made of her made-up Mrs Brown. Her three little parodies are unusually funny for Woolf. She spends most effort on Bennett’s version. Then, to check, she takes down a novel of his, Hilda Lessways. She quotes from it, from the long factual description of Hilda Lessway’s house, in order to graphically demonstrate what a blizzard of realistic detail clutters up Bennett’s texts. No wonder his novels are so bloody long.

But Woolf says Bennett’s approach is the wrong way round. The house isn’t important, the person living in it, Hilda, is the important thing.

Back to 1910 and Woolf says that E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence spoiled their early work by giving in to the British public’s need for conventions and facts. They compromised with what she calls the Edwardian quality of Wells-Galsworthy-Bennett’s books. Foster and Lawrence had to wriggle free of the old conventions in order to capture the uniqueness of ‘Mrs Brown’.

By now we can see that this ‘Mrs Brown’ has become a metaphor for a particular view of reality, of Life as portrayed in fiction. And so Woolf comes to the present day and tells us that she can hear all around her the sound of authors crashing and smashing down those Victorian-Edwardian conventions in order to convey the truth of life. But the trouble with contemporary authors is they don’t know what to replace all those dead old conventions with. Hence the sense of confusion and lack of common values which she lamented in ‘How it strikes a contemporary’. It’s one thing to tear down the old rule, but what are the new rules and how do we agree on them?

Then Woolf is surprisingly harsh on a couple of notorious modern writers, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. She condemns Joyce for his indecency and Eliot for his obscurity. It’s part of her broader point that modern writers have to waste so much of their energy smashing the old conventions and forging their own way. This was not true of her ideal writers from earlier times, authors like Jane Austen or Macauley the historian, who were at one with their times and so wrote easily and gracefully. Instead:

We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments. We must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition. Ulysses, Queen Victoria, Mr Prufrock — to give Mrs Brown some of the names she has made famous lately — is a little pale and dishevelled by the time her rescuers reach her.

Drawing to a conclusion, Woolf asks her readers to be tolerant of the problems and difficulties of modern fiction, to ‘tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.’ Modern authors are trying their best but they are having to invent a whole new world.

After all this talk about smashing and crashing and difficulties, she ends with the surprising claim that:

We are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs Brown.

Summary

Well, this is a Great Essay. She delivers a good, clear point of view, forcefully and vividly expressed. Just as T.S. Eliot’s essays in the early 1920s helped him think through his position and helped the perplexed public understand what his new type of poetry was trying to do, so Woolf’s essays show her developing her new and radical aesthetic, and this is very interesting. And her criticism of Wells and Bennett’s materialism becomes more debatable, discussable and powerful, the more you read it.

7. ‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926: 8 pages)

Justification of her wish to restore poetry to prose, on the model of her hero Thomas de Quincy.

She means poetic prose, prose poetry. She laments that most prose fiction is resolutely factual, that we are continually told that it is a solecism to include poetic flights in a prose text.

If the critics agree on any point it is on this, that nothing is more reprehensible than for a prose writer to write like a poet. Poetry is poetry and prose is prose—how often have we not heard that! Poetry has one mission and prose another

Trouble is that this occludes half of life, prevents us exploring our subjective, inner lives.

Therefore all that side of the mind which is exposed in solitude they ignore. They ignore its thoughts, its rhapsodies, its dreams, with the result that the people of fiction bursting with energy on one side are atrophied on the other.

Luckily there are in all ages writers who are not themselves of the first rank but who widen the possibilities of writing for contemporaries and successors. The example she has in mind is Thomas de Quincey who wrote a huge amount, and had a poetic sensibility, but never wrote any poetry because he didn’t have the sustained gift; and by the same token wasn’t interested enough in people to be a novelist so never write fiction.

In what form was he to express this that was the most real part of his own existence? There was none ready made to his hand. He invented, as he claimed, ‘modes of impassioned prose‘. With immense elaboration and art he formed a style in which to express these ‘visionary scenes derived from the world of dreams’. For such prose there were no precedents, he believed; and he begged the reader to remember ‘the perilous difficulty’ of an attempt where ‘a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins the whole music’.

And so he carved out his own space, writing poetically in the other prose genres: essays, biographies, confessions and memoirs.

He was an exception and a solitary. He made a class for himself. He widened the choice for others.

She goes on to describe at length the strength and weakness of her favourite among de Quincey’s books, the ‘Autobiographic Sketches’. By this stage she’s made her point, for surely she is the modern de Quincey, deploying ‘modes of impassioned prose’ to convey a deeper perception of life, than the stony prose writers. We sit with our friends and family, eating, talking, in too close proximity.

But draw a little apart, see people in groups, as outlines, and they become at once memorable and full of beauty. Then it is not the actual sight or sound itself that matters, but the reverberations that it makes as it travels through our minds. These are often to be found far away, strangely transformed; but it is only by gathering up and putting together these echoes and fragments that we arrive at the true nature of our experience.

She is describing her own technique.

8. How Should One Read A Book? (1926: 11 days)

Quite frequently Woolf displays the number one mistake of intellectuals and writers in thinking that the present moment, the moment she’s writing about, is somehow uniquely special, and moreover uniquely degraded and decadent. Thus she opens this essay:

At this late hour of the world’s history…

But it isn’t ‘this late hour of the world’s history’. Who’s to say this isn’t an early hour in the world’s history, that the last 3,000 years are just a prelude to what comes after. In fact they obviously will be. Human history will go on as long as there are humans to record it and who knows how long that will be – maybe thousands and thousands of years to come. This decline-and-fall trope is a cliché and doesn’t give you confidence of her broader understanding of history or society. You get the feeling that her orientating herself in culture and history is subtly awry, but then there’s something awry about all her writings, the detachment, the alienation, but also the odd insights of the mentally ill.

Anyway, her point is that there are more books than ever before (another cliché, something she also complains about in ‘The Decay of Essay-Writing’) so how should you read them? Well, there are no rules but the first thing to acknowledge is that books come in all shapes and sizes and genres and forms and we should respond appropriately.

Her essays often address issues which feel very outdated; her values are those of another age. Still in thrall to Victorian earnestness, she asks whether one should read books for pleasure or profit? Answer: no-one really cares. It’s a non-question. Maybe a GCSE-level question to get schoolchildren thinking but tangential to our concerns.

Anyway, she does make one simple Big Point, which is that nobody really understands what reading is. The physical activity, yes; you can test people on their ability to read, on their level of comprehension, on what they understand or remember. But at the more advanced level of registering nuance and implication… I wonder if there’s a specialist area of modern neuroscience devoted to the science of reading?

Belles letterism

Belles-lettres is a category of writing, originally meaning beautiful or fine writing… The phrase is sometimes used pejoratively for writing that focuses on the aesthetic qualities of language rather than its practical application.

I can’t see how a lot of Woolf could not be considered belle-letterism: the concern for fine, flowing elegant prose redolent of nineteenth century fine writing (Lamb, Pater); the use of the royal ‘we’; mention of ‘turning to the bookcase’ which evokes the comfy air of a book-lined study in a fine house or gentlemen’s club. It’s a permanent puzzle how radical and drastic her experiments in fiction were and yet how conservative and backward-looking her prose style is.

The problem [of what to read] is not so simple in a library as at the Zoölogical Gardens. Books have a great deal in common; they are always overflowing their boundaries; they are always breeding new species from unexpected matches among themselves. It is difficult to know how to approach them, to which species each belongs. But if we remember, as we turn to the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which, consciously or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that, adventuring the other; if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.

The leisurely, all-the-time-in-the-world elegance of this authorial ‘we’, the royal we, the superior ‘we’ of the privileged literary elite.

Co-production

At the end of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, Woolf introduced the idea that any book is a co-production between the writer and the reader. (This idea was taken up decades later, in the late 1960s, by reader response theory and to some extent anticipates Roland Barthes’ ideas about the death of the author and the birth of the creative reader.) She does the same again, here:

To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice.

Writers’ worlds

She asks us to imagine encountering a beggar in the street (as I, in fact, routinely do, every time I go shopping there are people begging or selling the Big Issue at both the front and the back entrance to Sainsburys: no escaping the modern beggar in London town).

Woolf gives an entertaining account of how such an encounter would be turned into fiction by 1) Daniel Defoe, 2) Jane Austen, 3) Thomas Hardy. Out of this little frolic she makes the fairly obvious point that each really great writer is a world of their own with a distinct perspective.

It is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he can give us. We have to remember that it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision. It is by reason of this masterliness of theirs, this uncompromising idiosyncrasy, that great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us.

She makes the equally obvious point that: sometimes the writing we have to work hardest to understand is ultimately the most rewarding; and that different works appeal to us in different moods. (Along the way she betrays her bias or premise that ‘real books [are] works of pure imagination’, in contrast to histories and other factual books.)

Over-reading

She mentions something equally as common but which I’ve never seen described before, the risk of ‘over-reading – when you overdo it with a book you’re enjoying, read too much, become tired, and suddenly realise you’re tired, fed up, and abruptly take against the whole thing:

Suddenly the book becomes dull as ditchwater and heavy as lead. We yawn and stretch and can not attend.

The cure (pretty obviously) is to read something else of a different type, Woolf’s favourite alternatives being biography or history. But:

However interesting facts may be, they are an inferior form of fiction, and gradually we become impatient of their weakness and diffuseness, of their compromises and evasions, of the slovenly sentences which they make for themselves, and are eager to revive ourselves with the greater intensity and truth of fiction.

Thus speaks the novelist who (surprise) believes that the novel is the highest form of writing. The risk of reading literary writers is taking them at their own value. As you get older you realise there are many other types of writing with just as much claim to importance, and that’s before the thousands of other human activities we need (doctors, nurses, teachers etc). Presenting the reading and writing of novels as some kind of heroic endeavour is a form of chauvinism; deeper down, a type of narcissism, defined as: ‘an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one’s own needs.’ All Woolf’s essays are about herself.

Reading poetry

Then she switches to what is required of reading poetry and its rewards.

Anyone who has read a poem with pleasure will remember the sudden conviction, the sudden recollection (for it seems sometimes as if we were about to say, or had in some previous existence already said, what Shakespeare is actually now saying), which accompany the reading of poetry, and give it its exaltation and intensity.

Good description.

After-reading

In the last part of the essay she describes what happens when we’ve finished reading a book i.e. we judge it. Here she suggests that in reading we go through two processes: one might be called the actual reading; the other the after-reading. It is really in the after-reading that all the bits and pieces we’ve been bombarded with during the reading coalesce into an overall view and opinion. Neat idea.

And is it good or bad, the novel, the fiction you just read? It’s the question which has been dogging literary theory for two and a half thousand years. The simple answer is – it’s up to you. Critics can’t help. They all disagree with each other. Opinions aren’t much help because ‘minds differ too much to admit of close correspondence in matters of detail’. The best approach is:

by realizing our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgments which we have gradually formulated in the past.

We must ask demanding questions of the book and follow the answers to the limits of our ability. Only when we’ve completed this process can we hold our opinion up against other people’s or the criteria laid down by the great critics.

Summary

To summarise:

A good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can. In the next place, he will judge with the utmost severity. Every book, he will remember, has the right to be judged by the best of its kind. He will be adventurous, broad in his choice, true to his own instincts, yet ready to consider those of other people.

A defence of reading

She has a last word for the moralists who criticise reading books as a lazy self-indulgent activity. She thinks the firmest defence is that books give pleasure, ‘mysterious, unknown, useless as it is’.

This is the argument of an aesthete and could have come from the lips of Oscar Wilde (we always have to remember what a Victorian Woolf was). The most obvious defence of reading is that it is educational and an educated population is an undeniable public good. The more educated and literate a population, the more economically active, productive and wealth creating. Then there’s the liberal defence that reading imaginative literature broadens the mind and produces a population of broad-minded, empathetic readers. Personally, I’ve always found this a weak argument because the twentieth century provides ample evidence of highly literate and civilised populations which allowed fiendish behaviour, Germany being the obvious one. Other factors are required to produce a liberal, civilised population besides just widespread literacy and reading.

Personally, I think practical arguments which eschew lofty aims and avoid moral principles, are most effective in a debate. And so it’s most effective not to argue that reading is valuable for this or that noble or social or moral end, but to start with the empirical fact that lots of people simply like reading. Begin with the evidence in the real world, the statistics about the numbers of books published, bought, borrowed and read each year. Can’t argue with the facts.

Lots of people go to football matches or pop concerts or go fishing or potter in their gardens. Reading takes its place among the range of activities practiced by tens of millions of people in a civilised society. It needs no more defence than that.

Comic conclusion

Woolf concludes with a piece of satirical exaggeration, stylish and silly, which made me smile.

That pleasure [of reading] is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgment when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.

Heroically wrong. Houses, pavements, plumbing, wiring, power stations, reservoirs and sewerage farms aren’t designed and built by bookish readers. But it’s a rare florescence of humour in Woolf’s writing and so a little treat.

9. Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927: 11 pages)

Describes a theoretical work of fiction in the future which will incorporate into its prose a high degree of poetry and drama, pointing towards her own novel The Waves.

Woolf claims that the present (1927) is problematic for fiction. She and so many of her contemporaries are struggling to express themselves. Why? One reason is that poetry, which was so easily available and expressive for the Victorians, has become impossibly complicated and difficult. Not only that but society is in turmoil, with the old Christianity destroyed yet people yearning to believe; with the awesome scale of scientific discoveries, from the age of the earth to the size of the universe, crushing the human spirit, creating an atmosphere of ‘doubt and conflict’.

For some reasons she moves on to consider the poetic play and notes how the attempts of the great nineteenth century poets – Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne – were miserable failures, and how the attempts of her contemporaries (maybe she’s thinking of T.S. Eliot’s doomed attempts to revive the play in Elizabethan blank verse) have likewise failed.

Why? You have to go back to the Elizabethan dramatists (as she so often in her essays goes back to Shakespeare) to understand why. It’s because the Elizabethan playwrights could write about anything; they completely shared a worldview and experiences and a diction with their audiences and readers, and so didn’t need to hold back. Modern authors, by contrast, live in a highly atomised, class-ridden society, where everyone lives locked up in their own houses, in their own living rooms, listening to their own records or radio or reading their own books, each in little worlds of their own. No wonder the modern writer finds it so hard to cut through.

Above all there’s a corrosive cynicism which means the modern writer daren’t be caught out celebrating simple beauty without hastening to show the dark and ugly side of life as well. Poetry hasn’t the flexibility, the ability to change subjects and register, which the fragmented modern mind requires.

Therefore – and here’s her point – it may be that modern prose is going to take over some of the duties formerly performed by poetry. It may be that in 10 or 15 years’ time prose will be used for purposes it has never been used for before; that that cannibal, the novel, will have swallowed up even more of the territory of literature.

In particular there may come a book which is written in prose but with the sensibility of poetry, which will have some of the exaltation of poetry but written in prose. It will be read but not acted. We won’t even have a name for its hybrid form. I realise that she is referring to the experimental novel she was currently writing, The Waves, published in 1931 and which she referred to not as a novel but as a ‘playpoem’, and she goes on to describe other ways in which poetry will be melded with prose in her experiment.

Surprisingly, maybe, she thinks the classic novel which most successfully incorporated poetry is Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne. Because it is continually changing subject matter, tone and register, we tend not to notice that there are passages of deliberately exquisite feeling, because these are completely incorporated into the text alongside the farce and pratfalls and bawdy and sentiment. Sterne fashions a prose which is getting on for being as flexible and omni-expressive as the Elizabethans.

10. Craftsmanship (1937)

A radio broadcast on April 20th, 1937. This text is immediately bewildering because it starts with a series of claims all of which seem questionable, simplistic or wrong.

We know little that is certain about words, but this we do know—words never make anything that is useful; and words are the only things that tell the truth and nothing but the truth.

‘Words tell the truth and nothing but the truth.’ This is so wrong it’s hard to know where to start. What words are, what language is and how it works, is too encyclopedic a subject to be knocked off in a pithy phrase. The claim is so vague and insubstantial I wondered if it’s one of her mad essays.

Let us then take for our starting point the statement that words are not useful. This happily needs little proving, for we are all aware of it. When we travel on the Tube, for example, when we wait on the platform for a train, there, hung up in front of us, on an illuminated signboard, are the words ‘Passing Russell Square.’ We look at those words; we repeat them; we try to impress that useful fact upon our minds; the next train will pass Russell Square. We say over and over again as we pace, ‘Passing Russell Square, passing Russell Square.’ And then as we say them, the words shuffle and change, and we find ourselves saying, ‘Passing away saith the world, passing away… The leaves decay and fall, the vapours weep their burthen to the ground. Man comes…’ And then we wake up and find ourselves at King’s Cross.

Woolf comes from another time and place. Having never done any real work, having servants to do all the housework, leading a pampered, sheltered life, Woolf has no idea, no idea at all, of the importance of words in professional contexts, in the law, in the civil service, in the administration of nations and counties and cities, in rules and regulations, in the vast world of healthcare and medicine. Only if you leave out most of what people in civilised societies use language for, can you acquiesce in the dreamy digressions of this pampered lady.

Very symptomatically the quote which ends the piece – ‘The leaves decay and fall, the vapours weep their burthen to the ground. Man comes…’ – is from Tennyson, patron saint of mellifluous dreaminess. It’s a characteristically Victorian reference point, to a man who devoted his long career to ignoring the gritty, complex realities of the Victorian age and created a dream otherworld into which his many readers and fans could take refuge. Despite her often challenging handling of her content, in terms of her style Woolf’s novels offer a similar level of mellifluous, elegantly shaped escapism, part of the reason for her enduring popularity.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most of the essays can be found online. The OWC introduction can be read on Amazon.

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Posted by Simon on April 18, 2025

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A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)

Literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.

A pioneering work of feminism, Virginia Woolf’s long essay, ‘A Room of One’s Own’, was based on two lectures she was invited to deliver at Cambridge University in October 1928 on the subject of ‘Women and Fiction’. In fact the text as we have it was extensively worked over, and is divided into six, not two, sections. In the 1977 Granada paperback edition I own, it is 107 pages long, not quite book length but long for an essay.

Be warned: it gets off to a very, very slow start. Several times I put it down, bored and dismayed by the deliberately whimsical inconsequentiality of the opening section. It only really gets interesting with the start of section 3, about page 40, and from then on contains a steady flow of interesting, sometimes important, insights and ideas.

Section 1. A library, lunch and dinner in Cambridge (20 pages)

Summaries (Wikipedia, the blurb on the back) always quote ‘A Room of One’s Own’s eighth sentence as its most significant message:

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

She states this right at the very beginning of the text and then explains that she will try and convey the thought processes which led her to this conclusion. The trouble is that these processes are long-winded, deliberately whimsical and digressive, and slow to get started.

The odd or funny thing about this is that one of the oldest sexist libels against women is that they are incapable of logical, rational thought – and here is what is supposed to be one of the great feminist texts of the century apparently justifying that very libel, going out of its way to demonstrate Woolf’s reluctance to write clearly and logically, and her preference for apparently aimless, subjective rambling. Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s a slab from the second paragraph:

Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please – it is not a matter of any importance) sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. That collar I have spoken of [the commission to deliver lectures about] women and fiction, the need of coming to some conclusion on a subject that raises all sorts of prejudices and passions, bowed my head to the ground.

To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought.

Thought – to call it by a prouder name than it deserved – had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until – you know the little tug – the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?

Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say…

‘I will not trouble you with that thought now…’ Instead she rambles on to describe getting up and setting off walking across the grass. Here she is collared and her train of thought interrupted by an officious college beadle who tells her to keep off the grass and walk on the path. ‘What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I could not now remember’ and she doesn’t tell us.

Something makes her think about the essays of Charles Lamb, and she remembers the one where he comments on seeing a manuscript of the poem Lycidas by John Milton and marvelling that the great work was ever different from how it’s come down to us (from Lamb’s essay ‘Oxford in the Vacation’). Then she remembers that the manuscript of Lycidas is kept in Cambridge, so she sets off to the library where it’s kept (the library of Trinity College, Cambridge). Here she is outraged when a flunky tells here that ‘ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.’ She turns away, angry and disgusted.

She hears the organ playing in a chapel, calling people – well, men, old men dressed in fur-trimmed cloaks and college gowns – to a service, which in turn triggers a sort of historical fantasy.

The outside of the chapel remained. As you know, its high domes and pinnacles can be seen, like a sailing-ship always voyaging never arriving, lit up at night and visible for miles, far away across the hills. Once, presumably, this quadrangle with its smooth lawns, its massive buildings and the chapel itself was marsh too, where the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Teams of horses and oxen, I thought, must have hauled the stone in wagons from far countries, and then with infinite labour the grey blocks in whose shade I was now standing were poised in order one on top of another, and then the painters brought their glass for the windows, and the masons were busy for centuries up on that roof with putty and cement, spade and trowel. Every Saturday somebody must have poured gold and silver out of a leathern purse into their ancient fists, for they had their beer and skittles presumably of an evening. An unending stream of gold and silver, I thought, must have flowed into this court perpetually to keep the stones coming and the masons working; to level, to ditch, to dig and to drain. But it was then the age of faith, and money was poured liberally to set these stones on a deep foundation, and when the stones were raised, still more money was poured in from the coffers of kings and queens and great nobles to ensure that hymns should be sung here and scholars taught. Lands were granted; tithes were paid. And when the age of faith was over and the age of reason had come, still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships were founded; lectureships endowed; only the gold and silver flowed now, not from the coffers of the king. but from the chests of merchants and manufacturers, from the purses of men who had made, say, a fortune from industry, and returned, in their wills, a bounteous share of it to endow more chairs, more lectureships, more fellowships in the university where they had learnt their craft. Hence the libraries and laboratories; the observatories; the splendid equipment of costly and delicate instruments which now stands on glass shelves, where centuries ago the grasses waved and the swine rootled. Certainly, as I strolled round the court, the foundation of gold and silver seemed deep enough; the pavement laid solidly over the wild grasses…

You can see how it’s not really discussing the subject of ‘women and fiction’ nor explaining the thinking behind her ‘money and a room of her own’ conclusion.

Then, in the story of her day in Cambridge, it’s time for lunch. She thinks it a shame that traditional fiction rarely describes actual dishes people consume and so she goes out of her way to describe what she had for lunch.

I shall take the liberty to defy that convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. After that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many and various, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent. And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been done with than the silent servingman, the Beadle himself perhaps in a milder manifestation, set before us, wreathed in napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult.

She listens to the civilised talk at the table and feels like something has changed since the war. What is it? Well, poetry.

Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves. Could one set that humming noise to words? Perhaps with the help of the poets one could. A book lay beside me and, opening it, I turned casually enough to Tennyson.

And she quotes a stanza from Tennyson and then one from Christina Rossetti, the idea being that the rhythms of these poets dictated how people spoke before the war but now, since the war, that rhythm has been lost. The thought makes her laugh out loud but when someone enquires why she’s laughing, rather than confess this rather frivolous idea, she instead points to a Manx cat, a cat without a tail, which she’s seen through a window walking across the college quadrangle. Left alone again, she continues about Tennyson and Rossetti:

What poets, I cried aloud, as one does in the dusk, what poets they were!

The old poets expressed feelings one was familiar with and so one hummed and declaimed them with confidence and happiness. Modern poetry is very different:

But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment. One does not recognize it in the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the difficulty of modern poetry; and it is because of this difficulty that one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet.

For ‘the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves is far rarer now than then.’ Did the old poets sing under the influence of a beautiful illusion? Did the war strip away that illusion and show us the truth of human nature? Ah, what is truth, what is illusion? (the kind of rhetorical question which packs ‘The Waves’). The question sets her thinking, musing and daydreaming as she walks the road towards Headingley and is so distracted that she misses the turning she wanted to take to Fernham [Fernham is a fictional college, an amalgamation of the Cambridge colleges, Newnham and Girton].

Yes indeed, which was truth and which was illusion? I asked myself. What was the truth about these houses, for example, dim and festive now with their red windows in the dusk, but raw and red and squalid, with their sweets and their bootlaces, at nine o’clock in the morning? And the willows and the river and the gardens that run down to the river, vague now with the mist stealing over them, but gold and red in the sunlight – which was the truth, which was the illusion about them? I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations, for no conclusion was found on the road to Headingley, and I ask you to suppose that I soon found out my mistake about the turning and retraced my steps to Fernham.

‘I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations…’ she writes, but that, of course, is exactly what she is not doing. Surely any keen young undergraduate who turned up for her lecture (or bought this book) expecting some insight into the subject of women and fiction was expecting more than this. A long self-indulgent account of the author’s rambling day, complete with the full menu of the nice lunch she ate, and her strolling around the city? You might expect the lecture to eventually return to the nominal subject, but the most impressive thing about it is the way it refuses to address the subject at all. Instead she now tells us that her autumn rambling triggered a kind of vision of an autumn garden:

A fancy – that the lilac was shaking its flowers over the garden walls, and the brimstone butterflies were scudding hither and thither, and the dust of the pollen was in the air. A wind blew, from what quarter I know not, but it lifted the half-grown leaves so that there was a flash of silver grey in the air. It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me in the spring twilight, wild and open, and in the long grass, sprinkled and carelessly flung, were daffodils and bluebells, not orderly perhaps at the best of times, and now wind-blown and waving as they tugged at their roots. The windows of the building, curved like ships’ windows among generous waves of red brick, changed from lemon to silver under the flight of the quick spring clouds. Somebody was in a hammock, somebody, but in this light they were phantoms only, half guessed, half seen, raced across the grass—would no one stop her?—and then on the terrace, as if popping out to breathe the air, to glance at the garden, came a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress—could it be the famous scholar, could it be J—— H—— herself? [according to the notes, this is Jane Harrison, classical scholar and anthropologist] All was dim, yet intense too, as if the scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by star or sword – the gash of some terrible reality leaping, as its way is, out of the heart of the spring.

But just when you thought she might be trembling on the brink of saying something clear, logical, rational and useful, she cuts away to… dinner! Yes she is in another college hall stuffing herself with a posh dinner.

Here was my soup. Dinner was being served in the great dining-hall. Far from being spring it was in fact an evening in October. Everybody was assembled in the big dining-room. Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain. Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes—a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening and women with string bags on Monday morning. There was no reason to complain of human nature’s daily food, seeing that the supply was sufficient and coal-miners doubtless were sitting down to less. Prunes and custard followed. And if anyone complains that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a miser’s heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in misers’ veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect that there are people whose charity embraces even the prune. Biscuits and cheese came next, and here the water-jug was liberally passed round, for it is the nature of biscuits to be dry, and these were biscuits to the core. That was all. The meal was over.

To recap, it is one of the oldest sexist libels that women are incapable of abstract, logical thought and instead are limited to either a narcissistic obsession with the minutiae of their own lives, or, at best, with humble domestic topics such as cooking and gardening. In the opening sections of this book it seems as if Woolf is going out of her way to justify the grossest sexist libelling of the female mind? I was genuinely shocked by the self-centred, rambling set of inconsequential impressions and memories with which it opens.

And continues in the same vein. The college guests go back to the room of a friend of hers, a science tutor, where they open wine and gossip (first topic of conversation being someone who’s recently got married, as if she’s deliberately playing to the grossest stereotype of the female mind being continually obsessed with who’s going out with who, getting married to who, getting divorced from who). But this gossip doesn’t hold her and again she drifts off into her own personal fantasy.

A scene of masons on a high roof some five centuries ago. Kings and nobles brought treasure in huge sacks and poured it under the earth. This scene was for ever coming alive in my mind and placing itself by another of lean cows and a muddy market and withered greens and the stringy hearts of old men – these two pictures, disjointed and disconnected and nonsensical as they were, were for ever coming together and combating each other and had me entirely at their mercy. The best course, unless the whole talk was to be distorted, was to expose what was in my mind to the air, when with good luck it would fade and crumble like the head of the dead king when they opened the coffin at Windsor. Briefly, then, I told Miss Seton about the masons who had been all those years on the roof of the chapel, and about the kings and queens and nobles bearing sacks of gold and silver on their shoulders, which they shovelled into the earth; and then how the great financial magnates of our own time came and laid cheques and bonds, I suppose, where the others had laid ingots and rough lumps of gold. All that lies beneath the colleges down there, I said; but this college, where we are now sitting, what lies beneath its gallant red brick and the wild unkempt grasses of the garden? What force is behind that plain china off which we dined, and (here it popped out of my mouth before I could stop it) the beef, the custard and the prunes?

I thought it would go on forever like this but at the very end of the first section the tone does, at last, change and some sort of facts enter. She makes some kind of point. She abruptly describes the immense struggle it took the education pioneers Emily Davis and Barbara Bodichon to raise the money to found the first women’s college in Cambridge, Girton College, which was opened in 1869 (and where the lecture is being given).

And for the first time the essay comes to life and actually addresses the struggle for women’s rights. Woolf quickly lays down the reasons why it was so difficult to raise the money to establish this college for women’s higher education, namely:

1. In the mid-Victorian era women were considered baby factories. Woolf invents a fictional Victorian woman who had no fewer than 13 children, and this was physically exhausting and immensely time consuming. No wonder so many of their foremothers had no time or inclination for business or moneymaking activities of any kind.

2. The law forbade women from owning money or property. Any money they made, by law belonged to their husbands. What motivation was there, then, to set up in business, to found business dynasties and so on when, the moment you married, the entire thing was handed over to your husband? No motivation at all. Demotivation.

After throwing this bombshell of hard fact into her talk, Woolf returns to her earlier musing, meditative mode and describes walking back to the inn she was staying at, pondering the experiences of her day – being chastised by the beadle, being turned away from the library, watching all the crusty old men lining up to enter their church service – and reconsiders it in the light of the point she’s just made about women’s lack of legal and financial rights, ‘thinking of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other.’

It’s only now that the rather dim reader (i.e. me) can see that there was a pattern to these ramblings after all: that all these ‘trivial’ personal experiences are designed to build up a portrait of a world where women are subject to an infinite number of regulations and restrictions, from the petty to the serious, life-limiting. And so, she wonders, what is the cumulative effect of so many restrictions on women’s minds and on the tradition of women’s writing?

What is the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer? She doesn’t quite say this but the implication is clear: that male writers benefited from every privilege possible in a patriarchal society, whereas women writers had to fight against a huge battalion of legal, financial, cultural, traditional enemies facing them at every turn.

She isn’t quite that vehement, but the thought is there, implied in everything she’s said. To be honest it was only reading the introduction to the Oxford University Press edition that helped me see that what comes over as a meandering stream of memories and impressions can be stripped down and turned into bullet points which are a list of exclusions which women have been subject to:

  • being told by a man to keep off the grass destroys her train of thought
  • being excluded from the library of the male-only college speaks for itself, a grotesque form of intellectual censorship
  • being excluded from the all-male congregation going into a church service stands for women’s exclusion from organised religion since time immemorial
  • and then something I hadn’t realised at all, the point of giving the menus, of describing what she had for lunch and what for dinner, was to contrast the fancy haute cuisine menu of lunch at the all-male college with the very plain meat and two veg, prunes and custard menu at Girton, the all-women college which struggled so hard to raise the money to be founded and which still lacks the massive endowments of the all-male colleges which, of course, stretch back to the Middle Ages

When rearranged and presented like this it makes for an impressive list and a handy if highly subjective introduction to the theme of how women in England have for centuries been excluded from business, finance, education and learning and culture. And some of these incidents (the officious beadle, the blocking from the library) return throughout the text, becoming leitmotifs and symbols standing for the greater wrongs of the patriarchy, exactly as she made fairly trivial childhood incidents become repeated leitmotifs which gained layers of meaning and emotion, in her experimental novel ‘The Waves’

But this wasn’t at all obvious from actually reading the text: I had to have it explained to me by the introduction to the Oxford University Press edition (by Morag Shiach).

Section 2. The British Museum, the patriarchy, her legacy (14 pages)

Section 2 starts off a little more as you might expect a lecture to, with a little fleet of rhetorical questions:

That visit to Oxbridge and the luncheon and the dinner had started a swarm of questions: Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?

Alas, it quickly falls back into Woolf’s facetious style. There is something about her continual irony, sometimes sarcasm, which continually makes you think she isn’t serious. Hedging everything with irony makes everything a playful game which, I suggest, undermines her own cause.

A thousand questions at once suggested themselves. But one needed answers, not questions; and an answer was only to be had by consulting the learned and the unprejudiced, who have removed themselves above the strife of tongue and the confusion of body and issued the result of their reasoning and research in books which are to be found in the British Museum. If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up a notebook and a pencil, is truth?

I’ve complained of a similarly irritatingly facetious tone in H.G. Wells and E.M. Forster. Maybe it was entertaining in its day, maybe it was the standard and expected style for fiction and essays. But now it comes over as irritating and stupid. Who cares about this silly little aside about ‘truth’? ‘What is truth’ is quite a big question. Writing such silly ironies makes her sound like precisely the stereotype of the superficial woman which she is meant to be at such pains to explode.

Thus provided, thus confident and enquiring, I set out in the pursuit of truth.

What this silly ironising about ‘truth’ really highlights is that Woolf had very little formal education and never studied for a degree. In other words, she doesn’t understand what academic study is. It is silly to think she can sit down for a morning at the British Museum, skim through half a dozen books and come up with The Truth about anything. But she hides her intellectual embarrassment behind these silly petticoat jokes and is very aware of her shortcomings. When the books she orders (almost at random) arrive:

The student who has been trained in research at Oxbridge has no doubt some method of shepherding his question past all distractions till it runs into his answer as a sheep runs into its pen. The student by my side, for instance, who was copying assiduously from a scientific manual, was, I felt sure, extracting pure nuggets of the essential ore every ten minutes or so. His little grunts of satisfaction indicated so much. But if, unfortunately, one has had no training in a university, the question far from being shepherded to its pen flies like a frightened flock hither and thither, helter-skelter, pursued by a whole pack of hounds.

She discovers there’s a huge number of books written by men about women, but hardly any by women about men. Characteristically, she makes a ‘perfectly arbitrary choice of a dozen volumes or so’ and orders them up from the library stacks. (Why does she take every opportunity to emphasise how arbitrary, flighty and superficial she is? It’s like she’s playing into the enemy’s hands at every opportunity. [Or, more subtly, is she demonstrating and embodying an alternative, non-male, non-rational, non-aggrandising way of thinking, letting thoughts wander and digress and reveal their own ‘female’ truths? Discuss])

Similarly, not knowing how to study a subject and not realising it might take more than a morning to research a subject like ‘the oppression of women’ or ‘women in British history’, instead she reads a random selection of books, randomly, and makes random notes in her notebook, which she then proceeds to read out to her audience. She might as well say ‘Look how stupid and badly educated I am.’

Instead of taking careful notes and marshalling them into some semblance of an argument, Woolf admits that she spent half the time doodling the face and figure of a big, hairy bombastic man, an angry professor, the type who writes weighty tomes about the inferiority of women. Then she starts wondering what made this (made-up) figure so angry – was it because his wife had run off with a dashing cavalry officer (‘slim and elegant and dressed in astrakhan’)? Is this frivolous or subtly effective, her turning serious social questions into deliberately frivolous fictions?

In my review of ‘The Waves’, I pointed out how the six characters are never shown interacting with each other, rarely if ever have any dialogue, but instead stand stiffly like actors on a stage, facing the audience and declaiming their solipsistic monologues. This stiff absence of any interaction made me look up the symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome and discover that they displayed every single one.

Here, the inability to focus, concentrate or develop any train of thought without wandering off into daydreaming or doodling, which Woolf attributes to herself, made me look up the symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). They are:

  • difficulty paying attention or staying focused
  • being restless or overactive
  • interrupting others or having trouble waiting
  • poor time management
  • being forgetful
  • procrastinating
  • disorganization

It’s hard not to relate at least some of these symptoms to the self-portrait of the forgetful, easily distracted woman incapable of sustained research or thought which emerges from the opening sections of this book.

The patriarchy

Eventually she finds something to say. The one thing all the books she’s skimmed through written by men about women possess is the common tone of anger. Why are so many men angry at women and so quick to put them down? This is an absolutely vast question which invokes psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology and any number of other disciples.

but having briefly mentioned it, Woolf strolls off to find a restaurant to have lunch in. Here a previous diner had left the daily newspaper. She peruses it and finds more than she found in all the books, for she realises just how profoundly England is in the grip of a patriarchy.

The most transient visitor to this planet, I thought, who picked up this paper could not fail to be aware, even from this scattered testimony, that England is under the rule of a patriarchy. Nobody in their senses could fail to detect the dominance of ‘the professor’ [the angry caricature she doodled in the museum]. His was the power and the money and the influence. He was the proprietor of the paper and its editor and sub-editor. He was the Foreign Secretary and the judge. He was the cricketer; he owned the racehorses and the yachts. He was the director of the company that pays two hundred per cent to its shareholders. He left millions to charities and colleges that were ruled by himself…He it is who will acquit or convict the murderer, and hang him, or let him go free. With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything.

The human (male) need to feel superior

And at last, a third of the way through the book, Woolf starts to say interesting things. She starts from the premise that life is a struggle for most people, that most people need to maintain illusions to make it bearable to carry on. One of the most widespread of these illusions is finding comfort in the idea that, whatever your situation, you are at least superior to some other group of people. A feeling of superiority allows you to maintain the illusion of purpose and achievement in your life.

Woolf speculates that maybe men need to feel superior to women in order to achieve all their great achievements. This explains many things. It explains why, when a woman makes a perfectly valid criticism of some man’s writing or painting or speech or whatever, men tend to over-react, becoming furious. It is because even a small criticism is an attack on the entire psychological system whereby men maintain what they like to think of as their superiority.

This, maybe, is one explanation for the otherwise incomprehensible anger of so many men against women.

Her aunt’s legacy

Then Woolf shares something profound and central to the book and its famous central thesis (‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’)

Around the time (some) women were given the vote (the Representation of the People Act, February 1918) Woolf inherited a legacy from an aunt. It paid £500 a year in perpetuity. Woolf is interesting when she describes how this changed her whole view of the world. Until then she’d had to scrabble for an income via all kinds of menial reviewing jobs, almost all controlled and doled out by men. Now she no longer had to flatter or fear men. She slowly realised that she was completely liberated. Slowly this caused her to reconsider lots of things in society, starting with war itself, all the statues and guff about glory and so on. So much of it seemed like men justifying male behaviour.

The protected sex

The section ends with a new thought, that women have for centuries been ‘the protected sex’. What will happen when the social transformations of the 1920s work their way through, when women are allowed or encouraged to do any job, when women cease to be ‘the protected sex’? Who knows, maybe the fact that women, on average, live longer than men will itself change.

All assumptions founded on the facts observed when women were the protected sex will have disappeared – as, for example (here a squad of soldiers marched down the street), that women and clergymen and gardeners live longer than other people. Remove that protection, expose them to the same exertions and activities, make them soldiers and sailors and engine-drivers and dock labourers, and will not women die off so much younger, so much quicker, than men?

In the event, no. Women have for some decades being doing more and more of the jobs previously restricted to men, but it hasn’t dented the fundamental gender gap in life expectancy.

Life expectancy at birth in the UK in 2020 to 2022 was 78.6 years for males and 82.6 years for females. (Office for National Statistics)

Section 3. Women in history and literature (14 pages)

So she has gotten round to opening up some pretty massive issues (the patriarchy, male control, male anger, male jobs, social and economic changes of the 1920s).

The next section presents, on the face of it, another disappointment. Rather than dig deeper into these sociological issues, it feels like Woolf retreats to her comfort zone to talk about literature. To be precise, her focus suddenly shifts to the question of why there were no women writers during the Golden Age of Queen Elizabeth I?

Powerless in society, powerful in literature

To do so she makes a quick review of women in the literature of the ages and points out the paradox that, although throughout most of history women have been slaves and drudges, pawns in family marriages, entirely at the beck and call of fathers and husbands… yet the classic literature of the ages, all written by men, is thronged with women of dazzling power and agency, from the heroines of the Greek epics and tragedies, through Cleopatra and the strong women of Rome, through the leading figures in Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth, Viola, Portia. Why did societies which fiercely policed and repressed women (for example, ancient Greece) produce toweringly powerful figures of women in literature, poetry and plays?

Woolf relies heavily on the experts of her day and quotes the historian G.M. Trevelyan (1876 to 1962) and the classicist F.L. Lucas (1894 to 1967). It is instructive reading their prose next to hers i.e. theirs is full of intellectual meat and interesting views, whereas hers are much weaker, relying much more on poetic impressions of, for example, characters like Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth and Rosalind. The paradox of Greek women which I just summarised, in fact derives entirely from a man, Lucas.

Lack of knowledge of women in history

Still, she makes one Massive Point: this is that there is a pitiful absence of information about women’s lives before the eighteenth century. She directly addresses her audience of bright young women undergraduates at Girton and asks if none of them can devote their lives to the historical study of women’s lives. It would be fascinating to know if anyone in her audience (or who later read the book) was inspired to do just that.

A joke

Woolf’s works are conspicuous for their almost total lack of humour. There are few if any laughs in ‘Jacob’s Room’, ‘Mrs Dalloway’, ‘To The Lighthouse’, a humorous tone but no actual jokes in ‘Orlando’, and none in ‘The Waves’. She certainly never tells jokes with a witty punchline or outcome, just as she never tells ‘stories’. I’m not saying it’s easy. That’s why really successful comic writers are few and far between. So when something funny crops up it’s worth recording. This made me laugh out loud.

I thought of that old gentleman, who is dead now, but was a bishop, I think, who declared that it was impossible for any woman, past, present, or to come, to have the genius of Shakespeare. He wrote to the papers about it. He also told a lady who applied to him for information that cats do not as a matter of fact go to heaven, though they have, he added, souls of a sort. How much thinking those old gentlemen used to save one! How the borders of ignorance shrank back at their approach! Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s sister

Anyway, back to the central theme of this section which is the question why there are no women writers from the Golden Age of Elizabethan Literature.

To sketch an answer Woolf rather brilliantly invents a sister for Shakespeare, named Judith, and wonders what her life would have been like. In a nutshell, repressed and stifled at every turn, not sent to school, mocked by her parents, fleeing a loveless engagement by running away to London, where nobody would hire her as an actor let alone a playwright, she ended up becoming mistress to the theatre owner and, driven mad by frustration, killing herself.

How many thousands of other women, born with sparkling gifts and epic potential, Woolf asks, found themselves similarly stifled?

Whenever one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.

She suggests that many of the poems which have come down to us attributed to ‘Anon’ might well have been written by women given no admittance into the male domain of writing.

Having to use a man’s name

Even into the 19th century it lasted, with authors as big as Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë), George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), George Sand (Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant) being forced to pretend to be men.

Hard for men, impossible for women

Woolf goes on to describe the way that, since the time of Rousseau and his famous Confessions (1782) we have had more and more autobiographies and biographies and editions of the letters of great writers, and if one thing comes over it is how very hard it is to write a masterpiece.

But if hard for men, then impossible for women, who faced a barrage of opposition from everyone they knew, plus from their own personal doubts and hesitations. Any woman foolish enough to try and write was likely to be ‘snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted’ and she cites some mind-bogglingly sexist put-downs of women from the likes of Dr Johnson to Oscar Browning to even Desmond McCarthy, a friend of hers.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Shakespeare had no psychological blockers

The thrust of this section is that Shakespeare was so complete a poet in part because he seems to have had no obstacles to encumber his self expression, obviously a debatable theory. She applies it to the many men we know who did struggle to find a room of their own, financial independence, acknowledgement and encouragement, to explain why even their work was often botched and compromised. And then applies the same theory to the majority of women writers, many of whom (she speculates) never got to write a thing, due to the lack of opportunities, the lack of education, and their asphyxiation by a life of endless childbirth, child-rearing, housework and husband tending.

Section 4. Historical women writers (19 pages)

Section 4 continues on where the last section left off, to give half a dozen quotes from the poet Ann Finch, Lady Winchelsea (1661 to 1720) which demonstrate how angry she was at the way women were mocked and held back in her day. Woolf’s point being that this is precisely the kind of psychological snag, the bitterness and resentment, which prevented many women’s self-expression being pure and complete, as in the hypothetical model of Shakespeare’s mind, pure and unblemished by doubt or resentment (in her theory/model).

Woolf goes on to lament that the voluminous writings of Margaret of Newcastle (1623 to 1673), who was never given the education, discipline or support, deteriorated into long rants and screeds. Then she moves on to praise the letters of Dorothy Osborne (1627 to 1695).

Aphra Behn

Next she moves on to (very briefly) discuss the career of Aphra Behn (1640 to 1689), by which point I’d realised that all this is by way of being a pocket review of the earliest English woman authors (it would be nice of this had been explained but rational structuring, ordering and introducing of her material is not, as we’ve seen, Woolf’s strong point).

Behn changed the rules of the game by making a successful living as a woman writer. She could be used as an example by the aspiring women writers of subsequent generations.

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their mind.

And so, skipping ahead a bit, by the middle of the eighteenth century there were lots of women authors, churning out bad novels, unreadable poetry and thousands of essays about Shakespeare.

The advent of middle-class women authors

Woolf then alights on another key turning point: at the turn of the nineteenth century, middle class women began to write and she swiftly moves on to consider the Big Four, being: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, and George Eliot.

Why did they all write novels, when the original motivator for literature was poetry? Because they all lived in the early nineteenth century drawing room, which was a kind of laboratory of character and conversation. Often they had no room of their own (aha) and so actually wrote in the communal living space, in the company of siblings and family and even visitors and guests.

Jane Austen’s perfection

Then she comes back to her theory of the lack of internal, mental, psychological blockage, especially regarding Austen. The anger and bitterness she finds in the 17th century women poets was entirely absent in Jane Austen.

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at ‘Antony and Cleopatra’; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare… Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely.

Woolf compares Austen with Charlotte Bronte’s character, the governess Jane Eyre, who feels restless and confined and frustrated at wanting to live a larger life, and uses quotes from ‘Jane Eyre’ to indicate the pitiful limitations of these women’s lives.

All those good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman; written too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so poor that they could not afford to buy more than a few quires of paper at a time.

When put like that, it’s an amazing achievement. Woolf contrasts the pitifully restricted domestic experience of George Eliot with the florid adventures in life and love of the young Leo Tolstoy who, as a man, was free to travel widely, join the army, take up any profession. No wonder her (wonderful) novels are so constrained while his encompass the whole world.

Deferring to male values

Woolf makes an interesting point when she says that in so many of these women writers you can feel the subtle or not-so-subtle deferral to male values. Women writers feel they have to justify their subject matter because they are writing about ‘women’s matters’ in a world ruled by patriarchal values and judgements.

It is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex… yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial’. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop — everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.

The whole structure, therefore, of the early nineteenth-century novel was raised, if one was a woman, by a mind which was slightly pulled from the straight, and made to alter its clear vision in deference to external authority. One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. She was admitting that she was ‘only a woman’, or protesting that she was ‘as good as a man’. She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was thinking of something other than the thing itself… She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.

Fascinating. A really important insight. All the more impressive the achievement of Jane Austen and Emily Brontë to write as women write, without fear or favour or excusing themselves to men and their male values.

Male and female traditions

Then she devotes a few pages to the idea that male writers have a long tradition of male writers to fall back upon. Not just subjects and treatment but the flow of individual sentences. She quotes a sentence from the early nineteenth century and declares it a man’s sentence, with the weighty rhythms of male concerns. Then says this kind of heavy style was wholly inappropriate for women and what they wanted to say.

Lamb, Browne, Thackeray, Newman, Sterne, Dickens, De Quincey – whoever it may be – never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use. The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully

In this respect, Jane Austen perfected sentences for women, ‘devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it’ which explains why, though she had less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said.

Shorter books for women?

In the last paragraph of this section she speculates about women’s fiction of the future (much as she speculated about the death gender gap, earlier), and wonders whether women don’t require shorter books than men.

The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be.

Section 5. Mary Carmichael (14 pages)

Mary Carmichael

The most striking feature of Woolf’s day is that women now write as much as men (or nearly) and upon an equally wide range of subject matter. She takes down from her shelf (ostensibly at random, which is her wont) a bang up-to-date novel, Life’s Adventure, or some such title, by Mary Carmichael. (The notes tell me that Mary Carmichael was a pen-name used by the family planning i.e. contraception campaigner, Marie Stopes (1880 to 1958).

At first she considers her style, which is thorny, unlike the flowing Jane Austen. Then the subject matter which she finds interrupted. But then she comes across a sentence which hits her like a hammer, ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ and this triggers the thoughts which fill the rest of the section. For Woolf reflects how often women, in fiction by both men and women, are defined primarily by contrast with men. The notion that this novel will consider the secret and special tone of friendship between women strikes Woolf as opening a major new epoch in fiction. How much men’s fictions concern deep friendships between men, close bonding going back to classical times (Achilles and Patroclus). How very few are the works which have tackled the subject of friendship between women.

Women’s creativity

Woolf asserts that women have a special type of creativity. Literature has been greatly impoverished for rejecting and ignoring it. As testimony witness the many Great Men who have freely admitted the need of women’s company, the company of wives or close women friends, in order to shed a different perspective on their thoughts and endeavours, to refresh and renew them (she singles out Dr Johnson’s friendship with Hester Thrale).

Women have been trapped indoors by so many societies that interiors, rooms, have a special feminine power undetectable by men.

Departing a little from conventional feminism, maybe, she says it would be a great pity if modern women just started writing like men. It is vital that women maintain their difference.

It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is…

Women writers like Mary Carmichael should not only record the obscure lives of lower middle class and working women, they also have large scope on reporting on the deficiencies of men. God knows men have been writing libels about women’s imperfections for millennia. Now, with more women writers than ever before, freed to write more candidly than ever before, about the strangeness and peculiarity of men.

The result is bound to be amazingly interesting. Comedy is bound to be enriched. New facts are bound to be discovered.

Woolf concludes, rather patronisingly, that given a room of her own and £500 a year, Mary Carmichael might, in another hundred years, be a decent writer.

Section 6. (17 pages)

Out the window

The pressure drops off. Woolf reverts to her fiction manner. She looks out of the window at busy London and marvels that none of the passersby gave any indication of caring for the plays of Shakespeare or the future of women’s novels. Moments like this make you think very badly of Woolf. She comes across as a simpleton. In the manner of her novels she observes different people doing things and invests them with tremendous significance as if that, just doing that, is the same as writing a story or narrative. When she writes:

The mind is certainly a very mysterious organ, I reflected, drawing my head in from the window, about which nothing whatever is known, though we depend upon it so completely

I felt pity for her shallowness, for her uneducated, unintellectual falling-back on the lamest clichés.

Male and female parts of the mind

She watches a couple meet on the corner of her street and get into a taxi. This leads to a sequence of doodling and pondering in which she wonders whether all of us have a male part and a female part of our minds and that we are at our best when they are integrated and in balance. This echoes Freud’s theory of the fundamental bisexuality of the psyche and Jung’s theories of the ‘anima’ or feminine aspects within a man and the ‘animus’ or masculine aspects within a woman, meaning that every individual contains both masculine and feminine qualities within their unconscious mind, regardless of their gender. Except that both of them were professional psychologists and Woolf is a writer looking out a window and having some random thoughts.

Characteristically, her mind goes to Shakespeare, her go-to author in every situation, who she praises for being genuinely androgynous, containing what she calls the man-womanly and the woman-manly equally.

She makes the rather startling claims that ‘No age can ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own’ and blames it on the suffragettes whose sustained campaign against the patriarchy forced millions of men to reflect on their masculinity and rush to defend it.

Masculine writing

She takes down a book written by a contemporary male author and finds it a relief after living with women writers for the past few weeks:

It was delightful to read a man’s writing again. It was so direct, so straightforward after the writing of women. It indicated such freedom of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in himself. One had a sense of physical well-being in the presence of this well-nourished, well-educated, free mind, which had never been thwarted or opposed, but had had full liberty from birth to stretch itself in whatever way it liked.

But then she slowly realises she doesn’t like something about it. It is the tone of strident self-assertion. He uses ‘I’ at absurd length. The women’s movement has triggered a counter-reaction.

The limitations of modern masculine writing

And she develops this further by considering the writing of Rudyard Kipling and John Galsworthy. The sex awareness she mentioned a moment ago, this means that these modern writers write with just the male part of their minds.

Virility has now become self-conscious—men, that is to say, are now writing only with the male side of their brains. It is a mistake for a woman to read them, for she will inevitably look for something that she will not find.

Shakespeare, Coleridge, they wrote out of a type of mental androgyny: their writings feed both sexes. Modern male writers have become sex-aware and polemically masculine and so their writings leave the female reader cold.

It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible… all their qualities seem to a woman, if one may generalize, crude and immature.

Fascism

In a surprising move – because her works give so little sense of being aware of the wider world, the world outside her privileged flow of sensations and impressions – she suddenly mentions Fascist Italy. In her place and time, October 1928, Fascist Italy is an absurd over-exaggeration of the masculine. It seems like a mad over-reaction to the (relative) modern liberation of women: ‘For one can hardly fail to be impressed in Rome by the sense of unmitigated masculinity.’

A balance

The best writers balance the gender elements in the mind, are man-womanly or woman-manly, approach a state of androgyny.

One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoi. In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman.

As you can see, this suffers, like so much older writing about gender, from the kind of essentialism which later feminists like Simone de Beauvoir criticised. Gender essentialism is:

‘the belief that gender is a biological, innate, and unchangeable quality that determines how men and women behave. It’s based on the idea that there are distinct qualities that make men and women different, that women are naturally caring and maternal while men are naturally aggressive and competitive.’

By basing so much of her critique on a very basic belief in masculine and feminine parts of the mind Woolf is, by definition, employing gender stereotypes which more contemporary feminists would (I think) reject.

Coda: addressing criticisms

That’s it. Her presentation is over. She hopes she’s achieved her aim of demonstrating why, in order to write freely, a woman needs an income of £500 a year and a room of her own, preferably one with a lock. She anticipates criticisms:

1. Is she going to appraise the relative merits of male writers and female writers? No. Nothing could be more puerile or pointless.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

2. Isn’t she being too materialistic with this emphasis on £500 a day? Isn’t the great artist or poet happy to be penniless? No. This also is a puerile delusion. Intellectual achievement depends on financial independence, always has, always ill. Which is also why there have been so few women writers. Because so few women have had the material independence which permitted intellectual achievement.

3. Why this focus on fiction, it sounds hard to write and profoundly unrewarding? This is correct. She advises her audience of young women to write about anything.

I am by no means confining you to fiction. If you would please me—and there are thousands like me—you would write books of travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science. By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy. Moreover, if you consider any great figure of the past, like Sappho, like the Lady Murasaki, like Emily Brontë, you will find that she is an inheritor as well as an originator, and has come into existence because women have come to have the habit of writing naturally; so that even as a prelude to poetry such activity on your part would be invaluable.

All women’s writing, on any topic, supports and enables all other women’s writing. As to the future, be yourselves.

It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

Thoughts

My main impression from reading Woolf’s long-winded and cumbersome historical entertainment, ‘Orlando’, was the way Woolf completely avoided discussion or even mention of all the political, cultural, economic, social, religious, scientific and technological controversies, discoveries and developments which took place during the 340 or so years which the narrative covers. Instead she fills page after page with her protagonist’s vapourings about love, love and poetry, poetry and truth, poetry and love, truth and love, until you want to bang your head against a brick wall.

On the handful of occasions when she tried to address even subjects close to her own heart, like the literary achievements of the Elizabethan poets (Shakespeare, Marlowe) or the Augustans (Dryden, Pope, Swift) Woolf demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had absolutely nothing of any interest to say about any of them. I was, frankly, astonished that this long book, which I’d read so many proud claims about for decades, turned out to be such an intellectual desert. Surely she can do better than this, I thought.

‘A Room of One’s Own’ proves that she could, up to a point. Summaries of the book’s main points don’t really convey the reading experience, which is of being subjected to Woolf’s deliberate whimsy, digression and lack of direction. On one level this book is a long admission of her own intellectual incapacity, epitomise by the ‘scene’ in the British Museum, which reads more like a scene from a novel than any attempt at intellectual research.

It was impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.

So far so strange and clumsy. But once she starts considering the role of the woman writer in history, Woolf suddenly starts making a steady stream of interesting and useful insights. ‘Orlando’ suggested she couldn’t think her way out of a paper bag but this long essay shows that she can… just not in the traditional logical, and maybe ‘male’, style which you might expect.

Then again maybe, just maybe, that is one of her points. She describes Jane Austen as finding the right style for what she wanted to say by simply ignoring the style and weight and rhythms of the male writers who’d come before her. When she says things like that, it’s tempting to think that Woolf was (as usual in her essays) also describing herself – suffering from a lack of education which wasn’t her fault, wounded by the countless rejections and denigrations she had received in her own writing career, battling through to a position where she felt confident sharing her own ideas and perceptions, memories and impressions in her own way, unintimidated by the demands of an aggressively rational, logical patriarchy.

So maybe my negative response to the whimsical indirection of the opening section simply proves that I’m on the opposite team and not sufficiently feminine enough to really grasp the alternative, woman’s way of thinking and perceiving, which Woolf was deliberately and consciously creating. Maybe. As so often with Woolf, you’re left with a kind of teasing ambivalence.

London

As in so many of Woolf’s writings, descriptions of London punctuate the text. As a Londoner, I find descriptions of London endlessly fascinating, for the light they shed on what has changed and what remains the same.

The day, though not actually wet, was dismal, and the streets in the neighbourhood of the Museum were full of open coal-holes, down which sacks were showering; four-wheeled cabs were drawing up and depositing on the pavement corded boxes containing, presumably, the entire wardrobe of some Swiss or Italian family seeking fortune or refuge or some other desirable commodity which is to be found in the boarding-houses of Bloomsbury in the winter. The usual hoarse-voiced men paraded the streets with plants on barrows. Some shouted; others sang. London was like a workshop. London was like a machine.

Windows

Maybe it’s whimsical and inconsequential of me but I can’t help noticing, as I have in the last few Woolf books I’ve read, that her characteristic gesture is to have her characters get up and look out the window. In a book like ‘Jacob’s Room’ this is to escape the sensory overload which comes from engaging with other people. In a more relaxed book like this one, it symbolises dreaminess, pondering, relaxing the mind and letting it drift.

Thus after lunch she sits in the window seat of the college looking into the quad; after dinner she stands at the window and looks out over the domes and towers of Cambridge; the day after visiting the British Museum she looks out the window at the busy streets of London; and then looks out her window on 26 October 1928 and sees the couple get into a taxi.

Daydreaming, pondering, drifting, observing, a woman looking out a window is the stock, standard, emblematic image of Woolf’s work. In fact it becomes such an obvious recurring image that I’ve written a separate blog post about it.

A personal view on the subject

I think it’s unwise to generalise about men or women (or gays or Blacks or any other demographic group). Nowadays, if you blithely stated that ‘All Chinese people are x’, ‘All Black people are y’ or ‘All Muslims are z’, you would get into trouble and might be prosecuted. Anybody writing ‘All women are this’ or ‘All women like that’ or ‘All women do the other’ is likely to get into similar trouble.

My experience, after reading thousands of books, many of them stuffed with misogynist attitudes and sexist tropes, and taking part in endless conversations on the subject, is to back off and leave the whole subject well alone. There is no victory in these kinds of conversations, you can only make yourself look stupid or bigoted. Rarely is the subject discussed dispassionately, with the use of reliable evidence and data; more often people just vent their opinions, prejudices and bigotries on whatever side of the argument they stand. Rarely does the argument end well; more usually all sides dismiss the others as bores, bigots or worse.

Therefore I think we should treat people, and think about people, as individuals, regardless of their ethnicity or gender. I try to take people as they come, assess them as I find them, without prejudging anyone. Some generalisations about groups or concepts is unavoidable in studying and discussing societies and history. But the optimum approach is to restrict yourself to specific, well-defined groups and use only clear and well-defined data. The alternative is the poisonous hatreds into which so much gender-based discourse has now descended, and which I’m trying my best to avoid.

Credit

‘A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1929. Page references are to the 1977 Granada paperback edition, although the text is easily available online.

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Posted by Simon on April 2, 2025

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Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence by Anthony Burgess (1985)

Man belonged to the cosmos and was fulfilled through his natural instincts, of which love was the greatest.
(Burgess’s summary of Lawrence’s credo, page 62)

Anthony Burgess (1917 to 1993) was a composer, poet, novelist, essayist, librettist, screenwriter, critic, provocateur and media personality. In the 1980s I watched him appear on TV arts programmes and read his numerous book reviews, essays and novels (notably ‘Earthly Powers’, 1980, and ‘The End of the World News’, 1982). He was great fun, an unashamed entertainer. This book is a classic example of his work: opinionated, interesting, drily amusing, sensible, packed with ideas and insights.

Preface

Part of this is because Burgess, like Lawrence, was an outsider. Most 20th century English authors went to private school and Oxbridge and so, whether they were radicals or conservatives, maintained the same kind of tone and worldview, the same manners, the same limited, privileged experience of life in their works. Burgess, as he explains in his preface, grew up in the pub and shop culture of working class Manchester, with little cultural capital and, like Lawrence, largely had to teach himself about literature. And they both married foreign wives and left England to live abroad, Lawrence in his pilgrimage round the world, Burgess to live in Monte Carlo.

That said, Burgess says there are also big differences. Burgess came of an Irish family and was raised a Catholic. This explains his attraction to James Joyce. But also puts him in a different tradition from Lawrence who came from non-conformist stock, proud of his puritanism, attracted to the old pagan gods, son of a miner.

Burgess admires Lawrence’s intransigence and sympathises with his sufferings on behalf of free expression. Lawrence stands for:

that fighting element in the practice of literature without which books are a mere decor or confirmation of the beliefs and prejudices of the ruling class. (p.x)

‘Literature is essentially subversive’ and Lawrence was a leading practitioner of that subversion.

Chapter 1. Lawrence and Myself When Young

Burgess quotes Lawrence’s biographer and critic Richard Aldington saying Joyce and Lawrence are diametrically opposed: Joyce is about being and Lawrence is about becoming.

Stylistically Joyce is drawn to economy and exactness, Lawrence to a diffuseness which looks for what he is trying to say while he is saying it. (p.4)

This strikes me as the single most important aspect of Lawrence’s style as a writer of prose and poetry. His paragraphs feel like they’re being shaped and formed, often reusing the same words and phrases, as you watch. It’s a unique experience of being involved in the writing, as it happens.

His writing does not seem to have emerged, lathed and polished, from the workshop: when we read him we are in that workshop, witnessing a hit-and-miss process of creation in which orthodox faults – prolixity, repetition, apparent absurdity – are idiosyncratic virtues. (p.9)

He is a writer taking chances and trusting that he will be taken seriously.

In the 1910s literature was influenced by the serious scientific predictions of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw with their promotion of Scientific, Rational solutions to society’s ills. Lawrence reacted against all this, despised all politics – maybe all rationality – and spoke for the Natural Man.

The purest exponent of the Natural Man after the Great War was Ernest Hemingway who saw that the complex sentences of Edwardian literature reflected a society and values which had all been exploded. He developed a stripped back, simple and repetitive style which promoted a simplistic code of honour. I like where Burgess says:

It may be that Hemingway’s prose is the biggest stylistic innovation of the century… Hemingway genuinely starts again from scratch. (p.8)

When I was a schoolboy and student, that was my view. From E.M. Forster to Ernest Hemingway was a leap from the 19th into the 20th century and, reading literary books today, they almost all still copy the Hemingway formula: short sentences, simple vocabulary, delete all adjectives and adverbs.

The pre-scientific or irrational in Lawrence made him a genuine primitive man, a pagan. He has a profound feeling for the pagan gods. Even the books set in England contain characters who talk like pagan deities. His people aspire to be naked, and their dialogue is voices from the unconscious, from another realm of experience.

Chapter 2. Beginnings

Lawrence’s father was a miner who worked at Brinsley Colliery, Eastwood, so you might have expected Lawrence’s subject to be squalor, dirt and struggle, for him to have become a proletarian writer. But Eastwood, ten miles north-east of Nottingham, in his day looked out over countryside, and Lawrence chose instead to become a writer of the countryside, flowers and animals.

Lawrence’s parents’ marriage was a warzone. His father was a miner, technically a ‘butty’ or supervisor of a gang of other miners. He was almost illiterate, spelling out the newspaper a word at a time, whereas Lawrence’s mother had been a teacher and clung to the idea that she came of gentle stock. Lawrence was unusually close to his mother – she is the central figure in his first major novel Sons and Lovers, and he was devastated when she died – but, by the same token, he was impressed by his father’s big beefy masculinity and the sodality of the miners.

Lawrence was an amateur painter till he was 20. His surviving paintings are vivid but demonstrate his complete lack of training in perspective or anatomy. Words were different. Poems and prose bent to the force of his imagination with little or no training.

At 17 he went as a pupil-teacher to Ilkeston training centre. At 21 he went to Nottingham University. Aged 23 he went to teach in Croydon. He discovered the ‘English Review’, edited by Ford Madox Hueffer, who ‘had the greatest editorial flair of his time, if not of the century’ and sent in some poems (p.20). Hueffer recognised the boy’s genius, invited him up to tea, introduced him to Ezra Pound. Lawrence showed Hueffer his first novel, ‘The White Peacock’.

Burgess makes a characteristically sweeping statement:

One of the uses of fiction is to affirm the values of the bourgeoisie. (p.24)

Lawrence is ‘this most visual of novelists’. Burgess emphasises the brilliant physical details in so many scenes.

Joyce, by contrast, was an urban man and knew nothing of flowers. Lawrence is the great novelist of flowers.

Snobbishness Lawrence’s mother felt she married down when she married his father. She aspired for her boys, wanted them to climb the social ladder. This is reflected from as early as ‘The Peacock’, with characters saying ‘awfully’ and ‘frightfully’, words never used in the Lawrence household. He was aping his social superiors, he was pitching the narrative at a higher social level.

Chapter 3. The Denial of Life

Lawrence’s second novel, ‘The Trespasser’, was published in 1912. It’s set on the Isle of Wight which was as far abroad as he’d managed to get by that point. The lead character Siegmund, hangs himself. The is the only suicide in Lawrence’s oeuvre.

In 1912 Lawrence eloped with Frieda Richtofen, the wife of his French tutor at Nottingham University, philologist and professor of modern languages, Ernest Weekley. She describes how they fell in love in her memoir, Not I, but the Wind…, how she was forced to abandon her three children when they eloped abroad, ending up in a rented house on Lake Garda in north Italy.

Mr Noon: Lawrence drafted the first part of this novel before the war. It was published as a fragment in 1934. Only 50 years later, in 1984, was the second part, which existed in papers belonging to a friend of Lawrence’s, published. The two halves or parts were first published together in 1984. The second half is quite different from the first. It appears to be a factually accurate and barely fictionalized account of Lawrence and Frieda’s early sexual relations. Burgess makes the point that:

It was common practice for Lawrence to write half a novel, abandon it, and then pick it up again with no great concern for plausible continuity; when in doubt, change your main character’s character, though retaining the name, and make him or her start a new life somewhere, preferably in Italy. (p.33)

This happens in ‘Mr Noon’, ‘The Lost Girl’ and ‘Aaron’s Rod’.

Marriage It is amusing that Lawrence was very fierce for marital fidelity, had a pagan reverence for the union of one man and one woman and yet the partner of his life was secured by wrecking her marriage to Professor Weekley. Also ironic that Frieda was (allegedly) unfaithful to him.

Anywhere Lawrence was one of those rare writers who could write anywhere, even amid noise and distractions. He never had a permanent home and so no book-lined study, was able to be interrupted mid-sentence to meet people or go and do some chore, come back hours later and pick up where he left off. In the relationship with Frieda, he did all the household chores while she lay in bed smoking. He reflected this aspect of himself in the character of Rawdon Lilly in ‘Aaron’s Rod’:

He put on the kettle, and quietly set cups and plates on a tray. The room was clean and cosy and pleasant. He did the cleaning himself, and was as efficient and inobtrusive a housewife as any woman. While the kettle boiled, he sat darning the socks which he had taken off Aaron’s feet when the flautist arrived, and which he had washed. He preferred that no outsider should see him doing these things. Yet he preferred also to do them himself, so that he should be independent of outside aid. (Aaron’s Rod, p.121)

England, My England Soon after eloping, Burgess quotes letters in which Lawrence lambasted the English and England in extreme terms. And yet he remained an Englishman through and through. Richard Aldington amusingly said Lawrence was as English as a wet Sunday in Hull.

Son and Lovers Another joke: given the theme of this novel is a young man’s struggle to break free from the smothering influence of his mother, Frieda playfully suggested it should be titled ‘Sons and Lovers: Or, His Mother’s Darling’. Lawrence was not amused.

Chapter 4. Son and Lover

David Herbert Lawrence was called Bert in the family home. He disliked his first name. After he eloped and became more cosmopolitan he liked his female admirers, starting with Frieda, to call him Lorenzo.

‘Sons and Lovers’ was published in May 1913. Giving its protagonist the French surname Morel is symptomatic of Lawrence’s aspiring cosmopolitanism. Burgess describes it as a ‘florescent, leafy, pullulent’ book (p.50).

Lawrence’s modernism lies not in the formal technique of his novels: they display none of the agonising over technique obvious in Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, James or Joyce. The modernism is in the content for two reasons to do with the characters.

1) His characters’ identities are extraordinarily labile: they change all the time. Not just that, but sometimes they disappear altogether, subsumed into the weather, the moonlight or other settings or environments.

2) All Lawrence’s characters point away from the conventions of normal social life towards primeval depths. They repeatedly sink to, or strip back layers to reveal, the elemental layer of human existence. This is deeper than anything in the history of the novel, deeper even than the Greeks in their tragedies.

Symptomatic that, ‘no strong believer in the solidity of human identities’ Lawrence had a lifelong fondness for charades (p.54). This spilled over into the best poems where he mimics or inhabits a bird, beast or flower to an extraordinary degree.

Masculinity All his life Lawrence kept a reverence for beautiful men, for the beauty of the male body, linking back to the strong nudity of his coal-miner father (stripped to the waist and washing in a tin bath every evening) and the community of tough men he managed.

Chapter 5. Coming Through

Lawrence was ‘arrogant, dogmatic, messianic, inconsistent’ but also loveable. He wasn’t troubled by his own faults or the impression they gave in society because society was a spume, a phantom: reality lay much, much deeper, and chasing, revealing and describing the depths of human experience was his challenge.

Reason Lawrence never understood rational argument, which was a kind of giving-in to the surface, the superficial, instead of seeking the core.

Friendship pattern The success of ‘Sons and Lovers’ introduced him to the upper echelons of English culture and society and inaugurated the rhythm he enacted with almost everyone he met: 1) ingratiating charm; 2) lecturing about eternal depths which they barely understood; 3) bitter rejection and immortalisation as satirised characters in whichever novel he was working on; 4) with the frequent threat of libel action (p.55).

‘Love Poems and Others’ published February 1913. In the summer Lawrence and Frieda returned from Germany to England principally because Frieda wanted to see her three children by Weekley.

In the autumn of 1913 he wrote a good deal of The Rainbow, provisionally titled ‘The Sisters’. In July 1914 Frieda’s divorce came through and the couple came to London to sign the papers, then get married. A few weeks later the Great War erupted and they were trapped in England for four long bitter years.

Chapter 6. Dementia

The Lawrences didn’t have money to pay the lawyers’ fees for the divorce so he was declared bankrupt. In December The Prussian Officer and Other Stories was published. In 1915 the odd story England, My England‘. Lawrence is always unsettling because he says the uncomfortable, inconvenient thing.

In 1915 Lawrence worked on ‘The Sisters’ and decided to divide it in two. He developed the notion of setting up a commune of like-minded artistic people in Cornwall. He tried to recruit Lady Ottoline Morrell for this. He wrote long letters raving about the collapse of British society to poor Bertrand Russell, with whom he was initially very taken before they had a huge falling out. Russell accused him (after his death) of being a proto-fascist.

Lawrence said he rewrote ‘The Rainbow’ about seven times. It was published on 30 September 1915. Just a week later, a negative review in the Daily News triggered outcry at the book’s supposed obscenity. The book was taken to court for breaching obscenity laws. Many witnesses for the prosecution and none for the defence. Lawrence wasn’t called. His publisher, Methuen, meekly apologised, withdrew the book, pulped the remaining copies and paid a fine of ten guineas. Britain’s writers did nothing. The Society of Authors did nothing. That maligned figure, Arnold Bennett, was the sole author to publicly protest (he had already sent the impoverished author a gift of £40).

The impact was to ruin Lawrence’s reputation, livelihood and career. It delayed publication of the second half of the novel, Women In Love, by five years, giving the misleading impression that it is a book of the 1920s, which it very much isn’t.

Burgess, of course, defends ‘The Rainbow’ but even he, in his summary, zeroes in and quotes some of the passages describing sex (in extremely vague and gaseous way). He himself doesn’t convey how much of the novel isn’t about sex at all, but about the tempestuous and primeval emotions of the characters, described in an amazingly impassioned prose.

In my review of The Rainbow I point out that with the arrival of Ursula to young womanhood the novel drastically changes tone, moving out of its kind of primitive pagan rural background and arriving in the modern world of schools and trams. Burgess makes the nice point that this is the ‘Wellsian mode’, the tone of Ann Veronica and Wells’s Edwardian social novels.

Chapter 7. Westward

Lawrence fantasised about setting up a colony of like-minded artists in America, maybe Florida, until the authorities made it clear he couldn’t leave the country. So he settled on Cornwall where he founded an artistic community. Two leading figures were the gifted editor John Middleton Murry and the brilliant New Zealand short story writer, Katherine Mansfield.

Lawrence was at one point so close to Murry that he suggested becoming blood brothers. The quartet shared a cottage for a while but inevitably fell out. Nearly 20 years later Murray was cruelly satirised as the slimy seducer Denis Burlap in Aldous Huxley’s novel ‘Point Counter Point’.

In Cornwall Lawrence revised part two of The Sisters, which came to be titled Women in Love. He finished in November 1916 but could find no publisher. July 1916, his travel book about his time in Italy, Twilight in Italy, was published.

During this period he was summoned to several Army medicals in Bodmin. He was always rejected but found the poking and prodding of his body deeply humiliating. His horrible wartime experiences are dramatised in the long, brilliantly vivid ‘Nightmare’ chapter in ‘Kangaroo’.

Lawrence spoke openly against the madness of the war. His wife was German. On 12 October 1917 local police raided his home and ransacked it for evidence they were spies, signalling to German U-boats with their washing or their late-night lights. No evidence was found but Lawrence was ordered to leave Cornwall.

Lawrence and Frieda went to stay with H.D. in London. He started writing Aaron’s Rod. In November 1917 the poetry collection ‘Look! We Have Come Through’ was published. In 1918 they went to live in Derbyshire. In October ‘New Poems’ came out. As soon as the war finished (November 1918) they set about leaving England but it took a year, until October 1919, before they could get passports.

During this period Lawrence did the reading for his book of criticism, Studies in Classic American Literature, which was eventually published by Thomas Seltzer in the United States in August 1923. It contains essays on Benjamin Franklin, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Henry Dana Jr., Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. It contributed to establishing Herman Melville as a seminal figure in American literature.

Some critics criticise it for being a rushed, superficial and highly impressionistic study; Burgess calls it ‘a series of jolts and lunges… meant to jolt Americans’ into reading their great authors. He claims it is one of the few books which created an entire new discipline, as it apparently helped jolt Americans into creating course of America literature at their universities.

Chapter 8. Nakedness

Burgess devotes an entire chapter to ‘Women in Love‘ which Burgess considers one of the ten great novels of the century. The central point of the novel is the way the characters are stripped down to their essentials, stripped to their primitive emotional cores which are depicted as bubbling over with extreme emotions, continually changing.

They are not human beings as we expect to meet them either in real life or in fiction. They are close to animals in the discontinuousness of their emotions, with unpredictable shifts of feeling which are always intense… they are capable of great emotional and even physical violence; they seem to have a skin missing. This is the peculiar quality of Women in Love which could as well be called Women in Hate. (p.89)

He outlines the main characters, identifies some of their real-life bases (Rupert Birkin is Lawrence, Hermione Roddice was partly based on Ottoline Morrell, Gudrun bears many of the traits of Katherine Mansfield).

Burgess singles out three big scenes: 1) how the violence of the big half-wild rabbit scene, in which it scratches and draws blood from both Gudrun and Gerald, anticipates the violence of their relationship and his final attempt to murder her.

2) When Ursula comes across Rupert throwing stones at the reflection of the moon in the millpond to try and abolish the power of the feminine moon over him.

3) The naked wrestling scene between Birkin and the mine owner Gerald Crich, which is deeper than homoerotic, far more primal, and its sad incompletion, the way Gerald can’t rise to Birkin’s wishes.

If we are startled by this scene we are merely experiencing the shock that it was Lawrence’s lifelong mission to impart – the shock of meeting [elemental] truths which logic and science… have tried to drive out. (p.96)

Burgess thinks it is a great novel because it is completely new: the novel, as a form, is mostly concerned with people in a social context, it is the quintessentially bourgeois art form, hedged round by manners and etiquette. From Samuel Richardson through Jane Austen to Henry James and E.M. Forster, the most earnest novels had always been about social convention and good manners. Lawrence tears the face off all this and shows his characters as madly irrational complexes of blood and nerves; primal, pagan wild animals: they have a social face (they have jobs and responsibilities) but their private lives are thronged with out-of-control primeval forces, ‘naked primitives’.

He makes the further point that the novel, up to that point, existed to convey a plot, a story. In their different ways Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford showed that you could achieve new literary heights by jettisoning the straitjacket of a logical plot and instead showing human reality in a heightened form.

Chapter 9. A Snake and Sardinia

Burgess is dismissive of ‘Aaron’s Rod’, the novel Lawrence began in 1918, set aside, then completed in the spring of 1921. ‘It is a loose improvisation of which not much need be said’ (p.101).

More interesting is The Lost Girl, which he had also abandoned, and now took up and completed. It is a hokey tale in the popular style of Arnold Bennett with lots of authorial buttonholing – ‘Now fancy our two young heroes walking up the steps to the hotel…’ and, being absolutely unthreatening, won a literary prize and £100.

Lawrence and Frieda visited Florence, which he liked. He fancied it a place of manliness and virile statues, now gone to seed and packed with a large expatriate British community of ‘aesthetes’. Some of these are portrayed pretty blatantly in ‘Aaron’s Rod’ leading to accusations of bad manners and caddishness.

They moved on to Sardinia, then to Sicily where they found a cottage where they lived, off and on, for two years. The stay in Sardinia inspired Sea and Sardinia the most charming book Lawrence ever wrote and, in Burgess’s opinion, the best single introduction to his oeuvre.

Chapter 10. The Prophecy is in the Poetry

This chapter covers:

  1. Lawrence’s best book of poems, Birds, Beasts and Flowers
  2. his two works triggered by Freud, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious
  3. his final, posthumous work, Apocalypse

Chapter 11. Eastward

1921, year of The Captain’s Doll, in which the captain and his German paramour turn into Lawrence and Frieda, endlessly bickering, with their famously arduous trek up a glacier during which they bickered and argued every inch of the way there and back.

In October 1921 ‘Sea and Sardinia’ was serialised in The Dial magazine and was read by the American socialite Mrs Mabel Dodge Luhan. She was starting an artists’ community in Taos, New Mexico, with the aim of preserving the arts and crafts of the local Indians. She fancied having a writer-in-residence to record the way of life and ‘Sea and Sardinia’ convinced her that D.H. was the man. She wrote offering him free board and lodging and Lawrence bit.

He and Frieda decided to visit America not by crossing the Atlantic but by heading East. They took ship from Naples in February 1922, passed through the Suez Canal arriving at Ceylon in March. He discovered he really hated tropical jungles.

They sailed on to Australia, arriving at Perth at the start of May 1922 and stayed with friends for a fortnight. Staying in a town outside Perth they met Maria Louisa Skinner, a minor writer who was emboldened to show Lawrence her manuscript of a novel. For reasons that puzzle Lawrence scholars to this day, he was inspired to take it up as a collaboration and rewrite it the Lawrence way. It was eventually published as The Boy in the Bush with Skinner credited as co-author. Burgess thinks Lawrence collaborated because Australia made a big impact on him but he simply wasn’t there long enough to pick up the local lore. This manuscript was packed with local lore and just needed the psychological depth which he tried to add.

After just two weeks, they took ship to Sydney. He only stayed here two days (too expensive) before heading to a house 50 kilometres south.

Chapter 12. A Comical-Looking Bloke

Here Lawrence wrote Kangaroo which Burgess calls ‘the strangest but in some ways most satisfying novel of his entire career’ (p.135). It was an improvisation i.e. he set off without having a plot or characters but the book’s slapdash unevenness of tone 1) allows for all kinds of elements, including extended lyrical descriptions of the Australian landscape and 2) creates an overall sense of spontaneity and immediacy which is very appealing.

Kangaroo’s main characters are transparently based on Lawrence and Frieda, being Richard Lovat Somers, an English writer, and his wife Harriet, who has a foreign look. They arrive in Sydney, find a house to rent. The neighbours are a childless couple and the husband, Jack Callcott, explains he’s a member of a secretive authoritarian political movement, the Diggers, who are seeking to overthrow democracy. He introduces Lovat to their leader, a charismatic Jewish lawyer named Ben Cooley and codenamed ‘Kangaroo’.

Burgess points out that the novel is about types of power:

  • there is an entire chapter devoted to the dynamic of Frieda and Lawrence’s marriage, and Lawrence’s preposterous efforts to convince her that she should submit to him as lord and master, which she robustly ridicules
  • the political plot, sort of, about the Diggers and Cooley, although his so-called ideology is disappointingly wishy-washy, all about love of your fellow men, and Colley asks Somers (in several embarrassingly bad scenes) to love him

The plot, such as it is, leads up to a riot at a meeting of the Australian Socialist Party, which is attacked by a phalanx of pseudo-fascist Diggers, complete with gunshots, a bomb being thrown, and Kangaroo being mortally wounded. Burgess points out how all this is prefaced by an extended passage about the nature of the ‘mob’, reminiscent of Freud’s work ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ which had just come out (in 1921), which Burgess says ‘shows an acuteness worthy of Adolf Hitler’ (p.142). I found it, like most of Lawrence’s attempts to tackle serious political or sociological issues, so wordy, so convoluted, and so embroiled with his personal mythology around the sexes and the deep gods, as to be almost unreadable.

Burgess briskly summarises that Lovat cannot give his allegiance to Kangaroo because the latter’s philosophy of brotherly love is shallow piffle beside Lovat’s deep feeling for the dark gods lying behind everything, deeper than humanity.

In a side note, Burgess picks out one of the final scenes of Lovat walking by moonlight by the seashore as being as magical and symbolic as Burkin throwing stones in the millpond to break the image of the moon in ‘Women in Love’. Lawrence’s novels overflow with wonderful, wonderful nature descriptions.

Chapter 12. Quetzalcoatl

After their Australian sojourn Lawrence and Frieda continued their odyssey east, arrived in San Francisco and took train to the artists’ community at the pueblo town of Taos, New Mexico, in the south-west USA. They had, as you recall, been invited by its owner Mabel Dodge Luhan, the American socialite, who had read Lawrence’s poetry and thought he’d be a perfect fit.

They were found a ranch fifteen or so miles from the town and endured a tough and demanding winter in its very primitive conditions, helped by a couple of Danish artists they sub-let some outhouses to.

By spring 1923 they needed a break and Lawrence took Frieda to Mexico. After some weeks in Mexico City, they headed south west and settled in a house on Lake Chapala. Over the next few years they made three trips in all. Out of them came a long novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926), an epic 462 pages in the Penguin edition, and the travel book, Mornings in Mexico (1927).

Burgess gives a workmanlike summary of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ but doesn’t do this vast, complex, brilliant and ridiculous book justice. He calls it ‘the least liked of Lawrence’s novels and one can see why’. It is humourless, and pontificates, at length, on a subject of little interest to most English readers (a couple of Mexicans leading the rise of the new religion of the old Aztec god Quetzalcoatl ).

One key point I nearly forgot by the time I’d staggered to the end of it, is that it, also, was very obviously written at two different times. The opening chapters are written in a surprisingly pared-back prose, lacking the usual Lawrentian guff, repetition and rhetoric. Almost as if he’d been reading Hemingway (who, however, hadn’t published much yet). Whereas the second half, describing the proponents of the new religion of the old Aztec god Quetzalcoatl is an orgy of half-baked mysticism, pseudo-psychology and tedious ‘hymns’.

Burgess suggests the difference in style is explained by facts on the ground. After 6 months Frieda was fed up of Mexico’s searing heat and (probably) Lawrence’s insistence on her submission to his religious fantasies. So she booked a berth on a ship from New York back to Britain (as the novel’s protagonist Kate Leslie, also does). On the New York quayside they had such an intense argument that they for a while thought the marriage was over.

He travelled west across America, stopping in the young Hollywood, before making it back to Mexico City. Here he completed the novel unrestrained by Frieda’s presence and influence. So you could argue that the first, very restrained and unLawrentian half, with its sensible characters doing believable things, was written under Frieda’s influence; and that the wildly self-indulgent second half, a fantasia of the new religion, accompanied by long poem-hymns he attributes to the new religionists, is Lawrence unleashed.

In real life Lawrence for a while felt he had lost Frieda and that, in her insistence on being free, independent and going her own way (home), she had ‘won’ their endless battle; whereas in the novel, Lawrence has the very strong character Kate Leslie in the end bow and submit to the male principle of her dark native husband. I.e. in the novel Lawrence faked that he’d won. In reality he swallowed his pride, and also took ship to Britain, ending in London where he realised just how much he disliked the English.

In his brisk summary of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ Burgess doesn’t mention the book’s countless breath-takingly beautiful prose descriptions of the Mexican landscape and mood. Equivalents to the wonderful evocation of the Australian landscape in ‘Kangaroo’. In both these novels, for my money, the ‘plot’ is dubious but the sense of place is astonishing.

Burgess thinks ‘there is no less convincing ending in the Lawrence oeuvre’ (p.157) but I found the ending of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ appropriately ambiguous and uncertain. It just stops in mid-conversation as the protagonist, Kate Leslie, rather hopelessly asks the Mexican general she’s married and who wants her to join their religious movement, Cipriano Viedma, to make her stay with him – despite the fact that we’ve seen her pining for Britain and booking a berth on a ship home. It ends on a note of irresolution and ambiguity which, I thought, accurately sums up the Lawrentian protagonist, endlessly conflicted and contradictory and changeable.

Chapter 13. A Spot of Red

In London Frieda and Lawrence became close to the artist (the Right Honourable) Dorothy Brett, and she accompanied them when they sailed back across the Atlantic in March 1924. They travelled from New York to Chicago and then back to Taos. Here Mable Luhan gave the Lawrences 170 acres of land and Lawrence, always surprisingly practical, threw himself (alongside native labourers) into rebuilding the adobe shacks, clearing the irrigation ditches, planting a flower garden.

In this period Lawrence wrote St Mawr. Like so many of Lawrence’s fictions it splits into two distinct parts (England and America), maybe three (London, Shropshire, Texas). The first, longer part portrays the posh, upper-middle-class world Lawrence was now moving in (the miner’s son had come a long, long way in a little over 10 years), set in London mews cottages and posh grand houses.

St Mawr is the name of a horse, a stallion, bought by Mrs Witt, a redoubtable American widow of independent means, for her son-in-law Henry Carrington, so he can join her and her daughter, Louise (Lou), as they go riding in Rotten Row (in Hyde Park) and mingle with London’s elite. Here the nervy, uncontrollable horse causes a scene and is banned as a danger to the public.

The scene then shifts to the West Midlands on the Welsh border, where a posse of posh people go for an extended break and where St Mawr is startled by a snake in the heather and rears backwards, kicking one of the men in the party in the face then rolling onto Henry and crushing his foot.

In part two, the leading figure, Mrs Witt, takes daughter, son-in-law and difficult horse by ship back to America, to the ranch where she grew up and whose profits pay for her pampered lifestyle travelling round Europe (and which explains why she and her daughter like horses).

But they don’t stop here. Lou looks for somewhere isolated where she can be herself and discovers a half-abandoned old ranch in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and buys it, and persuades her mother to join her and the family retainer, a native American named Phoenix, in rebuilding and furbishing it.

Burgess makes the obvious point that the entire narrative arc of the story follows Lawrence’s recent life, from posh nobs in London, via an excursion into the English countryside, then back to the States, to the dusty desert reminiscent of Taos, and then the final 20 pages are a pretty literal description of the ranch which Mabel Luhan, with great generosity, gave to Lawrence.

Burgess goes on to make the fairly obvious point which I’d completely missed that St Mawr is Lawrence: wounded, angry, liable to lash out. When the horse kicks a nice posh chap in the face up in the Shropshire hills it is Lawrence spitting in the face of the posh people he met in London and claimed to love his work and who he loathed. In fact St Mawr overflows with hatred of just about everyone, as I itemise in my review of it.

According to Burgess, right at the end of 1924 Lawrence travelled with Frieda and Brett back to Mexico. The British vice-consul found them a cottage in Oaxaca and it was here that he completed ‘The Plumed Serpent’, in all its madness.

He also completed the odd book of travel sketches combined with anthropological reportage, ‘Mornings in Mexico’. The book starts out as restrained and observant sketches of his hacienda, his servant, a long walk to a remote village and a description of a market day; but then the second half and the last three or four chapters become more anthropological, describing trips to observe traditional Indian music and dances, and taking it on himself to explain the Indians’ entire animistic worldview. Several of these chapters do not take place in Mexico at all, but in the United States, so the title of the book is pretty misleading.

Here in Oaxaca, in early 1925, Lawrence fell very ill. He went down with malaria but also food poisoning causing diarrhoea. To compound his misery, the region was hit by an earthquake. He was moved to the one decent hotel in Oaxaca. He was left weak and ill. All the old fight went out of him. For years he had written fantasies of subjecting Frieda to his imperious male will. Now he could barely walk and realised how utterly dependent on her he had become.

A doctor in Mexico City diagnosed tuberculosis and told Frieda that Lawrence only had a year or two left to live. When they tried to return to Taos the US immigration officials prevented him, until overridden by a kindly official in the embassy in Mexico City. But only with a 6-month visa.

In the event Lawrence recovered back on the ranch and was fit enough to get involved in all manner of outdoor chores and work. Burgess dwells on his finding a porcupine with cactus needles in its nose and carefully extracting them, which led to one of his many essays about man’s place in nature.

In September 1925 his US visa expired, he travelled to Washington with Frieda, then they caught a liner back across the Atlantic. He kidded himself he’d come back but, of course, he never did. His ranch is now a museum dedicated to him, the D.H. Lawrence ranch.

Lawrence disapproved of the Atlantic – ‘a dismal kind of ocean; it always affects me as the grave of Atlantis’ – although not as much as he disapproved of England.

Chapter 14. Life in Death

Lawrence passed through England en route for the continent. Burgess thinks Italy was Lawrence’s true home and the Mediterranean his proper sea. By the autumn of 1925 they had settled at a place called Spotorno, on the coast just over the border from France. Here he turned 40.

Burgess summarises Lawrence’s life to date: he had travelled right around the world looking for a race unspoiled by western materialism but hadn’t found it. He had hated the tropics (Ceylon), ignored the native people of Australia, seen the corruption and lassitude of the Mexicans, hated America’s Fordist culture, loathed England’s imperial snobbery.

Etruscan Places Now, back in Italy, he persuaded himself he’d found it in the long-extinct and legendary race of the Etruscans. Hence his book Etruscan Places. The Etruscans created a civilisation in west and north-west Italy which reached its height around 500 BC. To Lawrence’s mind they were an example of a primitive people in touch with their sensual pagan selves who were crushed out of existence by the cerebral, law-obsessed, imperialistic Romans.

This is obviously a grotesque distortion of the historical facts since 1) if crushed they were, it was by the Roman Republic, centuries before there was a Roman Empire (see Roman–Etruscan Wars), 2) the Romans were indeed an obsessively militaristic culture but at the same time they also practiced a florid variety of blood-thirsty cults, traditions and ceremonies which you’d have thought Lawrence would have had sympathy for.

But really what Lawrence does is reshape the Etruscans into his own image, as embattled outsiders fighting several types of ‘establishment’. This is why the book opens with an attack on all historians of the ancient world who Lawrence accuses of being in thrall to the glamour of Greece and Rome and downplaying all other cultures.

And, as Burgess points out, when Lawrence was anathematising an empire which crushed scores of native peoples in the name of ‘freedom’ he was also obviously referring to the British Empire, whose subjugation of native peoples around the world Lawrence deplored.

The Man Who Died Burgess devotes 4 pages to a summary of this vivid short story depicting Jesus waking from the dead in his tomb. In the story Jesus stumbles out and takes shelter with a peasant before the several encounters with disciples described in the New Testament.

These encounters are given according to the Biblical sources but we see that the resurrected man who lived them is radically different from the Jesus of the Bible account. For he has thrown off his mission to convert the world to love. He now sees all that as a form of narcissism. Now he will live for the instinctive life within him i.e. become Lawrentian man.

And so in the second half of the story (and, as Burgess points out, so many of Lawrence’s stories and novels fall into two distinct halves) he travels south along the coast. Here he comes to a small domestic temple to the goddess Isis and falls under the spell of its priestess, culminating in their having sex at the pagan altar.

Burgess doesn’t quite bring out how brilliantly vivid and imaginative this story is, with scores of moments of insight, starting with the searing description of what it feels like to rise from the dead – but he correctly points out the other striking thing about it which is – why wasn’t it banned? Why wasn’t Lawrence prosecuted for blasphemy? What kind of story could possibly be more blasphemous? Instead, as we know, the Establishment reserved its fury for his next novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It’s always sex with the philistine, guttersnipe British, who are too thick to notice transgressive ideas.

Chapter 15. A Woman’s Love

‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ is a book about fidelity. Lady Constance Chatterley and the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors must be true to each other and what they awaken in each other – a true awakening of their bodies’ sensual and sexual identities – despite the full panoply of opposition society can throw at them: gossip and rumour, social disapproval, censure from her father and sister, the howling anger of his shrewish wife, the cold anger of her husband, and the minefields of the law.

He began it at Scandicci in Italy in October 1926 and over the next two years wrote three versions. Many critics think the shorter first version is best, but it was the longest version which he chose to have privately printed in 1928.

Burgess correctly points out that for a book which supposedly champions free and ecstatic sex, ‘Chatterley’ is embarrassingly limited and ignorant. Lawrence is embarrassingly fixated on the penis, the phallus, on Mellors’s erect penis, and the sex is entirely orientated around his quick phallic penetration of Lady C. There is little or no foreplay and no attention whatsoever is given to Connie’s pleasure or orgasm. She is condemned to find all her pleasure in response to his quick thrusting cock.

As Burgess says, not just any modern westerner with an interest in the subject, but any literate member of the world’s other cultures, readers of Japanese, Chinese or India erotica, would know vastly more than Lawrence describes. Lawrence’s supposed sex set-pieces make us look like an embarrassment on the world stage. ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ only counts as a ‘sexy’ book when set against the narrow, blinkered, strangled, philistine background of early 20th century Anglo-Saxon culture. Compared with the erotic writings of virtually any other tradition, it is pitifully inadequate.

Burgess is critical of it. He thinks Connie isn’t as interesting a female figure as Ursula, Gudrun (who is?) or Kate Leslie, while her desertion of a crippled husband subverts her moral standing. Mellors is less attractive than the gamekeeper in The White Peacock. In my reading, I didn’t like Mellors. He is unnecessarily chippy and shirty with Clifford and, especially with the painter Duncan Forbes who offers to help them out and Mellors rudely dismisses. By the end I didn’t like either of the lovers. My sympathy went out to Mrs Bolton, a battling single mum from the village who comes to be Clifford’s housekeeper and manages to stay sympathetic to all three parties in the love triangle.

Both Lawrence’s US and British publishers refused to publish it. Lawrence had a full version privately printed in Italy and distributed 2,000 copies. Wikipedia describes the fate of various expurgated and pirated editions. Burgess summarises Lawrence’s own account of printing a private edition, as given in ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.

The famous 1960 trial came about because Penguin decided to use the text as a test of the recent Obscene Publications Act 1959.

When the jury found against the prosecution i.e. that paperback publication could go ahead, Burgess and other critics like him were relieved because now they were free to discuss the book on its merits and admit the fact that it’s a flawed novel.

Official persecution continued. When he sent the manuscript of his poetry collection ‘Pansies’ to his London publisher, it was intercepted, opened, and alleged ‘obscenities’ cut.

In 1919 the Warren Gallery held an exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings. A surprising 12,000 people paid to see them. They yellow press got wind of the nudity and egged on the police to raid the gallery and confiscate 14 of the pictures. The authorities proposed to destroy the paintings and the book of the exhibition though the gallery owners rounded up some contemporary artists to defend him.

Burgess doesn’t think much of the paintings, says the paintings ascribed to Mark Rampion, the character based on Lawrence in Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point, are better.

Chapter 17. Death in Vence

Burgess dwells on the friendship between Aldous Huxley and Lawrence and he quotes a nice section from an interview given late in life where Huxley says that Lawrence was, above all, happy. Burgess thinks Huxley absorbed enough of the scientific worldview ‘to bring a new intellectual rigour to the novel’. Having just read a load of Huxley’s novels I think this is rubbish. There’s nothing intellectually rigorous about them, my abiding impression is of the endless vapouring gaseous trip about Love and Art gassed by preposterous pseudo-intellectual rentiers. And his later writings about drugs and religion dress up in scientific terminology but are basically spiritualist nonsense.

What comes over from Lawrence’s last months spent dying from tuberculosis was his own foolish denialism, and the complete wretched inadequacy of contemporary medicine. Only antibiotics can treat TB and they hadn’t been discovered/invented yet.

Testimony from various sources suggest that Frieda was worse than useless at looking after Lawrence. She couldn’t cook, turned the kitchen of the villa where he spent his last weeks into a slum. Everything had to be cleaned and tidied by Aldous and especially Maria Huxley who worshipped Lawrence like a god.

We have it on the testimony of Aldous Huxley that, a day or two before he died, Lawrence said of his wife: ‘Frieda, you have killed me.’ The best source for his final days is from the English poet Robert Nichol. He wrote:

Aldous would not repeat such a terrible saying unless he felt it to be true. And he said, ‘I like Frieda in many ways but she is incurably and incredibly stupid – the most maddening woman I think I ever came across. Nevertheless she was the only sort of woman with whom D.H.L. could live. (quoted p.196)

Burgess makes the point that if Lawrence had married little Maria Huxley, she would have been a faithful, efficient, kind wife, creating order and tidiness everywhere, as she did for Huxley – but Lawrence needed chaos. He thrived on the battle of wills, the clash between his domesticity and Frieda’s slovenliness, between his working class background and her aristocratic hauteur, between his English puritanism and her continental sensuality, on her willingness to fight back.

Mind you, these comments shed light on Frieda’s own memoirs, one of the most salient parts of which, for me, was the way she doesn’t actually comment on any of the numerous books he wrote during their 18-year marriage. I thought it was tact. Maybe she was just too stupid, and didn’t try.

He died peacefully in his sleep and was buried at Vence. A year later he was exhumed and shipped over to Taos where Fried built a shrine for him at the ranch.

Burgess calls him ‘the most English of our writers’, is that true? More English than Chaucer, Shakespeare or Dickens? He’s nearer the mark when he says:

The British expect comfort from their writers, and Lawrence offers very little. (p.197)

The tenor of the text and endings of most of his stories offer very little comfort, from the bleak endings of ‘Women in Love’ and ‘The Fox’, to the uncertain ending of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ or the hanging ending of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ – you go through these great emotional rollercoaster rides reading his stories but then, at the end… what?

Chapter 18. On The Side of Life

Burgess has a half-hearted go at speculating what might have happened if Lawrence had lived longer. Would he have come over to Huxley’s way of seeing i.e. combining all the blood and dark gods stuff with a more rational point of view? Unlikely.

Like most critics, Burgess thinks Lawrence had, in fact, done his best work. Some people think Sons and Lovers is his masterpiece; Burgess thinks it’s Women In Love. But after that it was all slowly downhill, there is a steady diminution in force, he is never so wildly radical again.

Then Burgess adds his own interpretation which is that Lawrence was a professional writer. He could sit down anywhere and bang out letters, stories, essays, poems or continue with a novel. More than most we have to take his oeuvre, across its many genres, as one thing.

Was he a prophet? Burgess acknowledges Lawrence’s writings about power, his dislike of Italian fascism, but his own flirting with power and submission in ‘Kangaroo’ and ‘The Plumed Serpent’. But he doesn’t mention what I think is stronger, which is the sense of doom which dogs Mellors in ‘Lady Chatterley’. Mellor’s conviction that a great crash was coming and the future was going to be very dark proved to be right.

Lawrence would have been dismayed to learn his name is associated in the common culture with sex, with the scandal surrounding Lady Chatterley, with the soft porn movie versions, as a prophet of soft-porn sensuality. There’s nothing soft porn about Lawrence: his writings are hard and rebarbative, they are not relaxing or lulling.

This is Burgess at his weakest. He wanders off into a lengthy consideration of Henry James and his criticism of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as he tries to define what ‘life’ means in the context of a novel. But he’s over-thinking it. Think back to reading ‘The Rainbow’: it is the most fantastic depiction of the complexity of human existence, of being a person plonked down amid families, in settlements and cultures, in the natural and man-made worlds, and the endless fizzing popping confusing experience of being alive to all these endless inputs and experiences. Comparisons with Henry James or James Joyce or any other writers are beside the point. Lawrence was the poet laureate of the teeming richness of Life and delves so deep, drilling beneath all conventional notions of identity, taking his characters to primeval, archetypal depths. And his novels inhabit the animals they describe and bring to life the myriads of flowers quite as fully as his human characters, maybe more so.

It seems overblown when Lawrence writes about the ‘cosmos’ but surely Lawrence, more than any other writer, had the right to do so, because he deliberately moved out of all his comfort zones, left England behind, and wrote dazzling evocations of the landscapes, flora and fauna of the Mediterranean, Australia, and the American and Mexican desert. Who cares what Henry James wrote about ‘form’ or why James Joyce deployed such complex symbolical structures – you only have to read any of Lawrence’s descriptions of the Australian outback, of the silver fish in the cold Pacific, of the thunderhead clouds massing over the distant mountains in Mexico, and you realise you are in the presence of a great, great writer, who owned and described more of the world than most of his contemporaries even saw.

Burgessian vocabulary

  • allumeuse = French for ‘tease’
  • hypergamy = the action of marrying or forming a sexual relationship with a person of a superior sociological or educational background (as working class men do with upper class women, as Lawrence men do in a number of his stories: Virgin and Gypsy, Lady Chatterley)
  • prevernal = relating to the early stages of spring, or the end of winter

Credit

Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence by Anthony Burgess was published by William Heinemann in 1985. Page references are to the 1986 Abacus paperback version.

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Posted by Simon on March 19, 2025

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The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence (1915)

A flame kindled round him, making his experience passionate and glowing, burningly real.
(description of Will Brangwen falling in love, although it could be almost any Lawrence character, male or female)

What did the self, the form of life matter? Only the living from day to day mattered, the beloved existence in the body, rich, peaceful, complete, with no beyond, no further trouble, no further complication.
(Ursula’s credo right at the end of the book, p.484)

This strikes me as a work of utter genius. Lawrence had an astounding gift for creating men and women who are more like pagan gods of the landscape, who live what seem primeval lives of extraordinary depth and intensity.

Other novelists build their narrative out of key scenes, scenes which move the story along or reveal people’s personalities, create way stations to the plot or highlight characters’ development. Many novelists work through extensive dialogue, designed to disclose people’s (clashing) personalities, sometimes to announce shocking revelations, as in a stage play or, alternatively, to be witty and amusing. Lawrence is extremely unlike all of that. This novel amounts almost to a repudiation of that entire tradition.

Instead, with relatively few well-defined scenes and tens of pages passing with no dialogue at all, Lawrence describes the inner lives of his characters at great length, to intense and penetrating depth, in rhapsodic poetic prose. At one point he gives a sense of what he’s about, in the perception of the newly-married Tom Brangwen:

He surveyed the rind of the world: houses, factories, trams, the discarded rind; people scurrying about, work going on, all on the discarded surface. An earthquake had burst it all from inside. It was as if the surface of the world had been broken away… leaving here exposed the inside, the reality: one’s own being, strange feelings and passions and yearnings and beliefs and aspirations, suddenly become present, revealed, the permanent bedrock… (p.150)

He does so not in a rational, analytical way. Instead there are page after page describing the complex, many-sided and continually changing quality of his characters. Their moods, emotions, feelings and qualities are described with incandescent vividness and they are always changing, sometimes paragraph to paragraph, sometimes sentence to sentence, in a dizzying, bewildering shimmer. Is this how people’s perceptions, moods and feelings change? It feels rather delirious and yet wonderful at the same time. Here are young Anna and Will falling in love.

A spell was cast over her. And how uneasy her parents were, as she went about the house unnoticing, not noticing them, moving in a spell as if she were invisible to them. She was invisible to them. It made them angry. Yet they had to submit. She went about absorbed, obscured for a while. Over him too the darkness of obscurity settled. He seemed to be hidden in a tense, electric darkness, in which his soul, his life was intensely active, but without his aid or attention. His mind was obscured.

(Note the repetition. I’ll come to that in a moment.) Or Ursula wanting to be back in love with Anton.

When she had roused him to a pitch of madness, when she saw his eyes all dark and mad with suffering, then a great suffering overcame her soul, a great, inconquerable suffering. And she loved him. For, oh, she wanted to love him. Stronger than life or death was her craving to be able to love him.

Hundreds and hundreds of pages of characters keyed up to the most intense and exquisite emotional peaks and extremities.

Passion

‘The Rainbow’ follows three successive generations of the Brangwen family who inhabit and inherit the family farm, Marsh Farm, in rural Nottinghamshire, from the 1840s to the Edwardian era. But there is little or nothing about business dealings, the practical details of raising crops or cattle and so on.

Instead the book focuses in huge detail on two types of subject: first the childhood and adolescence of the key figure in each generation; but then, most particularly, on the love lives of these figures, described with astonishing, monomaniacal intensity. Here is just one among many, many such passages, in this case describing Ann and Will falling in love, in this scene embracing and kissing.

They would stand sometimes folded together in the barn, in silence. Then to her, as she felt his young, tense figure with her hands, the bliss was intolerable, intolerable the sense that she possessed him. For his body was so keen and wonderful, it was the only reality in her world. In her world, there was this one tense, vivid body of a man, and then many other shadowy men, all unreal. In him, she touched the centre of reality. And they were together, he and she, at the heart of the secret. How she clutched him to her, his body the central body of all life. Out of the rock of his form the very fountain of life flowed. But to him, she was a flame that consumed him. The flame flowed up his limbs, flowed through him, till he was consumed, till he existed only as an unconscious, dark transit of flame, deriving from her.

Lawrence’s characters are continually being swept out into the spaces between the stars, bursting into flames, swooping cruel as a hawk, and generally being transported by stark, primeval, unstoppable passions. At numerous points the impassioned couples imagine themselves transported far from ‘civilisation’, like beings on a desert island, like Adam and Eve. At one point Lawrence makes this more than usually clear.

And yet, for his own part, for his private being, Brangwen felt that the whole of the man’s world was exterior and extraneous to his own real life with Anna. Sweep away the whole monstrous superstructure of the world of to-day, cities and industries and civilization, leave only the bare earth with plants growing and waters running, and he would not mind, so long as he were whole, had Anna and the child and the new, strange certainty in his soul. Then, if he were naked, he would find clothing somewhere, he would make a shelter and bring food to his wife. (p.193)7

Male and female created He them

He asserted himself before her, he felt himself infinitely male and infinitely irresistible, she asserted herself before him, she knew herself infinitely desirable, and hence infinitely strong. And after all, what could either of them get from such a passion but a sense of his or of her own maximum self, in contradistinction to all the rest of life? (p.302)

Above all, this enormous 500-page hymn to the life of the passions and emotions focuses on what, in Lawrence’s hands, is the primal dyad, duality and dichotomy between a man and a woman in love. Thousands of other writers have handled this worn-out subject but Lawrence does it unlike anyone else. Other novelists structure their stories through scenes, which generally include dialogue in which characters reveal their feelings, and the scenes are carefully calibrated to depict men and women going through the fairly well-recognised stages of acquaintance, friendship, admiration, affection, first feelings of love and so on. Think Jane Austen. Above all they have a social aspect and their characters conform to social norms.

Not so Lawrence. Lawrence works through page after page of prose poetry describing the characters’ feelings in the most primal, extreme, almost abstract way, sometimes with the simple profundity of the Old Testament.

She liked Anthony… All her life, at intervals, she returned to the thought of him and of that which he offered. But she was a traveller, she was a traveller on the face of the earth, and he was an isolated creature living in the fulfilment of his own senses. (p.417)

His characters are like protagonists in a kind of Wagnerian drama of souls, endlessly battling for fulfilment.

She became proud and erect, like a flower, putting itself forth in its proper strength. His warmth invigorated her. His beauty of form, which seemed to glow out in contrast with the rest of people, made her proud. It was like deference to her, and made her feel as if she represented before him all the grace and flower of humanity. She was no mere Ursula Brangwen. She was Woman, she was the whole of Woman in the human order. All-containing, universal, how should she be limited to individuality? (p.444)

Very often the drama rotates around ideas of completion. Male and female both feel a lack and want to be made complete and, once married, finally achieve this wonderful sense of completion, and yet all kinds of things can knock it sideways, create barriers, can make them hate each other, and brood and be distant, but then something snaps, one or the other begs forgiveness, there is joyful reunion and completeness again.

It was begun now, this passion, and must go on, the passion of Ursula to know her own maximum self, limited and so defined against him. She could limit and define herself against him, the male, she could be her maximum self, female, oh female, triumphant for one moment in exquisite assertion against the male, in supreme contradistinction to the male.

Something Lawrence does again and again is give each gender successive paragraphs – a paragraph to how the man is feeling, a paragraph to the woman. It’s one of the many ways he creates this sense of a primal male-female opposition or dyad.

He was struggling in silence. It seemed as though there were before him a solid wall of darkness that impeded him and suffocated him and made him mad. He wanted her to come to him, to complete him, to stand before him so that his eyes did not, should not meet the naked darkness. Nothing mattered to him but that she should come and complete him. For he was ridden by the awful sense of his own limitation. It was as if he ended uncompleted, as yet uncreated on the darkness, and he wanted her to come and liberate him into the whole.

But she was complete in herself, and he was ashamed of his need, his helpless need of her. His need, and his shame of need, weighed on him like a madness. Yet still he was quiet and gentle, in reverence of her conception, and because she was with child by him.

Sex

As that passage implies, there is a very strong sexual undertone to all this. For most of the book Lawrence nowhere explicitly describes sex, even when the couple are alone in their house, even alone in their bedroom, the language is never specific about undressing, boobs and willies and so on, it always remains at this level of abstract nouns, of ‘need’ and ‘completion’ and ‘union’ and suchlike.

But sex, heterosexual sex, the loss of self in the union of bodies making love, obviously underpins a great deal of the book’s psychology and, maybe, it’s aesthetic, its constant search for a kind of primitive intensity and physical communion between male and female.

At one point Will, a Christian, takes his wife Anna, a sceptic, to visit Lincoln cathedral. As he enters the soaring building he undergoes a great soaring of the soul but, as you can see, the whole thing is described in very thinly veiled sexual terms.

Here the stone leapt up from the plain of earth, leapt up in a manifold, clustered desire each time, up, away from the horizontal earth, through twilight and dusk and the whole range of desire, through the swerving, the declination, ah, to the ecstasy, the touch, to the meeting and the consummation, the meeting, the clasp, the close embrace, the neutrality, the perfect, swooning consummation, the timeless ecstasy. There his soul remained, at the apex of the arch, clinched in the timeless ecstasy, consummated… Every jet of him strained and leaped, leaped clear into the darkness above, to the fecundity and the unique mystery, to the touch, the clasp, the consummation, the climax of eternity, the apex of the arch. (p.202)

More straightforwardly, Will returns from an evening in Nottingham after arguing with Anna, and they approach each other as strangers, which they find more arousing.

She watched him undress as if he were a stranger. Indeed he was a stranger to her. And she roused him profoundly, violently, even before he touched her… They abandoned in one motion the moral position, each was seeking gratification pure and simple.

Strange his wife was to him. It was as if he were a perfect stranger, as if she were infinitely and essentially strange to him, the other half of the world, the dark half of the moon. She waited for his touch as if he were a marauder who had come in, infinitely unknown and desirable to her. And he began to discover her. He had an inkling of the vastness of the unknown sensual store of delights she was. With a passion of voluptuousness that made him dwell on each tiny beauty, in a kind of frenzy of enjoyment, he lit upon her: her beauty, the beauties, the separate, several beauties of her body.

He was quite ousted from himself, and sensually transported by that which he discovered in her. He was another man revelling over her. There was no tenderness, no love between them any more, only the maddening, sensuous lust for discovery and the insatiable, exorbitant gratification in the sensual beauties of her body. And she was a store, a store of absolute beauties that it drove him to contemplate. There was such a feast to enjoy, and he with only one man’s capacity. (p.235)

Still described in general or euphemistic or categorical terms. Whereas, 25 or so years later, here are Ursula and Anton.

She enjoyed him, she made much of him. She liked to put her fingers on the soft skin of his sides, or on the softness of his back, when he made the muscles hard underneath, the muscles developed very strong through riding; and she had a great thrill of excitement and passion, because of the unimpressible hardness of his body, that was so soft and smooth under her fingers, that came to her with such absolute service. (p.460)

‘With such absolute service,’ what a thrilling phrase. Once they have slept together once, the descriptions of Anton and Ursula become more, not explicit exactly, more frank. More honest, maybe, though still couched in poetic rather than naturalistic details.

He came to her, and cleaved to her very close, like steel cleaving and clinching on to her. Her passion was roused, it was fierce but cold. But it was fierce, and extreme, and good, their passion this night. He slept with her fast in his arms. All night long he held her fast against him.

As you can see, it’s not really the sex, it’s the complete picture of closeness or otherwise between people, which Lawrence is after.

Married love

Tens of thousands of novels, from Jane Austen to Bridget Jones, depict the process of finding a mate, of falling in love, as leading up to the great plot climax of marriage and ending there.

Lawrence is notable for carrying right on into the state of married love, in fact he only really blossoms once a couple are married and the real struggle begins, the struggle for complete physical and spiritual union, which is so overwhelming when achieved and experienced, which obliterates the outside world in its intensity, and yet is so fragile, so easily punctured by the slightest whims of jealousy or irritation or misunderstanding on the part of either spouse. And then the days and nights of alienation and coldness and apartness, sometimes rising to active hatred of the other, before some route is found back to apologise and forgive.

A large amount of the first half of the text is made up by this endless battle of the two sexes, conceived in a kind of elemental abstraction.

Horrible in the extreme were these nocturnal combats, when all the world was asleep, and they two were alone, alone in the world, and repelling each other. It was hardly to be borne. (p.189)

Joy

If there are black moments of hatred and scorn, Lawrence’s work is also, and mostly, coloured by an extraordinary primeval joy. Here’s the heavily pregnant Anna Brangwen, left alone during the day while her husband, Will, goes to work in Nottingham.

She had her moments of exaltation still, re-births of old exaltations. As she sat by her bedroom window, watching the steady rain, her spirit was somewhere far off.

She sat in pride and curious pleasure. When there was no one to exult with, and the unsatisfied soul must dance and play, then one danced before the Unknown.

Suddenly she realized that this was what she wanted to do. Big with child as she was, she danced there in the bedroom by herself, lifting her hands and her body to the Unseen, to the unseen Creator who had chosen her, to Whom she belonged.

She would not have had anyone know. She danced in secret, and her soul rose in bliss. She danced in secret before the Creator, she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness.

It’s not joy, is it, it’s exultation, and this note of fantastic joy and psycho-physical excitement recurs again and again, the fantastic excitement of being alive!

To Ursula it was wonderful. She felt she was a new being. The darkness seemed to breathe like the sides of some great beast, the haystacks loomed half-revealed, a crowd of them, a dark, fecund lair just behind. Waves of delirious darkness ran through her soul. She wanted to let go. She wanted to reach and be amongst the flashing stars, she wanted to race with her feet and be beyond the confines of this earth. She was mad to be gone. It was as if a hound were straining on the leash, ready to hurl itself after a nameless quarry into the dark. And she was the quarry, and she was also the hound. (p.317)

Aspects of Lawrence’s style

Plain prose

Lawrence doesn’t achieve his effects through fancy vocabulary. It’s striking how ordinary most of his vocabulary is. It’s really the power of his perceptions which startle you. Lydia gets a job caring for an old vicar who keeps a parish by the sea.

Very strange was the constant glitter of the sea unsheathed in heaven, very warm and sweet the graveyard, in a nook of the hill catching the sunshine and holding it as one holds a bee between the palms of the hands, when it is benumbed. Grey grass and lichens and a little church, and snowdrops among coarse grass, and a cupful of incredibly warm sunshine.

Repetition within paragraphs

Who knows how conscious it was but Lawrence employs a very definite strategy of repeating two or three key words within each paragraph. Each paragraph has one or two key words which are repeated two or three times. The effect is to make each paragraph feel… feel like it has an identity of its own, stands distinct from its neighbours. Each one seems to be ringing its own bell. Look at the repetition of ‘very’ in the paragraph above. There are thousands of similar and often more striking examples.

It’s as if Lawrence has struck out a phrase encapsulating a perception and then wants to examine it from various sides, repeats the phrase, repeats it with slight variations, to see what happens as he walks round it, to observe the changing light giving it different perspectives.

To pick a paragraph more or less at random: young Anna Brangwen has gone to church accompanied by her cousin, Will Brangwen. They are both sitting in a pew as the service begins. First read it for the sense:

The colour came streaming from the painted window above her. It lit on the dark wood of the pew, on the stone, worn aisle, on the pillar behind her cousin, and on her cousin’s hands, as they lay on his knees. She sat amid illumination, illumination and luminous shadow all around her, her soul very bright. She sat, without knowing it, conscious of the hands and motionless knees of her cousin. Something strange had entered into her world, something entirely strange and unlike what she knew. (p.110)

And then pick out the repetitions:

The colour came streaming from the painted window above her. It lit on the dark wood of the pew, on the stone, worn aisle, on the pillar behind her cousin, and on her cousin’s hands, as they lay on his knees. She sat amid illumination, illumination and luminous shadow all around her, her soul very bright. She sat, without knowing it, conscious of the hands and motionless knees of her cousin. Something strange had entered into her world, something entirely strange and unlike what she knew.

It’s not the consciously poetic prose of an Oscar Wilde because it avoids Wilde’s gossamer vocabulary, all silver and emeralds, and instead deliberately uses very plain ordinary language (except, I suppose for luminous, maybe). But the key words are the opposite of recherché – on the, hands, knees, strange. You could hardly get commoner words. Yet this kind of sounding repetition is without doubt poetic in technique and it’s absolutely everywhere, in every single paragraph.

Direct repetition

Generally, the repeated words or short phrases are scattered throughout a paragraph, separated by other phrases. But sometimes he wants to be so emphatic that he just repeats a phrase side by side.

She felt his power persisting on her, till she became aware of the strain, she cried out against the exhaustion. He was forcing her, he was forcing her. (p.181)

Why could he not leave her? Why could he not throw himself into the hidden water to live or die, as might be? He could not, he could not. (p.187)

Hard and fierce she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and burning as a fierce salt. Till gradually his warm, soft iron yielded, yielded, and she was there fierce, corrosive, seething with his destruction, seething like some cruel, corrosive salt around the last substance of his being, destroying him, destroying him in the kiss. (p.322)

Ursula was beside herself. She could not endure till the Saturday came, her thoughts burned up like a fire. If only it were Saturday, if only it were Saturday. (p.339)

On a macro level, certain words or images become associated with certain characters through repetition: foreign and foreignness with Lydia; Tom Brangwen’s blue eyes; flame with Anna; Will the hawk.

Dialect and surprise words

He does, occasionally, deploy dialect, or unusual words, or (colloquial?) phrases, mostly in direct speech.

Will Brangwen had some weeks of holiday after his marriage, so the two took their honeymoon in full hands, alone in their cottage together.

‘Sit you down,’ said Tom Brangwen, ‘an’ take a bit off your length.’

What did the unrevealed God matter, when a man had a young family that needed fettling for? (p.275)

‘Isn’t it a nasty morning,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s not much of weather.’ (p.370)

‘Pens don’t melt into the air: pens are not in the habit of mizzling away into nothing. What has become of them then?’

The main motor of the text is his staggering imagining of people’s primeval lives and feelings; but the proximate cause is his extraordinary sentences. On page 30 or 40 I realised that nearly every sentence comes with an unexpected phrasing which knocks the wind out of you, extraordinary unexpected vividnesses in sentence after sentence, smacking your imagination like a sheet of rain across a lake.

He held her in his arms, and his bones melted. (p.119)

The days went by, they ran on dark-padded feet in silence. (p.120)

The air was all hoary silver. She looked around her. Trees stood vaguely at their distance, as if waiting like heralds, for the signal to approach. In this space of vague crystal her heart seemed like a bell ringing.

Tom Brangwen wanted to make a speech. For the first time in his life, he must spread himself wordily. (p.137)

Lawrence is an astonishing spendthrift of beautiful lines, throwing away hundreds of casually brilliant and inspiring lines.

The firelight glowed against the darkness in the room.

He had worked for many years at Cossethay, building the organ for the church, restoring the woodwork, gradually coming to a knowledge of beauty in the plain labours. Now he wanted again to carve things that were utterances of himself. (p.355)

He seemed made up of a set of habitual actions and decisions. The vulnerable, variable quick of the man was inaccessible. (p.443)

And the mood in the build-up to Christmas.

Everywhere was a sense of mystery and rousedness. Everybody was preparing for something.

Nature poetry

The period just before the First World War saw an efflorescence of nature writing, a gaggle of so-so poets jostling to describe what was coming to feel like the disappearing landscapes of rural England. Edward Thomas was probably to emerge as the best of these but he only started writing his magical poetry once the Great War commenced. Anyway, Lawrence describes nature with the same bright vivid intensity he depicts his humans. They’re relatively rare, his straight nature descriptions, but when they occur, they are like the brightest nature photography.

The year drew on, in the hedges the berries shone red and twinkling above bare twigs, robins were seen, great droves of birds dashed like spray from the fallow, rooks appeared, black and flapping down to earth, the ground was cold as he pulled the turnips, the roads were churned deep in mud…

And yet a deep characteristic of Lawrence is that he doesn’t describe nature as an outsider, as a bourgeois tourist, but always relates it to the hard, muddy lives of the farmers he’s depicting. Sparkling nature is embedded in the world of human labour.

The year drew on, in the hedges the berries shone red and twinkling above bare twigs, robins were seen, great droves of birds dashed like spray from the fallow, rooks appeared, black and flapping down to earth, the ground was cold as he pulled the turnips, the roads were churned deep in mud. Then the turnips were pitted and work was slack.

For me, reading the first version of this paragraph without the final sentence lacks something. When you add in those final nine words, the whole rhythm of the paragraph seems complete. Here’s a selection of his nature writing.

Corn harvest came on. One evening they walked out through the farm buildings at nightfall. A large gold moon hung heavily to the grey horizon, trees hovered tall, standing back in the dusk, waiting. (p.121)

The young people went home as a sharp little moon was setting in the dusk of spring. Tufts of trees hovered in the upper air, the little church pricked up shadowily at the top of the hill, the earth was a dark blue shadow. She put her hand lightly on his arm, out of her far distance. And out of the distance, he felt her touch him. They walked on, hand in hand, along opposite horizons, touching across the dusk. There was a sound of thrushes calling in the dark blue twilight. (p.178)

How lovely was the sunshine that loitered and wandered out of doors, where the catkins on the big hazel bushes at the end of the garden hung in their shaken, floating aureole, where little fumes like fire burst out from the black yew trees as a bird settled clinging to the branches. One day bluebells were along the hedge-bottoms, then cowslips twinkled like manna, golden and evanescent on the meadows.

The dim blue-and-gold of a hot, sweet autumn saw the close of the corn-harvest. To Ursula, it was as if the world had opened its softest purest flower, its chicory flower, its meadow saffron. The sky was blue and sweet, the yellow leaves down the lane seemed like free, wandering flowers as they chittered round the feet, making a keen, poignant, almost unbearable music to her heart. And the scents of autumn were like a summer madness to her. She fled away from the little, purple-red button-chrysanthemums like a frightened dryad, the bright yellow little chrysanthemums smelled so strong, her feet seemed to dither in a drunken dance. (p.308)

There was a place where she went trespassing to find the snowdrops that grew wild. It was evening and the winter-darkened meadows were full of mystery. When she came to the woods an oak tree had been newly chopped down in the dell. Pale drops of flowers glimmered many under the hazels, and by the sharp, golden splinters of wood that were splashed about, the grey-green blades of snowdrop leaves pricked unheeding, the drooping still little flowers were without heed. Ursula picked some lovingly, in an ecstasy. The golden chips of wood shone yellow like sunlight, the snowdrops in the twilight were like the first stars of night. And she, alone amongst them, was wildly happy to have found her way into such a glimmering dusk, to the intimate little flowers, and the splash of wood chips like sunshine over the twilight of the ground.

The plot = four generations of the Brangwen family

The Marsh farm in the valley of the river Erewash, not far from the village of Cossethay in one direction and the town of Ilkeston further away. In the 1840s a canal was built across their land and then a railway on a viaduct.

At the back a confusion of sheds spread into the home-close from out of two or three indistinct yards. The duck-pond lay beyond the furthest wall, littering its white feathers on the padded earthen banks, blowing its stray soiled feathers into the grass and the gorse bushes below the canal embankment, which rose like a high rampart near at hand, so that occasionally a man’s figure passed in silhouette, or a man and a towing horse traversed the sky.

First generation – Alfred Brangwen

Alfred Brangwen of this period married a woman from Heanor, a daughter of the ‘Black Horse’. They had four sons and two daughters. The eldest boy ran away to sea and did not come back.

The second boy, Alfred, became a draughtsman in a lace-factory in Nottingham, stifling his native creativity. He married the daughter of a chemist, became something of a snob, in later life took to womanising.

The third son, Frank, became a butcher, at eighteen married a little factory girl, who bore him numerous children. In later life he became a drunk and a bore.

Of the daughters, Alice, the elder, married a collier and lived for a time stormily in Ilkeston, before moving away to Yorkshire with her numerous young family. Effie, the younger, remained at home.

Second generation – Tom Brangwen marries Lydia

The story follows the youngest son, Tom Brangwen, from boyhood to manhood. He struggles at school. When he was 17 his father fell and broke his neck, leaving just him, his mother and Effie in the farm. When he was 23 his mother died leaving him and Effie. They quarrel a lot. He takes a corner at the local pub to keep out of the way. Then Effie got married and moved out, leaving Tom with Tilly, the cross-eyed servant girl.

The story describes him having pre-marital sex several times, first time with a prostitute, next time with a girl he meets from a group at the pub, the glory and bewilderment of it. One day he sees a small woman dressed in black shepherding a child, walking the other way up the hill. One thing leads to another and he starts to woo her.

She is Lydia Lensky, of German descent, who married a Polish doctor who got caught up in the Polish Rebellion (spring 1863), was forced to flee, arriving in London (recapped pages 256 to 258). The doctor died and she threw herself upon charities who found her work caring for old single vicars, first one in Yorkshire, now one in Derbyshire.

Tom woos her over months, then one evening carries a bunch of daffodils he’s picked to the vicarage to propose to here. They are married. Account of his winning over Lydia’s feisty young daughter by her deceased doctor husband, Anna Lensky. Lydia bears him a son but Tom always stays closer to Anna.

She [Anna] was, however, only eighteen when a letter came from Mrs Alfred Brangwen, in Nottingham, saying that her son William was coming to Ilkeston to take a place as junior draughtsman, scarcely more than apprentice, in a lace factory. He was twenty years old, and would the Marsh Brangwens be friendly with him.

Will Brangwen, comes to visit and the narrative describes their slowly falling in love, till they are regularly meeting for illicit hugs and kisses in the cowshed. One time father Tom spies them, doesn’t interfere but is upset at the thought of losing his beloved daughter.

Third generation – Anna marries Will Brangwen

Will and Anna marry. It is a very stormy relationship, Anna being independent and headstrong but Will subject to black rages. Tom leases them a cottage of their own, Ivy Cottage.

Tom Brangwen had taken them a cottage at Cossethay, on a twenty-one years’ lease. Will Brangwen’s eyes lit up as he saw it. It was the cottage next the church, with dark yew-trees, very black old trees, along the side of the house and the grassy front garden; a red, squarish cottage with a low slate roof, and low windows. It had a long dairy-scullery, a big flagged kitchen, and a low parlour, that went up one step from the kitchen. There were whitewashed beams across the ceilings, and odd corners with cupboards. Looking out through the windows, there was the grassy garden, the procession of black yew trees down one side, and along the other sides, a red wall with ivy separating the place from the high-road and the churchyard. The old, little church, with its small spire on a square tower, seemed to be looking back at the cottage windows.

Will retains a lifelong interest in Christianity and church architecture, he feels liberated into eternity by it, whereas Anna sees only the finite stone building which feels man-made and cramped next to the wide universe.

Fourth generation – Ursula and Gudrun

Anna bears several children. The first is a daughter, Ursula. Will is still just 22 (p.214) and falls helplessly for this first daughter. Barely a year later another girl, Theresa. Two years later, Gudrun (p.219). Then Catherine. By the time he’s 26, Will has four children. By the time he’s 30, five (p.238).

Anna becomes totally self sufficient in being a mother which drives him to seek fulfilment elsewhere. But after failed attempts to chat up girls in Nottingham, he returns home more ironic and alienated and, paradoxically, this makes him more attractive to Anna, and they embark on a renewed sex life.

(Anna’s father, Ursula’s grandfather, Tom, dies in a flood, when torrential rain bursts the canal bank and floods the Marsh, he being drunk and riding back from a day in town. His son, Tom, works away and so the second son, Alfie, inherits the Marsh.)

Ursula is 8 when her father, Will, sets up woodwork classes in the local church for village boys (p.239). Ursula is conscious of a difference from the poor families in the village and gets into fights. Her parents send her to Nottingham Grammar School where she is thirsty for knowledge but not systematic. As she hits adolescence she undergoes intense religious experiences, though contradictory, rebelling against the literal interpretation of Jesus, wanting a more sensual religious rapture or ecstasy.

She feels hampered by being the eldest in a house full of children, by ‘the perpetual tyranny of young children’.

She’s just short of 16 (‘a slim, smouldering girl, deeply reticent… sensitive in the extreme, always tortured, always affecting a callous indifference’) when young Anton Skrebensky, son of the friend of the Brangwen family’s, turns up, aged 21 and in the army and wonderfully confident and self possessed.

History, breasts, the rest of England

History With the arrival of Ursula something happens: the narrative seems to emerge from a kind of unspecified timelessness, from ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’, and into something more like the modern, historical, recorded world. This is signalled by specific historical references: at first the vague one to ‘the Mahdi’, which could derive from a long period, but then the extremely specific one marking the exact start of the (second) Boer War (October 1899) and intermittently chronicles the progress of the war via letters from Anton Skrebensky who serves in it.

Breasts I’ve added ‘breasts’ to this heading for a specific reason. When Lawrence described the previous generations of womenfolk – the woman from Heanor, Lydia Lensky, Anna Brangwen – there was a great deal of Lawrence’s characteristically ripe and florid prose about their love affairs but it was all described in general terms, about completion and fulfilment, even when she clasped his firm body or he pulled her towards him, it’s in a generalised kind of way, very rarely is there a reference to physical particularities (apart from height, body shape, facial features).

My point is that when Ursula arrives, she does so accompanied for the first time by 1) specific historical references and 2) by the word ‘breasts’. We learn that women have, not a vague ‘bosom’ which heaves with passion, but two breasts which are revealed when they strip naked. Ursula strips for her lesbian lover and they both have breasts. Thus the women cease being almost abstract principles of femininity (although they retain all those aspects) but now become real, physical women. You have for the first time real nudity.

The rest of England And the rest of England starts to appear. Up till now, a little over half-way through, the narrative took place in an almost abstract rural background with very limited horizons. The nearby village of Cossethay, the town of Ilkeston on its hill which can be seen from Marsh Farm, those are the borders of the narrative’s world, that is all the country the characters know or need to know.

But with the arrival of Ursula, suddenly we are turfed out of the primal dream of the first half and dumped into contemporary England, the England of economics and coal mines and imperial wars, of politicians in London. It is a shock when Skrebensky’s barracks at Salisbury is mentioned, or the fact that Fred Brangwen’s bride, Laura, attended Salisbury Training College. Naming mundane places in England seems like a crashing come-down after the primal semi-abstract setting of the first half. Even more so when Ursula applies for teaching jobs at Gillingham in Kent or Kingston-on-Thames in Surrey. I’d spent so long in Lawrence World that I’d forgotten such boring and mundane places existed. As with the history and the breasts of naked women, it feels like the narrative emerges from a kind of ahistorical dreamtime into the modern world of real people with physical bodies scrabbling for jobs.

Ursula’s story

Anton goes to war Ursula has a romantic involvement with the dashing son of friends of the family, Anton Skrebensky, but comes to see he is too conventional. By the time he is called on duty to serve in the Boer War (started October 1899) Ursula is over him. He writes a few letters which she loses.

Lesbian Miss Inger She has a schoolgirl crush on her grammar school teacher Miss Winifred Inger, which develops into a lesbian affair. Miss Inger invites her to stay with her at a bungalow with a lake where they go swimming, kiss and appear to have sex. But after a while Ursula comes to find her too ‘hippy’ and ‘clayey’ and stops feeling so intensely. In fact, she manages to marry Winifred off to her Uncle Tom. There’s a vivid portrait of an extended visit to Uncle Tom Brangwen, who is the manager of a horrible modern filthy colliery in the brand new red-brick town of Wiggleston. He explains how the coalminers are like faceless units who have adapted themselves to their horrible work and their horrible homes, They stay for weeks. Uncle Tom is experienced and cynical, he just wants someone to breed with (p.352). One night Miss Inger slips into Ursula’s bed to ask her whether she should accept Tom’s proposal. Coldly, Ursula say yes. Miss Inger goes back to her own bed to cry.

Applying to become a teacher When school ends Ursula is dumped back in the cottage (Yew Cottage) overflowing with kids and babies and hates it. She writes to her headmistress who advises her to become a teacher. She should earn in the region of fifty pounds a year. (Interestingly, her father estimates that, from his work and a private income of Anna’s, he earns about £400 a year. Compare with Margaret and Helen Schlegel, who each have annual unearned income of £600 pa i.e. £1,200 combined.)

Ursula applies through a central agency and receives interested replies from schools in Gillingham, Kingston and Swanwick (p.362). But her father (Will Brangwen), now well entrenched in restoring the church next door, playing the organ and supervising the choir, refuses to let her go as far away as London. Instead he finds a school in the slum quarter of Ilkeston, St. Philip’s Church School in Brinsley Street (p.367).

(Incidentally, 2 years earlier her grandmother, Lydia, had died; seeing as old Tom died in the flood years earlier, Marsh Farm passes to their second son, Uncle Fred and his wife whose marriage Ursula attended with Skrebensky, where she wanted to expose her breasts to the huge moon, p.368.)

Teaching The headmaster, Mr Harby, ‘a short, thick-set, rather common man’ with complete control of the school and its hundreds of boisterous children. She is a hopeless failure at keeping discipline and standards with her 55 (!) small children. The head master comes to loathe her. She is still only 17 (p.393).

She hates teaching. The pupils are wildly disobedient and violent, kicking her, throwing stones at her. In a major learning she loses her temper and thrashes a boy to a whimpering wreck. Then does it again to another. Now the children are scared of her, but she has hardened her heart.

Suffragettism and feminism

She and Maggie, in their dinner-hours and their occasional teas at the little restaurant, discussed life and ideas. Maggie was a great suffragette, trusting in the vote. To Ursula the vote was never a reality. She had within her the strange, passionate knowledge of religion and living far transcending the limits of the automatic system that contained the vote. But her fundamental, organic knowledge had as yet to take form and rise to utterance. For her, as for Maggie, the liberty of woman meant something real and deep. She felt that somewhere, in something, she was not free. And she wanted to be. She was in revolt. For once she were free she could get somewhere. Ah, the wonderful, real somewhere that was beyond her, the somewhere that she felt deep, deep inside her.

That deeply-felt sense of injustice, that you’re put down and held back merely by virtue of being a woman, explains feminism’s deep and abiding and universal hold over billions of women, but also why it is so incoherent, contradictory and impractical as anything like a set of beliefs or demands. Because it’s a deep gut conviction which can express itself in a myriad different ways.

Maggie Schofield She becomes friends with another young teacher, Maggie Schofield. They eat packed lunches together in the nearby churchyard. Ursula goes to stay at Maggie’s home, in the grounds of a fine house where her brothers are caretakers and gardeners. She is set a-flutter by Maggie’s older brother, Anthony, with his eyes like a goat, and walks and talks with him, but when he proposes she gently says no. She knows she is a wandering spirit.

She buys a bicycle I’ve repeatedly read that bicycles were the great liberating invention of the 1890s. There was a widespread bicycle craze and countless cycling clubs were set up. The device was especially important for women because it allowed women, for the first time in history, to travel widely and freely beyond their homes and without male chaperones. A paragraph indicates that Ursula and Maggie fully participate in this new freedom.

She and Maggie went to all kinds of places together, to big suffrage meetings in Nottingham, to concerts, to theatres, to exhibitions of pictures. Ursula saved her money and bought a bicycle, and the two girls rode to Lincoln, to Southwell, and into Derbyshire. They had an endless wealth of things to talk about. And it was a great joy, finding, discovering.

(Compare the bicycle as agent for freedom in H.G. Wells’s novel, Ann Veronica, and the brief mention and photo of lady bicyclists in my review of Oscar Wilde’s London.)

Outgrowing Cossethay The Brangwen clan have always felt themselves superior to the villagers. In fact it’s one of the earliest themes, sounded in the book’s opening pages. When her parents decide to move away from Cossethay Ursula is delighted. She, too, needs to leave. The locals:

They quoted this and that about her. And she was ashamed because she did feel different from the people she had lived amongst. It hurt her that she could not be at her ease with them any more. And yet — and yet — one’s kite will rise on the wind as far as ever one has string to let it go. It tugs and tugs and will go, and one is glad the further it goes, even it everybody else is nasty about it. So Cossethay hampered her, and she wanted to go away, to be free to fly her kite as high as she liked. She wanted to go away, to be free to stand straight up to her own height. (p.419)

Will Brangwen gains a position After decades of plugging away at his wood carving, Will Brangwen is invited to apply for the job of Art and Handwork Instructor for the County of Nottingham. His salary will be £200 a year (p.429). To do this he will have to be located more centrally and so he, Anna and the remaining children leave Yew Cottage and move to a big red-brick villa at a place named Willey Green, on the edge of the sprawling colliery-townlet of Beldover. Will Brangwen, like the novel as a whole, since Ursula arrived, ‘must become modern’ (p.421). Ursula, as the eldest, helps with the move to the new house (we are told the astonishing fact that the Brangwen family now numbers ten! – no wonder Ursula complained about the tyranny of children, toddlers and babies everywhere).

Ursula starts college She completes her two years at St Phillips school and enrols to do an art degree at University College Nottingham (a constituent college of the University of London which didn’t become the University of Nottingham until 1948).

She studies for three years. At first the college seems a magical place of learning, linking back to the medieval origins of education. But by the second year she’s come to realise the lecturers are not priests of higher wisdom but retailers of second hands goods. All the subjects come to bore her. Cynically, she realises they are just being trained to add to their commercial value.

In her third year she is 22. She gets a letter from Skrebensky. It is six years since their last meeting, so, since he went off to the war in October 1899, it must be 1905.

Ursula finds the meaning of life Pages 441 to 442. In science classes, Ursula is given a lecturer, Dr Frankstone, who puts forward the extreme rationalist argument that, from a scientific point of view, there is nothing special about life which, after all, follows the laws of physics, chemistry, biology. But Ursula rebels against this scientific materialism, in these terms:

Suddenly in her mind the world gleamed strangely, with an intense light, like the nucleus of the creature under the microscope. Suddenly she had passed away into an intensely-gleaming light of knowledge. She could not understand what it all was. She only knew that it was not limited mechanical energy, nor mere purpose of self-preservation and self-assertion. It was a consummation, a being infinite. Self was a oneness with the infinite. To be oneself was a supreme, gleaming triumph of infinity. (p.441)

Ursula loses her virginity Anton Skrebensky writes to say he’s in England, does she want to meet? They meet in Nottingham and go for many walks. She is transfigured by his presence and he declares he still loves her. He tells her stories of his years in Africa and weaves a spell, a mystique around the darkness of the African night, ‘massive and fluid with terror’, and this becomes the motif of their meetings, ‘darkness’ and the ‘fecundity’ of the night become the key words of these passages. They appear to fall in love all over again and kiss in kisses described with great sensual beauty by Lawrence.

So they stood in the utter, dark kiss, that triumphed over them both, subjected them, knitted them into one fecund nucleus of the fluid darkness. It was bliss, it was the nucleolating of the fecund darkness. Once the vessel had vibrated till it was shattered, the light of consciousness gone, then the darkness reigned, and the unutterable satisfaction. They stood enjoying the unmitigated kiss, taking it, giving to it endlessly, and still it was not exhausted. Their veins fluttered, their blood ran together as one stream.

See what I mean about the poetry of Lawrence’s primal, elemental view of human existence, transformed and transported into a mystical realm. One walk leads them to a shade of an old oak tree and it is here that they finally go beyond kisses and Ursula appears to lose her virginity.

He came to her finally in a superb consummation. It was very dark, and again a windy, heavy night. They had come down the lane towards Beldover, down to the valley. They were at the end of their kisses, and there was the silence between them…

They walk on to an old oak tree, swaying in the wind, and lie down under it, and this, I think, is Lawrence’s description of Ursula losing her virginity:

Then he turned and kissed her, and she waited for him. The pain to her was the pain she wanted, the agony was the agony she wanted. She was caught up, entangled in the powerful vibration of the night. The man, what was he? — a dark, powerful vibration that encompassed her. She passed away as on a dark wind, far, far away, into the pristine darkness of paradise, into the original immortality. She entered the dark fields of immortality. (p.451)

1) Note how ungraphic this is, how hedged around and muted and euphemised. I take it the sentence describing the act is ‘The pain to her was the pain she wanted, the agony was the agony she wanted’ which is the opposite of explicit. Lawrence characteristically turns it into an elemental moment, fraught with Biblical overtones (the ‘agony’ of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane) which would have infuriated Christian traditionalists. 2) But barely is the sentence over before we are swept away on a great wind of gassy abstractions, off into paradise.

(When E.M. Forster does this, moves from the concrete moment up into one of his pagan or classical references, it is objectionable because it feels so limp and polite. By contrast I find Lawrence’s deployment of a similar trajectory, from the concrete to the abstract, convincing because he is so sincere. He really means it.)

Contemporary Edwardian readers would have been scandalised that Ursula feels absolutely no shame or regret about having pre-marital sex: ‘She was not ashamed — why should she be?’ But it’s worse than that because Lawrence portrays sex as the main way to become fully human, to complete yourself. And in so doing, achieve that annihilation of the external world which all his characters seek.

When she rose, she felt strangely free, strong… She had taken him, they had been together… But it was as if she had received another nature. She belonged to the eternal, changeless place into which they had leapt together… Her soul was sure and indifferent of the opinion of the world of artificial light. As they went up the steps of the foot-bridge over the railway, and met the train-passengers, she felt herself belonging to another world, she walked past them immune, a whole darkness dividing her from them… This curious separate strength, that existed in darkness and pride of night, never forsook her. She had never been more herself. (p.452)

Instead of being a dirty, shameful act which requires ages of guilt and atonement, Lawrence depicts unmarried sex as a complete liberation of her, a fortification, a making of her character, a giving of strength and inner certainty which will never leave her.

She was perfectly sure of herself, perfectly strong, stronger than all the world. The world was not strong — she was strong. The world existed only in a secondary sense: — she existed supremely. (p.452)

This is a powerfully non-conformist point of view, in our own times as much as Lawrence’s. Sex has completed her and now they both stand outside all conventional values, free and utterly independent.

They had revoked altogether the ordinary mortal world. Their confidence was like a possession upon them. They were possessed. Perfectly and supremely free they felt, proud beyond all question, and surpassing mortal conditions.

Holiday in London Anton proposes marriage (the decent thing) but Ursula, strong-headed as always, refuses. Instead they go for an extended holiday to London, where they live under false pretences as Mr and Mrs Skrebensky in a hotel in Piccadilly. Living in sin, as the Establishment would call it until the 1970s or ’80s, maybe still in some Christian or religious communities.

To France On a whim Ursula demands they go to France. They catch the train to Paris, which isn’t described at all, then she wants to go to Rouen, and the one-sentence description of the great cathedral for a moment revives the reader’s memory of Will and Anna in Lincoln cathedral. As their short break draws to an end she beings to draw apart from him.

Back in England she goes back to Nottingham and Anton is left bereft in London. He drinks at his club. He pesters her to get engaged. He has six months before his posting to India and wants to take her as a bride. He writes to her father, gets his permission, they are formally engaged, she gives him a ring.

Her final exams These have to be taken in London so she goes to stay in a pension near the British Museum. Anton sleeps with her. They go out west to a restaurant on the river near Richmond which is a disaster because Anton asks when she wants to be married and she says she doesn’t, and he starts crying, gets up and walks away crying, till she runs after him to dry his eyes and calm him down before they get a memorable cab back into London, getting out to walk through Hyde Park.

Failure and decision Ursula fails her third year exam. She does not get her BA. Anton is leaving for India in September. Ursula faces a decision: marry him and go to India to live the life of an army officer’s wife; or remain unmarried and become a spinster teacher. She consults Dorothy, pointing out she doesn’t believe in love, love isn’t the be-all and end-all, why shouldn’t she love many men? Dorothy points out how promiscuity ends badly. So, out of fear, she acquiesces and agrees to marry Anton.

The house party In August Anton invites her to a house party on the Lincolnshire coast being given by his great aunt, golf, tennis etc (p.476). Ursula is intimidated by all these worldly people, described with characteristic Lawrentian hyperbole.

She did not like it. In crowds, in assemblies of people, she liked formality. She felt she did not produce the right effect. She was not effective: she was not beautiful: she was nothing. (p.476)

She and Anton go for walks beside the sea and have sex among the sand dunes. These scenes, right at the end of this huge novel, feel like the most shameless and permissive. We are repeatedly told how Anton sneaks out of the room he’s sharing with another man, sneaks down the big house’s corridors and into Ursula’s room ‘when it’s safe’.

She let him take her, and he seemed mad, mad with excited passion. But she, as she lay afterwards on the cold, soft sand, looking up at the blotted, faintly luminous sky, felt that she was as cold now as she had been before. Yet he, breathing heavily, seemed almost savagely satisfied. (p.477)

But the point of these fornications is they slowly drive the pair apart until Ursula is utterly detached from them while Anton revels in his savage triumphs. When the time comes for her to catch a cab to the station they part as strangers. All this is interesting – the way you can have mad sex with someone and yet, on an emotional level, become more and more alienated. It’s a strange, uncanny thing which I think I’ve experienced myself and couldn’t be described by an author who politely omitted the entire sexual side of life.]

Anton marries Left bereft and empty, tortured by nights without the mad passion of Ursula, Anton acts decisively. He writes to the grown-up daughter of the colonel of his regiment, and proposes. Initially surprised, she replies, they correspond, she accepts, they are married in a fortnight, and Anton sails off to India a respectable married man. All this has a peculiar psych-sexual logic. It makes no rational sense but perfect emotional sense.

Ursula realises she’s pregnant Back at the (relatively new) family home in Beldover, Ursula repents her hardness to Anton. She realises she is pregnant with his child which transforms here view. She has an epiphany about the deep truth of motherhood, how it brings stability and identity. For the first time she realises the achievement of her mother, Anna, with her endless babies. She writes to Anton apologising, saying she will become his wife and come out to India, then waits for a reply. And waits…

The walk in the rain and the horses This extraordinary novel ends with an extraordinarily, hallucinatorily powerful scene. One windy rainy day Ursula goes for a walk across fields in the rain and has a terrifying encounter with a pack of horses, depicted as vast elemental, mythical forces. She becomes terrified and has to climb up a tree, through its branches and drop the other side of a hedge to escape them. After lying in a stupor against a tree in the rain, she finally makes it home and takes to her bed where she develops a fever that lasts for weeks.

Freedom In her delirium, she yearns for freedom from everything, society, the world, her lover, her parents, even from her own body.

If she could but extricate herself, if she could but disengage herself from feeling, from her body, from all the vast encumbrances of the world that was in contact with her, from her father, and her mother, and her lover, and all her acquaintance. Repeatedly, in an ache of utter weariness she repeated: ‘I have no father nor mother nor lover, I have no allocated place in the world of things, I do not belong to Beldover nor to Nottingham nor to England nor to this world, they none of them exist, I am trammelled and entangled in them, but they are all unreal. I must break out of it, like a nut from its shell which is an unreality.’

The fundamental Lawrence position: denial of the entire world in order to achieve complete freedom.

The rainbow In her recovery she realises she is not pregnant. She gets a brisk cablegram from Anton telling her he’s married. She doesn’t care, he is part of the old life. She sits in the windowseat watching the world go by, the shabby colliers and constrained women and watches the new housing estates being built across the hillsides, ‘a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land’, and is sickened by the world, she dreams of a new life, of a new germination, of new seed waiting to burst into life. And suddenly she sees a rainbow forming in the rainy skies, a symbol of hope for a new life.

And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill. And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming itself. In one place it gleamed fiercely, and, her heart anguished with hope, she sought the shadow of iris where the bow should be. Steadily the colour gathered, mysteriously, from nowhere, it took presence upon itself, there was a faint, vast rainbow. The arc bended and strengthened itself till it arched indomitable, making great architecture of light and colour and the space of heaven, its pedestals luminous in the corruption of new houses on the low hill, its arch the top of heaven.

And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.

God, what a magnificent, hallucinatory, overwhelming work of genius!

Memorable scenes

The description of Frank watching farm hands carrying fresh sides of beef from the slaughterhouse.

Tom taking a bouquet of daffodils to woo Lydia Lensky.

Married Tom Brangwen taking toddler Anna to the market with him, how she outbraves the other farmers.

Tom Brangwen takes toddler Anna out to the cowshed to stop her crying.

Young toddler Ursula running across the fields to meet her daddy, Will, from work.

Her father, Tom, drowning in the great flood.

Married Will, after an argument with Anna, picks up a young woman at the theatre and takes her to a dark park where they kiss and he is dazed with lust but she says no and breaks away.

Anton Skrebensky takes Ursula to a funfair in Derby. Weeks later, on his last day, they go to town then he brings her home in a crazy car ride.

Ursula thrashing the rat-like schoolboy Williams.

The walk through the snowy park when Maggie Schofield’s brother, Anthony, proposes to her. The snow and birds in the snow are beautifully done.

Anton and Ursula in Lincolnshire, she dancing in the waves, he caressing her body through her long Edwardian dress, sex in the sand dunes.

Lawrence and imperialism

Skrebensky is in the British Army, the Royal Engineers or Sappers, to be precise (p.474). When Ursula asks whether he enjoys the army Anton explains the need for an army and references the triumph of the Mahdi in Sudan. The Mahdi’s forces took Khartoum after a year-long siege and killed the British barrack, including General Gordon, on 26 January 1885. The British public clamoured for revenge but it was a long time coming and the extensive Mahdist state wasn’t overthrown by British forces until 1899. Ursula and Anton’s conversation takes place sometime during this long interval, 1885 to 1899.

I’ll quote Ursula and Anton’s dialogue in its entirety because it demonstrates Lawrence’s relentless focus on the personal. There may be wars and fighting and such, but they mean nothing next to his characters’ quest to find themselves and be themselves. Ursula is talking and Anton replies:

‘It seems just as much a game.’
‘If you call war a game.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s about the most serious business there is, fighting.’
A sense of hard separateness came over her.
‘Why is fighting more serious than anything else?’ she asked.
‘You either kill or get killed — and I suppose it is serious enough, killing.’
‘But when you’re dead you don’t matter any more,’ she said.
He was silenced for a moment.
‘But the result matters,’ he said. ‘It matters whether we settle the Mahdi or not.’
‘Not to you — nor me — we don’t care about Khartoum.’
‘You want to have room to live in: and somebody has to make room.’
‘But I don’t want to live in the desert of Sahara — do you?’ she replied, laughing with antagonism.
‘I don’t — but we’ve got to back up those who do.’
‘Why have we?’
‘Where is the nation if we don’t?’
‘But we aren’t the nation. There are heaps of other people who are the nation.’
‘They might say they weren’t either.’
‘Well, if everybody said it, there wouldn’t be a nation. But I should still be myself,’ she asserted brilliantly.
‘You wouldn’t be yourself if there were no nation.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’d just be a prey to everybody and anybody.’
‘How a prey?’
‘They’d come and take everything you’d got.’
‘Well, they couldn’t take much even then. I don’t care what they take. I’d rather have a robber who carried me off than a millionaire who gave me everything you can buy.’
‘That’s because you are a romanticist.’
‘Yes, I am. I want to be romantic. I hate houses that never go away, and people just living in the houses. It’s all so stiff and stupid. I hate soldiers, they are stiff and wooden. What do you fight for, really?’
‘I would fight for the nation.’
‘For all that, you aren’t the nation. What would you do for yourself?’
‘I belong to the nation and must do my duty by the nation.’
‘But when it didn’t need your services in particular—when there is no fighting? What would you do then?
He was irritated.
‘I would do what everybody else does.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I would be in readiness for when I was needed.’
The answer came in exasperation.
‘It seems to me,’ she answered, ‘as if you weren’t anybody — as if there weren’t anybody there, where you are. Are you anybody, really? You seem like nothing to me.’

You can see why they both become irritated with each other. There is no breaking down Ursula’s focus on the personal and her light mockery of Anton’s earnestness, which is mockery of his entire profession and commitment. You can pick different bits to make different points, but for me the key statement is Ursula saying: ‘But we aren’t the nation. There are heaps of other people who are the nation.’ It is a manifesto for complete irresponsibility. Whatever it is, other people will do it while we concentrate on living our best lives, discovering ourselves, expressing ourselves.

I thought that this dialogue happened any time during that 14 year period of Mahdist rule, as indicated above, until page 326 when, the narrative tells us, war is declared against the Boers i.e. 11 October 1899. This triggers a couple of pages repeating Anton’s belief that individual needs and feelings must be subordinated to the needs of the whole, the state, the community.

Who was he, to hold important his personal connection? What did a man matter personally? He was just a brick in the whole great social fabric, the nation, the modern humanity. His personal movements were small, and entirely subsidiary. The whole form must be ensured, not ruptured, for any personal reason whatsoever, since no personal reason could justify such a breaking. What did personal intimacy matter? One had to fill one’s place in the whole, the great scheme of man’s elaborate civilization, that was all.

Which is, of course, the precise opposite of Lawrence’s position. For Lawrence, the community or ‘civilisation’ is an abstract term which is derived from individuals but individuals are concrete entities while civilisation is a word. Later on, we are told Uncle Tom Brangwen’s similarly cavalier attitude.

About all the rest, he was oblivious, and entirely indifferent — even about the war. The nation did not exist to him. He was in a private retreat of his own, that had neither nationality, nor any great adherent.

From what I know this was Lawrence’s essentially unpatriotic attitude to the Great War (when this book was published) and contributed to his bad reputation and unpopularity.

(Note: interesting that both classics, ‘Howards End’ and ‘The Rainbow’, contain fragments of imperialism. In ‘Howards End’ Mr Wilcox’s company made its fortune in West Africa – when Margaret visits his London office there’s a big map of West Africa on the wall – and the youngest son, Paul Wilcox, goes out to Nigeria as an imperial officer. Here in ‘The Rainbow’, Skrebensky is in the British Army and serves in the Boer War, remains in Africa for three more years, before being posted to India.)

Why Lawrence’s attitudes to sex, morality and Christianity got him into trouble

1. Lawrence’s sexual worldview

There’s not a lot of graphic sexual description – a quick check shows the word ‘breasts’, for example, only appears seven times in this huge text – but, as you’ve seen, Lawrence’s entire conception of human personality is based on this hyperbolic, super-exaggerated depiction of extremes of emotional and psychological and spiritual delirium and a crucial, central component of this is the vision of couples achieving an extraordinary physical and emotional communion. Sex sets them free.

The fact of their own consummate being made everything else so entirely subordinate that they were free. (p.452)

This is described again and again, with Tom and Lydia, Will and Anna, Ursula and Anton, in rhapsodies of bodies meeting and achieving consummation, which are modelled on and continually hint at sexual intercourse.

Although sex nowhere appears explicitly, a hyper-sexualised frame of mind, page after page of rhapsodic descriptions of psycho-physical unions, underpins the entire book.

This explains why, just a few months after its publication, ‘The Rainbow’ was prosecuted in an obscenity trial at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on 13 November 1915. As a result, the book was banned and 1,011 copies were seized and burned. It became unavailable in Britain for 11 years, although editions were available in the United States.

2. Lawrence’s characters’ complete indifference to social morality

Arguably, though, just as important in the Establishment’s widespread criticism of the book as its sexualised worldview, is the complete indifference of all his characters to conventional morality, and often their active rejection of it. They are barely aware of it, it never hampers or controls their behaviour. Of Anna, he writes:

She adhered as little as he to the moral world. (p.235)

And she stands for all the main characters: frankly, none of them give a damn what society thinks. Here are Ursula and Anton:

She gave the complete lie to all conventional life, he and she stood together, dark, fluid, infinitely potent, giving the living lie to the dead whole which contained them.

Lawrence goes out of his way to explain how each successive couple lives life on their own terms, heedless of any outside comments or values. When young Tom Brangwen loses his virginity to a prostitute at a pub, and then has sex with a woman he’s picked up in a pub out in the woods, he shows no remorse or Christian guilt. Lawrence just explores the impact on his emotions.

After Ursula loses her virginity, Lawrence goes out of his way to say she was not ashamed or embarrassed, just as she had the lesbian affair without any thought of outside values or strictures. When Will Brangwen tries to have his way with a girl he’s picked up at the theatre, in a dark public park, all this is described frankly and openly with none of the Christian or moralising commentary the Edwardian world demanded.

And after Ursula and Anton become lovers, they go on holiday to London and live in sin, unmarried but masquerading as Mr and Mrs Skrebensky, which was not only scandalous but probably against the law. They don’t care, they revel in their blithe rejection of all society’s values.

If I was an Edwardian moralist, preaching the stern requirements of Empire and Duty and Christian morality, the uniform indifference of all the main characters to social norms and values would upset me just as much as the impassioned sexualised descriptions.

(A side note on this: Uncle Tom Brangwen the colliery manager’s open cynicism about ‘morality’ when Ursula and Winifred go to stay with him i.e. the working classes can’t afford morality and don’t care. They leave that sort of thing to their betters who can afford ‘morality’, p.349.)

3. Lawrence and Christianity

This is too big a subject for me. It would take a book to describe and disentangle because all the main characters have complex responses to Christian teachings which change and develop over time. Lawrence is not unsympathetic to Christianity’s message and cultural significance. He was raised on it and it shows. It’s important that Will Brangwen is made very sympathetic to Christian belief, maintains the church next door to Yew Cottage, repairs the organ, leads the choir and so on. But it is all done in the Lawrentian style i.e. in terms of rhapsodies and ecstasies, depicting a kind of utterly amoral, sensual and rhapsodic type of Christianity which must have horrified contemporary churchmen.

For example, take the extraordinary scene set in Lincoln Cathedral where Will experiences a deeply religious experience and yet it is couched in unmistakably sexualised terms, with the soaring arches coming together in great climaxes of fulfilment. Not only that, but at the climax of that chapter, in an extraordinary narrative manoeuvre, the narrator himself becomes Jesus for the last few pages (281 to 282).

Lawrence has a lot of time for the historical, cultural and spiritual importance of the church and its traditions but it is a profoundly Lawrentified Christianity. He is clearly soaked in the Biblical tradition and from time to time makes Biblical comparisons, mentioning Pisgah or David or Samuel. But these have a different flavour to his citations from Jesus, which are weighed and assessed by characters.

In particular, an entire book could be written about the changing, evolving attitude of Ursula to Christianity. In her, Lawrence describes in some detail the changing beliefs of a sensitive young girl, from girlhood, through adolescence and into young adulthood. At one point there’s a passage of several pages where Ursula considers one by one the main teachings of Jesus and relates them to her own life.

‘Sell all thou hast, and give to the poor.’
Did she want to do that? Did she want to sell her pearl-backed brush and mirror, her silver candlestick, her pendant, her lovely little necklace, and go dressed in drab like the Wherrys?

This seems a fair thing for a novelist to do, to describe how their characters respond to Christian teaching and how that response changes as they grow and mature; something similar must have occurred in thousands of other coming-of-age novels. What most of them probably didn’t have so much is the earlier passages where the adolescent Ursula responds to Christian belief in purely sensual terms.

‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.’
It was the temporal answer she gave. She leapt with sensuous yearning to respond to Christ. If she could go to him really, and lay her head on his breast, to have comfort, to be made much of, caressed like a child!

Recap

So I’d have thought it was not just 1) the deeply sexualised worldview which underpins the entire book and is present in so many passages, which offended contemporary readers, but also 2) the characters’ complete indifference to convention values and social morality, and 3) Lawrence’s having an ostensibly serious, earnest feel for Christian teachings but again and again converting these into his hyper-sensualised worldview. I’d have thought it was all three aspects of this deeply unconventional and aggressively non-conformist writer which offended the powers that be, triggered scathing reviews and landing him in court.

Can a male author write women characters?

In quick succession I’ve read ‘Howards End’ and ‘The Rainbow’, both long novels written by men with strong women as the central figures, extended depictions of the deepest thoughts, feelings, sensations of strong characterful women, written by men.

More than once, as I read Forster and Lawrence’s descriptions of the deepest thoughts and feelings of their women characters, I’ve wondered, ‘Is any of this true? Or likely?’ As a heterosexual man living with a wife and daughter my experience is of being continually bewildered by the lack of communication or understanding between man and woman. And yet many women readers, for over a century, have loved the characters of Margaret Schlegel and Ursula Brangwen.

This is too big a question for me to work through or settle, I’m just pointing out the oddity of reading such extended depictions of the most private, intimate thoughts and feelings of women, written by men.

Criticisms

Unrealistic

The obvious criticism is that this is ludicrously unlike how people in the real world think, behave or speak. The defence is, How do you know? How do any of us know how other people are feeling, especially at the deep, emotional level Lawrence is obsessed with depicting?

Boring

Another obvious criticism is that it’s boring – 500 pages of characters all living on a kind of high wire of emotional intensity, described in page after page of rhapsodic prose-poetry, get pretty exhausting. You’d have thought so – all I can say is I found it exhilarating right up to the end.

You can’t ignore the world

A stronger criticism is to do with the tension between the characters and the real world. In a nutshell, Lawrence characters try to ignore and keep the real world at bay. Again and again his couples create a private world, often centred in the intimacy of their bedrooms, extending at most to other rooms in their household, and completely ignore the outside world. This works perfectly for Tom Brangwen whose farm is a sort of microcosm. For a long time it works for Will and Anna who make Yew Cottage and the nearby church into their entire world. But it breaks down in the figure of Ursula who, as I’ve described, brings real physicality, along with history, and then the harsh contemporary world of work into the novel, in the blunt form of the horrible school she teaches at, then Nottingham College.

Lawrence kept reminding me of the Jacobean poet John Donne, whose love poems are devoted to making ‘one little room an everywhere’. His characters are so intensely solipsistic that even when they’re out and about, going about their business, even when Tom Brangwen goes into Ilkeston on market day or Will Brangwen commutes to his office in Nottingham or Ursula takes the train to Nottingham Grammar School, still, somehow, they take their ‘one little room’, their imaginative universe, with them.

The criticism is that this is not a sustainable attitude. The world is the world, demands that we take it seriously, if only to earn a living, at which point we have to interact with all manner of other people, and, generally, lots of them. All of that Lawrence tries to keep at bay.

Seen from this perspective, the novel reflects a kind of primal conflict between the one little room of the characters’ intensive loves and the wider world of jobs and people. Viewed thus it falls into two halves. In the first half, the book succeeds in inhabiting a kind of timeless country idyll, almost untouched by the outside world, in which Marsh Farm is a kind of universe of its own, scene of Tom’s single and then married life, just as Yew Cottage represents the world created by Will and Anna, and all their children.

In the second half the novel emerges, with Ursula, into the light of day, engaging far more fully with the real world in all its complexity, father Will getting his inspectorate, the girls commuting to grammar school, Ursula getting her ill-fated teaching job, the children, the other teachers and so on.

But it isn’t a complete transformation. Ursula still battles hard against the influence of the outside world. She loathes the redbrick town where Uncle Tom has gone to live and is appalled by the empty shadow lives lived by its broken coalminers, just as she is appalled by the lives of the poor children she teaches, and the hard hearts of the other school teachers.

In the first half the characters live in an ahistorical world which is like a timeless dream, which is why I liked it so much. In the second half, the Ursula half, the mix is more half and half, Ursula’s many moods and rhapsodic emotions are more kettled by the real world, which all the time she tries to hold at bay.

I imagine critics have discovered all kinds of dichotomies in the text. The obvious one is between men and women. Then another obvious one, between town and country. But I suggest yet another dichotomy which dominates the text, echoing the town and country one in places, but lying deeper: this is the dichotomy between the ‘little room world’ each of the characters creates and treasures, and their rejection of and resistance against the Outside World. Again and again the characters seek to ridicule, belittle and abolish the outside world. Here’s Ursula walking through Nottingham, with its bright street lights and busy trams and panting trains, rejecting the lot:

‘The stupid, artificial, exaggerated town, fuming its lights. It does not exist really. It rests upon the unlimited darkness, like a gleam of coloured oil on dark water, but what is it? — nothing, just nothing.’

In the tram, in the train, she felt the same. The lights, the civic uniform was a trick played, the people as they moved or sat were only dummies exposed. She could see, beneath their pale, wooden pretence of composure and civic purposefulness, the dark stream that contained them all. They were like little paper ships in their motion. (pages 447 to 448)

And here’s Anton, from the same passage, rejecting the city and all its people:

He despised it all — it was all non-existent. Their good professors, their good clergymen, their good political speakers, their good, earnest women — all the time he felt his soul was grinning, grinning at the sight of them. So many performing puppets, all wood and rag for the performance! (p.449)

Lawrence characters don’t just criticise the external world, they seek to annihilate the outside world in order to let their inner worlds triumph, become the universe.

They were perfect, therefore nothing else existed. The world was a world of servants whom one civilly ignored. Wherever they went, they were the sensuous aristocrats, warm, bright, glancing with pure pride of the senses.

They alone inhabited the world of reality. All the rest lived on a lower sphere.

She was in some other land, some other world, where the old restraints had dissolved and vanished, where one moved freely, not afraid of one’s fellow men, nor wary, nor on the defensive, but calm, indifferent, at one’s ease. Vaguely, in a sort of silver light, she wandered at large and at ease. The bonds of the world were broken. This world of England had vanished away. (p.472)

But England hasn’t vanished, London hasn’t disappeared, the world of work and trains and trams resumes day after day, without respite.

Lawrence characters continually focus on their inner lives, feelings and emotions, scorning and rejecting almost everything about the outside world, and yet are still subject to its presence and pressure, which sometimes overwhelms them, but at other points they successfully obliterate. This, I think, is the fundamental dynamic driving this book.

The sequel

Originally Lawrence conceived of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’ as one massive novel which he considered titling ‘The Sisters’ and ‘The Wedding Ring’. It was his publisher, Methuen, who persuaded him to break it into two (still very long) works (both about 500 pages long). In the event, what with the negative reviews and then the legal banning of ‘The Rainbow’, Methuen chose not to publish the sequel.

Credit

‘The Rainbow’ by D.H. Lawrence was published in 1915 by Methuen and Co. References are to the 1977 Penguin paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on February 3, 2025

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Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster (1927)

‘Aspects of the Novel’ is based on a series of weekly lectures which E. M. Forster gave at Trinity College Cambridge in 1927, in which he discussed the English novel. Forster used examples from classic novels to describe what he claimed to be the seven universal aspects of the novel, namely:

  • story
  • characters
  • plot
  • fantasy
  • prophecy
  • pattern
  • rhythm

The book was mocked when I was a student for its rambling, amateurish, belle-lettreist approach, lacking all reference to any kind of smart theory. Forster knew it lacked intellectual depth and modestly described it as ‘a ramshackly survey’, but he deprecates to deceive. Although eschewing scholarship and expertise, he says many interesting things, and it’s fascinating to read the comments on eminent books and authors by one of themselves.

Introduction

Forster doesn’t make grand statements or general rules, in fact he’s all about how difficult it is to define or discuss the novel. What, even, is a novel?

He adapts the suggestion of Monsieur Abel Chevalley that it is ‘a fiction in prose of a certain length’, adding it probably needs to be over 50,000 words long. He doesn’t say this, but the issue reminds me of all those Joseph Conrad stories which are too long to be short stories but don’t quite make Forster’s word count. ‘Heart of Darkness’ is 37,906 words long. Is it a novel or a novella? D.H. Lawrence wrote half a dozen works more complex than short stories, but without the full weight and length of novels, so they are called novellas.

Forster wants to talk about the ‘English’ novel, so what does ‘English’ mean in this context? Does it refer to the country? No. To any long fiction work written in English.

It’s notable that Forster doesn’t worry about the implications of American fiction swamping British fiction. In 1927 maybe it was still seen as the poor relation. He’s much more concerned with the influence on the English novel of the Continent. But this, he says, is in fact negligible. English fictions writers are sometimes influenced by the French, but rarely by the Spanish, Italian, Germans or any other national literature. In this, as everything else, the English are insular and generally hold aloof from the Continent.

But he makes a few chastening points about English fiction in a nominal league table of achievement:

No English novelist is as great as Tolstoy—that is to say has given so complete a picture of man’s life, both on its domestic and heroic side. No English novelist has explored man’s soul as deeply as Dostoevsky. And no novelist anywhere has analysed the modern consciousness as successfully as Marcel Proust.

English poetry is world class. English fiction less so. He cites Bronte, Hardy, Gaskell, Meredith and says they’re fine in their way, often give vivid portraits of particularly English areas and types. But set next to War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov? No.

He is extremely averse to the notion of ‘periods’ (the Victorian novel, ‘Edwardian fiction’ etc) much beloved by academics. Ditto the idea of ‘influence’, that this or that writer is writing under, or seeking to evade, the influence of this or that other writer.

Forster prefers to think of all the writers he deals with sitting in the British Library Reading Room with pens in hand, at the same time, dealing with the same kinds of problems, unaffected by their times or predecessors, an attitude he summarises as:

History develops, Art stands still.

A note on scholarship. Genuine scholarship, defined as having read everything in your subject and something from around the fringes and having taste and discrimination, is extremely rare. Most people are pseudo-scholars who know about particular authors or periods. This is why pseudo-scholarship likes specialising in particular periods, or authors, or subjects, and compiles a mocking list.

The literature of Inns, beginning with Tom Jones; the literature of the Women’s Movement, beginning with Shirley; the literature of Desert Islands, from Robinson Crusoe to The Blue Lagoon; the literature of Rogues—dreariest of all, though the Open Road runs it pretty close…

Obviously all these objections have been swept away by a century of pseudo-scholarship. His approach is going to be to quote from various classic novelists and make comments.

He gives passages from Samuel Richardson and Henry James before making the point that both are anxious rather than ardent psychologists. Each is sensitive to suffering and appreciates self-sacrifice but falls short of the tragic, though a close approach is made.

Then H.G. Wells (Mr Polly) and Dickens (Great Expectations). They are both humorists and visualizers who get an effect by cataloguing details. They are generous-minded and hate shams. They are valuable social reformers. Sometimes the lively surface of their prose scratches like a cheap gramophone record, a certain poorness of quality appears. Neither of them has much taste: the world of beauty was largely closed to Dickens, and is entirely closed to Wells.

Then Tristram Shandy and Virginia Woolf. They are both fantasists. They start with a little object, take a flutter from it, and settle on it again. They combine a humorous appreciation of the muddle of life with a keen sense of its beauty. There is a rather deliberate bewilderment, an announcement to all and sundry that they do not know where they are going. But their tones are very different. Sterne is a sentimentalist, Virginia Woolf is extremely aloof. Virginia Woolf’s her aim and general effect both resemble Sterne’s (discuss).

Technique changes and develops. Sterne and Woolf may have certain things in common but Woolf’s way of expressing them is more developed and advanced.

Anti-theory (obviously). The Bloomsbury emphasis on friendship and affection as the ultimate moral criteria.

Principles and systems may suit other forms of art, but they cannot be applicable here… I am afraid it will be the human heart, it will be this man-to-man business, justly suspect in its cruder forms. The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Sentimentality… will lurk in the background saying, ‘Oh, but I like that,’ ‘Oh, but that doesn’t appeal to me,’ and all I can promise is that sentimentality shall not speak too loudly or too soon. The intensely, stiflingly human quality of the novel is not to be avoided. The novel is sogged with humanity; there is no escaping the uplift or the downpour, nor can they be kept out of criticism.

Story

The basis of a novel is a story, and a story is a narrative of events arranged in time sequence

He postulates three (rather wishy-washy silly) attitudes to story in the novel, and says his one is:

Yes — oh, dear, yes — the novel tells a story.

He is really against the need for a story in a novel. Some call it the backbone of the text, but he calls it the tapeworm. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist.

He calls it the ‘low atavistic form’ and paints a picture of the crudest Neanderthal people sitting round a fire at the end of a day hunting mammoth and being enthralled by the group’s resident storyteller, the urge to tell goes back that far and the urge to hang on each development of the plot.

The classic example is the Thousand and One Nights in which Scheherazade tells a story each night but ends abruptly when the sun rises, this keeping her wicked husband in perpetual suspense to hear what happens next.

We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next. That is universal and that is why the backbone of a novel has to be a story. Some of us want to know nothing else—there is nothing in us but primeval curiosity, and consequently our other literary judgments are ludicrous. And now the story can be defined. It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence — dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death, and so on. Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next. These are the only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story. It is the lowest and simplest of literary organisms. Yet it is the highest factor common to all the very complicated organisms known as novels.

He then posits two ways of thinking about time. One is pure chronology, one event after another, what he calls the time-sense. But there is also ‘life by values’ where we live for, and remember, only certain special intense moments. The cheapest novels (typically, detective novels and thrillers) exist simply to tell what happens next. More sophisticated examples dwell on values i.e. on the special moments, for example turning points, in characters’ lives. Thus the novel has a double allegiance, to life by time and life by values.

But no matter how much you prefer the values approach, you can never relinquish plot. The novelist must cling, however lightly, to the thread of their story, they must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise they become unintelligible.

One novelist has tried to abandon all signs of plot, Gertrude Stein who ‘hoped to emancipate fiction from the tyranny of time and to express in it the life by values only.’

She fails because as soon as fiction is completely delivered from time it cannot express anything at all… [it was a noble experiment but doomed to failure because] the time-sequence cannot be destroyed without carrying in its ruin all that should have taken its place; the novel that would express values only becomes unintelligible and therefore valueless.

Back to the basic need for a story, Walter Scott is a prime example of a storyteller which is why Forster doesn’t like him. Scott has ‘a trivial mind and a heavy style.’ He cannot construct. He has neither artistic detachment nor passion. He only has a temperate heart and gentlemanly feelings, and an intelligent affection for the country-side and this is not basis enough for great novels.

Forster gives a long summary of the plot of Scott’s (1816), the third of the Waverley novels to show how one damn thing happens after another, Scott deploying characters’ comings and goings purely to extend the plot, till he runs out of steam and ties everything up with the wedding of the nice young people. It is a classic example of a novelist focusing on ‘the life in time’, which leads to ‘slackening of emotion and shallowness of judgment, and in particular to that idiotic use of marriage as a finale’.

He compares this with Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale which is a book dominated by time: ‘Time is the real hero of The Old Wives’ Tale’, showing the growth and ageing and death of the lead female characters. This has more integrity and depth than Scott plonking down event after event but, in the end, isn’t enough. The Old Wives Tale is ‘strong, sincere and sad but misses greatness.’

He contrasts both these with Tolstoy’s War and Peace which also shows characters growing old but makes the interesting point that the hero of Tolstoy’s novel is not time but space, the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and characters have been scattered, from the sum-total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens, fields, which accumulate grandeur and sonority after we have passed them.

Many novelists have the feeling for place — Five Towns (Bennett), Auld Reekie (Scott), and so on. Very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy’s divine equipment. Space is the lord of ‘War and Peace’, not time.

A note about ‘voice’. Forster reverts to his description of:

the voice of the tribal narrator, squatting in the middle of the cave, and saying one thing after another until the audience falls asleep among their offal and bones. The story is primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading was discovered, and it appeals to what is primitive in us.

People

Characters are ‘word masses’ arranged and grouped by the writer, given characteristic gestures or phrases, and assigned names and slowly accumulating into characters.

What is the difference between people in life and people in books? History gives us the outward actions of people. Only the novelist can take us inside minds to show their motivation.

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed. And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our friends do and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life.

He suggests there are five basic facts of human existence: birth, food, sleep, love and death (you could add others, but these seem central), then gives a brief description of each.

About birth we know nothing and Forster is surprised how few novelists really describe it or the mental state of the baby or infant. Tristram Shandy and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man stand out as two exceptions.

Death on the other hand, is extremely popular with novelists, for two practical reasons. 1) The death of a character in the middle of the story can be used to trigger emotion; 2) death of the main character is a handy and time-honoured way to end the story. He doesn’t mention them, but think of the tragedies of the ancient world.

Food is strangely ignored in fiction; often characters just eat something, sometimes provender is ignored for pages and days.

Sleep is also usually neglected in fiction. We all sleep for about a third of our lives, yet fiction ignores this unless it needs to mention disturbed sleep or specific dreams.

Love:

You all know how enormously love bulks in novels, and will probably agree with me that it has done them harm and made them monotonous. Why has this particular experience, especially in its sex form, been transplanted in such generous quantities?

( Forster has no answer but I have: Darwin. Of course we obsess about love (and sex) because it is one of our deepest biological imperatives, to mate and breed, and even after breeding the imperative (in men at any rate) to mate and ejaculate continues as an urgent force until the end of our lives. Women on the other hand, bearers of babies for nine long months and then their carers for decades afterwards, naturally want to marry well, and so spend an inordinate amount of time picking and choosing who to marry / mate with. It is the theme of all Jane Austen’s novels.)

Back to Forster, he sees two reasons why love is so monotonously prominent in fictions:

1) As part of the general over-sensitiveness of all fictional characters:

The constant sensitiveness of characters for each other — even in writers called robust like Fielding — is remarkable, and has no parallel in life, except among people who have plenty of leisure. Passion, intensity at moments — yes, but not this constant awareness, this endless readjusting, this ceaseless hunger. I believe that these are the reflections of the novelist’s own state of mind while he composes, and that the predominance of love in novels is partly because of this.

2) We wish love to be perfect. This is one reason so many narratives end in marriage, while the future is imagined to be a perfect harmony which the reality of being married, obviously, undermines. Ending narratives with marriage is ending with hope and promise.

He introduces the entertaining concept of Homo fictus. He

is generally born off, he is capable of dying on, he wants little food or sleep, he is tirelessly occupied with human relationships. And — most important — we can know more about him than we can know about any of our fellow creatures, because his creator and narrator are one.

He ends with an extended meditation on the character of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, admiring her good sense, high spirits, kindness and humour. He thinks Moll Flanders is an:

example of a novel, in which a character is everything and is given freest play. Defoe makes a slight attempt at a plot with the brother-husband as a centre, but he is quite perfunctory, and her legal husband (the one who took her on the jaunt to Oxford) just disappears and is heard of no more. Nothing matters but the heroine; she stands in an open space like a tree, and having said that she seems absolutely real from every point of view.

He asks when do we feel that a character in a book is ‘real’?

It is real when the novelist knows everything about it. He may not choose to tell us all he knows — many of the facts, even of the kind we call obvious, may be hidden. But he will give us the feeling that though the character has not been explained, it is explicable, and we get from this a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life.

I was really comforted by Forster’s explanation. I worry all the time that I don’t really ‘get’ people, the people at work and people in social situations (at the school pickup, at parties). I worry all the time that I don’t understand people and so am saying the wrong thing. It is precisely because novels give us the illusion that we can and do understand people, that we find them so comforting. This is Forster’s view.

Human intercourse… is… haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly and… can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. [Fictional characters] are… people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible. And that is why novels, even when they are about wicked people, can solace us; they suggest a more comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race, they give us the illusion of perspicacity and of power.

They give us the comforting illusion that life is more ‘manageable’ than, in reality, it actually is. Or indeed, more explicable.

People (part 2): types of character and points of view

But Moll is an exception. She is a solitary. Most characters in most novels exist in relationship to a number of characters. Taking them out of context is like taking half the bushes out of a mature and well planned shrubbery: everything looks sparse and bare as a result. Their canny arrangement is the key.

But characters can be anarchic. Given too much vigour they can destroy the plan and lopside the plot.

1. Two types of character, flat and round

Flat characters used to be called humours or caricatures, can be summarised in a line.

Flat characters are very useful to him, since they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere — little luminous disks of a pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like counters across the void or between the stars… He is the idea, and such life as he possesses radiates from its edges and from the scintillations it strikes when other elements in the novel impinge.

They are often more memorable than main characters precisely because they don’t change and so comforting or reassuring.

All of us, even the sophisticated, yearn for permanence, and to the unsophisticated permanence is the chief excuse for a work of art. We all want books to endure, to be refuges, and their inhabitants to be always the same, and flat characters tend to justify themselves on this account.

The special case of Dickens, almost all of whose characters are ‘flat’, yet his incredible vitality gives his books an amazing depth. Similarly most of H.G. Wells’s characters are flat but come to life because of the author’s tremendous brio. Dickens and Wells are good at transmitting force which animates everything, even when they’re only puppets.

Why are Jane Austen’s characters round?

She is a miniaturist, but never two-dimensional. All her characters are round, or capable of rotundity… her characters though smaller than his are more highly organized. They function all round, and even if her plot made greater demands on them than it does, they would still be adequate… All the Jane Austen characters are ready for an extended life, for a life which the scheme of her books seldom requires them to lead, and that is why they lead their actual lives so satisfactorily.

The test:

The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat.

2. Point of view

He cites Percy Lubbock who said point of view is the central weapon in the novelist’s armoury and defined three types:

  • from outside characters, as an onlooker
  • omniscience i.e. can describe everything from within
  • take the part of one of the characters and be in the dark about the motives of all the others

Forster thinks this privileging of point of view is a symptom of ‘critics’ wanting to make The Novel a special case with its own rules and techniques. Personally, he thinks it less important than a proper mix of characters and the writer’s ability to ‘bounce’ us into believing them.

Gide’s ‘Les Faux Monnayeurs’ plays with different points of view and tactics but is too clever to be involving.

The Plot

Aristotle thought character was revealed through action, but then he was talking about drama, the stage. Forster thinks action (the plot) is less important for the novel.

A story is a series of events. A plot is a series of events with some element of causality and explanation involved. Curiosity is enough to understand a story (‘when happened next?’). Understanding a plot requires memory (for facts scattered earlier) and intelligence (to piece together and interpret them).

George Meredith is now unfashionable but was once, around 1900, all the rage. Forster thinks he is one of the great contrivers of plots. His contrivances are plausible and they alter characters.

A writer who is far greater than Meredith, and yet less successful as a novelist — Thomas Hardy. Hardy seems to me essentially a poet, who conceives of his novels from an enormous height. They are to be tragedies or tragi-comedies, they are to give out the sound of hammer-strokes as they proceed; in other words Hardy arranges events with emphasis on causality, the ground plan is a plot, and the characters are ordered to acquiesce in its requirements. Except in the person of Tess (who conveys the feeling that she is greater than destiny) this aspect of his work is unsatisfactory. His characters are involved in various snares, they are finally bound hand and foot, there is ceaseless emphasis on fate, and yet, for all the sacrifices made to it, we never see the action as a living thing as we see it in Antigone or Berenice or The Cherry Orchard.

Most novels are feeble at the end because the plot takes over. The novelist needs to end the thing and so character and other aspects are all put on hold while the bits and pieces of the plot are tied up. Which is why novel ending are so often flat and disappointing.

Forster devotes five pages to describing Gide’s attempts to deconstruct novel writing in ‘Les Faux Monnayeurs’ which, I must say, sound contrived and clunky.

Fantasy

There is more in the novel than time or people or logic or any of their derivatives, more even than Fate. And by ‘more’ I do not mean something that excludes these aspects nor something that includes them, embraces them. I mean something that cuts across them like a bar of light, that is intimately connected with them at one place and patiently illumines all their problems, and at another place shoots over or through them as if they did not exist. We shall give that bar of light two names, fantasy and prophecy.

His sections on fantasy and prophecy are suddenly incoherent, under-developed. He gives no very useful definition of fantasy. He sounds very like Forster in introducing the notion of fauns and dryads and Pan: this sounds like his strange short stories. He also sounds like Forster in claiming the great god Muddle stands behind Tristram Shandy. This is the first place where I felt his opinion was inadequate and embarrassing.

He gives a long rather embarrassing summary of a now unknown book called ‘Flecker’s Magic’, by Norman Matson, in which a boy is given a wishing ring by a witch etc. He goes on to summarise and quote Max Beebohm’s fantastical comic novel ‘Zuleika Dobson’, ‘a highly accomplished and superbly written book whose spirit is farcical’. His quotes make it sound tiresome. Much has happened to the genre of Fantasy over the past 100 years to make his comments seem vain.

Parody. Very useful for the type of writer who has a lot to say but doesn’t take to creating characters: they can simply parody someone else’s. After mentioning Lowes Dickinson’s book ‘The Magic Flute’ he wastes a couple of pages giving a surprisingly unsympathetic summary of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. I was disappointed to see Forster takes the Bloomsbury / Virginia Woolf line that Ulysses is a book about dirt and smut:

It is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, it is an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human character in the interests of Hell (!).. an epic of grubbiness and disillusion.

He thinks the aim of the book is ‘to degrade all things and more particularly civilization and art, by turning them inside out and upside down’. On this page I stopped respecting Forster’s opinion and realised how trapped he is in his timid, bourgeois English tea-party provincialism.

Prophecy

When the author wants to say something about the universe, a visionary, bardic strain. It is predominantly a tone of voice. To fully appreciate it you have to suspend your sense of humour, your sense of the absurd. He mentions D.H. Lawrence in this regard.

He quotes a long passage from ‘Adam Bede’ by George Eliot and makes the sage point that her writing depends on her ‘massiveness,’ because ‘she has no nicety of style’. Then a passage from ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ to show what it means to say that Dostoyevsky was a prophet. It means that everything means more than it says, reaches out to have cosmic implications.

We are not concerned with the prophet’s message, or rather (since matter and manner cannot be wholly separated) we are concerned with it as little as possible. What matters is the accent of his voice, his song.

Fantasy is diffuse, sparkles with fragments, whereas prophecy is focused on a great central vision. Fantasy is more often than not funny whereas prophecy requires suspension of humour.

Forster gives an extended summary of Herbert Melville’s classic novel ‘Moby Dick’, dwelling on its visionary prophetic character. It is more song than novel. And he adds a summary of the short story ‘Billy Budd’. Both of them are allegories of good and evil (though he doesn’t use the word allegory).

He makes the striking point that Melville wasn’t hampered by a conscience ‘that tiresome little receptacle… which is often such a nuisance in serious writers and so contracts their effects.’

Then D.H. Lawrence, ‘the only prophetic novelist writing today’. He makes the shrewd point that Lawrence was also a preacher and lots of people are irritated or angered by the preaching. But the real writer lies ‘far, far back’ behind the surface antagonisms and speaks with the voice of the Norse god Balder.

The prophet is irradiating nature from within, so that every colour has a glow and every form a distinctness which could not otherwise be obtained. Take a scene that always stays in the memory: that scene in ‘Women in Love’ where one of the characters throws stones into the water at night to shatter the image of the moon. Why he throws, what the scene symbolizes, is unimportant. But the writer could not get such a moon and water otherwise; he reaches them by his special path which stamps them as more wonderful than any we can imagine. It is the prophet back where he started from, back where the rest of us are waiting by the edge of the pool, but with a power of re-creation and evocation we shall never possess.

He rightly realises that Lawrence writes as if from an entirely new world.

He ends with ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë. It is a book of storms, visions and prophetic tone of voice. The notorious thing about ‘Wuthering Heights’ is that no one can remember the plot, they just remember the giant passion of the central characters.

Pattern and Rhythm

He discusses some books with patterns: the hour glass of ‘Thais’ Anatole France in which two characters swap plights; the daisy chain in ‘Roman Pictures’ by Percy Lubbock in which one character is passed along through a sequence of encounters with others.

Pattern and Henry James

Far more complicated is ‘The Ambassadors’ by Henry James. He summarises the plot and has a few words of praise for James:

He is so good at indicating instantaneously and constantly that a character is second rate, deficient in sensitiveness, abounding in the wrong sort of worldliness; he gives such a character so much vitality that its absurdity is delightful.

Like a lot of people I am put off reading James by the reputation for hyper-sensibility which surrounds him and then, on the few occasions I’ve tried, have struggled to penetrate through the prose and understand what is going on. So it is a relief to read Forster’s criticisms of The Master.

The basic one is that 1) James wrote works of art but at the cost of leaving most of human life out of them. And then 2) Forster says he has a very restricted number of character types who recur in all his novels, namely:

  • the observer who tries to influence the action
  • the second-rate outsider
  • the sympathetic foil, very lively and frequently female
  • the wonderful rare heroine
  • sometimes a villain
  • sometimes a young artist with generous impulses

Forster’s summary is comic: ‘And that is about all. For so fine a novelist it is a poor show.’ And then 3):

The characters, beside being few in number, are constructed on very stingy lines. They are incapable of fun, of rapid motion, of carnality, and of nine-tenths of heroism. Their clothes will not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the sources of their income, their servants are noiseless or resemble themselves, no social explanation of the world we know is possible for them, for there are no stupid people in their world, no barriers of language, and no poor. Even their sensations are limited. They can land in Europe and look at works of art and at each other, but that is all. Maimed creatures can alone breathe in Henry James’s pages — maimed yet specialized.

As interesting as Forster’s points is the vivid way he expresses them:

The longer James worked, the more convinced he grew that a novel should be a whole—not necessarily geometric like The Ambassadors, but it should accrete round a single topic, situation, gesture, which should occupy the characters and provide a plot, and should also fasten up the novel on the outside—catch its scattered statements in a net, make them cohere like a planet, and swing through the skies of memory.

And:

Put Tom Jones or Emma or even Mr. Casaubon into a Henry James book, and the book will burn to ashes.

Conclusion:

Though they [Henry James characters] are not dead — certain selected recesses of experience he explores very well — they are gutted of the common stuff that fills characters in other books, and ourselves. And this castrating is not in the interests of the Kingdom of Heaven, there is no philosophy in the novels, no religion (except an occasional touch of superstition), no prophecy, no benefit for the superhuman at all. It is for the sake of a particular æsthetic effect which is certainly gained, but at this heavy price.

H.G. Wells wrote a very funny satire of James which he cheerfully sent to The Master and was surprised when James was profoundly upset. Wells thinks the novel should overflow with people and ideas and life. Interestingly, Forster concludes:

My own prejudices are with Wells. The James novels are a unique possession and the reader who cannot accept his premises misses some valuable and exquisite sensations. But I do not want more of his novels.

So James demonstrates the limitations of seeking Pattern, which is to say, seeking formal Beauty, in a novel. The chances are: the more Beauty, the less life and humanity.

To put it in other words, the novel is not capable of as much artistic development as the drama: its humanity or the grossness of its material hinder it (use whichever phrase you like). To most readers of fiction the sensation from a pattern is not intense enough to justify the sacrifices that made it.

Rhythms large and small

Two types of rhythm, large and small, macro and micro.

Micro rhythms Proust has examples of micro rhythms but not macro. Forster makes the bold claim that ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ ‘is chaotic, ill constructed, it has and will have no external shape; and yet it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythms.’

By rhythms what he appears to mean are recurring facts, connections and coincidences. He gives the specific example of a phrase from a piece of music which recurs only at long intervals of hundreds of pages:

Rhythm can develop, and the little phrase has a life of its own, unconnected with the lives of its auditors, as with the life of the man who composed it. It is almost an actor, but not quite, and that ‘not quite’ means that its power has gone towards stitching Proust’s book together from the inside, and towards the establishment of beauty and the ravishing of the reader’s memory. There are times when the little phrase — from its gloomy inception, through the sonata into the sextet — means everything to the reader. There are times when it means nothing and is forgotten, and this seems to me the function of rhythm in fiction; not to be there all the time like a pattern, but by its lovely waxing and waning to fill us with surprise and freshness and hope.

Macro rhythms Very large scale repetitions and shape as in a classical symphony (in this case, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony). In fact, very candidly, Forster tells us he can’t think of an example of this macro rhythm in fiction.

Maybe in drama because drama is more tightly structured, in drama characters submit to the dramatic shape which is known from the start. But fiction, as he sweetly puts it, ‘Human beings have their great chance in the novel.’

Early on, in the chapter about plots, Forster lamented that novels have to end, pointing out how lifeless the endings of most novels are, as the logic of closing the plot overrides the human vitality which has preceded it. Now, at the end of the book, he returns to the same idea. He says that at the end of a performance of a Beethoven symphony you hear chords or sense shapes which were never actually expressed in the music, which tower behind it. Then optimistically wishes the same kind of aesthetic effect could be achieved in a more open-ended type of fiction.

Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out.

When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that? Is not there something of it in ‘War and Peace’? the book with which we began and in which we must end. Such an untidy book. Yet, as we read it, do not great chords begin to sound behind us, and when we have finished does not every item even the catalogue of strategies – lead a larger existence than was possible at the time?

Conclusion

It’s fashionable to make predictions about The Future of the Novel but he won’t. All sorts of scientific discoveries and social transformations may occur but the task of the novelist will stay broadly the same. He repeats his motto: ‘History develops, art stands still.’ He imagines human nature will remain pretty fixed but gives himself a slight glimmer of hope.

If human nature does alter it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people — a very few people, but a few novelists are among them — are trying to do this. Every institution and vested interest is against such a search: organized religion, the State, the family in its economic aspect…

Maybe he meant his friends in the Bloomsbury Group, overinflating, as they all did, their own importance. Anyway, the state and the family have hardly been abolished because it seems like we need both of them. Organised religion, on the other hand, the personal repression, legal persecution and censorship exercised in the name of the Church of England, have largely withered away, like the Church itself. But, it turns out, via social media, the philistine press and other, rising religious organisations, we have invented new ways to judge and censor ourselves. That will never change.

As to The Future of the Novel, despite a century of pessimistic prognostications, this year, 2024, more novels than ever before were published. The Novel is doing fine.

Thoughts

1. Style

Only towards the end of the book did I notice the absence of Style from his handful of aspects. Style, the order of words in the sentence, the way sentences are assembled into paragraphs, is probably the aspect of novels which interests me most. It feels like Forster consciously avoided it, knowing what a minefield it is.

2. Forster’s oddly strange or incisive phrasing

Forster almost goes out of his way to appear a gentlemanly old buffer, an amiable old cove, and yet his writing often contains disconcerting turns of phrase and thought, which seem unexpectedly modern, harsh or violent.

In his fiction this is most obvious in the short stories, which are surprisingly weird, but these oddities crop up continually in everything he writes. For example, his opening comparison of ‘the story’ to a tapeworm. Here are some other oddities:

We move between two darknesses. Certain people pretend to tell us what birth and death are like: a mother, for instance, has her point of view about birth, a doctor, a religious, have their points of view about both. But it is all from the outside, and the two entities who might enlighten us, the baby and the corpse, cannot do so, because their apparatus for communicating their experiences is not attuned to our apparatus for reception.

Then food, the stoking up process, the keeping alive of an individual flame, the process that begins before birth and is continued after it by the mother, and finally taken over by the individual himself, who goes on day after day putting an assortment of objects into a hole in his face without becoming surprised or bored.

When a baby arrives in a novel it usually has the air of having been posted.

[Characters] are creations inside a creation, and often inharmonious towards it; if they are given complete freedom they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay.

One of our foremost writers, Mr. Norman Douglas, is a critic of this type, and the passage from him which I will quote puts the case against flat characters in a forcible fashion. The passage occurs in an open letter to D. H. Lawrence, with whom he is quarrelling: a doughty pair of combatants, the hardness of whose hitting makes the rest of us feel like a lot of ladies up in a pavilion.

Credit

Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster was published 1927 by Edward Arnold. References are to the 1962 Pelican paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on January 24, 2025

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Where Angels Fear To Tread by E.M. Forster (1905)

‘The whole thing is like one of those horrible modern plays where no one is in “the right”.’
(Harriet Herriton’s view, page 71)

This is E.M. Forster’s first novel and his shortest, 10 brisk chapters clocking in at a tidy 160 pages in the Penguin paperback edition. It concerns prim middle-class Edwardian Brits getting into trouble in Italy. It shows a set of English people who pride themselves on their detailed knowledge of Italy’s art and historical glories but haven’t a clue how to handle actual Italian people. On a superficial level it depicts the inability of people from two cultures to understand each other and so, in this respect, shares the same fundamental idea that underpins his mature masterpiece, ‘Passage To India’, 25 years later.

But that’s not really an adequate description because, pushing a little deeper, you realise that, right up to the surprisingly grim and tragic climax, it’s not just Brits versus Italians, it’s about all the characters’ inability to communicate with and understand each other.

The book is heavily dated in two ways, obvious and less obvious. First off, all the characters are Edwardian ladies and gentlemen whose lives and minds are hemmed in by conventions and constrictions which we have long since abandoned / moved beyond. Costume drama. Historical distance. The other way it’s dated is that, especially at the climax of the story, Forster isn’t quite up to managing the task he has set himself and so his prose, and his characters, lapse into heavily dated tropes of chivalry and honour and saintliness which remind us that Forster was much closer to Tennyson than he is to us today. (Tennyson died just 13 years before the book was published.)

Plot summary

1. Backstory

Lilia Theobald is the daughter of old Mrs Theobald and grew up in Yorkshire. Ten years before the narrative opens Lilia married Charles Herriton. He was the son of domineering Mrs Herriton, who is also mother to Harriet and, the youngest son, Philip, a huge fan of Italy, its Beauty and Culture etc. Mrs Herriton tried to deter her son from marrying Lilia and, when he disobeyed her, set about taming and reforming her. (There’s no mention of the husband of Mrs Theobald i.e. Lilia’s father, nor of Mrs Herriton’s husband. Forster’s families are generally matriarchies.)

At some point Charles got Lilia pregnant and she had daughter Irma. Then a bit later Charles died. This fact is told with no drama or emotion whatsoever as it is simply the background and setup to the main narrative. Now a widow, Lilia wants to move in with her mother (Mrs Theobald) but for reasons I don’t understand, perhaps simply to oversee her grandchild, this is blocked by interfering Mrs Herriton who insists that Lilia sets her up house close to the Herriton family in the Cambridgeshire village of Sawston.

2. Main narrative

The narrative proper kicks off when a solution to the ‘problem’ of what to do with Lilia has presented itself. Nice Miss Caroline Abbott who lives near the Herritons, is travelling to Italy for a year and needs a female companion. Perfect! Egged on by Philip (Mrs Herriton’s clever, pompous younger son who has himself been to Italy and raves about its art and culture etc) Mrs Herriton encourages Lilia to take this opportunity, to sell her house and hand over young Irma (‘Poor child. So vulgar’) to her (Mrs Herriton) and go off to Italy with Miss Abbott.

After a steady stream of unremarkable letters describing their tour of the Grand Sights of Italy, one fine morning the Herritons get a letter from Lilia announcing that she is engaged to be married. To an Italian! Outraged, Mrs Herriton despatches young Philip to find out what’s going on and stop it.

A few days later Philip arrives in the small Italian town of Monteriano where most o the the action is set, and is introduced to Lilia’s fiancé, Signor Carella. Lilia’s letter had given the impression he was an aristocrat, which was at least something for the snobbish Herritons to cling onto, but this turns out to be a deception – Carella is the son of a dentist, so you can imagine snobbish Philip’s horror! In any case, when they hear Philip is on the way, the ill-starred couple have hurriedly gotten married, which flabbergasts Philip but makes them burst out laughing at his folly.

Humiliated, Philip returns to England with the news and the Herriton family promptly cut off all contact with Lilia and also stop her communicating with her daughter.

The narrative then switches to focus on the slow unravelling of the cross-cultural marriage between Lilia and Carella, lingering on 1) the 101 cultural differences between a Brit and an Italian, between a Northern woman and a southern man:

No one realized that more than personalities were engaged; that the struggle was national; that generations of ancestors, good, bad, or indifferent, forbad the Latin man to be chivalrous to the northern woman, the northern woman to forgive the Latin man.

And 2) the specific failings of these two particular characters: Lilia soon realises she is totally isolated in an alien landscape and has few if any mental resources to fall back on, while Gino is influenced by his local friends (such as Spiridione) to assert himself as a man, an Italian man and a good Catholic, which means forbidding Lilia from leaving the house, and having an affair.

They had married in the spring and by the autumn the marriage has failed and Lilia makes the first of several attempts to run away. Forster tells us that both partners, for different reasons, become obsessed with having a baby, specifically a son. In a way this represents Forster turning the knife, pushing the unhappy marriage onto the next level of misery. To my surprise Lilia dies giving birth to the child and we’re only at the end of chapter 4. Farewell Lilia.

The Herritons are mildly upset by the news but Caroline Abbott is distraught at Lilia’s death, blaming herself for ever taking her to Italy. The Herritons resolve to forget the whole sordid affair and concentrate on bringing up the orphan Irma, now 9 years old. However this plan is scuppered when several postcards arrive from Italy, addressed to Irma and claiming to be from her ‘little brother’. Despite their attempts to intercept these, Irma gets sight of them and not only asks awkward questions about her little brother, but spreads the word at her school, telling her friends who tell their mums, and so the issue becomes a social problem for Mrs Herriton.

Domineering Mrs Herriton realises Something Must be Done and dispatches Philip the lawyer to go and meet up with his sister, Harriet (taking a holiday in the Tyrol) and, together with her, journey on to Monteriano and persuade Gino to part with the child and let him be brought back to England.

In the event, Philip and Harriet have a comically disastrous trip, becoming rapidly exhausted in the summer heat, losing things or leaving them at hotels and Harriet has a talent for opening train windows and getting smuts (small cinders from the burnt coal burned to drive the train) in her eye. With the result that the siblings bicker all the way. She is prim judgemental Low Church, he fancies himself as a Bohemian non-conformist.

Chapter 6

When they arrive at Monteriano after much squabbling they are amazed to discover that Miss Abbott has beaten them to it and is staying at the same hotel, the Stella d’Italia. Three Brits versus an Italian.

But things don’t go the way anybody planned. On the first day, when they go round to his house, they are told Gino is out, so they’re at a loose end; until they notice that a production of the opera Lucia of Lammermoor is on that evening and, on an impulse, decide to go.

This is an opportunity for Forster to describe the florid interior of an Italian opera house and to contrast the vibrancy of the production with those of the British or Germans. But in the final act of the opera Philip finds himself invited into a box where sit Gino and some of his friends where he is treated with great hospitality and embarrassed to raise the reason they’ve all come i.e. to deprive Gino of his son.

Chapter 7

Worse follows the next day when Miss Abbott decides to make an early assault upon Gino, before Philip’s scheduled meeting with him. To her horror she discovers that Gino is a loving doting father, more than that, he has a primeval pagan paternal connection with the 8-month-old baby. When Gino proceeds to bathe the beautiful bronze baby Miss Abbott feels as if she’s entered a Renaissance painting, is softened and hypnotised by the baby and completely forgets the point of her mission. Which is the moment when Philip arrives, puzzled to find her there before him. And then both men are puzzled when Miss Abbott, confused and upset by the crudeness of their mission and her failure, bursts into tears and goes running out.

Chapter 8

Cut to Harriet Herriton ranting at Philip, criticising him for failing to obtain the baby, criticising him for letting Miss Abbott go see Gino first, while Philip weakly defends himself. It is central to the plot that Harriet is a big graceless woman, in her thinking as her physique. She takes very literally the mission her mother has sent them on – to remove the baby from the Gino, who she is convinced murdered Lilia, which is so far from the truth (Lilia died in childbirth) as to be farcical if it didn’t turn out to have such tragic consequences.

Stung by his sister’s criticism, Philip tracks down Miss Abbott to the church of Santa Deodata where she appears to be praying. She, like Harriet, still believes they should take the baby back to England but is more human, realising how difficult it is going to be now she understands just how much Gino is attached to it. This chapter is designed to really bring out the differing attitudes of the three young English people, for Philip stands distinctly apart from the two women in his lack of involvement or commitment. To him the whole thing is a comedy which is doomed to fail and which should be enjoyed for the entertainment he provides. He is given a speech summing up his attitude:

‘Some people are born not to do things. I’m one of them; I never did anything at school or at the Bar. I came out to stop Lilia’s marriage, and it was too late. I came out intending to get the baby, and I shall return an ‘honourable failure.’ I never expect anything to happen now, and so I am never disappointed. You would be surprised to know what my great events are. Going to the theatre yesterday, talking to you now – I don’t suppose I shall ever meet anything greater. I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it – and I’m sure I can’t tell you whether the fate’s good or evil. I don’t die – I don’t fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I’m just not there. You are quite right; life to me is just a spectacle, which – thank God, and thank Italy, and thank you – is now more beautiful and heartening than it has ever been before.’ (p.134)

During this conversation, which is really a debate between different attitudes to life, Miss Abbott comes to understand Philip more and Philip comes to really admire her. He is attracted to her. He even allows himself to think their relationship might develop into…you know… lurv.

Over lunch Harriet is rude to Miss Abbott who she thinks has gone over to the enemy. On the practical front they order two carriages for that evening to take them to the station. Both the women talk as if they will be taking the baby with them though we now realise Philip doesn’t think there’s a hope in hell of that happening and doesn’t care.

He felt little interest in the matter, and he was sure that he had no influence.

But he goes through the motions, keeping an appointment he’d made with Gino to meet him at the Caffe Garibaldi. Gino now finds the whole proposition of the Brits buying his son off him is funny and mocks Philip who doesn’t care. They have become pretty good friends and when Gino learns Philip’s leaving that evening he tells him to come back the following year.

He also informs him that he is planning to get married, to a not particularly attractive woman who, he thinks, will be a good mother to his son. Philip wishes him well and Gino invites him to be the boy’s godfather. Philip returns to the hotel, informs the two women of his total failure and they all pack. Soon it’s 8pm and the two carriages arrive. It starts to rain. Miss Abbott packs her stuff into one which sets off down the hill to the railway station but Philip is irked then worried when Harriet fails to show.

Then the village idiot appears in the pouring rain and hands Philip a note from Harriet telling him to get in the coach and meet at the town gate. This he does but when she clambers into the carriage he realises she is carrying a bundle in which is Gino’s baby. She had gone to his house to make one last plea and, finding him out and the maid, Perfetta, distracted, had simply wrapped the baby in some shawls and stole it.

Philip is still processing the implications of this theft which is likely to get them arrested and maybe prosecuted, and takes a turn in holding the little mite which he sees is crying, when, without any warning, the carriage they’re riding in is violently overthrown and he is knocked unconscious.

When he comes to he realises his arm is badly hurt, maybe broken, the lamps have been knocked out so they’re in pitch dark in pouring rain. Harriet is alright as is the coachman but the baby is nowhere to be seen. Philip has the presence of mind to tell the others to remain absolutely still and feels around in the dark till he finds the bundle lying across a deep rut in the road. When he examines the baby he realises it is dead!

Chapter 9

Turns out it was Miss Abbott’s coach which their coach collided with to cause the crash. Now all three Brits take the remaining coach back up to Monteriano. Here Philip takes the responsibility of confronting Gino and telling him the terrible news. Something happens to Forster’s prose. It becomes as overwrought as the subject matter. previously it had been enjoyably amiable and gently mocking. Now he’s created a melodrama and his prose and authorial attitude lose their poise to become more overwrought:

Round the Italian baby who had died in the mud there centred deep passions and high hopes. People had been wicked or wrong in the matter; no one save himself had been trivial. Now the baby had gone, but there remained this vast apparatus of pride and pity and love. For the dead, who seemed to take away so much, really take with them nothing that is ours. The passion they have aroused lives after them, easy to transmute or to transfer, but well-nigh impossible to destroy. (p.146)

Gino, returning happy from the café, understandably fails to take in what Philip is telling him, that these English tourists, having failed to buy his son from him, stole him and, just down the hill a little way, were involved in an accident and now his son is dead. Although the narrative focuses entirely on the English characters, you can’t help feeling that Gino is the central character.

Anyway, he moves from disbelief through to mental disturbance – systematically tapping every surface in the little house – to sudden rage at Philip, seizes his broken arm – which makes Philip punch him as a reflect action – then following him into the baby’s room where Philip hides behind the bed but Gino finds him, kneels on him and starts to strangle him. Next thing we know Miss Abbott has arrived and pulled Gino off him and over to a chair. At which point Gino breaks and cries like a baby, Miss Abbott cradles him, and the narrative tone again stumbles, lurching into late Victorian sentiment crossed with Italian art connoisseurship.

All through the day Miss Abbott had seemed to Philip like a goddess, and more than ever did she seem so now. Many people look younger and more intimate during great emotion. But some there are who look older, and remote, and he could not think that there was little difference in years, and none in composition, between her and the man whose head was laid upon her breast. Her eyes were open, full of infinite pity and full of majesty, as if they discerned the boundaries of sorrow, and saw unimaginable tracts beyond. Such eyes he had seen in great pictures but never in a mortal. Her hands were folded round the sufferer, stroking him lightly, for even a goddess can do no more than that. And it seemed fitting, too, that she should bend her head and touch his forehead with her lips. (p.151)

Chapter 10

Cut to a new scene. Philip, Miss Abbott and Harriet are on the journey home, though still in Italy. Philip tells Miss A that this morning, as they left Milan, he received a letter from Gino, perfectly forgiving him. In this little exchange we learned that there was an official investigation and an inquest at which Gino lied to protect the English.

Forster ties up loose ends. Philip is now full-blown in love with Miss Abbott who is oblivious of the fact. He tells her he won’t go back to Sawston but will move to London and work. Incidentally, we discover that both of them have agreed not to mention that Harriet was responsible for the baby’s death. All that was hushed up in Italy and will be hushed up back in England.

The final scenes are just as extraordinary or weird or unpredicted as the sudden pointless death of the baby. Here, in the rattling train corridor, just as Philip is nerving himself to reveal that he loves her, Miss Abbott staggers him by revealing that she loves Gino. The two or three encounters they had have utterly bewitched her and she would give herself to him ‘body and soul’ in a flash, if he asked. Except being the obtuse son of a dentist he never did, and now here she is rattling back to England and to the stifling boring milieu of little Sawston where she will live out her life in dutiful service of the community and crush to death the mad passionate love which rages inside her.

This, as you might expect, has a devastating impact on Philip who, however, is an Edwardian gentleman, stifles his own deep feelings, and says the things he thinks will help her cope with her distress, as she gives in to a storm of tears.

Right to the end the novel is about misunderstandings and emotional repression.

Tropes, or types of content

So much for the story, the plot. But the narrative is also a vehicle for Forster to do quite a number of other things, to deploy and practice a number of novel-ish themes. These include:

Dissecting English snobbery

The character of bossy Mrs Herriton is enjoyably done. I liked the scene where she and her daughter a just planting out some peas when the post comes with the letter from Lilia saying she’s got engaged – with the result that the poor peas don’t get covered with soil and next morning the birds have eaten them. So carefully English.

The way she dominates and drives her children is entertaining (‘His mother knew how to manage him’), as well as how she plays and adapts to the changing social pressures evident in the little community (i.e. the other matrons) of Sawston so that, when little Irma spills the beans about her baby brother out in Italy, Mrs Herriton has to be seen to be doing something about it.

Showing off about Italy

There’s a long tradition of English novelists (as of English people) feeling compelled to show off their superior knowledge about the art and literature of Italy, along with their superior knowledge of the finest Italian wines and the best Italian restaurants and the tastiest Italian food to eat in each of the yummy Italian regions etc.

Actually Forster is lighter on this aspect than a determined show-off like Aldous Huxley, but still, fairly regularly, adopts the tone of the Italy Expert:

They clattered up the narrow dark street, greeted by that mixture of curiosity and kindness which makes each Italian arrival so wonderful.

Signor Carella, with the brutality so common in Italians, had caught [the cat] by the paw and flung her away from him.

‘I’ll show you,’ said a little girl, springing out of the ground as Italian children will. ‘She will show you,’ said the Dogana men, nodding reassuringly. ‘Follow her always, always, and you will come to no harm. She is a trustworthy guide. She is my daughter/cousin/sister.’ Philip knew these relatives well: they ramify, if need be, all over the peninsula. (p.97)

‘He said he was sorry – pleasantly, as Italians do say such things…’ (p.103)

There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy; it is not the bad taste of a country which knows no better; it has not the nervous vulgarity of England, or the blinded vulgarity of Germany. It observes beauty, and chooses to pass it by. But it attains to beauty’s confidence. (p.107)

Gino had the southern knack of friendship. (p.153)

Every time I read these rather patronising generalisations about Italians (on virtually every page) I wondered what Italian readers made of them back then or make of them now. Did Italian intellectuals find it boring and tiresome that tourists from Surrey or Cambridge claimed to know more about their country, their history and their culture than Italians themselves?

Showing off about art

As with Italy, so with Italian art, English authors just feel compelled to show off their superior knowledge at every opportunity.

There she sat, with twenty miles of view behind her, and he placed the dripping baby on her knee. It shone now with health and beauty: it seemed to reflect light, like a copper vessel. Just such a baby Bellini sets languid on his mother’s lap, or Signorelli flings wriggling on pavements of marble, or Lorenzo di Credi, more reverent but less divine, lays carefully among flowers, with his head upon a wisp of golden straw. (p.126)

The author showing off not only his scholarship but also his exquisite taste in making so fine a distinction between Signorelli and Lorenzo di Credi (‘more reverent but less divine’).

Mocking showing off about Italy i.e. Philip

However, what makes Forster more interesting than the run of show-off novelists is that, at the same time as indulging it, Forster gently mocks the tedious English tendency of claiming superior knowledge about Italy. This is done in the essentially comic figure of young Philip, right from the first page described as ‘intoxicated’ by his memories of Italy, determined to be the suburban bourgeois Italy Expert, and so given lots of speeches where he mansplains Italy to everyone else:

Italy, Philip had always maintained, is only her true self in the height of the summer, when the tourists have left her, and her soul awakes under the beams of a vertical sun.

And:

‘I do believe that Italy really purifies and ennobles all who visit her… Don’t, let me beg you, go with that awful tourist idea that Italy’s only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land.’

And:

‘When you know the Italians as well as I do, you will realize that in all that he said to you he was perfectly sincere. The Italians are essentially dramatic; they look on death and love as spectacles.’

What makes all this comic is that when Philip comes face to face with actual Italians he is either completely flummoxed, as when encountering Gino, or exasperated, as when trying to navigate their train system, or (rightly) suspects that he is being mocked by the townspeople of Monteriano:

‘Monteriano seemed in one conspiracy to make him look a fool.’

There’s a particularly comic moment when Philip recognises in Gino’s face the look of the kind of rough handsome Italian man he has admired on his aesthetic trips to Italy, admirable to look at… but not to have in the family! One of the broadly comic aspects of the novel is the way that the English characters love of all things Italian doesn’t extend to actual Italians, who are dismissed as unreliable, chaotic and ineffective.

So Forster has it both ways – as a narrator he professes Italian Knowledge while at the same time mocking characters who aspire to the same kind of hoity Italian Knowledge. Mirrors reflecting mirrors.

The (alleged) Italian attitude to women

Forster treats us to this slab of wisdom about Italian attitudes to men and women.

Lilia gathered somehow from this conversation that Continental society was not the go-as-you-please thing she had expected. Indeed she could not see where Continental society was. Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of Socialism – that true Socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners. In the democracy of the caffe or the street the great question of our life has been solved, and the brotherhood of man is a reality. But is accomplished at the expense of the sisterhood of women. Why should you not make friends with your neighbour at the theatre or in the train, when you know and he knows that feminine criticism and feminine insight and feminine prejudice will never come between you? Though you become as David and Jonathan, you need never enter his home, nor he yours. All your lives you will meet under the open air, the only roof-tree of the South, under which he will spit and swear, and you will drop your h’s, and nobody will think the worse of either.

Meanwhile the women – they have, of course, their house and their church, with its admirable and frequent services, to which they are escorted by the maid. Otherwise they do not go out much, for it is not genteel to walk, and you are too poor to keep a carriage. Occasionally you will take them to the caffe or theatre, and immediately all your wonted acquaintance there desert you, except those few who are expecting and expected to marry into your family. It is all very sad. But one consolation emerges – life is very pleasant in Italy if you are a man.

Was it true then, in 1905? Was it true, generally, of Italian culture in the 20th century? Or is the point of this sweeping generalisation to describe the character of judgemental Lilia more than Italy? Is its main purpose to amplify and generalise out the crushing disillusion which she experiences? (see below)

Generalisations about life in novels

So I’ve considered generalisations about Italy and art and women. These are all clearly subsets or specific examples of the broader tendency of novels of the classical period to overflow with generalisations about life.

For centuries novels have been a channel for writers to pass on their supposed insights and wisdom about human nature and the human psyche. Judged by the standards of science or psychology, these are often of dubious truth or accuracy but then, quite obviously, a lot of the time these little life lessons aren’t to be assessed for their truth. Their purposes are 1) to reinforce the voice of the narrator, to build him up as someone blessed with insights and wisdom about life that the likes of you and I are not party to; and 2) to build up the atmosphere of the story. They do this by implying that this isn’t a story about 3 or 4 insignificant people but that these characters, actions and opinions somehow embody universal values or aspects of human experience. So the generalisations help to big up the author and his story.

As I mentioned in connection with Italy boasting, Forster isn’t an excessively didactic writer, but he does slip in his fair share of generalisations about human nature every two or three pages, things like:

Suffering, however, is more independent of temperament, and the wisest of women could hardly have suffered more.

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.

Our vanity is such that we hold our own characters immutable, and we are slow to acknowledge that they have changed, even for the better.

We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.

For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and – by some sad, strange irony – it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.

The barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or – to put the thing less cynically – we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice. (p.138)

These may or may not be ‘true’ but they 1) are a recognised part of the classical novel tradition; readers have paid their money and they expect a reasonable serving of wisdom sayings; 2) they make the author sound clever i.e. give him the authority which helps make the narrative more effective, makes us take it more seriously.

Ad hoc or partial generalisations

There is a third aspect to this which is 3) when the generalisation is clearly not expressed in the abstract as a universal truth, but tied to a certain situation or character. In this case it is a kind of implemented or dramatic truth, designed to shed light not on universal human nature, but on a specific character or incident or interaction of characters. Thus when Lilia reflects on her new husband’s status as the son of a dentist and Forster writes:

Even in England a dentist is a troublesome creature, whom careful people find difficult to class. He hovers between the professions and the trades; he may be only a little lower than the doctors, or he may be down among the chemists, or even beneath them.

The purpose of this little nugget is not to tell us anything about dentists but to give us a feel for Lilia and her snobbish sense of English social hierarchy. Slightly different but in the same ballpark is this one which opens chapter 4:

The advance of regret can be so gradual that it is impossible to say ‘yesterday I was happy, today I am not.’

On the face of it this is a universal wisdom saying of the kind I described earlier, but the real point is that this leads straight into a consideration of how Lilia became disillusioned with her marriage. Why not say that straight out – ‘Over the next few months Lilia became disillusioned with her marriage?’ Because Forster is gathering rhetorical weight or evidence to back up his characterisation and his story. He is invoking a kind of folk wisdom to give his story extra weight and depth. Just telling the facts is boring. The reader wants their money’s worth.

Also this kind of thing often acts as an introduction to a new scene, lofty generalisations before we descend to a new section of the narrative. They ease us into the specific situation. This is a very old technique in the novel. The most famous example in all English literature is probably the opening line of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ This isn’t famous because it’s true. It’s famous because it’s such a classic example of what I’m talking about, the sweeping generalisation about human nature or society which is used to introduce, ease and usher us into a narrative.

Anyway, this leads on to another logical category, which is where the author has his characters make great generalisations about life.

Novelist’s characters generalising about life

He concluded that nothing could happen, not knowing that human love and love of truth sometimes conquer where love of beauty fails. (p.71)

‘Absolute trust in some one else is the essence of education.’

‘There’s never any knowing – (how am I to put it?) – which of our actions, which of our idlenesses won’t have things hanging on it for ever.’ (p.136)

Sometimes the characters’ truth sayings are plausible in and of themselves but mostly they are designed to expand on and illuminate a character, and can do so in both a positive and a negative way:

‘Women… are never at ease till they tell their faults out loud.’

Evidently she had the usual feminine incapacity for grasping philosophy [thinks pompous Philip]

As we all do, characters in fictions tend to express general axioms as the basis for specific arguments, only in novels they do it more fluently and articulately than most of us manage in real life.

These generalisations, then, are not intended to hold true of the world, they are very clearly meant to demonstrate the characters’ foibles and imperfections. As in this Lady Bracknell-ish declamation by Mrs Herriton:

‘Then you were still infatuated with Italy. It may be full of beautiful pictures and churches, but we cannot judge a country by anything but its men.’ (p.73)

Conclusion about generalisations

When I read novels as a boy I furiously underlined these kinds of life sayings, convinced I was learning wisdom. Forty years later I have read thousands and thousands of the things and realise they are best accepted as purely rhetorical, serving various aims for the novelist such as introducing new scenes or themes, of illuminating particular characters through their own mouths, showing the basic principles they base their behaviour on and soon. Seen from this perspective, novels can be thought of as marshalling conflicting arguments and principles as much as contrasting characters. But none of the axioms have to be true to make the novel work as a fiction – they just have to be plausible enough to make the narrative go.

Puppets

Characters in a novel are obviously puppets of the author’s plan. Sometimes they hint that they’re aware of this. The issue comes into full view several times in relation to young Philip who is all-too-aware that he is a puppet to his mother, who is in many ways a stand-in for the scheming novelist himself:

[Philip] was sure that [Mrs Herriton] was not impulsive, but did not dare to say so. Her ability frightened him. All his life he had been her puppet. She let him worship Italy, and reform Sawston—just as she had let Harriet be Low Church. She had let him talk as much as he liked. But when she wanted a thing she always got it.

Philip saw no prospect of good, nor of beauty either. But the expedition promised to be highly comic. He was not averse to it any longer; he was simply indifferent to all in it except the humours. These would be wonderful. Harriet, worked by her mother; Mrs. Herriton, worked by Miss Abbott; Gino, worked by a cheque—what better entertainment could he desire? There was nothing to distract him this time; his sentimentality had died, so had his anxiety for the family honour. He might be a puppet’s puppet, but he knew exactly the disposition of the strings.

Forster’s amiableness

Forster’s distinguishing feature is his amiable good humour. He’s not exactly a humourist but most of the time he is drolly amused by his own creations and reading a novel by him is to enter into the same spirit of civilised good humour.

Gino’s father could have been given any profession, he could be an anonymous generic businessman. It is characteristic of Forster that he makes him a dentist because of its comic incongruity and because of the impact it has on Philip, the comic version of the pompous Italy-lover. Here’s Philip’s dramatic response to the news:

A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano. A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die.

This is comedy at the character’s expense. Forster makes more of the scene of Philip confronting Gino, who bursts out laughing at his pomposity, than of the scene of Lilia dying and that tells you the kind of novelist he is – essentially comic, although of a very dry or ironic flavour.

There’s a moment when Philip forgets all about the baby he’s come to Italy to rescue because Caroline Abbott reports that Gino apologises for pushing him over and this pleases and flatters Philip’s vanity. He smiles and feels that all is well with the world again. And Forster is more than usually intrusive when he comments:

This admirable change in Philip proceeds from nothing admirable, and may therefore provoke the gibes of the cynical. But angels and other practical people will accept it reverently, and write it down as good. (p.103)

The description of angels as actual beings is, for a moment, reminiscent of Forster’s fantasy short stories, which often describe death and the afterlife with unnerving concreteness – but above all this little moment indicates how forgiving Forster is to his characters – he is humanely understanding of their weaknesses.

Lawrence versus Forster

Forster and his characters timidly dream about breaking free and living an untrammelled life, in the meanwhile mocking and sniping at each other for their petty vanities and snobberies, and breaking each others’ lives without meaning to. Lawrence’s characters do it. They really try to escape England’s stifling conformity. Which explains why Forster became a cosy member of the British establishment while Lawrence was driven into exile.

A sentence in the second paragraph of his first short story sums Forster up:

Ravello is a delightful place with a delightful little hotel in which we met some charming people.

He manages to make one of Italy’s most beautiful and historic towns sound like Dorking. There is something irremediably bourgeois, middle class and Little England about Forster. He can set stories in Italy till the cows come home but his mind is that of a timid vicar or maiden aunt, terrified of any lapse from the most repressed and timorous good manners.

Forster is what D.H. Lawrence had to flee England to get away from. Ghastly good taste and spiritual timidity.

Credit

Where Angels Fear To Tread by E.M. Forster was first published in 1905 by Edward Arnold. References are to the 1982 Penguin edition.

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Mrs Craddock by Somerset Maugham (1902)

‘Entre deux amants il-y-a toujours un qui aime, et un qui se laisse aimer.’

After the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth in 1897, the 23-year-old William Somerset Maugham optimistically abandoned his career as a trainee doctor to become a professional writer. Later in life, Maugham considered this to have been a bad mistake, for literary success came only slowly and he spent nearly a decade churning out ten novels which sold little or poorly.

All the time his real ambition was to be a playwright, but none of his plays were accepted either. It was only in 1907, ten years after Liza, that his play Lady Frederick was finally staged and, to his own surprise, became a runaway success, transforming his reputation and fortunes. Within a year he had four plays running in the West End and had arrived.

Mrs Craddock

Mrs Craddock, from 1902, is a product of his lean early years, and you can see why. It is a long and uneven narrative, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, covering ten or so years in the life of Bertha Leys:

  • from when she is a head-strong, romantic orphan under the guardianship of her aunt Mary living in the family home, Court Leys in Kent
  • through her infatuation for and marriage to the virile local farmer Edward Craddock
  • her slow realisation that Edward is conventional, unimaginative and boring and cares more about his wretched cows and pet dogs than about Bertha’s feelings
  • (something she starts to suspect on their honeymoon in London where he laughs at crude vaudeville and can’t see the point of the art galleries which Bertha adores)
  • she is mortified when he humiliates her at tennis at a big party of the local gentry
  • she hopes that getting pregnant and having a child will bring them close together again, or at least provide a focus for her thwarted love
  • but, inevitably, she has a long, drawn-out miscarriage and the baby is still-born
  • worse than anything is the calm, sensible way Edward accepts this and its corollary, the doctor’s conclusion that she will never again be able to have children – news at which Bertha is, understandably, distraught (chapter 17)
  • their married life becomes a series of niggling arguments – like the one about whether the farm workmen should chop down some beech trees which overshadow an important field (Edward) or should not, because they are old and beautiful (Bertha)
  • these escalate into flaring rows and, slowly, Bertha is forced to admit that she can no longer stand her husband
  • so she leaves Edward and Kent to go travelling with Aunt Mary on the Continent for months
  • on her return to London she has an ill-advised but madly passionate fling with a distant cousin, Gerald Vaudrey
  • but when, after torments of separation, and even mad thoughts about going with him to the New World, Gerald finally leaves for New York, Bertha’s spirit snaps and she returns to Court Leys emotionally empty

Ironically, throughout the novel, as Bertha’s love for him dwindles and dies, we watch as Edward’s career has gone from strength to strength. He manages the Ley property superbly, making a hefty profit and buying up surrounding land, restoring the house, building a tennis court in the grounds, and becoming the life and soul of local North Kent society.

It’s just a shame that Bertha loathes and detests local North Kent society for its parochialism and small-minded snobbery. In the final chapters of the book Bertha and Edward live together but utterly separate in spirit. Bertha, bored out of her mind, walks the local countryside, watches the changing seasons, goes down to the sea and stares for hours at its endless waves, dreaming of escape, dreaming sometimes of suicide or some kind of painless dissolution, anything to make the dreary routine of morning, noon and night, boring dinners with her husband or dreary visits to the local vicar or other landowners, all go away.

Then Edward, stubborn and confident to the end, goes out riding on a horse which has already thrown him once and broken his collarbone. The horse shies at a fence, falling on top of him and he dies. Stunned, Bertha staggers to her bed and reviews her life. Shocked and dismayed, she realises that she is… free!

On the day of the funeral, there is social comedy about who should get order of precedence in the funeral parade among the various organisations Edward which was a leading member of (the freemasons, the county council, the Conservative Party).

But quite separate from all that, Bertha doesn’t attend the funeral. Remote and isolated from the hurly burly of the entire world, she lies on her sofa, in the beautifully restored house, admiring the fine view to the sea, and picks up a book. The End.

Response

I enjoyed reading Mrs Craddock but was aware of its numerous faults. For a start, there are several odd passages where Maugham is being ‘experimental’ (or giving in to contemporary literary fashion) but which really don’t come off.

One of them occurs half way through, when Bertha, still in her infatuation stage, hears tell that Edward is a little injured, and goes off into a peculiar hallucination of him being brought in dead, her washing the corpse, lowering the coffin into the grave and her throwing herself on top of it, a bizarre stream-of-consciousness hallucination – at the end of which Edward walks in right as rain and wondering why she’s in such a state.

The book is also heavily garlanded with over-ripe, purple prose passages describing the Kent countryside or the romantic air of Italy, which go on for pages.

That said, the book has two obvious virtues or strengths:

One is the effectiveness of the social comedy generated by the stiflingly conventional provincial society of Blackstable (the thinly disguised version of Whitstable where Maugham was himself brought up in the 1880s).

The characterisation of the stiff local vicar, Mr Grove, his well-intentioned sister, the hearty doctor, the dashing local landowner Branderton, the chorus of snobbish local ladies led by Mrs Branderston, with Mrs Mayston Ryle and Mrs Molsons not far behind, the scenes involving this little community – are often very funny.

The vicar’s sister, Miss Glover, is a particularly memorable character, all shiny stiff dress and sincere Christian sympathy. Maugham was always strong on social comedy, and strong on the subtleties and veiled malice of petty snobbery. It would later reappear in his feel for the thousand and one stupid restrictions on colonial life in the Far East, as described in his short stories of the 1920s.

Another is Maugham’s knack for beginning or setting his stories in very mundane settings, and often mundane incidents, but from this base working up passages of tremendous emotional intensity which stay with the reader.

Thus, for example, Bertha’s passionate lust and master-worship of Edward are described with real heat, as is her second great infatuation, the sensuality leading to inflamed lust for young Gerald. You can almost smell the sex. Unusual for its day.

Similarly, Bertha’s anger when she realises that Edward doesn’t much care if she lives or dies or what she does, is vividly described and moving.

And so, again, towards the end, is her prolonged mood of depression as she wanders down to the grey Kent sea and fantasises about drowning in it.

So far so good. But whether all these passages really come together to form a convincing description of a plausible personality, such as literature is meant to, I’m not sure.

I’m not sure and I’m also not sure if I’m qualified to judge. For a start, maybe only a woman reader or critic could really assess whether Bertha is a ‘realistic’ character. Who am I to say?

Secondly, the novel covers a period from the 1880s to the end of the 1890s and… that was so long ago, so far away, in a kind of constipated rural Victorian society which is almost impossible for us to imagine, that I can’t see how any modern reader can make a just assessment of its veracity.

What can be confidently made is the criticism that the number two figure in the story – Edward Craddock – never really comes alive. Tall, strong and good-humoured he remains throughout the novel – admittedly putting on weight and growing red-cheeked as the years pass – an unbendingly good, honest, efficient and utterly boring man, the straight man to Bertha’s fireworks display of emotions.

Maybe it’s the failure to bring the man in this novel fully alive which has contributed to it being more or less forgotten.

But what is good, I think, in the novel, is the slow, slow pace at which Maugham describes Bertha’s slow, slow, slow loss of her infatuation, then loss of her love, then her loss of respect for her husband. The book has to be long because its whole point is to describe the very gradual erosion of her love in great detail. In this respect, in the care with which Maugham has plotted the decay of passionate love, I think the novel works.

Sex and lust

Without much by way of introduction or preparation the book launches us straight into the flustered mind of twenty-one-year-old Bertha – living calmly and respectably with her aunt in the family home Court Leys – and her fiercely physical infatuation with the tall, strong, dark local farmer, Edward Craddock who is a tenant farmer on the Ley family land, at Bewlie’s Farm.

He came nearer, a tall fellow of twenty-seven, massively set together, big boned, with long arms and legs, and a magnificent breadth of chest. Bertha recognised the costume that always pleased her, the knickerbockers and gaiters, the Norfolk-jacket of rough tweed, the white stock and the cap – all redolent of the country which for his sake she was beginning to love, and all vigorously masculine. Even the huge boots which covered his feet gave her by their very size a thrill of pleasure; their dimensions suggested a certain firmness of character, a masterfulness, which were intensely reassuring… His cheeks were flushed and his eyes glistened. His vitality was intense, shining out upon others with almost a material warmth.

Although it’s hard for us now to imagine, a number of later writers, in the 1930s and 1940s, paid tribute to the way Maugham broke free of Victorian silence about sex, and wrote with a new openness and candour about passionate, physical love.

This fierce physicality was there right from the start in Maugham’swork, in the powerful descriptions of Liza’s pulse racing and her body swooning against the tall, strong, masculine figure of Jim Blakeston in his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897) – and exactly the same thing is repeated here, as impressionable young Bertha thrills at the touch and swoons against the tall, strong, masculine figure of young Edward.

When he put it round her shoulders, the touch of his hands made her lose the little self-control she had left. A curious spasm passed through her, and she pressed herself closer to him; at the same time his hands sank down, dropping the cloak, and encircled her waist. Then she surrendered herself entirely to his embrace and lifted her face to his. He bent down and kissed her. The kiss was such utter madness that she almost groaned. She could not tell if it was pain or pleasure. She flung her arms round his neck and drew him to her.

When at last he bade her good-bye and shook hands, she blushed again; she was extraordinarily troubled, and as, with his rising, the strong masculine odour of the countryside reached her nostrils, her head whirled.

In a field she saw him, directing some operation. She trembled at the sight, her heart beat very quickly; and when, seeing her, he came forward with a greeting, she turned red and then white in the most compromising fashion. But he was very handsome as, with easy gait, he sauntered to the hedge; above all he was manly, and the pleasing thought passed through Bertha that his strength must be quite herculean. She barely concealed her admiration.

‘I’m rather frightened of you, sometimes,’ she said, laughing. ‘You’re so strong. I feel so utterly weak and helpless beside you.’
‘Are you afraid I shall beat you?’
She looked up at him and then down at the strong hands.
‘I don’t think I should mind if you did. I think I should only love you more.’

‘Let me look at your hands,’ she said. She loved them too. They were large and roughly made, hard with work and exposure, ten times pleasanter, she thought, than the soft hands of the townsman… She stretched out the long, strong fingers. Craddock, knowing her very little, looked with wonder and amusement. She caught his glance, and with a smile bent down to kiss the upturned palms. She wanted to abase herself before the strong man, to be low and humble before him. She would have been his handmaiden, and nothing could have satisfied her so much as to perform for him the most menial services. She knew not how to show the immensity of her passion.

It’s a commonplace enough word but in Maugham’s hands the word ‘thrill’, more nakedly than in other writers of the time, describes the physical impact of sexual arousal and lust.

Even the huge boots which covered his feet gave her by their very size a thrill of pleasure…

Craddock blushed. Bertha noticed it, and a strange little thrill went through her…

He took her hand and the contact thrilled her; her knees were giving way, and she almost tottered.

His letters had caused her an indescribable thrill, the mere sight of his handwriting had made her tremble, and she wanted to see him; she woke up at night with his kisses on her lips.

It gave her a queer thrill to see him turn white when she held his hand, to see him tremble when she leaned on his arm.

It’s a striking paradox that such an externally polite, formal, correctly dressed, well-mannered and self-contained man as Maugham wrote so obsessively and fiercely, throughout his career, of complete sexual abandonment and the heart-stopping power of sheer physical lust.

Never before had she experienced that utter weakness of the knees so that she feared to fall; her breathing was strangely oppressive, and her heart beat almost painfully.

And the candid way he describes the wish to be mastered, dominated, controlled, owned and directed by a powerful strong man.

For the moment Bertha forgot her wayward nature, and wished suddenly to subject herself to his strong guidance. His very strength made her feel curiously weak.

‘Shut your eyes,’ she whispered, and she kissed the closed lids; she passed her lips slowly over his lips, and the soft contact made her shudder and laugh. She buried her face in his clothes, inhaling those masterful scents of the countryside which had always fascinated her.

Later in the book, the same thing happens all over again when she becomes infatuated with Gerald. In the course of that affair there takes place something you don’t usually read about at the period, which is the clearly defined moment when Bertha decides to have sex with Gerald, to give him the great gift of her body, to make their union unique and unforgettable.

You can almost smell the pheromones radiating off the page as Bertha pursues Gerald across London, tracking him down to her aunt’s house, her aunt goes out and they are on the verge of doing something unforgiveable according to Victorian custom (Bertha was still a married woman and keeps telling us that Gerald is almost young enough to be her son) when… there’s a knock at the door and Aunt Mary reappears in the nick of time!

Still. The description of Bertha’s heat and arousal as` she gets so close to her goal is almost pornographic in its blood-heating intensity.

Later, in the 1920s, Maugham met D.H. Lawrence (but then, he met everyone) although they didn’t hit it off. From the limited knowledge I have, I can’t help thinking that this story about a passionate young woman’s lust for a farmer prefigures Lawrence’s novels of love among the haystacks, and I wonder what the younger man thought of the trail Maugham had blazed with his shocking-for-their-time descriptions.

The battle of the sexes

Arguably the central subject of ‘the novel’ since its birth has been the battle of the sexes – to be precise the struggle to find and keep the perfect partner.

The English novel starts in 1748 with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, a 500-page battle between a man who wants to ravish his servant girl (Pamela) and the said servant girl who insists that they are married before he takes her ‘virtue’. And the rest of ‘serious’ fiction continued to be centred on this theme for at least 150 years – the sly marriage markets of Jane Austen, the earnest character studies of George Eliot, in the American ladies in Europe of Henry James and the Golden Age snobbery of Edith Wharton, through the endless sex war in D.H. Lawrence, eachoed in the love comedies of H.G. Wells or Aldous Huxley, and so on.

Literature which doesn’t address the problem of finding the right partner, and holding onto them i.e. of marriage and adultery, tends not to be thought central to the Great Tradition of the English Novel. Thus ‘serious’ literary critics for a long time refused to admit Sterne, Dickens or Conrad to the ‘canon’.

Love, marriage, infidelity, these are the topics which fill vast warehouses of ‘serious’ literature. Madame Bovary. Anna Karenina.

Mrs Craddock is smack bang in the middle of that tradition for which marriage is the sole interest of human life and, in particular, unhappy marriage. Unhappy, mismatched and ill-fated love turned out to be the central theme of Maugham’s long career.

And Mrs Craddock amounts to an extended early exploration of this theme.

Maugham and women

And at the heart of these mismatched marriages is the women. Maugham throughout his long career had a special sympathy with women. Take imaginative, free-spirited, if naive, Kitty Garstin getting bored of her dull husband in The Painted Veil. Or Mary Panton, unsuitably married to an alcoholic gambler in Up At the Villa and then seriously considering a second (and obviously foolish) marriage to an eminent diplomat twice her age. Or Julia Lambert, famous actress throwing herself away on a worthless young cad in Theatre. Or Liza giving her heart and body to rascally Jim Blakeston instead of decent loyal Tom in Liza of Lambeth. Mismatches, all of them. And women all at the centre of the stories.

In Maugham’s theatrical comedies of manners, there is also a wide array of interesting women characters. There are old and amusingly cynical women (Lady Grayson in Our Betters), younger, powerful women (Constance Middleton in The Constant Woman) and mature, tragic women (Mrs. Tabret in The Sacred Flame).

It is the women, and their often painful emotional journeys, who stick in the reader’s imagination, while the callow young men in these plays are often only dramatic ciphers.

Maugham’s subject is the eternal erring of the human heart, but it is nearly always a woman’s heart which is described, and felt, with greatest intensity.

The New Woman

As if the marriage theme wasn’t already central enough in the literary tradition, the 1890s saw a particular interest in the role and experience of women in contemporary society. It was the era of ‘the New Woman’, and a flurry of novels were published examining the issue of women in society, with narratives and characters being created to explore the rights and wrongs of women.

The term ‘New Woman’ was popularized by British-American writer Henry James, who used it to describe the growth in the number of feminist, educated, independent career women in Europe and the United States. Independence was not simply a matter of the mind: it also involved physical changes in activity and dress, as activities such as bicycling expanded women’s ability to engage with a broader more active world. The New Woman pushed the limits set by a male-dominated society, especially as modeled in the plays of Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906). (Wikipedia)

The New Woman was in all the papers, in magazines, in articles, on the stage, discussed in Parliament, aired in a thousand short stories and novels. It even percolated through to the provincial backwater of Blackstable where Mrs Craddock is set, and where clever, cosmopolitan Miss Ley enjoys teasing the hide-bound locals.

‘Which do you think is the predominant partner?’ she asked, smiling drily [referring to Edward and Bertha].
‘The man, as he should be,’ gruffly replied the doctor.
‘Do you think he has more brains?’
‘Ah, you’re a feminist,’ said Dr. Ramsay, with great scorn.

Striking that old fuddy-duddy Dr Ramsay knows what a feminist is and uses the term ‘feminist’ in a story set in the 1880s. Amazing that women were arguing with men about the role of women, and both able to joke and josh about it, some 130 years ago. In that 130 years hundreds of novels, plays, films, thousands of factual books and hundreds of thousands of articles have been written about the New Woman, about feminism, women’s liberation and #metoo.

Quite clearly it is an issue, a real and enormous issue – but one like homelessness and poverty and managing the economy and the North-South divide and how to run the railways, which every generation of intellectuals thinks it has discovered, discusses to death, but which is, somehow, never finally solved.

Boldness about marriage

I mentioned Maugham’s surprising candour in describing the physical characteristics of lust. He makes at least one of his characters be just as scandalously blunt about the broader realities of sex and reproduction. It is Bertha’s aunt, Miss Ley, who is given a speech impatiently telling the dry-as-dust Miss Glover, the vicar’s sister, that the basis of marriage is biological reproduction and nothing more.

‘Yes, I know what you all think in England,’ said Miss Ley, catching the glance and its meaning. ‘You expect people to marry from every reason except the proper, one – and that is the instinct of reproduction.’
‘Miss Ley!’ exclaimed Miss Glover, blushing.
‘Oh, you’re old enough to take a sensible view of the, matter,’ answered Miss Ley, somewhat brutally. ‘Bertha is merely the female attracted to the male, and that is the only decent foundation of marriage – the other way seems to me merely horrid. And what does it matter if the man is not of the same station, the instinct has nothing to do with the walk in life; if I’d ever been in love I shouldn’t have cared if it was a pot-boy, I’d have married him – if he asked me.’
‘Well, upon my word!’ said the doctor.
But Miss Ley was roused now, and interrupted him: ‘The particular function of a woman is to propagate her species; and if she’s wise she’ll choose a strong and healthy man to be the father of her children. I have no patience with those women who marry a man because he’s got brains. What is the good of a husband who can make abstruse mathematical calculations? A woman wants a man with strong arms and the digestion of an ox.’
‘Miss Ley,’ broke in Miss Glover, ‘I’m not clever enough to argue with you, but I know you’re wrong. I don’t think I am right to listen to you; I’m sure Charles wouldn’t like it.’
‘My dear, you’ve been brought up like the majority of English girls – that is, like a fool.’
Poor Miss Glover blushed. ‘At all events I’ve been brought up to regard marriage as a holy institution. We’re here upon earth to mortify the flesh, not to indulge it. I hope I shall never be tempted to think of such matters in the way you’ve suggested. If ever I marry I know that nothing will be further from me than carnal thoughts. I look upon marriage as a spiritual union in which it is my duty to love, honour, and obey my husband, to assist and sustain him, to live with him such a life that when the end comes we may be prepared for it.’
‘Fiddlesticks!’ said Miss Ley.

As with his hot-blooded descriptions of lust, Maugham’s correlation of human reproduction with animal reproduction i.e. as an animal instinct devoid of all moral or religious meaning, strikes me as definitely anticipating D.H. Lawrence.

Boldness about religion

And the same goes for his treatment of traditional religion. After his parents died, Maugham was brought up an orphan in the home of his father’s brother, the unimaginative vicar of Whitstable in the 1880s (hence the accuracy of the social comedy of provincial Kentish society in this novel).

Sometime in his student years, Maugham’s Christian faith just melted away and he experienced a tremendous sense of liberation, liberation (as Selina Hastings’s fabulous biography of Maugham makes crystal clear) to have sex with whoever he wanted, male or female.

Accompanying Miss Ley’s blunt truth-telling about sex, there is a similar passage in which Bertha brutally attacks the Christian faith. Devout, tightly-laced Miss Glover, the vicar’s spinster sister, has come to ‘comfort’ Bertha after she’s lost her baby in childbirth. Bertha demurs.

‘Oh, Bertha, you’re not taking it in the proper spirit – you’re so rebellious, and it’s wrong, it’s utterly wrong.’
‘I can only think of my baby,’ said Bertha, hoarsely.
‘Why don’t you pray to God, dear – shall I offer a short prayer now, Bertha?’
‘No, I don’t want to pray to God – He’s either impotent or cruel.’
‘Bertha,’ cried Miss Glover. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying. Oh, pray to God to melt your stubbornness; pray to God to forgive you.’
‘I don’t want to be forgiven. I’ve done nothing that needs it. It’s God who needs my forgiveness – not I His.’

The attack continues later, when Miss Glover returns with the vicar as back-up. Bertha initially starts off meekly reading the Prayer Book with them, but then breaks down:

‘I have no wish to “give hearty thanks unto God,”‘ she said, looking almost fiercely at the worthy pair. ‘I’m very sorry to offend your prejudices, but it seems to me absurd that I should prostrate myself in gratitude to God.’
‘Oh, Mrs. Craddock, I trust you don’t mean what you say,’ said the Vicar.
‘This is what I told you, Charles,’ said Miss Glover. ‘I don’t think Bertha is well, but still this seems to me dreadfully wicked.’
Bertha frowned, finding it difficult to repress the sarcasm which rose to her lips; her forbearance was sorely tried. But Mr. Glover was a little undecided.
‘We must be as thankful to God for the afflictions He sends as for the benefits,’ he said at last.
‘I am not a worm to crawl upon the ground and give thanks to the foot that crushes me.’
‘I think that is blasphemous, Bertha,’ said Miss Glover.
‘Oh, I have no patience with you, Fanny,’ said Bertha, raising herself, a flush lighting up her face. ‘Can you realise what I’ve gone through, the terrible pain of it? Oh, it was too awful. Even now when I think of it I almost scream.’
‘It is by suffering that we rise to our higher self,’ said Miss Glover. ‘Suffering is a fire that burns away the grossness of our material natures.’
‘What rubbish you talk,’ cried Bertha, passionately. ‘You can say that when you’ve never suffered. People say that suffering ennobles one; it’s a lie, it only makes one brutal…. But I would have borne it – for the sake of my child. It was all useless – utterly useless. Dr. Ramsay told me the child had been dead the whole time. Oh, if God made me suffer like that, it’s infamous. I wonder you’re not ashamed to put it down to God. How can you imagine Him to be so stupid, so cruel! Why, even the vilest beast in the slums wouldn’t cause a woman such frightful and useless agony for the mere pleasure of it.’

This powerful scene should take its place in any anthology describing the collapse of Christian belief in the later 19th century.

What with the Darwinian view of human reproduction, this forthright atheism, and the implicit theme of the New Woman throughout the novel, along with the numerous natural descriptions which I’ve mentioned, Maugham was clearly making an effort to write a Big Serious Novel tackling some of the fashionable Issues of the Day.

It doesn’t work because the central characters aren’t, in the end, really believable enough to support the great weight placed on them. But it’s a valiant attempt.

Miss Ley

All this is to overlook the third major character in the story who is, on one reading, arguably its most successful character – Bertha’s Aunt Mary, or Miss Ley as she’s referred to.

In the opening scenes of the novel, Bertha is still living under Miss Ley’s guardianship, we see them often together, and so she is one of the first characters we get to know and like. Although she then disappears from view for the long stretches which describe Bertha and Edward’s marriage, whenever Miss Ley does reappear – when Bertha goes to stay with her for a short break, and then runs away with her to the continent, and in the prolonged sequence when Bertha is staying with Miss Ley while she has her almost-affair with young Gerald – she was greeted with cheers from this reader. Why? Because she is drily, quietly funny.

Miss Ley sat on the sofa by the fireside, a woman of middle-size, very slight, with a thin and much wrinkled face. Of her features the mouth was the most noticeable, not large, with lips that were a little too thin; it was always so tightly compressed as to give her an air of great determination, but there was about the corners an expressive mobility, contradicting in rather an unusual manner the inferences which might be drawn from the rest of her person. She had a habit of fixing her cold eyes on people with a steadiness that was not a little embarrassing. They said Miss Ley looked as if she thought them great fools, and as a matter of fact that usually was her precise opinion. Her thin grey hair was very plainly done; and the extreme simplicity of her costume gave a certain primness, so that her favourite method of saying rather absurd things in the gravest and most decorous manner often disconcerted the casual stranger.

‘Saying rather absurd things in the gravest and most decorous manner’. Miss Ley emerges as the vehicle for the best of the book’s sub-Jane Austen sly wit, acting – especially in the first half – as the tart and comic centre of the novel, as drily cynical and Bertha is passionately romantic.

Humanity, Miss Ley took to be a small circle of persons, mostly feminine, middle-aged, unattached, and of independent means, who travelled on the continent, read good literature and abhorred the vast majority of their fellow-creatures.

She asked politely after [the doctor]’s wife, to whom she secretly objected for her meek submission to the doctor. Miss Ley made a practice of avoiding those women who had turned themselves into mere shadows of their lords, more especially when their conversation was of household affairs.

[Miss Ley] had already come to the conclusion that he [Craddock] was a man likely to say on a given occasion the sort of thing which might be expected; and that, in her eyes, was a hideous crime.

Miss Ley was anxious that no altercation should disturb the polite discomfort of the meeting.

Miss Ley revels in the embarrassment of other people, especially the uptight, narrow-minded provincials around her. She spends as much time as she can in London, and even more abroad in Italy (in another anticipation of a more famous novelist, this time E.M. Foster with his nice-girls-and-their-aunts-in-Italy stories). Whenever Miss Lay arrives back in Kent it is hilarious to watch the locals being affronted and outraged and shocked and tutting and twitching the curtains, under fire from Miss Ley’s dry wit and through Miss Ley’s quiet, sardonic gaze.

And she is not only an appealing character in her own right. But at a number of key moments (throughout Bertha’s early infatuation with Edward, then slyly noticing her loss of faith in her husband, and then throughout the Gerald affair) Miss Ley’s role as onlooker and chorus to the main action pushes her closer to the reader’s perspective.

It is as if she was standing next to us in the wings of a theatre, muttering an ironic commentary as we both watch the overwrought romantic heroine fainting and weeping and panting with passion.

Oscar Wilde

Moreover, Miss Ley gets most of the book’s one-liners. Much of the dialogue of Mrs Craddock contains the sub-Wildean cynical wit which was to characterise Maugham’s later string of extremely successful plays, such Oscarisms as:

‘Marriage is always a hopeless idiocy for a woman who has enough money of her own to live upon.’

‘Marriage is an institution of the Church, Miss Ley,’ replied Miss Glover, rather severely.
‘Is it?’ retorted Miss Ley. ‘I always thought it was an arrangement to provide work for the judges in the Divorce Court.’

‘Mr. Branderton has been to Eton and Oxford, but he conceals the fact with great success.’

‘My dear Dr. Ramsay, I have trouble enough in arranging my own life; do not ask me to interfere with other people’s.’

It is madness for a happy pair to pretend to have no secrets from one another: it leads them into so much deception.

‘I make a point of thinking with the majority – it’s the only way to get a reputation for wisdom.’

‘You wouldn’t rob us of our generals,’ said Miss Ley. ‘They’re so useful at tea-parties.’

And the fact that almost all of these lines are given to Miss Ley, and that she emerges as in many ways the most loveable character, explains why Maugham begins the book with a dedication – more precisely, a mock ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ – to her. He obviously liked her best of all the characters in the book, and she is the only one you would want to meet.

A tiny Marxist comment

Having just been to an extensive feminist art exhibition, and read numerous articles about the Judge Kavanaugh affair, and read some feminist articles about Maugham and Women and, given that Bertha is quite clearly a heroine who traditional feminist criticism would see as the oppressed, repressed, stifled, stymied victim of the Patriarchy – it is worth pointing out that Bertha never does a day’s work in her life.

Bertha lives her entire life off the labour of the workers on her father’s farms and estates, as does Miss Ley.

Both women live lives full of books and art and travel and galleries and fine feelings, their meals are cooked and served and cleared away by nameless faceless servants (we never learn the names of any of the Craddocks’ household servants or farm workers), their rooms are cleaned, their laundry is washed, trains run for them, boats sail for them, galleries open for them – without them ever lifting a finger to earn it.

They belong to the rentier class. They are social parasites. Edward works hard and is efficient and effective at transforming the fortunes of the Ley estate, at managing its livestock and agriculture, and joins local bodies like the parish council and freemasons, which he also runs with exemplary honesty and thoroughness. And for this – he is bitterly mocked by his wife:

Bertha soon found that her husband’s mind was not only commonplace, but common. His ignorance no longer seemed touching, but merely shameful; his prejudices no longer amusing but contemptible. She was indignant at having humbled herself so abjectly before a man of such narrowness of mind, of such insignificant character. She could not conceive how she had ever passionately loved him. He was bound in by the stupidest routine. It irritated her beyond measure to see the regularity with which he went through the varying processes of his toilet. She was indignant with his presumption, and self-satisfaction, and conscious rectitude. Edward’s taste was contemptible in books, in pictures, and in music; and his pretentions to judge upon such matters filled Bertha with scorn.

Books, art and music – that is how Bertha judges people, not for their character or dutifulness or patriotism or hard work. All these are rather ridiculous qualities in her eyes.

This scorn is echoed by young Gerald, himself the wastrel son of rich parents, who was kicked out of public school and has got his family’s housemaid pregnant.

On one occasion Edward comes up to see his wife during her stay with Miss Ley. After he has left, Gerald, the good-for-nothing idler, mocks solid, efficient, patriotic Edward Craddock to Miss Ley, who feebly defends him:

‘His locks are somewhat scanty but he has a strong sense of duty.’
‘I know that,’ shouted Gerald. ‘It oozes out of him whenever he gets hot, just like gum.’

This, one cannot help thinking, is all too often the attitude of high-minded writers and artists – regardless of gender or race – to the actual, physical, hard, demanding labour of making and maintaining the world; the smug condescension of the bookish toward those who do the daily necessary labour which makes their luxurious lives of fine feelings and deep thoughts and carefree travel possible.

Maugham pours so much feeling and sentiment and imagination and sympathy into hundreds of pages describing Bertha’s feelings and passions and thoughts and worries and fears and disillusion and unhappiness and despair – that it is easy to forget that she is a leech.

Plus ça change

Reading older literature, I am continually struck at the way that things which bothered the late-Victorians are still bothering us now. The status, roles and rights of women were exercising many of their best minds. Same now. And so was the problem of the poor, the homeless, and the huge inequalities in society. Same now.

But there are other, lesser issues, too, which made me think that some things really never change.

Railways For example, it was only last week that we were hearing about the Labour Party’s plans to renationalise the railways because, in private hands, the level of service given by the railways is shocking, and all the money they raise seems to end up as massive dividends for their shareholders. Well, here is what Maugham thought about British railways in 1902.

Though it was less than thirty miles from Dover to Blackstable the communications were so bad that it was necessary to wait for hours at the port, or take the boat-train to London and then come sixty miles down again. Bertha was exasperated at the delay, forgetting that she was now (thank Heaven!) in a free country, where the railways were not run for the convenience of passengers, but the passengers necessary evils to create dividends for an ill-managed company. (Chapter 23)

Brexit There’s a passage designed to contrast Edward’s narrow-minded Little Englandism and his simple patriotism with Bertha’s cultured cosmopolitanism and loathing of patriotic symbols (in this case, jingoistic late-Victorian music) which anticipates a lot of the rhetoric of Brexit. Manly if thick Edward is talking:

‘I don’t mind confessing that I can’t stand all this foreign music. What I say to Bertha is – why can’t you play English stuff?’
‘If you must play at all,’ interposed his wife.
‘After all’s said and done The Blue Bells of Scotland has got a tune about it that a fellow can get his teeth into.’
‘You see, there’s the difference,’ said Bertha, strumming a few bars of Rule Britannia, ‘it sets mine on edge.’
‘Well, I’m patriotic,’ retorted Edward. ‘I like the good, honest, homely English airs. I like ’em because they’re English. I’m not ashamed to say that for me the best piece of music that’s ever been written is God Save the Queen.’
‘Which was written by a German, dear Edward,’ said Miss Ley, smiling.
‘That’s as it may be,’ said Edward, unabashed, ‘but the sentiment’s English and that’s all I care about.’
‘Hear! hear!’ cried Bertha. ‘I believe Edward has aspirations towards a political career. I know I shall finish up as the wife of the local M.P.’
‘I’m patriotic,’ said Edward, ‘and I’m not ashamed to confess it.’
‘Rule Britannia,’ sang Bertha, ‘Britannia rules the waves, Britons never, never shall be slaves. Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!’
‘It’s the same everywhere now,’ proceeded the orator. ‘We’re choke full of foreigners and their goods. I think it’s scandalous. English music isn’t good enough for you – you get it from France and Germany. Where do you get your butter from? Brittany! Where d’you get your meat from? New Zealand!’ This he said with great scorn, and Bertha punctuated the observation with a resounding chord. ‘And as far as the butter goes, it isn’t butter – it’s margarine. Where does your bread come from? America. Your vegetables from Jersey.’
‘Your fish from the sea,’ interposed Bertha.
‘And so it is all along the line – the British farmer hasn’t got a chance!’ (Chapter 12)

Or again, Edward stoutly declares:

‘I’m quite content to be as I am, and I don’t want to know a single foreign language. English is quite good enough for me…. I think English people ought to stick to their own country. I don’t pretend to have read any French books, but I’ve never heard anybody deny, that at all events the great majority are indecent, and not the sort of thing a woman should read… What we want now is purity and reconstitution of the national life. I’m in favour of English morals, and English homes, English mothers, and English habits.’

Cosmopolitan contempt for Britain The cosmopolitan Miss Ley thinks there is something intrinsically pathetic about the English.

‘You’ve never had a London season, have you? On the whole I think it’s amusing: the opera is very good and sometimes you see people who are quite well dressed.’

To this day there is a broad streak of intellectual literary life which despises the English and worships the literature, climate, fashion and landscape of France or Italy.

Tourism When I went to Barcelona recently I couldn’t miss the graffiti everywhere telling tourists to go home and stop ruining their city. I’ve since read articles about other tourist destinations which are struggling to cope with the number of visitors. Back in 1902 Miss Ley shared this feeling that tourism was ruining everywhere, in this case Paris:

We have here a very nice apartment, in the Latin Quarter, away from the rich people and the tourists. I do not know which is more vulgar, the average tripper or the part of Paris which he infests: I must say they become one another to a nicety. I loathe the shoddiness of the boulevards, with their gaudy cafés over-gilt and over-sumptuous, and their crowds of ill-dressed foreigners. But if you come I can show you a different Paris – a restful and old-fashioned Paris, theatres to which tourists do not go; gardens full of pretty children and nursemaids with long ribbons to their caps. I can take you down innumerable grey streets with funny shops, in old churches where you see people actually praying; and it is all very quiet and calming to the nerves. And I can take you to the Louvre at hours when there are few visitors…

Infest! She says tourists infest parts of Paris. If she had been describing immigrants, the book would be banned.

Politicians are idiots In a funny scene Edward stands for election to the local council and makes a speech riddled with pompous expressions, bad jokes, stories which disappointingly taper off, but still manages to end with rousingly jingoistic rhetoric.

Bertha is more ashamed and embarrassed than she’s ever been in her life by its simple-minded idiocy. But the speech is greeted with wild applause and Edward is elected by a landslide. People, Bertha concludes, are idiots. And the biggest idiots of all are running the country.

There is nothing so difficult as to persuade men that they are not omniscient. Bertha, exaggerating the seriousness of the affair, thought it charlatanry [of Edward] to undertake a post without knowledge and without capacity. Fortunately that is not the opinion of the majority, or the government of this enlightened country could not proceed.

Throughout the book the reader finds the same tone, and the same arguments, applied to the same ‘issues’ that we are still discussing and arguing about, 120 years later. Many superficial details change – but arguments about the rights of women, the idiocy of politicians, the rubbish train system, the philistine patriotism and the snooty snobbery of the book and art world – all of this remains the same as ever.

Related links

Somerset Maugham’s books

1897 Liza of Lambeth
1902 Mrs Craddock
1915 Of Human Bondage
1919 The Moon and Sixpence

1921 The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands (short story collection)
1921 The Circle (play)
1922 On a Chinese Screen (travel book)
1923 Our Betters (play)
1925 The Painted Veil (novel)
1926 The Casuarina Tree: Six Stories
1927 The Constant Wife (play)
1928 Ashenden: Or the British Agent (short story collection)
1929 The Sacred Flame (play)

1930 Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard
1930 The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey From Rangoon to Haiphong
1931 Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular (short story collection)
1932 The Narrow Corner (novel)
1933 Ah King (short story collection)
1933 Sheppey (play)
1935 Don Fernando (travel book)
1936 Cosmopolitans (29 x two-page-long short stories)
1937 Theatre (novel)
1938 The Summing Up (autobiography)
1939 Christmas Holiday (novel)

1940 The Mixture as Before (short story collection)
1941 Up at the Villa (crime novella)
1942 The Hour Before The Dawn (novel)
1944 The Razor’s Edge (novel)
1946 Then and Now (historical novel)
1947 Creatures of Circumstance (short story collection)
1948 Catalina (historical novel)
1949 A Writer’s Notebook

1963 Collected short stories volume one (30 stories: Rain, The Fall of Edward Barnard, Honolulu, The Luncheon, The Ant and the Grasshopper, Home, The Pool, Mackintosh, Appearance and Reality, The Three Fat Women of Antibes, The Facts of Life, Gigolo and Gigolette, The Happy Couple, The Voice of the Turtle, The Lion’s Skin, The Unconquered, The Escape, The Judgement Seat, Mr. Know-All, The Happy Man, The Romantic Young Lady, The Point of Honour, The Poet, The Mother, A Man from Glasgow, Before the Party, Louise, The Promise, A String of Beads, The Yellow Streak)
1963 Collected short stories volume two (24 stories: The Vessel of Wrath, The Force of Circumstance, Flotsam and Jetsam, The Alien Corn, The Creative Impulse, The Man with the Scar, Virtue, The Closed Shop, The Bum, The Dream, The Treasure, The Colonel’s Lady, Lord Mountdrago, The Social Sense, The Verger, In A Strange Land, The Taipan, The Consul, A Friend in Need, The Round Dozen, The Human Element, Jane, Footprints in the Jungle, The Door of Opportunity)
1963 Collected short stories volume three (17 stories: A Domiciliary Visit, Miss King, The Hairless Mexican, The Dark Woman, The Greek, A Trip to Paris, Giulia Lazzari, The Traitor, Gustav, His Excellency, Behind the Scenes, Mr Harrington’s Washing, A Chance Acquaintance, Love and Russian Literature, Sanatorium)
1963 Collected short stories volume four (30 stories: The Book-Bag, French Joe, German Harry, The Four Dutchmen, The Back Of Beyond, P. & O., Episode, The Kite, A Woman Of Fifty, Mayhew, The Lotus Eater, Salvatore, The Wash-Tub, A Man With A Conscience, An Official Position, Winter Cruise, Mabel, Masterson, Princess September, A Marriage Of Convenience, Mirage, The Letter, The Outstation, The Portrait Of A Gentleman, Raw Material, Straight Flush, The End Of The Flight, A Casual Affair, Red, Neil Macadam)

2009 The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings

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Posted by Simon on October 9, 2018

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