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Ethel Tompson
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I am going back once
more to what I call "gentle fiction".
I am a slow thinker and go back again
and again to the same thoughts: I must have been a ruminant in a previous life!
When some people go straight to the heart of the matter, (no pun intended with this
expression), I take circuitous routes and I meander around my topic, finding
new issues, relationships and definitions.
I apologize towards some readers of
this blog who are devoted readers of "gentle fiction". I am not disparaging
the books they love or the way they read them. I try to understand who reads
what, how and why. With my sinuous mind, I shall come back to this topic and
will refine my assumptions. No criticism is implied: only observation.
I still read blogs to which I have
subscribed and belong to the same active reading groups, and I wonder how
people can be so strongly engaged with their reading and with one or another
writer whom I would consider - and whom I do consider - as
secondary. I do not say negligible: no writer is truly and entirely negligible,
but really secondary as object of attention. Writers who may be taken up when
there is nothing better to read and who may be a hobby but not an absorbing
one. And yet, they are absorbing for some.
This is worth pondering and this gives
them an added value.
These writers are usually ladies - not
women, ladies, according to the definition Marilyn French gave in her pioneer
feminist book "The Women's Room" -, lady novelists of the twentieth
century read by ladies born during the twentieth century. The lady novelists
are sometimes gentle women, both in the sense of belonging to the social middle
class of gentlewomen and that of being gentle, that is understanding,
compassionate, well behaved, moderate, mild - all qualities that are slightly
evanescent and uneasily circumscribed. And mostly conservative. I am talking
here again of lady writers such as DE Stevenson, Angela Thirkell, Margery
Sharp, O Douglas, EM Delafield, Joyce Anstruther, Joyce Dennys or Susan
Pleydell, for instance - these novelists who have been resurrected by
Persephone Press, Greyladies, or smaller publishers.
Exceptions come later with Dora Saint
and her "Miss Read" and "Thrush Green" series. There, there
are schoolmistresses, depleted spinsters, widows living on a meagre stipend.
But even if they seem timeless, they live in the 1950s or 1960s when the great mutation of the Western society has taken place
and where women are allowed to work in some "gentle" jobs, and when
impoverished gentlewomen live quite normally in cottages. Some of them are not
even gentlewomen in the social sense of "middle class". Miss Clare
and Emily Davis in the "Miss Read" series have come from the lower class
and have reached the status of schoolmistresses through work and merit. They
are gentlewomen through their attitude towards life.
The lady readers are younger than the
lady writers, born at least one generation after them. Therefore they have
never been ladies of leisure but have almost always had a job or have raised
their children, mostly without help. They are one cut down the social ladder.
This may also be because of the changes that happened in society during the
twentieth century. But they are gentle according to the second meaning of the
word. They are well behaved, moderate, mild, kind although somewhat authoritative
sometimes, understanding and compassionate. I
tend to think they are conservative, politically or not.
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| Gertrude Fiske |
Their faculty of "identification-quite-but-not-entirely" seems to be a major point. One can put on the shoes of the heroine - it is usually a heroine, not a hero, as main protagonist - but with a distance left between one's own life and the heroine's life. This is important.
Most of the time, a house plays an important
part. Heroines may have to seek a job. Their lives will nevertheless revolve
about the notion of home. In Angela Thirkell's novels, no "heroine"
is a woman. She is a lady and does not work but makes a home for the family, or will be engaged or married by the end of the book,
raises her children, takes care of her husband, sometimes mildly flirts and
belongs to community activities and committees. DE Stevenson's protagonists are
married or will marry and then leave their job if ever they have one, as do those of Margery
Sharp's or O Douglas'. The house and/or the estate that goes with it are seen
through women's eyes and not through those of men's as in Trollope, where legal matters are expounded. Here, the relationship with the house is mostly emotional and calls sometimes, rather
incredibly, upon the supernatural as in "Celia's House" by DE
Stevenson, or in "The Herb of Grace" by Elizabeth Goudge. Dora
Saint's Miss Clare lives in her parents’ cottage and keeps it immaculate.
One may see the continuity of the
Victorian notions of "The Angel of the house" and of the importance
of home, their taming and civilizing effects upon boys and men.
The women engaged with these books are
usually home makers themselves. They have or had a job - a number of them are
librarians or teachers -, they are married or single through widowhood, or
divorced (there does not seem to be lots of "spinsters": they have at
the "worst" been partners) and they comment about cooking, gardening,
knitting, ailing, sewing, reading, writing, travelling, reading.
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| Gertrude Fiske |
| Even though there are lots of engagements, marriages, weddings, births and christenings in the novels, there must be no sex, and no allusion to sex in the novels. There is only romantic love or light flirting led through conversations with esprit. |
Readers are very careful about this
aspect and firmly condemn all literature mentioning the unspeakable. One cannot
say that it is a trait of the British prudishness and reserve. Indeed, readers
are manifold and come first from the United States, then from Canada, some from
Australia and New-Zealand, and of course from Britain. This adds sometimes to
the distance between writer and reader. Distance in time and distance in geography.
Both will often lead to a misunderstanding and a misconstruction of the novel
that creates a total rewriting of the story in the readers' minds.
And yet, they all insist on the feeling
of reality given by the plots, characters and settings. Details - these novels
are full of irrelevant details - are woven with the fabric of the readers'
lives. Which is unrealistic in the extreme as, for instance, life in the
Midwest in the 1950s has nothing to do with life in the Highlands in the 1930s
in middle to high-middle or low-upper classes. It is even more dissonant when
it comes to life today in the United-States and life in the 1950s in gentle
Britain.
Nevertheless the "near-identification" phenomenon is great. It allows a search in memories, a re-creation of the past
both the dreamed past of an idyllic Britain that never was, and of a life or lives of real families and
individuals.
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| Gertrude Fiske |
The reality of such fiction is denied
in the end of each novel (if not before the end) by a conscious twist made by
the writer into fairy tale. There is no tragedy in these books. As said above,
they almost always end with wedding bells or at least engagements or, less
often, by birth or reconstitution of happy families. In
this, they are conservative and ideal. They are the prolongation of fairy tales
read without the benefit of subtexts created by gender studies or analysis, the
prolongation of children books and mostly of girls books such as "The
Chalet School". They are a literature of comfort, escapism and
reassurance. A number of readers insist on the fact that a "good book" makes good
escape (from the tedium of everyday life or its complications?) with "a
nice cup of tea", "a chair", and with "curtains drawn in
winter".
This reading is legitimate. All
readings are legitimate as long as they do not hurt the self and others.
However, it is not far from the reading done by the heroine in
"Angel" by Elizabeth Taylor - which may be dangerous. And it is
certainly not the reading pioneered by references in such matters: Nicola
Beauman, Nicola Humble and Alison Light. Moreover, fragile publishers may be
deflected from their initial aim to reevaluate neglected fiction in order to
enlarge the literary canon and our multicultural vision of fiction. They come
to publish texts that had been left aside by some of these lady authors, under
readers’ pressure when such texts would have been better
left to academics for the purpose of research only. These texts sometimes
called "left in the attic", do more wrong than good to the writers
whom they expose with all their flaws.
In fact, a balance should be found
between the sophisticated and complex reading made by scholars - a lot might be
written about this and its consequences - and the too candid reading for
comfort. A balance is sometimes found. But so unfrequently. Between
unconditional praise and unconditional denial, in media res stat vitus.
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| Gertrude Fiske |
