They're (very nearly) here!: New Furrowed Middlebrow titles from Dean Street Press

It's almost time! Back in May, I announced our six new "cheerful village comedies" to help alleviate coronavirus and other stresses (well, originally planned to be happy, page-turning holiday reads for the summer, but now more likely to be used as antidotes to the news and to thoughts of cancelled summer travels). And now they're finally here, as of August 3. To tantalize you just a bit more in these final days of waiting, I'm revealing the full covers (complete with cover blurbs extensively agonized over by yours truly, who always makes very heavy weather of them indeed). I also have to mention our brilliant intro writers, as I neglected to do before.

 

First up, for the incomparable Miss Mole, we have a lovely new introduction by author and novelist Charlotte Moore, who has introduced other of our books, including Romilly Cavan's Beneath the Visiting Moon and E. Nesbit's The Lark. She has a marvelous way of summing up what makes a novel special, as in this brief excerpt:

 

Her sense of place is impeccable, her seasonal details exactly right. She knows for certain what her characters wore and ate, how they walked and talked. You won't get anywhere with this novel if you don't respond to Hannah - but who could fail to feel sympathetic interest in "a woman for whom repentance had no practical results"?

Who indeed!

 

Next is the wonderful Ruth Adam and her humorously autobiographical A House in the Country. Adam always reveals—even when making us laugh—a keen social awareness, as she did in her most famous work, her second novel I'm Not Complaining, which was reprinted in the 80s by Virago. It's only fitting, then, that her intro should be by journalist Yvonne Roberts, who brings her own incisive social consciousness to the intro and gives us some irresistible peaks at the reality behind Adam's novel. If her summing up of the house in question doesn't pull you in, nothing will:

 

The house is in Kent built in Tudor times by Flemish weavers with the curved gables of their homeland. It has 33 rooms, a resident bat, a temperamental insatiable geriatric boiler and five kitchens. It is home to lilacs and roses and swallows in the stable. Over the years, its powers of seduction ensnare not just the small band of Londoners but also a succession of domestic staff, weekend visitors, foreign paying guests and tenants. The whole is presided over by the magnificent figure of Howard, the head gardener. 

 

Now we come to Dorothy Lambert's frothy, funny Much Dithering, which is not only the title and a fair description of what goes on in the story, at least among some of the characters, but also, delightfully, the name of the village in which it all happens. Scholar and researcher Elizabeth Crawford is our go-to introducer for our least-known authors, and she never fails to find delicious tidbits (as when she was able to quote from Elizabeth Fair's unpublished diaries, or when she has enriched our readings of previously lost authors like Marjorie Wilenski or Barbara Beauchamp by unearthing hitherto unknown details of their lives and histories). We really put Elizabeth to work this time around, writing intros for all four of our remaining new titles, and she didn't let us down. It's amazing what she has unearthed about Dorothy Lambert, and not only that, she was able to trace the origins of some of Much Dithering's most notable characters in a Christmas play written by Lambert four years earlier! 

 

I don't like to play favorites with our books, since all of them are by definition favorites or we wouldn't be reprinting them, but Dorothy Evelyn Smith's Miss Plum and Miss Penny might have to be an exception. One of my earliest "discoveries" as a blogger (though obviously some savvy soul had discovered it before me since it had already been suggested as "possibly Persephone" at one of that publisher's events—happily for me, they didn't pick up on the suggestion!), it will always hold a special place in my heart. And Elizabeth Crawford again uncovers fascinating details about this rather private author, and I can't resist sharing this wonderful summation of the novel's characters via a tidbit about Smith herself:

 

Dorothy Evelyn Smith does not seem ever to have been interviewed by the press and, 50 years after her death, family memories are fading. But recollections that survive are of a woman who, besides listening to and making music, loved reading poetry, in particular Dylan Thomas’ 1954 publication, Under Milkwood. Knowing this, we can derive added pleasure as we encounter Alison Penny reading it at intervals throughout the novel, ‘faintly worried’ by some of the ‘confusing passages’. ‘It was rather more outspoken than she had bargained for...So very Welsh.’ Sly Miss Plum confesses to have been reading the book in bed, the implication being that no passages would have confused her. 

Finally, we have another author I stumbed across early on, Celia Buckmaster, and her two delightful comedies with a bit of an edge, Village Story and Family Ties. In her research for these intros, Elizabeth was able to track down no lesser source than Buckmaster's daughter, Loulou Brown, who provides wonderful insights into her mother's work and life, but also revealed (bestill my pounding heart) that the family possesses the manuscript of an unpublished third novel! Music to my ears, of course, and if the world ever returns to any semblance of normal, we hope to have a look at the manuscript and see what's what.

And that's all for this slightly smaller batch of new titles, but hopefully enough to keep you happily thinking for some time of eccentric village life with no trace of COVID anywhere!

And I just can't resist noting that we have, just this week, finalized plans for our next batch of titles, coming in January 2021, and oh boy! I can't reveal them yet, but I can say that I'm perhaps more excited than I've ever been before. Eleven titles, two authors, both new to our list—I can say no more, but stay tuned…

CELIA BUCKMASTER, Family Ties (1952)

Celia Buckmaster would have been 37 years old when this book, her second and final novel, was published.  She lived another 53 years, but apparently never felt the urge to write fiction again—or, if she did, never published it.  It may be that her painting, with which she was already actively engaged at the time of her marriage in 1940, simply took the upper hand again.  I do know—from biographical sources about her husband, Sir Edmund Leach—that she continued with her painting for much of the rest of her life, so that may have simply been her creative outlet of choice. (Sadly, though, I haven't been able to locate information about even a single one of her paintings online, but if anyone reading this happens to know about them, please contact me.)  Or perhaps she developed writer's block or had publisher woes or wanted or needed to dedicate her time to her family. 

Whatever the reason for Buckmaster's sparse output, it is rather sad, because the two novels she did produce seem to me to be rather extraordinary.  It's difficult to sum up a writer who produced only two novels, but it seems that there are some distinctive qualities that identify a "Buckmaster," just as there are with a "Pym" or a "Taylor" or a "Murdoch."

The themes of Family Ties are similar to those in Village Story.  Buckmaster portrays various characters in the same kind of village setting—it could be the same village, though a different use has been put to the former manor—occupied here by a girls' school, rather than by well-off strangers.  She focuses on their various tensions and discontentments, some more serious than others, but all presented deftly and elegantly and with subtle humor which sometimes can't be properly appreciated until read a second time.  It's possible to imagine Buckmaster, as Pym does, for example, going on and on with these themes and settings and similar types of characters, simply varying her scenarios and the types of human behavior into which she wants to delve, and each novel would have been entertaining and profound in its own way.  Perhaps, had this happened, she would even be as widely read as Barbara Pym.  Perhaps Buckmaster's obscurity as a novelist has resulted from the fact that there just simply isn't enough of her to go around?

In addition, it finally dawned on me (I can be rather slow sometimes) that one peculiarity of a "Buckmaster" is that it takes place in mythological time.  It's odd that I didn't realize this reading Village Story, but in neither novel is there any reference to the year.  Both novels occasionally jump forward or backward in time with nary a mention of any major historical event.  Though published only a few years after World War II, the war does not seem to have happened in the world of the novels, and even the leaps into the future—as when we learn in an aside what will happen when a very living character has died—don't seem to be aware of war as a possibility.  However, even in this world, the gentry are dying off and impoverished, women seem to be free to go to work if they choose (though most do not), and the cultural "feel" seems to me to fit the early 1950s when the novels were written.

Is this denial of history in the novels a strength or a weakness?  I tend to think the former, but it's certainly open for discussion.  As much as I would have loved to hear what these characters had thought and felt during the war years, the fact that they seem to have their own little world really does add a sort of mythical, universal quality to even the mundane events portrayed.  It seems like an intentional strategy of Buckmaster's, but it is, admittedly, somewhat surprising when one (finally, in my case) thinks about it.

I quoted the opening line of Village Story and I can't resist doing the same here.  Buckmaster is great at sucking you right into her world:

Mr. Monsoon was known in the village as "the old gentleman," and nobody minded when he said, "Amen, Amen, Amen," when the prayers got too long on Sunday morning; people knew he had rheumatism, and in any case the Vicar was apt to ramble on and on. He kept the sermons short too by sighing and clearing his throat after a certain time. But when the old Vicar died and a new one came, all this was changed. The old Vicar had always chosen something out of the Old Testament as a text for his sermon, and generally preached about woe and destruction. This was comforting for his congregation, who knew what to expect, and it had suited the tone of his voice, which had been low and quivering and full of poetic emotion. The new Vicar was quite different and spoke about "Conditions in the modern world" in his sermons (with a text taken from the New Testament) and nobody knew what he was driving at. Besides which, he used his normal everyday tone of voice in the pulpit and was apt to say—"And that means You and You and You" (pointing)—which made everyone nervous.

Buckmaster announces to the reader that Mr. Monsoon is the hero of the story, just as she did with Mrs. Ethelburger in the earlier novel, but in both cases it may be difficult to see exactly what is meant by the terms "hero" and "heroine"—and that in itself could be meaningful.  Neither character is completely likeable, though they are certainly interesting.  Mr. Monsoon, who lives with his wife, two sons, and two daughters-in-law, has squandered the family fortune and mortgaged their home to the extent that they may lose it altogether.  He attempts—not very effectively—to dominate his family, and he has somewhat romantic feelings for Amy, one of his daughters-in-law.  He likes provoking people into arguments, particularly their gardener, Mr. Smith, who "used to drink but got Saved and is rather pompous because of this, and tells little children about the Devil and idle hands."  And he has some rather unusual viewpoints, such as this one expressed in regard to Amy's discontentment with her husband:

"But this really does worry me," Mr Monsoon said. "I can't stand unhappy women. Men can always do something like big-game hunting when the worst comes to the worst. Or take up politics. But it's different for your sex. They grieve. And I can't stand it. When women get really unhappy I always feel that, like animals, they should be put out of their misery."

Although Amy's restlessness and eventual involvement with another man are probably the main plot thread, the real attraction for me, as in the earlier novel, is the wide array of supporting players, most brilliantly characterized even if their significance to the plot is trivial.  There is, for example, Mrs. Tyce, the widow of the old lord of the manor, who "is past eighty and so is able to look back on a long life more than half of which she has spent being horribly bored," and who passes the time now by sending anonymous letters (though written in her distinctive hand, so everyone knows who they're from). 

And there are my personal favorites, the Rockabys, particularly the superficial but well-meaning Mrs. Rockaby, who

was less fortunate than Amy. She had rather a lot of wrinkles, but called them laughter lines. Whatever they were she put grease on them from a little jar every night. She believed in the grease. It was very expensive and smelt horrible and when it got in her eyes, as it sometimes did, it stung. So after putting it on she always tried to get to sleep as soon as possible. It was said of her in London, where she much preferred to live, that it was ridiculous to think of her as the mother of a grown-up son. And, going about arm-in-arm with Bertram as she frequently had, that they looked more like brother and sister than mother and son. This made it all the harder to leave London because nobody said things like that in the country and in this remote little village where she now lived it seemed hardly worth while to keep on being young. But it was so much part of her life at the age of forty that Mrs Rockaby couldn't stop it. She went on bursting into fits of laughter, smiling dreamily and walking quickly, humming and tossing her head (she had her hair cut in the very latest style) all because in that way she felt she could keep herself young. And one day, somehow or other, she hoped to get back to London and hear her friends say, "Why, Evelyn, you haven't altered a bit."

There is perhaps a bit more humor in Family Ties than in Village Story, but here too it is always made to serve its point, as in this description of the sitting-room of the pretentious, cold-blooded Mr. Swan, who has returned from travel in exotic locales and set himself (as if it were an item on his "to do" list) to marry the Rockabys' daughter:

Thus in his sitting-room on the mantelpiece a large Buddha—so large that it is apt to intimidate his guests—stares over the top of people's heads with wide metallic eyes on to the far wall where spears and battle ornaments are hung. Deities with too many arms stand about on little tables next to ashtrays which belonged to. Temples once, and sometimes when nostalgic and remembering the magic of the East, Mr. Swan even lights joss sticks. This makes the place smell odd, and his housekeeper, Mrs. Henlow, who comes in every day from the village, sniffs and starts a search behind the sofa and in all the corners; but Ting the Siamese cat is neutered and perfectly clean.

Not only does the hodge-podge of (mostly pillaged, apparently) decorations tell a lot about Mr. Swan's total superficiality and indifference to their history or meaning—I love that the Buddha must gaze across the room at the weapons of war—but Mrs. Henlow's reaction to his attempt to recreate "the magic of the East" is just hilarious.

And just one more longish quote of many I could read over and over again.  Here is poor Mr. Monsoon trying to outsmart a heron who's eating the trout with which Mr. Monsoon has carefully stocked the river:

So every morning early when it appeared, he would dodge out along the path through the wood with his gun, in order to surprise and shoot the bird when he came out, very carefully, at the far side by the river. But always when he got there, the heron had disappeared. To attack it frontally from the house was no good because directly the bird saw anyone coming through the garden it lifted its enormous wings and flapped off.

"The damn thing must have a sixth sense," Mr. Monsoon would say, very saddened when time after time he had made his manreuvre through the wood to no purpose. But in fact it was Mrs. Monsoon who saw to it that the bird disappeared before destruction could overtake it. As soon as her husband left the house and was safely among the trees, she grabbed hold of a tablecloth or an apron or whatever was handy and waved it vigorously out of the dining-room window.

"Just shaking out crumbs, dear," she said when George asked once what on earth she was up to.

Clearly, Buckmaster is not a plot-based writer, which is one of the things I love about her.  Her focus is on characters and their revealing interactions, how they constantly misunderstand and frustrate one another (and yet they nevertheless go on and manage—usually—to find some meaning or emotional connection or, at the very least, a method of enduring). 

I'm feeling happy that I spontaneously decided to request Buckmaster's books when I read Nicola Beauman's mention of her.  She's now one of my favorites.

Just one final quote.  This was only a bit of description that struck me as vivid and clever.  But as I've re-read it, I wonder if it's not almost a summing up of Buckmaster's approach to fiction?

The gentle sound of the pigeons cooing came in from the garden, a continual murmuring sound that was always there but did not strike the ear; like people talking together of grief, voicing their troubles unemphatically, without malice and so without despair, forgetting they are in company.

Perhaps that's a stretch?  But anyway, it's a darn good sentence…

CELIA BUCKMASTER, Village Story (1951)

In a village a new face is new for a very long time, and a new name remains strange until it is put on a tombstone and so becomes one of the family at last.

As opening lines go, this is a pretty good one, and it was enough to reassure me that there were going to be, at the very least, a few high points in spontaneously deciding to read this totally unknown author's long-forgotten first novel.  But in fact there were more than just a few.

A few days ago, I gave a bit of background on coming across Celia Buckmaster's name in Nicola Beauman's wonderful biography of Elizabeth Taylor, and provided what little information I've unearthed about this intriguing painter and author of two novels.  I also mentioned that this has already become one of my favorite obscure novels—which has rather intimidated me, since now that I come to think of it I'm not at all sure how to sum up what I liked so much in this rather unpresumptuous, down-to-earth, but compulsively readable story about villagers living their lives.  Happily, though, for readers of this blog, the fact that it's an unpresumptuous, down-to-earth, but compulsively readable story about villagers living their lives may be a recommendation in itself!

Interestingly, it was Elizabeth Taylor that I thought of most often in reading Village Story.  Buckmaster has a similar knack for sharp, brilliant character sketches and a similar determination to give dignity and depth to even her minor characters.  Buckmaster's prose, like Taylor's, is smooth and understated, but re-reading parts of the novel to write this review I noticed hints and implications I had completely overlooked on my first reading—an experience that's also familiar from reading Taylor.  They are both deceptively simply writers, and sentences that seem perfectly straightforward contain subtle revelations.

Village Story's main plot revolves around two discontented wives.  Mrs. Noyce is a painter (like Buckmaster herself) who married her husband because he took her art seriously and wouldn't want her to be domestic, but who is now beginning to yearn for motherhood.  Mrs. Ethelburger, on the other hand—introduced by Buckmaster as the heroine of the novel—has four children and is more or less happy with her husband, but has nevertheless been escaping domestic drudgery by rather cold-bloodedly carrying on an affair with a businessman in the village:

Of course, if Mrs Ethelburger had been efficient and house-proud it might have been a bit easier. The house was very badly run. … Mrs. Ethelburger, who sat down when she wanted to think, had been classed as very intelligent when a girl, but seeing her in this ramshackle house, surrounded by her noisy family (as though there were not enough children about, there were photos of them all over the mantelpiece), people had wondered: hadn't she rather thrown herself away?

The reasons for the womens' discontentment are not made entirely explicit, but this seems rather appropriate for a novel focused on village life.  The reader, like a neighbor in the village, is given not much more information than one might overhear in passing or in the village pub, and is left to fill in the rest.

At any rate, these plot strands are merely the frame on which the novel rests.  We also meet the Noyces' cook and the elderly nurse who raised Mr. Noyce and lives with them still; the Rector and his wife, who finds life hilarious in a rather scornful way despite the Rector urging her toward compassion; Mr. Browning, the self-made businessman hurt by Mrs. Ethelburger's treatment; his mother, with whom he still lives and who thinks the villagers look down on her for dropping her aitches; and Linda, the resentful, spoiled young girl who helps out at the Noyces' until she begins to fantasize that Mr. Noyce is making advances on her.

It's all quite mundane and ordinary, as real life actually is, and that's what, for me, makes it so compelling.  Buckmaster's particular concern is for the little frustrations and limitations of civilized life.  Most characters are shown facing these, and Buckmaster's exploration of them reveals her real strength as a writer.  The only way to convey the power of it all is to quote, but be warned: Buckmaster doesn't write in short, clever soundbites.  Her depth unfolds in elegant slow motion, so my quotes will be longer than usual.  Hopefully I'm not too egregiously violating copyright.

Here is one of the most breathtaking bits in the novel, about the elderly nurse, in which virtually every line packs a punch:

And nurse, whom you probably think of as a minor character, a subdued joke, as it were, is an important person really. Her kind is dying out, but once people like her formed the infant minds of the country's rulers. Upper-class families, whose sons were destined to pass through the Public Schools and then the appropriate Universities, and thence onward guiding the nation's affairs, all had nurses. These women, once so intimately bound up with affairs, we are inclined to think of now as old-fashioned, Old Testament creatures really. And Old Testament they are. A man of Mr. Noyce's age, if he had a nurse in infancy, most certainly has the voice of conscience somewhere among his inner voices. It speaks with rather a common voice perhaps, muttering the Ten Commandments, gives warning about punishment, and says "Now, now" in awkward situations. That is nurse. Naturally when conscience is outmoded, so is nurse. We laugh at her and tease like Mr. Noyce. But Mr. Noyce will always feel a little guilty. There are still nurses, of course, to this day, for any class that can afford them, admirable nurses, young and college trained, but their function has altered with the times. They are interested in diet-vitamins and so forth, and child psychology has opened up a whole new field of investigation for them; so that it is to science that they look for inspiration at their task, not religion. "Carrots make you see in the dark," the modern nurse might well say to the finicky feeder, but: "Think what you said at Grace, Master Harry, and eat what's put before you"—certainly not.

Old nurse spends her time now mending and sewing in her dusty parlour. She is growing blind, and besides her silver-rimmed spectacles, she must read the Bible in the evenings with the help of a magnifying-glass. The mice trouble her, she can hear them gnawing at the wainscoting, and so she keeps her large neutered cat Marcus constantly at her side. There is always a fire burning in her room and a black kettle singing on the hob. Her hands are twisted with arthritis so that if she points an accusing finger her hand will not obey her and she cannot stretch it out. She wears only boots now, they help her with her ankles, and these are nearly hidden under the skirts of her voluminous grey dresses. She always has a shawl on, but not an apron, and the large black hairpins, which she uses to keep up her masses of white hair) catch at the shawl at the back of her neck so that she feels the shawl slipping and hunches her shoulders. Her voice trembles a little when she speaks, like someone reading who knows the end of the sad story. She still trusts in the Lord.

I've read this passage at least ten times now and think it's genuinely brilliant.  The accusing finger crippled with age manages to be symbolic, funny, and heartbreaking all at once.

And here, just after he has overheard an argument between Mr. and Mrs. Noyce, is Broom, their gardener, whose own wife has recently left him for another man.  Broom mulls over the turmoils and complexities of matrimony:

His own wife was childless, and he had come to the conclusion that barrenness was the root of all evil. A kind man with a sad look in his eyes, he would never, in fact, have laid hands on his wife with intent to harm her, but noticing how she treated animals, giving the dog a kick when she stumbled over him in the dark, shouting abuse at the proud geese when they invaded her garden, he had sometimes longed to beat her with the little whip she kept to train the cats. Besides having no children, Mrs. Broom and Mrs. Noyce had other things in common. Mrs. Broom had belonged to a circus before she married, and so to a certain extent had the feelings of a creative artist. She had been trained to do a small act with the lions; but one day there was an accident and her face was lacerated. Badly shaken and disfigured, she was no good for the circus any more. She then married Mr. Broom, who had always been after her (he had met her in the town near the village when first the circus came there, and then they had exchanged letters, meeting seldom but being faithful to each other), and now, perhaps out of nostalgia for the circus, she trained cats to do little tricks, such as jumping over boxes and leaping at her when she called. This ruined her temper, because cats are so hard to train. She had one friend, the village post-mistress—a large, domineering woman like herself, who lived in almost perfect peace with a frail, domesticated husband and two grown-up boys who went away to work. The post-mistress, Mrs. Blonsom, was on friendly terms with Mrs. Ethelburger. Both women kept bees, and when the time came for honey to be extracted, they helped each other. At Christmas they exchanged presents, and at all times of the year were glad to meet and have a talk. They did not exactly gossip, but were inclined to shake their heads together over the frailties of human nature.

This wealth of interconnected detail evokes the interconnected lives of the villagers as well as Broom's train of thought, and the image of Mrs. Broom training cats out of a frustrated desire for the circus is almost as funny and tragic as the nurse's arthritic finger.

And finally, though Buckmaster's intent in the novel is a serious one—she doesn't play the villagers for easy laughs—here is one passage it's hard to read without a smile, though here too are real frustration and well-meaning, if misguided, intent.  The Rector and his wife discuss her newfound political conviction:

"I know what you are driving at, Arthur. But you see, unlike you, I wasn't brought up with all these class prejudices. My family were once rulers, but whatever purpose did these landed gentry serve? Greedy landlords, that's what they are!"

"My dear, as I've said before, I don't think you quite understand what you are talking about. If you really want to be a Communist, you should first of all read Das Kapital. It's somewhere about in the library."

Mrs Spark drummed her fingers on the table, smiling a bit, but not looking at her husband.

"Arthur," she said, "to be a good Comrade doesn't mean that one has to be so awfully clever. You, for instance, are an intellectual. But the really important people, you know, are the Workers."

The Rector sighed.

Still, ever since Mrs Spark had learnt to sing 'The Red Flag' she had been much happier. She caught the bus every Wednesday afternoon (early closing day in the town), and stayed on for the factory workers' meeting. She read Communist tracts, and had ordered the Daily Worker. (But for some reason it had never come.) She carried on with her Women's Institute activities just as usual and arranged the flowers for Sunday services, and, in fact, carried on in every way just the same. Only every now and then there were these little outbursts. It made the Rector careful with what he said. But one cannot always think twice before one speaks, and so there were collisions. There are many surprising things about married life, but the apparent ease with which two people even in their old age can settle down to a new phase in their relationship is surely one of the most extraordinary. Before, it had always been the Rector who was right about everything; he held the magic keys. Now they were obsolete. Not that Mrs Spark had stopped being a Christian-far from it-she often remarked how near she felt to those early Christians (about A.D. 1). It was in her attitude to the little vexations-politics, what sort of books to put down on the library list, what programmes to listen to on the wireless-the sort of things a puzzled wife refers to her husband with confidence in his superior powers, that Mrs Spark had changed. He was quite calm about it all, and except for one thing (barring the arguments, of course, but they were only tiffs), never showed any strong feelings about the change. But instead of presenting her with a bunch of roses on her birthday as usual, he gave her a book on dialectical materialism. It proves, I think, that women are hard to please, because she was very hurt.

This is not a perfect novel.  It does bear some of the weaknesses of a first book.  Juggling so many characters is a challenge for any writer, and focus is occasionally lost.  There are places, too, where interactions—especially those involving the two central women—descend into mere squabbling and resentment and become less interesting.  But for me, the inspired characterizations and powerful writing of passages like those above more than make up for the book's flaws.  I think Village Story can be added to my list of forgotten novels that should be in print.

Now to dive into Family Ties, Buckmaster's only other novel, which I will plan to write about in the next week or two.  It will be a little bittersweet to exhaust such a strong writer's "complete works" so quickly!

"…someone called Celia Buckmaster…"

It must be vanishingly rare for anyone—least of all myself—to be able to say they know more about a middlebrow British woman novelist than Nicola Beauman does.  But this may be my one chance…

As most readers of this blog already know, Beauman's book A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-1939 (1983) is one of the seminal texts in the study of middlebrow writers, and the publishing house she began in the late 1990s, Persephone Books, has been an enormous force in the rediscovery of lesser-known women writers.  Suffice it to say she knows what she's talking about.

Beauman's subsequent biography of Elizabeth Taylor in 2009 was also a rich source, for me, of offhand mentions of little-remembered writers—I first came across Elizabeth Montagu, Kathleen Farrell, Kay Dick, and several others there.  But there was also an intriguing reference to "someone called Celia Buckmaster," with whom Beauman seemed to be unfamiliar.  Naturally, my obsessive nature led me to a fruitless Google search and then the discovery that the British Library showed two novels by Buckmaster. 

A bit more poking around revealed a few additional tidbits, which, since Buckmaster seems to have no other web presence whatsoever, I'll share here:

She was born in 1915 (at least her obituary reports that she was 90 at her death in 2005).  Her father's name was Henry Stephen Guy Buckmaster.

I haven't found anything significant about her early life, but by the 1920s she was close friends with acclaimed poet-to-be Lynette Roberts and set up a florist's business with her in the late 1920s or early 1930s.  At some point during these years, biographical information about Roberts mentions that Roberts and Buckmaster took time off from the shop and sailed via a cargo boat to Madeira, where they stayed for a time in a small house high on a hill.  Roberts began seriously writing poetry here.  At the time of her marriage a few years later, Buckmaster would be described as a talented painter, so one presumes that she may also have taken the opportunity to do some painting (and perhaps some early writing?) during this time.

Buckmaster was a bridesmaid at Roberts' wedding in 1939, and Dylan Thomas, a guest at the wedding, reportedly commented that the wedding was particularly notable for the beauty of its bridesmaids.

Buckmaster was married to renowned anthropologist Edmund Leach (later knighted) in 1940.  They lived initially in Burma, where Leach was in the military.  Their daughter Louisa was born in late 1941, and she and Celia apparently had a narrow escape from Burma as the war intensified.  Leach said that Louisa's birth saved Celia's life, as nursing mothers were evacuated from Burma by air in early 1942, while others escaped as best they could and many tragically died.  Celia and Louisa were separated from Leach for the remainder of the war.

In 1946, the couple had a son, Alexander, and Buckmaster turned (briefly) to writing in earnest.  She published two novels with the prestigious Hogarth Press—Village Story in 1951 and Family Ties the following year, after which she published no more books.  Perhaps there were short stories in magazines or journals, but I have not yet located them.  Unjustly, it does not appear that her novels received a great deal of attention and neither has ever been reprinted.

Buckmaster's later life can only be glimpsed in biographical information about her husband.  In the early 1960s, they spent an academic year in Palo Alto, California and Celia is described as embracing the nature and weather of California and as intensifying her painting during this time.

Back in England, the couple made their home in Barrington, a village near Cambridge, where Leach was Professor of Anthropology until 1978 and then a Provost at King's College.  Leach died in 1989, and Buckmaster remained in the Cambridge area until her death in 2005.  Her brief obituary in the Telegraph notes several grandchildren and great-grandchildren but makes no mention of her writing or painting.

So why have I taken the time to dig for information on a writer that even Nicola Beauman hasn't rescued from the shrouds of obscurity?  And why should anyone reading this blog care about her?

Well, in my first flurry of interest in Buckmaster, I submitted Interlibrary Loan requests for both novels, uncertain of whether the San Francisco Public Library would even be able to locate them.  But I should have more faith in the hard-working folks at SFPL, because last weekend both novels arrived—one from Minnesota and the other from Pennsylvania, no less!

On Saturday afternoon, I dived immediately into Village Story, and the rest of my weekend was spent lost in the hypnotic company of Buckmaster's fascinating villagers.  I was unable to put it down, and already (coming so close on the heels of my rave review of Mary Bell's Summer's Day) have a new favorite obscure novel. 

You're going to start thinking I'm a pushover.  (And perhaps I am.)  But you can judge for yourself when I post a review of the novel in a few days.  (Sorry, this was just a teaser…)

As for Family Ties (which, glancing at the library card inside, may not have been checked out since 1953), well, I am waiting until the weekend arrives to so much as open it.  I was afraid that otherwise I might have to call in sick to stay home and finish it!