RACHEL FERGUSON, Popularity's Wife (1932), Charlotte Brontë (1933), and The Late Widow Twankey (1943)

I've posted several times in recent months about my ongoing obsession with tracking down and reading all twelve of Rachel Ferguson's novels, as well as several of her other works, many of them now quite rare. And believe it or not, this project started even before I knew that I would be publishing some of her books under the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint from Dean Street Press. I've posted already about all three of the novels we're reprinting in October—A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936), A Footman for the Peacock (1940), and Evenfield (1942). Now I'm reporting on three more of Ferguson's extraordinarily unusual works.

Popularity's Wife (1932) was published the same year as The Stag at Bay, which I mentioned in an earlier post and which I found rather unsatisfying. I don't know for sure which came first, honestly, though I've guessed that Stag was her third novel and Wife her fourth. The latter is certainly an enormous improvement on the former. While Stag had, for me, few high points at all, Popularity's Wife shows more of the humor, personality, and quite distinct perspective that had, only a year or so before, made The Brontës Went to Woolworth's so memorable.

The novel is about a squire's daughter, Mary Arbuthnot, who runs off to marry a singer, Dion Saffyn, to the horror of her father, and then has difficulty coping with his "popularity" with other women. It follows them through the challenges of setting up house together—with far fewer servants and resources than Mary is accustomed to—on to childrearing and into middle age. If the plot didn't quite come together, for me at least, there are certainly passages here and there that might have written by a slightly tipsy Barbara Pym. Some of my favorites are near the beginning, as in the scene where Mary and her friend Leslie are coping with the "excellent women" of the village church:

An ideal of excessive punctuality was intangibly diffused all the week previous to the Festival, and the parish hacks gathered early, stacking their offerings neatly. It was etiquette which then prevented them from setting to work. Their allotted places differed not from year to year; nor must they helpfully encroach upon the uncharted territories of the Wyatt set. But, on the other hand, Mrs Wyatt and Miss Pragman reserved to themselves power to take over any person's job. The rankers, then swelled in numbers, waited about, and upon the signal began to tumble over each other to make up for lost time, always in the dark as to whether the toil of their hands would be passed.

'It's like The Jungle,' whispered Leslie West. 'D'you remember where they made it a rule in the stockyards that the work was to be speeded up, and speeded up and the bosses stood by with stop-watches, and then when the men were dripping with blood and sweat they were told that as they had done double the work in exactly the same time they wouldn't be paid extra, as it wasn't overtime.'

'I don't quite see the connection,' Mary answered.

'Nor do I really, but we follow the shape of that system,' Leslie added vaguely.

And a bit later in the same scene:

Leslie appeared on the moment with a paper bag in her hand. Miss Pragman laid aside her notebook with finality. 'Miss West, we are all here, could you not manage to be a little earlier? It makes the organisation of the wark so difficult when the warkers are not up to time.'

'I'm sorry, I was here before—anybody, and I just went out, as there seemed to be nothing doing.' Miss Pragman blinked, but refrained. 'Now, ladies, we can begin. Miss Leech, will you do the two Norman columns? Thank you. Your sister will help you. I expect you will prefer to wark together.' Vigorously she united the old sisters, who had had a bitter feud over the breakfast table on the subject of scorched eggs. Miss Lettice had deliberately omitted an instruction to the servant about supper in order that, as they started, she might run back and thus do away with the otherwise unavoidable necessity of walking with Bertha to the church. Stiffly she excused herself as she carried out the ruse, and Bertha had countered with a reference to imperfect housekeeping. Both sisters recognised the injustice of the gibe.

Hilarious stuff, and certainly a strong hint of what was to come later in Ferguson's career.

Fortunately, the class obsessions that made The Stag at Bay and Ferguson's satirical works Victorian Bouquet and Sara Skelton rather painful to wade through are more muted here. There is some concern, for instance, with the idea that Mary has married beneath her, though in fact the marriage, for all of its oddities and Dion's apparent infidelities, seems like a basically happy one. And it's quite an interesting relationship for Ferguson to be portraying in 1932, especially considering how much better Mary seems to feel about Dion's women once she starts doing a bit of philandering (or at least some serious flirtation) herself, and their three daughters' perspectives on all of it are fascinating as well.

I do admit that, like The Stag at Bay, there were times when I had a bit of trouble following along in Personality's Wife. Ferguson is known for her rather intricate, practically Proustian prose, a characteristic that would develop gorgeously—and, unlike Proust, hilariously—in her later novels. Here, it perhaps hasn't quite coalesced yet, so I did find myself now and then re-reading and turning pages trying to figure out what had just happened. But there's also no doubt that it's a striking advance over Stag (assuming as I am that it really did come after), and as a preview of coming attractions it's well worth reading.

The year after she published Personality's Wife, Ferguson made her one foray into drama. It's ironic, considering her love for the theatre and how frequently actors and performers appear in her fiction, that she only made a single attempt to involve herself with it as a writer. I haven't found any references online to how successful the play was, but somehow a copy of it found its way to the San Francisco Public Library, where it resides (in circulation, no less) to this day.

The Brontës were all the rage in the 1930s, and a goodly number of writers from my Overwhelming List wrote fiction or non-fiction about them (as well as, of course, about Jane Austen, who was having one of her many vogues at that time as well), so Ferguson was playing it unusually safe by titling her one effort Charlotte Brontë and dramatizing the major life events of poor Charlotte, both just before and after the loss of her sisters.

For my fellow book fetishists, I can't resist sharing this image of the
vintage library card holder and the Date Due slip which suggests
I was the first person to check out the book in 56 years!

She was also playing it safe in her mode of presenting the Brontës. She had gently joked about the sisters in The Brontës Went to Woolworth's, but here she mostly plays it straight, with the result that little of Ferguson's more outrageous (and entertaining) personality comes through. We get a taste of it when she opens the play with a present day tour group being escorted through the Brontës old home in Haworth (a preview, for me, of my own pilgrimage to Brontë country in October!), and a family of Americans comes in for the broadest mockery, of course (perhaps also a preview of my visit, though I shall try to restrain my most uncouth American instincts). After that, we flash back to the Brontës themselves, and it's all pleasant enough, if mostly rather melodramatic and predictable. It's only later on, after Charlotte's success, when we see a glimmer of Ferguson's satire in a party scene, in which the authoress is uncomfortable toasted by famous authors and fawners alike. The hostess toys with one superficial hanger-on and flirts with another:

MRS. C.: I always think one meets all the most interesting people at Mr. Thackeray's.

DUCHESS: There are occasional exceptions.

MRS. C.: Yes. How true. That young man over there, for instance.

DUCHESS: My grandson. (MRS. CHUTE gasps, and edges away. The DUCHESS chuckles, and pokes MR. EVERARD to her.) I know I'm a liar, Mr. Everard, but I couldn't resist it. You are my grandson, to-night.

MR. EV.: Only that? How lamentably respectable!

DUCHESS: It needn't be. Think o' the Borgias.

But alas, there's little of such lightness here, and most of the play is more focused on the tragic elements of the Brontës' lives. Early on, for instance, Ferguson presents Emily as having something like second sight, or a personal connection with the spirit world, and thus melodramatically previews the sisters' sad futures:

CHAR.: You must not touch her! I don't understand why. I only know you mustn't.

EM. (gazing fixedly straight ahead): Yes, I can hear You clearly. I have been listening for You. Is it to come, so soon? You must be merciful, for they are only children in understanding, my Charlotte and my Anne, my sisters … they are not like me, who have always known You ... Your wild, compelling voice. Remember that. I command You, remember that.

ANNE: Emmy ...

EM.: And must You have them all? What, every one! Oh, You will get Your way, but I must go before them, lest they fear and cower. I must be there to welcome them and warm them (relaxing and looking about her). What's the matter? Why do you both look at me so? Have—have I said anything?

CHAR.: No, my bonny. (A bell tinkles, and ANNE rises hastily.)

At times, I admit, the drama was surprisingly effective, but most of it could have been written by virtually any author of the day. Perhaps Ferguson realized that her best gifts couldn't easily be presented in such a mainstream form as popular drama, and this is why she never made another attempt. Charlotte Brontë is a pleasant enough curiosity in her career, but not particularly a standout for me.

But if Ferguson stifled her most eccentric impulses in writing for the theatre, she certainly let all the eccentricity out when it came, a decade later, to her tenth novel, The Late Widow Twankey (1943). I've quoted here before Ferguson's own statement about the peculiarities of The Brontës Went to Woolworth's. She reportedly said, while in the midst of writing it, "It's getting so odd that I'm rather frightened of it." But for my money she hit hitherto unfathomed heights of oddness with Widow. (Perhaps, by that late stage in her career, she was so accustomed to the strangeness of her work that she was no longer even a little frightened by it.)

It's not even an easy novel to summarize. Unlike Evenfield, published one year before, The Late Widow Twankey is set firmly in wartime and in a country village called Daisydown, but those are just about the only things absolutely firm about it. The uncertainty here, however, is certainly a key part of the plot.

The local vicar's wife, who has lived in the village for three years as the story opens, has been uneasy for some time about the residents of the village, who seem, somehow, to be intruders from another realm:

Stated quite baldly, without introspective trimmings or metaphysic stews, it amounted to a hidden conviction that the villagers were people leading double lives, one to your face and the other behind your back.

One begins to wonder when one encounters such characters as Dick Whittington and the titular Widow Twankey, not to mention a bit later when families like the Bopeeps and the Ridinghoods make their appearance. There's a Cinderella, with her stepsisters Clorinda and Thisbe, a Prince Charming who becomes, ironically, the vicar's wife's chief confidant, and two rather creepy Babes (i.e. in the Wood) who are far too old for their roles. I know next to nothing about traditional British pantomime, but it's clear that the oddities the vicar's wife notes stem from the characters of the novel being, well, characters from pantomime, attempting to adapt to wartime life in a small English village.

A very faded inscription in my copy of
Late Widow Twankey. The name appears
to be Nina Thurston (?), and the date is
Feb 12 '44.  I wonder if the date format
suggests it was owned by an American?

It's a clever concept, and Ferguson carries it off with her usual entertaining weirdness, though it never became quite clear to me to what extent the characters were compelled in some way to play their roles and to what extent they were merely pretending to play them for the sake of appearances. But perhaps that's the point—I think there's a real point beneath all the lunacy—that we all are in part driven to fulfill the roles we're born to, and in part resist them or merely pretend to play them while going about our own business when out of the public eye. And I suspect that a greater knowledge of pantomime would have aided me, too, in recognizing when the characters were behaving as they were supposed to and when they were going their own way.

The Late Widow Twankey is also of particular interest for me because it's the only other Ferguson novel (alongside A Footman for the Peacock) written and set during World War II, and so it reflects somewhat on the themes and tone of that earlier novel. I love her description of the outbreak of war:

When war broke out, which it did on the very Sunday following the sale of the Durden's cow for a sack of beans, the village, thought Mrs. Beech, became a shade more ridiculous than usual, unless all villages were being rather unbalanced, for one couldn't entirely believe that Daisydown possessed the monopoly of eccentricity.

One circumstance perversely reassured her, and that was the singular amount of political and social graft that there seemed to be going about. For without one ascertainable qualification that anybody discoverable had ever heard of, the Hon. Thisbe became a Captain of W.R.A.F.'s in full uniform, and the Baron hurried about in staff officer's kit and a (presumably hired) car which developed deafening complaints whenever anybody so much as looked at it, as Alison once remarked to Mr. Prince Charming, and on one occasion had actually telescoped in the middle of the road, which apparently caused the Baron no regrets or apprehensions of any description. 'But then,' put in the grocer, Mr. Prune, 'he's such a very good-natured gentleman.'

And a bit later, there is a classic example of the stereotypically unflappable Brit making the best of bad situations:

But in common with so many of the rural communities of England, the Daisydowners continued to be profoundly unaware of the war, and when anything did happen which forced their attention to the fact that it was no longer peace-time, they turned it into stuff for jest; and as though providence itself were conscious that Daisydown needed special treatment, it sent to that village, or so it seemed to Mrs. Beech, but one sample of everything, of which they made their joke and passed on to the usual business of living. There was, for instance, one air-raid only which sent down one H.E. bomb that hit the Durden's kitchen garden squarely, a circumstance which delighted the widow who said that it made a natural pond (or au reservoir) at no cost, of which at the moment she stood sorely in need, and when it was followed by two incendiaries she lit the fire with one and toasted a kipper upon the other, and when they burnt themselves out exclaimed, 'These rotten German goods ain't made to last!' as she ran, gibbering, her sidecurls flapping, from one to the other.

It's ludicrous and bizarre, but great fun, and if this isn't quite Ferguson's most accessible novel, it should prove irresistible to anyone who (like me, clearly) has caught the Ferguson bug. Naturally, it's almost impossible to locate, and this isn't one of the novels we're releasing in October, but stay tuned. If the first three Ferguson titles are well received, we might be able to get round to more of her work. And in the meantime, I still have a few more of her novels to write about here…

RACHEL FERGUSON, A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936)

It should have been a profoundly humorous sight. I can only say that it was beastly, for I knew in my heart that this furious pursuit wasn't the first; that once there were those who ran before her as I was running, and one who could not run so fast ... what she had done then I don't ever wish to know, and try not to think of.

I love it when a favorite author challenges my assumptions and expectations of their work, and this eerie quotation from Rachel Ferguson's sixth novel, A Harp in Lowndes Square (published the year before Alas, Poor Lady, which is available from Persephone) may give at least an inkling of just how surprising this book was. I'm calling it Ferguson's version of a ghost story, though like most of her novels its genre takes a back seat to her completely unique authorial voice and the peculiar depths of its plot. What's more, it is one of her most serious and passionate works, despite being leavened now and then with her usual hilarity.

The story begins with a short, eerie prologue, the significance of which one only fully realizes at the end of the book (I won't spoil it, of course, but I highly recommend immediately circling back to it when you finish the novel). A child, Anne, in her dingy bedroom at the top of a large house, hears noises downstairs late at night and wonders who it could be:

It leaves us speculating upon what Anne, the woman, would have made of that evening in Lowndes Square, when—still the younger Miss Vallant—she peered over those banisters and heard a young, unknown man and woman many flights below, and warmed to the voices of her son and daughter who were to be.

That's right. There's something about this unusual family that allows its members, in varying ways, to perceive the sights, sounds, and emotions of other times, and here Anne is warming to the voices of her future children (though what exactly they're doing in the old family home in the middle of the night you'll have to find out for yourself).

This family proclivity is particularly pronounced in said son and daughter, twins Vere and James, who have "the sight," which enables them to witness and even re-experience scenes from other times (including, on one memorable and startling occasion at Hampton Court, seeing Henry VIII and young Edward VI discussing tennis and eating apples). And they're not only sensitive to events from other times, but to each other's experiences: Vere experiences befuddlement and dulled senses when James gets drunk for the first time, and James experiences discomfort when Vere is on dates with young men. Vere, the narrator of the novel, also notes the suffering of houses as a result of neglect, the hidden emotions of furniture, and the echoes of past dances in ballrooms!

But it is ultimately their own family history which becomes the twins' obsession, as well as their most vivid and painful experience with the ghosts of the past. It begins with a curiosity about their mother's tortured relationship with her own mother, the formidable and apparently heartless Lady Vallant, who gleefully torments her servants as well as her family. And when the twins question their little-known aunts (the family is not close-knit, to say the least), they hear for the first time about Myra, "the aunt who died," "that shadow of whose very existence our own mother had never told us." Their curiosity is aroused, and they are on their way, determined to uncover the history behind their mother's silence.

Giving you a sort of scoop (in lieu of any pics of Harp's original
dustjacket), here's the artwork, by Danish painter Peter Ilsted,
that we plan to feature on the Furrowed Middlebrow edition of the novel.
I think it's wonderfully evocative, with just a touch of eerieness?

If that sounds rather straightforward, however, it isn't quite. This is, after all, a Rachel Ferguson novel, and so there are numerous entertaining digressions, distractions, and ramblings. World War I begins, though it figures little in the story apart from explaining James's absence for long periods and allowing a tighter focus on Vere's experiences. We get a preview of Ferguson's subsequent novel, Alas, Poor Lady, in the sad figure of Miss Chilcot, the family's old governess, a downtrodden gentlewoman whom Vere tracks down dying of starvation and neglect in a hospital. And then there's Vere's strange, more-or-less platonic relationship with an aging actor (and his wife), which is certainly a unique Ferguson touch.

But the center of the novel is the dreadful Lady Vallant and the sad, mysterious Myra. Of all the terrible mothers portrayed in the fiction of this time, Lady Vallant must stand as one of the towering figures of maternal monsterdom, and unlike some novels (including Monica Tindall's marvelous The Late Mrs Prioleau, which I wrote about here not long ago), there is little in Harp to explain or justify her cruelty, so that the reader is left wondering at her and trying to fathom her mindset.

Perhaps it's because of the pain and sadness Vere and James uncover that Harp feels, despite occasional moments of hilarity, surprisingly serious for a Rachel Ferguson novel. She was daft and silly in earlier works like The Brontës Went to Woolworth's, and she would be daft and silly again with A Footman for the Peacock. But perhaps Harp allowed Ferguson to tap into more personal, deeper concerns. That said, though, when her sense of humor presents itself, it's just as charming as ever, as when Vere and James are told that Lady Vallant keeps her servants on "board wages" and don't quite understand:

Board wages certainly sounded bleak, and for some time we all believed it meant sleeping on a plank.

Here as elsewhere, Ferguson is interested in class distinctions, though she also shows considerable interest in and sensitivity with the servants, as when Vere visits the "downstairs" areas of Lady Vallant's house:

He led me down to the rooms I had never seen. I asked to see the kitchen and was shown it. The warren of sitting-rooms and pantrys was small and freakishly ventilated; some of them, including the larders, had no windows at all and gas light burnt there all the year round, they told me. Furniture obviously taken from the upper floors made the staff comfortable enough and I saw that the dining table of the upper servants, still covered with breakfast things, sported an imposing array of our family silver. The cook was drinking a jorum of tea out of a cup that looked uncommonly like Crown Derby. And I said nothing: neither did Hutchins, for which I respected him. If you appropriate, do it in the grand manner. And that underworld of men and women, the majority of whom had so far only materialized to me as a row of decorous behinds at dining-room prayers, emerged as human beings, and I think we pleased each other reasonably well. Their laws of precedence, I knew, were tricksy, but I managed to make only two mistakes: confused the upper with the under housemaid and 'spoke' to the kitchenmaid who is, socially, dumb.

But as someone who occasionally wrestles with social anxieties of my own, my favorite passage, and the one that made me laugh the most, is Ferguson's suggestion for shocking oneself out of one's worries:

I once knew a man who cured himself of melancholia by putting £200 out of a Bank balance of £350 on the Derby. His action so shocked him that it drove away his bogeys, and a girl we all know, on being presented at Court, was so ill with nerves that she nearly fainted; she was on the verge oflosing consciousness and just managed to lean forward to some dowager sitting by her daughter and to stammer, quite untruly, 'I think your dress is fussy and unbecoming'. In the whispered melee that followed the faintness was forgotten for the whole evening.

Ferguson is always interesting in her turns of phrase, sometimes incorporating the contemporary parlance of the day that might otherwise be lost. Two things struck me along these lines in this novel. First, there is a reference to the "maroons" sounding before an air raid; has anyone else ever heard this term for sirens? A Google search brings up one or two such usages, but it seems to not have been a common one?

And then there's this offhand comment from Vere: "The story, as Americans say 'listened badly', and I knew it." Do Americans say such things?! I have to admit that, though I've never heard this expression, I do rather like it and may have to start using it in conversation. So perhaps there is something about it that appeals to Americans…

At any rate, some of you will recall that I announced not long ago that the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint will be reprinting three of Ferguson's best (in my humble opinion) novels this October, and Harp is one of those three. I was already excited enough about that, but in putting together that edition, we discovered that no less a figure than Gillian Tindall, acclaimed novelist and historian (and, relevent to readers of this blog, daughter of Ursula Orange), published a short piece about Ferguson in the Literary Review at the time of Persephone's release of Alas, Poor Lady. In that piece, Tindall not only speaks enthusiastically about Ferguson in general, but particularly singles out A Harp in Lowndes Square as one of her most intriguing works. She ends by noting, "I wish someone would reissue this book." (!!)

Think of this post, then, as a preview of coming attractions. A Harp in Lowndes Square is a unique and rather tragic entry in Ferguson's wildly varied body of work, and I'm delighted that others will now have a chance to read it.

No longer a fantasy: the first real-life Furrowed Middlebrow titles (part 1 of 3)

I promised a couple of days ago, when previewing the new Furrowed Middlebrow imprint colophon, that I would have real announcements very shortly, so here goes. I'm practically giddy with excitement (well, perhaps that's an exaggeration—I don't get giddy very often—but I am quite happy and awfully, awfully relieved to finally stop keeping secrets from you all). (By the way, if you missed the news about my publishing venture, check out the first reveal here and the colophon here.)

I know it's a bit coy to divide the announcement up into three posts—one for each of the three authors—but I can't bring myself to lump them all together because I want each of these three wonderful authors to get their props, their dues, their R-E-S-P-E-C-T, etc.

When I first compiled my "wish list" to send to Dean Street Press, there was, as you might imagine (especially since you know how I am), a fair amount of agonizing, obsessing, and handwringing as I tried to prioritize the authors and books that were absolutely the best and most exciting discoveries from my time as a blogger. But there was really never any doubt what the very first title should be, as it was in fact one of the handful of books that made me want to start blogging to begin with. At the time, I felt I just had to tell others about such a wonderful discovery. Imagine my delight when it turned out that we could fairly easily acquire the rights to it, and I could share it with you in a more practical form.

That title is…

[imagine a drum roll]

…obviously, Rachel Ferguson's glorious WWII novel, A Footman for the Peacock (1940). I've raved about it here repeatedly (see my original review of it here), so it can't come as a huge surprise that we'll be publishing it. Suffice it to say that it's not only one of my favorite blog discoveries, or one of my favorite novels by a British woman. It's one of my favorite novels, period—a brilliant, hilarious, scathing satire of a loathsome upper-crust family with a long history of cruelty and a present characterized by dodging any type of war-related effort or sacrifice. And the occasional walk-ons of a Nazi-sympathizing peacock, who is probably the reincarnation of a footman run to death by the family's ancestors, are just icing on the cake! I hope you all love it as much as I do.

But that's not all. Once the realization set in that I might actually have the chance to publish Footman, I started to poke around among Ferguson's other out-of-print novels. (So now you know the impetus behind my ongoing project of reading and documenting most of Ferguson's body of forgotten work…) In March of this year, I posted about her followup to Footman, 1942's wonderful Evenfield, a charming, funny mockery of chronic nostalgia that is itself brilliantly nostalgic.

Evenfield immediately became my second favorite Ferguson novel, and I'm delighted that it, too, will be a Furrowed Middlebrow title come October.

And we're doing a third Ferguson title as well. Along with Footman and its followup, we'll also be releasing A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936), published the year before Persephone's Alas, Poor Lady. I haven't reviewed Harp here yet, but stay tuned…

I should mention that, as is likely to be the case with many of the Furrowed Middlebrow titles, this is the first ever reprint of these novels. Not only that, but none were ever published in the U.S. in the first place, so copies of the original British editions (all from Jonathan Cape) are now vanishingly rare, even in libraries, and almost never come up for sale (currently Abe Books lists not a single copy of any of them—one can only imagine what the price would be were a bookseller to find they had one on hand!). All of which makes me even more pleased that we're able to make them available again.

I should also mention that all of the Furrowed Middlebrow titles will be released in both e-book and physical (print-on-demand) formats, and they'll be available on both sides of the pond (i.e. no transatlantic shipping costs!).

I'd be thrilled it if in some small way these reprints can expand Ferguson's reputation. Although she certainly has her faults (see my recent post about some of her earliest work), I find her a fascinating offshoot of both experimental modernist literature and the more mainstream entertainment of the "middlebrow." She certainly deserves more attention.

And that's all for now. But stay tuned for announcement #2 in a few days!

RACHEL FERGUSON, Three impossibly obscure early works (and just how many novels did she write anyway?)

This might be one of those posts that only interests me, and I may be letting my generally dormant academic instincts run a bit too rampant. But for the last couple of months, I seem to have been engaged in an obsessive project (is there any other kind for me?) to read almost everything Rachel Ferguson ever wrote, and I feel, since so few people have access to most of these books, that I should document my reading a bit and share it with anyone who is interested. So, bear with me (or skip right over this post if you prefer—I won't hold it against you).

I can't really say exactly what set me off on this project, though it certainly has something to do with having recently discovered another of her novels—her ninth, Evenfield (1942)—which I love. It may also just be a perfect storm: a combination of an enigmatic and intriguing author (relatively well-known for her second novel, The Brontës Went to Woolworth's [1931], reprinted by Virago in the 1980s and by Bloomsbury in recent years, and for her seventh novel, Alas, Poor Lady [1937], reprinted by Persephone, but otherwise Ferguson is pretty much lost to literary history); the fact that she wrote one of my all-time favorite novels (her eighth, A Footman for the Peacock [1940], which I discussed here); and the irresistible (and initially seemingly hopeless) challenge of tracking down copies of her often vanishingly rare books.

Then, add to that the mystery that seems to have surrounded her bibliography for some years—the question of just how many novels she actually wrote. If I seemed, above, to be stressing the chronology and number of her novels, it's because every online source I've come across produces a different total number of Ferguson novels.

Presumably, the discrepancies have been caused in part by the fact that some of these books are so thoroughly forgotten and hard to find, and in part by the fact that some of her books have seemed to defy definition—I've said before that Ferguson was nothing if not a distinctively peculiar author with her own unique approach to novels as well as to the other genres she tackled. But whatever the reason, from Wikipedia (which credits her with 13 novels) to Bloomsbury's website (which puts the number at 10) to Persephone's website (which stiffs her and credits her with only 9), there's considerable disagreement and little accuracy as to just how many novels Ferguson actually wrote.

It probably won't surprise any of you who regularly read this blog that I am going to be perversely different and assert that all of these sources are incorrect—that in fact Ferguson wrote not 9, not 10, not 13, but actually 12 novels. How do I have the chutzpah to claim to know more than the authors of these bios? Um, well, because I've actually been reading all of them, that's why!

In a later post, I'm going to sum up this project and post the most definitive bibliography I can come up with, but for now, here's a list of Ferguson's twelve novels:

False Goddesses (1923)

The Brontës Went to Woolworth's (1931)

The Stag at Bay (1932)

Popularity's Wife (1932)

A Child in the Theatre (1933)

A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936)

Alas, Poor Lady (1937)

A Footman for the Peacock (1940)

Evenfield (1942)

The Late Widow Twankey (1943)

A Stroll Before Sunset (1946)

Sea Front (1954)

(Oddly, Wikipedia lists The Late Widow Twankey as a play—presumably because it's subtitled "in Twenty-Two Magnificent Scenes"—but it is without a doubt a novel, which just happens, like several other novels of the time, to use the structure of a theatrical production.)

Now, I am a huge Rachel Ferguson fan, and this project of reading her more widely has, if anything, made me even more passionate about her. But everyone has their flaws, and Ferguson's are most clearly on display in the three early works I want to mention in this post, two of which in particular may also have contributed to the confusion surrounding her total number of novels. I'll look at those two first.

Sara Skelton: The Autobiography of a Famous Actress (1929) and Victorian Bouquet: Lady X Looks On (1931) form an oddly repetitious pair. Both are hard to categorize but might be called humor, of the same ilk (but definitely with Ferguson's distinct spin) as those books written by Cornelia Otis Skinner, say, in the 1950s and 1960s, or by Erma Bombeck in the 1970s and 1980s. At the time, they seem to have been referred to as satires. Each of the books features Ferguson narrating—from the perspective of a cranky, aging stage actress of limited intelligence and unlimited ego—a series of archly (far too archly, for the most part) humorous observations on topics of the day or reminiscenses of past events and cultural occasions. Although the former is putatively an "autobiography" while the latter is more obviously a series of reminiscences and commentaries, they are birds of a feather, the latter presumably resulting from the success of the former.

Both books also seem to have grown out of Ferguson's work as a popular columnist and theatre critic for Punch (both are credited on the title page to "Rachel of Punch"), as did two more books from the next few years—Nymphs and Satires (1932), a collection of some of her Punch pieces, and Celebrated Sequels (1934), which, according to one source, "parodies such popular writers of the day as E. M. Delafield, Beverly Nichols, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, and Hugh Walpole." This origin may also help explain why the books weren't really up my alley—they were undoubtedly targeted for a very specific audience that was "in the know" not only about theatrical history, celebrities, and popular culture dating back to Victorian years, but also about the sort of distinctly conservative, elitist, and sometimes outright offensive attitudes that are (I think) partly being satirized, but are also, it seems to me, viewed rather indulgently. More on that below.

Sara Skelton has become so obscure as to be left off of some Ferguson bibliographies altogether (thank you to University of Iowa, the one and only U.S. library with a copy, for actually lending it out!), while Victorian Bouquet has sometimes been erroneously described as a novel. Bizarrely, Ferguson's own 1936 novel, A Harp in Lowndes Square—published by a different publisher than the earlier books, who quite possibly had never read them—lists Sara Skelton, along with Nymphs and Satires and Celebrated Sequels, under the heading of "satires," but lists Victorian Bouquet among Ferguson's novels. One imagines Ferguson befuddled and amused by such a designation.

My interlibrary loan copy of Victorian
Bouquet clearly started life as a
Mudie's Library book

Starting with the positive, there are some really striking passages here and there in both books, as well as some daft humor that made me giggle. Here, from Victorian Bouquet, is "Lady X" on the suffrage movement:

For thirty years I made jokes about the feminine ballot, to please the men. And one fine day, I found myself at the head of a section surrounded by banners bearing many a strange device, marching down Whitehall, and revelling in every moment of it! By my side marched a dowager duchess and a laundrymaid.

Commonly, I detest these sentimental contrasts, but there it was.

I had discovered the team-spirit, which is of far more value to us than a dozen of votes. I had left my wits, my tongue, my looks, my sex-appeal and my social standing at home to look after the house. Shorn of all but the weapon of theoretic idealism, I tramped … the suffrage campaign, I see now, was our Eton and Oxford, our regiment, our ship, our cricket match.

And the day that a respectable paterfamilias, who in his saner moments would have sprung to open doors for me or fasten my shoestring, threw an elderly banana-skin at me, I was filled with an inner gratification far more real than when my husband came into the title and I became a countess.

One wonders (certainly not for the only time in reading these two books—or for that matter most of Ferguson's work) how much of Ferguson herself is in this passage and how much is the character she's inhabiting. But either way, it's an interesting and amusing portrayal of the unlikely camaraderie, liberation, and exhilaration that suffrage marches and protests must have allowed many women to feel for the first time. And Bouquet features several other particularly striking samples of early feminism, such as:

And then, I think, I took to musing over the astounding differences in human lives which are wrought by the trivial fact of sex. A girl's life and a boy's! To be a young man for just one day would, for a young woman, put the world in a totally different light. To be able to loiter without being followed. To be able to chat to car-men, newsvendors—policemen, even, without being stared at or hurried to by a crowd hoping you are in some dubious dilemma. To be able to knock people down instead of merely screaming for an always problematical assistance. To realize that one's looks don't matter—ah! that's the real freedom. To go out merely clean and to be harried by no tremors in respect of face powder, veil, hairpins, competitive dressing, high winds and petticoats. To scrap the provocative ankle and alluring veil, and just be a human being instead of an expensive assortment of sexual potentialities. To be done with the arch glance, the attack that, failing muscle, must coax, that failing brawn must argue … a woman's tongue is a tried and trusted jape with men, but it is our substitute for a fist. That, and the steamy arts of seduction which, unfortunately, do not always automatically accompany the feminine makeup.

Perhaps even more fascinating, a few pages later, is a clear awareness—sometimes still lost on today's feminists—of the fact that gender norms and restrictions oppress men as well as women. Lady X offers this advice to her young son:

I said to him: "There will be school, being fagged and probably bullied. Some fool will be there to laugh at my letters to you—for old women are perennially comic, as you will learn, my dear. You'll only be yourself till you are ten, and after that, my poorest and plainest, your whole life will be one concentrated effort to be exactly like the other man."

Of course, then she turns around and makes a few references (surely still rather titillating for the late 1920s and early 1930s) to gay men and lesbians that are rather less liberated. Here's Lady X's take on lesbians, for example:

At Adrian's parties, I am often the only woman present.

At the Studio Party I am often the only indisputable female in the room too, with the possible exception of one or two of the young gentlemen, because the ladies arrive in shirt-fronts, and sometimes in monocles and dinner jackets as well. I have listened to scorn poured upon them for this, and, indeed, why these ladies balk at trousers I cannot imagine. Personally, I think that their choice of attire is the worst they can do to us. I don't mind what a woman does so long as she doesn't dress as though she did it. But, for all that, I have my moments when I should like to undress the whole lot of them, and find out what the matter really is.

Otherwise, to take offence at them is unintelligent.

Um, yeah. Though I have to confess that I found this possibly homophobic passage from Sara Skelton (it's not about gay men per se, but it's certainly a condemnation of men who aren't sufficiently masculine), about the evolution of boxing matches, rather hilarious in a very silly sort of way:

In the 'seventies, prize-fights were often to-the-death affairs and not functions where, for fifteen guineas, you had not time to push your way from the entrance to a ringside seat before the bout was over, and the protagonists, sipping barley-water in ladies' dressing-gowns, were borne home in Rameses cars to spend the evening painting sprays of flowers in each other's birthday books.

[These passages are also intriguing—as are other elements of these books about elderly actresses—in relation to Ferguson's enigmatic but fascinating late novel A Stroll Before Sunset, which focuses on two rival aging actresses (I wrote about that novel here), and which presents some striking views about homosexuality and "feminine" men. It also features a prominently "feminine" man in a boxing match, so this was clearly an evocative image for Ferguson.]

Also from Sara Skelton, here is a sample of more pure silliness that made me laugh, from the great actress's childhood recollections:

I only remained at the Convent a few months, during which time I alternated between running away, childish attempts to commit suicide and a passionate determination to take the veil. The Mother Superior told me I was going to hell; I was always excited about new moves, and being thoroughly accustomed to travelling I thought that would be very nice, and hoped hell would look like the Brockett scene, and that the lighting would be more effective than the Keans made it.

Sadly, though, there are too few such passages. Much of the humor falls flat, as Ferguson was writing for such a specific audience and assuming so much about their knowledge of the theatre and sophisticated popular culture. And then, too, at the other end of the spectrum, there's much time spent, here and there (far too frequently) in both books, on pontifications about class.

Now, admittedly, as I already noted, Ferguson is playing the role of cranky, elderly, bigoted, rather dim-witted stage actresses, so we are certainly not intended to take all of the assertions at face value. And considering that this is the same author who, a decade or so later, was viciously mocking and satirizing the loathsome upper-crust family in A Footman for the Peacock, it's genuinely difficult to know just how much of Sara Skelton and Victorian Bouquet is intended seriously. What, for example, to make of Lady X's opinion of class relations generally:

I do not believe for a second that we are all equal. I believe that blood tells and always will. I believe in the deep necessity to England of Kingship, whose lowest manifestation is the love of a show that meanders through a tradition-riddled city; whose highest is the personal affection, however uncouthly expressed, that we bear our Royals, in spite of their Teutonic connexions and their preposterous hats. I could almost find it in my heart to believe in the Divine Right of Kings. And am certainly content to believe the King can do no wrong. I like to know that there are those more highly-born than myself—and oh! how much wealthier! I recognize that I have my social inferiors, and I expect them to do the same. Class jealousy is completely beyond my ken.

There are jokes at Lady X's expense here, no doubt, and perhaps we're to laugh at her very pomposity (particularly considering that she herself apparently married above her station), but for a modern reader it's not particularly funny. There are other passages that seem much more clearly to mock the stupidity and intolerance of some of the upper classes, as in Lady X's recollection of her mother's exchange at a dinner-party:

I remember, once, at a dinner-party at the Salisbury's in Arlington Street, hearing our hostess murmur to my mother: "My butler is leaving to get married," and Mamma's reply: "Insolent creature!…"

And truth be told, these sentiments do echo in a good many of Ferguson's works throughout her career, which makes it even more difficult to get a feel for where Ferguson's own feelings lie underneath the layers of irony.

[By the way, I'd be remiss not to mention that both Sara Skelton and Victorian Bouquet also contain short but shocking passages of virulent racism—both in relation to African-Americans. I literally gasped in reading both of them. The surface of each may be intended as satire and to reflect negatively on the actresses themselves (too ignorant to know any better, etc.), but I'm afraid I could find no really satisfactory explanation for them.]

It doesn't get a lot easier to interpret Ferguson's own beliefs when we throw her short, strange (of course), third novel into the mix. The Stag at Bay is an interesting if rather disjointed little novel. It seems to have been published only in an adorable little paperback edition, which (thanks to Stanford University Library) I was able to hold in my hot little hands (as well as scanning the cover for you, which was in amazingly good condition, considering its age). Paperback originals—at least by serious writers, as opposed to dime novelettes—seem to have been fairly rare at that time, and I wonder if the novel might have been edited down from a longer original manuscript to fit a length limit imposed by the publisher. Ferguson typically errs on the side of wordiness (if not always clarity), especially in her later novels, which grow progressively dense and labyrinthine in their prose (and I do mean that as a compliment, though perhaps some readers would disagree). But The Stag at Bay is so plucked and pruned that I found it difficult to follow in places, as if explanatory passages had been ruthlessly deleted by an over-aggressive editor. Or perhaps Ferguson was experimenting here with the simpler, more understated storytelling that Hemingway had popularized? If so, one assumes she put it down as a failed experiment…

The plot very much revolves around class concerns—more specifically the decline of an old family, and the rise of a newly-rich family of business folk who end up purchasing their property, oblivious of all the responsibilities the landed gentry have traditionally upheld. The situation is presented as a tragic one, and the scene in which the noble, loyal duke must tell his noble, loyal farmers of the impending sale of the estate, with much resultant handwringing on both sides, is perhaps the central drama of the novel. Surely, however ironic Ferguson often is (and however much we might disagree with the sentiment), the following lofty passage about this world turned upside down seems heartfelt and genuine:

And when the nobility of England had been finally hounded into the villas of suburbia, what would follow?

It meant that in a very few generations the grand and great-grandchildren of the best blood, the blood privileged, would subtly assimilate the atmospheres of suburbia. Perhaps in two hundred years—and for all time after that, nobility would be purged away. And in its place would be—what?

Bewilderment. A coming race in whom wavered the flame indomitable. … A coming race whose lingering fineness—always freakishly liable to reincarnate—warred with circumstance, whose every delicate perception hampered.

A new Lost Tribe.

Oh, dear. It's rather like one's grandfather telling one about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket, isn't it? Kids these days, etc. (Though I have to confess I sometimes find myself thinking in perhaps comparable—if not quite such class-based—ways about the decline of artistic and literary culture, so perhaps I am almost as cranky as Ferguson.)

For what it's worth, the nouveau riche aren't entirely demonized, though their characters aren't nearly as sympathetic as some in Ferguson's later novels. Perhaps she mellowed a bit with age? (But then I recall Simon at Stuck-in-a-Book discussing her memoir, We Were Amused—see here—and noting that her class biases are still firmly in place in the final book she wrote, so perhaps she just became more empathetic toward characters at all levels of society as she became a better, more nuanced writer, while retaining her essential beliefs.)

The most interesting element in The Stag at Bay is the character of Miss Postlethwaite, the companion of the duke's sister, Lady ffolliott, though she doesn't appear often enough and isn't presented vividly enough to redeem the novel (and Ferguson tackles the plight of ladies' companions much more entertainingly and sensitively in her final novel Sea Front, which I plan to post about soon—again, bear with me in this obsession!). She has one memorable rant near the end of the novel, which earns the novel a mention alongside the far superior later novel Alas, Poor Lady in Ferguson's Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry. I'll quote it here, as it's virtually the only memorable passage from the novel:

"You mustn't be too sorry for me because you like me." She began to speak with a thin, roused passion. " There are hundreds of women—ladies—all over England, and oh! the number in London!—who won't beg and can't work, who are starving by genteel inches in boarding-houses if they are lucky—'catteries' they are called—dear women, fine women, born mothers some of them; and they decay and decay, and come down to taking an interest in the new Swiss waiter and bickering for the best places by the fire. … If they were the nobility they'd get credit, or sell their treasures, like the duke—if they were the women of the working-class they'd be visited by Royalty and attended to in Parliament as a 'national problem.' But they aren't a national problem … they're just impoverished gentlewomen."

Perhaps this suddenly flaring concern, very much a backdrop to the drama of the decline of the gentry in The Stag at Bay, was the kernel that grew, five years later, into Alas, Poor Lady.

Having now read so much of Ferguson's work, I do have a bit of a theory about her class beliefs. There's a bewildering conflict here. She is able to be so empathetic and entertaining—not to mention viciously satirical and utterly hilarious about snobbishness and entitlement—in some of her writing. And then in other spots she seems to become the most gleeful elitist one could ever hope to meet, disdaining the unwashed masses and scorning those who don't remember their place.

Which is the "real" Rachel Ferguson, I ask myself, and which is a sharp satirizing of the kind of person who takes such perspectives? It's rather difficult to tell, and of course I don't claim to have a definitive answer. But it certainly seems that both are the real Rachel Ferguson. I think that—perhaps not unlike a good many authors we read and love from this period?—Ferguson genuinely believed in the fundamental goodness of a kind of idealized, traditional class system—noblesse oblige and all that—with an upper class that benevolently leads the nation, preserves the great traditions and intellectual pursuits, and charitably protects the underlings beneath them. It's not a perspective that very many of us can share today, and not many writers even at the time were quite so open in expressing it, nor had they done all the analysis Ferguson has clearly done, but a good many people probably took it as a given at the time. And Ferguson seems to have truly felt it was the most beneficial arrangement for everyone involved.

On the other hand, when Ferguson took something seriously, she was passionate and eloquent in defending it, and this is where, for me, she redeems her less palatable beliefs. Because although she occasionally, as in the passage quoted above, grates on our nerves by bemoaning the uppity lower classes, her most brilliantly scathing mockery is generally reserved for those of the upper classes who fail to uphold the role she feels they are destined to play. This is what makes A Footman for the Peacock so great, I think, and what may have been misunderstood by critics at the time as making light of wartime concerns. She's simply not having any of a loathsome family of elites dodging their duties to the nation and to others.

Perhaps I have a high tolerance for the bigotries of my favorite authors (Hemingway was a glaring homophobe, in addition to his misogyny and racism, and I love him anyway; ditto with Virginia Woolf and her own brand of elitism). But I do find that Ferguson's refusal to just accept the upper classes as somehow inately superior, her expectation that their behavior should match the position they occupy, that they should be held accountable, is a comprehensible and consistent one. It doesn't make me agree with her, but I admire that she applies her standards ruthlessly and equally.

I do wonder, though, having loved The Brontës Went to Woolworth's for nearly a decade now, what bee could possibly have got in Ferguson's bonnet that led her from the charming madness of that novel to the stodgy, preachy tone of The Stag at Bay just one year later. It's the most forgettable of her mostly delightfully odd accumulation of (twelve!) novels. And Sara Skelton and Victorian Bouquet are, if anything, even more forgettable (unless one finds it hard to forget how uncomfortable and irritating they are).

But oh my, so much better was still to come (and for better or worse, you'll probably hear more about it here)!