GILLIAN TINDALL, The Pulse Glass (2019)

I have a whole slew of recent reading I need to catch up on here—something like two dozen books altogether, and some of them quite interesting (though some will have to be mentioned only briefly as my notes haven't always been all they might have been). But before I do that, I can't delay in writing about a wonderful book I just finished, and a brand new one to boot. Me reading a book hot off the presses? Unheard of!

Many of you will recall that Tindall is—as well as one of the foremost history writers in the world today (and, earlier in her career, a successful novelist as well and therefore included in my author list)—also the daughter of Ursula Orange, author of three novels reprinted as Furrowed Middlebrow titles, and the niece of Monica Tindall, author of another FM title. She also surely has the most seductive approach to historical writing I could imagine—such that even if you think you're not really "into" history, you really owe it to yourself to give her work a try. I couldn't put The Pulse Glass down and finished it in two days (it would certainly have been one if not for that dratted dying computer).

I first read and became a fan of Gillian's when she emailed me after I'd written about her mother's books, but as soon as I picked up Three Houses, Many Lives (2012) and, a bit later, Footprints in Paris (2009), I was hooked. Her focus, as she herself described it, is on the study of place and urban history, but that hardly does justice to the scope and elegance of her work. The Pulse Glass, for example, has four epigraphs—one from the periodical History Today, one from a poem by Polish Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska, one from children’s author Philippa Pearce, and one from Proust—which might just begin to suggest the varied sensibility and array of learning Tindall brings to her work.

The book begins on a somber note, as Tindall scatters her brother’s ashes along a disused railway line. This leads to meditations on the perishability of both people and objects, and on the randomness with which some objects manage, often by pure happenstance, to survive their inevitable contemporary irrelevance before taking on new, richer meanings for later generations. It's difficult to find a snippet from the book that can really give a sense of the power of the connections Tindall makes between personal events, objects, and history, but this passage gives a hint of the random survivals which particularly fascinate her and in turn make the book so riveting:

Let enough time pass and any written missive from the world that has vanished becomes precious. How glad a museum would now be to receive a medieval shopping or laundry list! And glad they are when some unexpected windfall comes their way. About a dozen years after the beginning of the present century, someone doing repairs to a wall in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, noticed that a tightly folded paper had at some point been stuffed into a crack between stones, presumably to keep out a draft, and had subsequently been plastered and painted over. When the paper was retrieved and deciphered, it turned out to be a fragment of a musical score by Thomas Tallis, complete with words, from a special service held in St. Paul's for Henry VIII in 1544, two years before his death. It is known that the service was arranged by Catherine Parr, the final wife who survived the much-married kind, and it is thought that the words may be by her. With similar serendipity, two much-folded sheets of paper were found lining the spine of a seventeenth-century book in the printing and publishing archive of Reading University. The sheets had apparently been used to reinforce the binding, and turned out to be from one of the first books printed in England by Caxton's press—a priest's handbook, dating frtom 1476-7. An interesting example of a printed page being, for once, more significant than a handwritten one.

Papers so unvalued that they are reused for bindings are clearly a fruitful source for lost writings, for in 2018 the Vice-Chancellor of Northumbria University, while rummaging in Cambridge University Library, made a similar find. As part of the backing of another manuscript, and divided into several different scraps, he discovered the score of a lost Christmas carol that had been sung in his own district in the early fifteenth century—'Parit virgo filium'. So, after five hundred and fifty years, the mute carol proclaiming a virgin bearing a son was given voice again in Newcastle Cathedral.

From its melancholy opening pages, The Pulse Glass proceeds with interlinking discussions of the blooming and wilting of railway lines, and the surprising afterlife of some disused stations; the enormously unlikely survival of a medieval Latin gospel; the centuries-old letters of several prominent families; rediscovered treasure from the attics of Westminster Abbey, which connect up with the intriguing vicissitudes of a small ivory figure of Christ that sits on Tindall’s bookcase; and the sometimes misguided urban "renewal" of London. That's just to name a few. And her tale touches on such disparate topics as the English Civil War, Richard III and the Princes in the Tower, Rudyard Kipling, and Florence Nightingale, as well as compelling details of Tindall's own family, earlier books, and the house in London in which she's lived for half a century.

And what wonderful connections she is able to make along the way, and what wonderings she inspires!

The book ends, too, on a personal note. The second-to-last chapter sheds charming light on Gillian's aunt, Monica Tindall, author of The Late Mrs Prioleau, one of my favorites of the Furrowed Middlebrow reprints. And in the final chapter, she offers her most thorough and heartbreaking discussion of her mother, Ursula Orange, and of Ursula’s suicide. I read this chapter with tears in my eyes and that little quiver that comes from real life poured elegantly, measuredly into great writing.

On our recent vacation, I largely took a vacation from blog reading as well. One of the utterly non-blog-related books I read was Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk, who was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize just a few days before we set out (I had bought the book at least a couple of weeks before the announcement, so I was in the unusual position of being right on point). I loved Flights, with its unusual and lovely weaving together of disparate stories into what must be called a novel, even if it resembles few novels before it. Tokarczuk also reminded me of another contemporary author I love, W. G. Sebald, whose haunting, melancholy novels are among my favorites.

Reading The Pulse Glass, in turn, brought both Tokarczuk and Sebald to mind. Which is why I can't yet bring myself to put the book on my "have read" shelves and am keeping it right by the side of the bed. A re-read is surely imminent.

It's possibly my favorite book of the year, and (here's a sentence I never thought I'd write) the fact that I'm briefly mentioned in the final chapter has nothing at all to do with it!

URSULA ORANGE, Company in the Evening (1944)

I'm obviously still doing a bit of catching up on books I've meant to write about but haven't gotten around to.  I read this one ages ago, not long after I reviewed three other Ursula Orange novels.  It was quite a little reading spree, and happily I managed to track down five out of her six novels.  Thankfully, I made notes about this one, because although I don't think it's by any means a perfect novel, it is definitely worth writing about—if only real life didn't keep getting in the way of my blogging! 

Orange is possibly the most interesting and entertaining of the absolutely, truly, beyond-the-pale-of-obscurity writers I've run across.  I included two of her early novels in my Possibly Persephone post a while back, about novels that should be in print but aren't (and I really urge you, yet again, to read Orange's wonderfully charming, cozy WWII novel, Tom Tiddler's Ground, published in the U.S. as Ask Me No Questions), and while I was a bit lukewarm on the third, it was still an entertaining read. 

All three of those earlier novels were relatively light and frothy, with just a few serious undertones beneath the frivolity.  But by the time we get to Company in the Evening, published three years after Tom Tiddler's Ground, Orange—like many writers publishing late in the war—has gotten a bit more serious, with the fatigue and deprivations of the war clearly beginning to take their toll.  And in this, her second to last novel, Orange is also experimenting with her methods of storytelling.

Like Tom Tiddler's Ground, Company in the Evening is set during wartime, and although there is certainly humor throughout, the lightness of the opening passage rather belies the more serious tones of what is to come:

IN THE EVENT OF AN AIR RAID PASSENGERS ARE ADVlSED TO etc.

I did not want to keep on idly reading and re-reading this notice, and yet, as I sat in my third-class railway carriage, traveling slowly and with frequent stops, not to mention two changes, towards my destination—Winterbury Green in Sussex—my eyes were constantly falling on it. There was, as always, a certain grim humour in the picture it conjured up. ("Excuse me if I lie on top of you, Madam." "Not at all, I believe it's safer underneath.")

The narrator is Vicky, a young woman who is fairly recently divorced and who has gone back to work to support her young daughter, Antonia.  She works for a literary agency which focuses on helping authors market their short fiction and articles to periodicals.  As the novel begins, Vicky has reluctantly offered to allow Rene, her pregnant, widowed sister-in-law (Vicky's brother has been killed in the war), to stay with her indefinitely.  Vicky and Rene have little in common—she later says of her, "Talking to her is like walking through a bog—squash, squash, squash—never, just never do you really crunch on to anything solid."  But Vicki is also worried about her mother's health and doesn't want her to be saddled with Rene instead, and so she resigns herself to losing some of her valued privacy and solitude, and pretends to her mother that "company in the evening" is just what she needs:

I have never tried to make Mother understand that, of all the unhappiness my divorce has brought upon me, loneliness has never been in the least a part. A sense of failure—yes. A rather frightening feeling of being alone against the world—yes. Regret that Antonia should be brought up without a father—yes. Loneliness—no. Lack of company in the evening is to me an absolute luxury.

We soon learn that, although Vicki has rarely come across her ex-husband, Raymond, since their divorce, she seems to retain some conflicted feelings about him:

He wasn't what you'd call the epitome of a Good Husband, with capital letters.  He wasn't a rock of gentle integrity, like Barry.  I could never rely on him to back me up at all costs (and this was not because he was fickler, but because his conception of me was always of a Person, never primarily of a Wife).  But if, at the moment, you don't happen to be wanting a Good Husband and, in all honesty, nine-tenths of the time I don’t—and do happen to be wanting someone to share a joke with, someone utterly companionable, someone restful because he's quick, not because he's slow, someone with whom you drop at once thankfully into a sort of allusive mental shorthand, then, to my mind at least, you want Raymond.

It's hardly surprising, after this passage, that Vicki and Raymond happen to meet one evening, or that they have a nice chat as a result, and one of the strands of the novel's plot has obviously been set in motion (can a strand be set in motion? well, you know what I mean).  There's also her increasingly contentious relationship with Rene, and with her housekeeper and former nurse, Blakey, who dislikes Rene and enjoys stirring up conflict, and there's a fascinating portrait of one of the writers the agency represents, and a glimpse of the inner workings of a literary agency (see below).

All of which is enjoyable enough, even if it doesn't quite hold together as smoothly or enjoyably as Orange's earlier novels.  For better or worse, there's also the presence of one of Orange's pet themes—of snobbishness and the sophisticated desire to avoid it at all costs.  This theme was, for me, one of the weak points in To Sea in a Sieve, though there at least it was played mainly for laughs.  Here, Orange seems more in earnest about Vicky's horror of being snobbish, and it really does come across as a rather snobbish concern in itself (is feeling superior to folks who feel superior really not snobbishness? see Richmal Crompton's Leadon Hill!).  Perhaps that's precisely the point, but it just became heavy-handed at times, with a bit too much anxious self-examination on Vicky's part.

But this self-examination—even if it doesn't always make for engrossing reading—is also part of what made this novel seem rather unique for its time.  If Orange's Begin Again seemed ahead of its time in its sophistication and its portrayal of women who must have belonged to one of the first generations to begin to take an Oxford education for granted, then Company struck me as ahead of its time in its confessional first-person style, which comes across as quite a bit more like Margaret Atwood than Virginia Woolf (with perhaps just a touch of Bridget Jones, believe it or not).  I felt at times as though I might be reading Atwood's The Edible Woman, written nearly 30 years later, and the passage about Raymond quoted above is a case in point.  There have always been first-person narrators, of course, but somehow Vicky's strikes me as a rather modern voice—not one of the self-effacingly funny narrators, like Dodie Smith's Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle, nor one of the formally elegant ones that Elizabeth Taylor or Elizabeth Bowen might have created.  Vicky seems to speak to us seriously but more or less in our own contemporary language, and that seems like an achievement to single out.

But one of my favorite elements of the novel, as I mentioned above, are the passages describing Vicky's troubles with one of the agency's clients.  Vicky first gives a bit of background:

Unless you are an avid reader of women's magazines you would not know her name, but even if you had happened to notice it somewhat, you would be surprised to hear what a large and steady income she makes for herself from her writing. The woman's magazine short story market may be a footling one, from the point of view of literature, but it's an extremely lucrative one for a skillful craftsman. Ten percent of this author's earnings (the agency's share) was well worth bothering about.

This writer—whom Vicky gives the fake name Dorothy Harper—appears to specialize in rather trite, romantic tales (though one of her titles, Mermaids in Bloomsbury, would—were it a real novel—no doubt inspire me to an obsessive search for a copy, and should surely be stolen by someone for a title of something!).  Lately, the author has begun offering her work directly to periodical editors, and then, if they're rejected, offering them to the agency, which—in ignorance of her previous attempts—turns around and offers them back to the editors, creating an embarrassing situation for all.

Geek that I am, I found the agency's quandary, and the insight into dealing with difficult authors, fascinating—though perhaps not all readers would feel the same.  And Dorothy Harper herself is an entertaining character—as snobbish and superficial as Vicky prides herself she's not:

Dorothy Harper had evacuated herself with all speed at the beginning of the blitz to her Cornish cottage. Not that I blame her—there was no reason why she should stay to be bombed. Only I couldn't help smiling a little when she came prancing back into the office in the middle of January with two new short stories,  one about the heroism of an old woman in the blitz, the other about a crotchety spinster in Gloucestershire, whose whole life and outlook was radically changed (for the better of course) by her child evacuee. Miss Dorothy Harper herself  was loud in her complaints against the billeting officer who had tried to push a schoolboy on to her. ('"But my dear man,' I said—I know him well, he used to be dear Lord Portarlington's right hand man and was always about the place when one dropped in there—'My dear man, how can I? Nobody is readier than myself to help, but it would not be fair on the child to billet it in a place where it couId not stay. I am not here permanently myself, alas, only for a very very little time.''') Mrs. Hitchcock caught my eye and gave me a wry grin. Dorothy Harper wafted herself out of the office, all pearls, fur-coat and scent. I am sure that she always pictured herself as bringing just a little colour and romance—a breath of the outside world—into our drab lives. As neither of us ever did anything but listen patiently while she talked her society prattle, perhaps we encouraged her in this conception. I was 'Miss Sylvester' to her, as I was to all our clients. I am sure that had she known that I was (like her) a divorcee, she would. have been deeply shocked. Little typists in offices (she would think) have no business to be also divorced women with private lives of their own.

I wonder how many of the World War II stories and novels I have loved were in fact written by women safely outside of all danger zones, merely fantastizing the harrowing details?!

Apart from Harper's connection to the snob theme, it's not entirely clear to me how these experiences in the agency tie in with the novel's overall themes and plot, but they're an interesting glimpse of a portion of the publishing world I've never encountered before.  It made me wonder, too, could this be an insight into Orange's profession before (or even while) she was writing her novels?  Little is known about Orange's life, after all.  Or is it instead an ironic reversal of her position? Could she have been a writer of the trite magazine fiction Vicky acts as agent for, before (or, again, while) writing her novels?  There certainly seems to be real personal insight, at any rate, which shines through and makes these passages compelling.

I've now read four of Orange's six novels.  Her final work, Portrait of Adrian, published the year after Company in the Evening, has been waiting patiently on my TBR shelf for months now after I got side-tracked from my Ursula Orange obsession.  It has been described as a "psychological portrait," and I'm curious to see where Orange went from the half humorous/half serious tone of Company. 

But I'm even more curious about Have Your Cake, Orange's fourth novel, published only one year after the brilliant frivolity of Tom Tiddler's Ground.  Alas, that one—published cheaply and in a small print run, no doubt, in the midst of wartime paper rationing—seems to have vanished from libraries and copies rarely seem to come up for sale at all, let alone at remotely affordable prices.  I've had to add it to my new Hopeless Wish List, but somehow, I swear, I will track down a copy.  As God is my witness, etc.

By the way, as it happens, an anonymous commenter on another post only recently gave me the information—I can't imagine how I hadn't put two and two together and figured it out for myself—that Ursula Orange's daughter is actually author Gillian Tindall, and that Tindall writes about her mother (and her suicide) in her 2009 book Footprints in Paris: A Few Streets, A Few Lives.  Of course, I have now ordered a copy of that book, and will no doubt find myself unable to share what I learn.  And not only that, but I've discovered that Tindall herself has written at least a couple of novels, and that the first was published in 1959, which means she will be added to my Overwhelming List as well with my next update.  I do love having multi-generational sets of authors on my list.  So, stay tuned!

URSULA ORANGE, To Sea in a Sieve (1937)

In the past few weeks, I've been doing a lot of enthusiastic babbling about Ursula Orange—a writer I had never even heard of until recently and about which little information has been available.  I first read and reviewed her third novel, Tom Tiddler's Ground (published in the U.S. as Ask Me No Questions), which instantly became one of my favorite discoveries of 2013 and is high on my list of books to re-read as soon as time allows.  It's the high point of my Orange reading so far.  Then I tracked down her debut novel, Begin Again, which is perhaps a bit rough around the edges, as debuts have a tendency to be, but which I also found quite smart, funny, compulsively readable, and even a bit edgy in its way.

Now I've gotten my hands on the novel that came in between.  To Sea in a Sieve appeared a year after Begin Again and four years before Tom Tiddler's Ground.  This was actually the first book of Orange's that I heard about, when I came across a contemporary review that discussed it alongside another now-obscure novel, Ethel Boileau's Ballade in G Minor.  Although the reviewer for Saturday Review preferred Orange's novel to Boileau's, he remained underwhelmed.  But he did squeeze in a comparison to E. M. Delafield, which—happily—made me bound and determined to give Orange a try:

Miss Orange now and again comes very close to being as acidly funny as E. M. Delafield, but most of the time she spoils her effects by not being willing to let well enough alone, and explaining her best jokes. Her Mummy is a great deal more human than Lady Boileau's Mummy, and apt to get really annoyed from time to time. Sandra, with whose marriage the book is concerned, is a really engaging person, and many of the minor characters are genuinely well done. "To Sea in a Sieve" was, to me, a great deal more entertaining than "Ballade." But I have no doubt that Lady Boileau's book will be discussed more earnestly at the bridge clubs.

Alas that I have no bridge club at which to discuss either novel, so I shall make do by discussing Sieve here.  But it does sadden me a little to say that I was also a bit underwhelmed…

As the reviewer noted, Sieve follows the vicissitudes of Sandra Blakiston's marriage, but indeed it also preliminarily follows her expulsion from Oxford and her indecision about who to marry in the first place—Charles, her upper class fiancé, with whom she has an easy, bantering relationship of jokes and affectionate mutual insults, or Stephen, the earnest, left-leaning intellectual for whom all joking only points out the cruel injustices of the world.  The following long-ish passage, which takes place after Sandra has had a fight with Charles and gone off camping on Sark with Stephen and their friend Mavis, displays Orange's usual playfulness as well as the stark difference between Sandra's two love interests:

Mavis was burrowing briskly among the piles of clothes. Most of Sandra's and Mavis's possessions lived permanently on the ground. There were some hooks fastened with string to the tent-pole, but if anyone hung more than two things on one hook it slid passively to the ground. Sandra had amused the others by addressing the hooks in a manner supposed to resemble that of her late headmistress, beginning:

'Now that you are all here together, hooks,' and going on to accuse them collectively of a lack of team-spirit and separately of any sense of responsibility towards the duties and burdens that all must in this life be prepared loyally to support. 'The lessons that you learn in this small world of tent-life,' she wound up, 'will help to carry you through the wider outside world of wardrobe, door-peg and even of crane-life. Yes, hooks, why are you smiling among yourselves? There is nothing impossible in the idea that one of my hooks will one day rise to the supreme responsibility of being a crane-hook—'

Stephen laughed but quickly grew solemn again and asked: 'Are girls' schools really like that?'

'Oh yes,' said Sandra unashamedly.

'Good Lord,' said Stephen and he looked so disgusted that the fooling was quickly at an end, sliding into a serious discussion about co-education. Fooling with Stephen usually ended in a serious talk, whereas fooling with Charles had gathered momentum and rolled along to the point where giggling idiocy ended in kisses.

By contrast, this brief exchange between Sandra and Charles while horseback riding gives a sample of their "giggling idiocy":

'In my experience,' said Charles, who was watching her struggles with amusement from the other side of the ditch, 'he's exactly like other horses. What he's waiting for now is a good crack behind the saddle just before he sticks his toes in for the tenth time to refuse.'

'Oh. But you didn't hit yours.'

'No. I didn't get him all fussed up first,' said Charles pleasantly. 'However, if you disapprove of corporal punishment I should try getting off and reasoning with him.'

There are quite a few such passages throughout, many of them really funny, so that To Sea in a Sieve is at times quite enjoyable.  At its best, it even reminded me of a Hollywood screwball comedy of the kind being produced in numbers at the time Sieve was written.  In The Awful Truth (one of my all-time favorite movies), for example, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne play a happily married couple who have a daft squabble, get divorced, marry entirely unsuitable people, hilariously sabotage each other's marriages, and wind up reuniting in the end. 

Something similar happens here, as Sandra's rather shallow determination to be free-spirited and open-minded, and to resist all the beliefs and assumptions of her class, leads her to choose Stephen over Charles, and to live in poverty (well, by her standards, which still allow for the occasional presence of a charwoman) as Stephen works ineptly but with great political idealism at a failing bookstore.  And these situations do produce some genuine humor, as when Sandra muses on her improvement as a housewife while making a sly reference (like the kind given more air time in Begin Again) to the relative usefulness of a university education in the day-to-day life of a married women:

Nevertheless, household management no longer represented for her a maze of bewildering uncertainties, nor cooking a series of agitated guesses culminating in a peak of agonising uncertainty at the moment when the food was placed on the table but the first mouthful had yet to be taken. She was now competent to the point that when she undertook to produce a meal she always achieved something quite eatable not more than a quarter of an hour after the intended time; and that, for a girl with seven years of school and two of college behind her, was not bad after all.

Or when Stephen's political correctness—as we might call it now—starts to grate on Sandra's nerves, as in this discussion about the bookstore owner's wife, with whom Sandra has discussed the shop's disgruntled shopgirl, Daisy:

Stephen exclaimed disgustedly: 'Imagine the mind of a woman who goes prying into things that have nothing to do with her just for the sadistic satisfaction of getting up on a pedestal and denouncing someone as a bad lot.'

'Imagine the mind of a woman who comes into the kitchen and finds her maid locked in the embraces of a milkman—a married milkman,' retorted Sandra. 'I suppose she ought to say, "That's right, my dear. Carry on and don't mind about the dinner. I'm very glad to think you're not being repressed in any way."'

The trouble for me was that the proportion of entertaining moments to the amount of agonizing and argument is just not quite high enough.  Clearly Orange was trying to show the evolution of Sandra's thinking, from its naïve post-Oxford idealism to its more nuanced grappling with real world challenges.  But perhaps Orange could have done a bit of expeditious excising of some of Sandra's angst along the way.

I do have to mention one section of To Sea in a Sieve that was quite entertaining for me.  At one point, Stephen falls ill and Sandra agrees to fill in for him in managing the bookstore for a couple of weeks.  This gives her the opportunity of discovering that she is really quite good at handling customers and organizing the business—and is even good at managing the disgruntled shopgirl—at least until she storms out in a huff…  This section therefore has real relevance to Sandra's development, but more importantly, for a lover of bookstores like me, it was great fun to vicariously run a bookstore for 50 pages or so!

Sieve's cute little library
card, with evidence of
its, um, popularity...

And, just for those who fetishize library books
as much as I do...I suspect the fines are now a bit
more than two cents a day, don't you?

Ultimately, though, To Sea in a Sieve felt like a transitional work, between the passion and exuberance of Begin Again and the mature, controlled, and endlessly charming Tom Tiddler's Ground.  The ending, too—unlike that of The Awful Truth—didn't quite ring true, at least for me, and I left the novel feeling a bit discontented.

But mind you, not so discontented that I haven't managed to get hold of two more of Orange's novels—1944's Company in the Evening and 1945's Portrait of Adrian—which is little short of amazing since I believe the copies I have in my hot little hands are the only copies in any U.S. library.  (Thank you, University of Pennsylvania!)  I'm especially excited since these are Orange's final two novels, and will be my first experience of where she went, as a writer, after Tom Tiddler's Ground.  I am a bit sad that the novel she wrote immediately after Tom Tiddler's Ground, 1942's Have Your Cake, is apparently nonexistent in the U.S. and prohibitively expensive to purchase.  It's looking like a candidate for my new Hopeless Wish List (which I'm planning to post in the next few weeks).  But, I'm frankly amazed that I've been able to track down five out of six novels by this utterly and undeservedly forgotten author (refer to the library card from Sieve above if you don't believe the "forgotten" part), so I will be thankful and not expect to, um, "have my cake" and eat it too…

An array of delicious Oranges?

URSULA ORANGE, Begin Again (1936)

In the past couple of weeks, I finally got around to re-reading Nicola Humble's The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s (2001), which I've been meaning to do for a long time.  I first read it several years ago and I realize now that it has always been a sort of ghostly presence on this blog.  It's one of the foundational texts—at least academically—for the study of the kinds of books I spend most of my time reading these days, and it has certainly influenced how I think about these books and how I write about them here, even if I've never given it proper credit before.  (Nicola Beauman's  A Very Great Profession [1983] is perhaps even more foundational and also very much a ghostly presence here, so I should give it a shout out too while I'm at it.)

Humble's arguments are too subtle and complex to summarize here (even if I could feel confident that I’ve grasped all the subtleties), but among other things she discusses how middlebrow novels portray class anxieties, stresses surrounding domestic labor (with or without servants), changing standards of gender and sexuality, bohemianism as a way of testing the boundaries of social mores, and ongoing anxieties about women's roles in relation to education, employment, marriage, and motherhood.  Anyone who reads a lot of midcentury novels by women writers can attest to the almost ubiquitous presence of these themes, so Humble's comparisons and elucidations were useful to me and have added an extra layer of richness to my reading of these novels.

Apart from a desire to acknowledge Humble's influence on this blog, I'm mainly mentioning her now because my recent re-reading of her book was still bouncing around my brain when I read Begin Again, Ursula Orange's 1936 debut novel, and so it sort of haunted my reading of it (I don't know what it is with me and ghosts today—that's the last reference to them, I swear).

In particular, women's education and employment and their changing views of romance and marriage, are central themes in Orange's novel.  Humble analyzes these themes in relation to Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night (1935), published just one year before Orange's novel, and points out how many of the educated women in Gaudy Night (a mystery set during a reunion of former students at Shrewsbury College, if you haven't read it) have difficulties balancing their intellectual pursuits and/or career goals with marriage.  The ideal of a balanced, equal partnership in marriage is, for Sayers, an elusive one to achieve, and she does not seem overly optimistic about it.

But while Sayers' women have been away from school for several years, Orange's novel focuses on four young women, educated together at Oxford and only recently out of school.  They are only beginning to find their way and balance their ideals—including some rather romanticized bohemian ideals of sexual and artistic freedom, refusal of traditional roles, and economic independence—with the realities of work and romance they have encountered.  Jane and Florence live in London and support themselves with office jobs.  Sylvia stays at home and shocks her family with theories of every-woman-for-herself sexual and social liberation.  And Leslie, as the novel opens, is rather hilariously lost in dreamy-eyed idealization of the other three as she tries to convince her mother to let her use her small nest egg to live in London and attend art school:

She knew, not only from Jane and Florence's conversation (it had been some time since she had had a really good talk with them) but also from the pages of modern novels exactly the way in which young people living their own lives in London talk together—an attractive mixture of an extreme intensity and a quite remarkable casualness. "Henri says Marcovitch's new poems are the finest things he's ever read—will certainly found a school of their own. By the way—hand me the marmalade—Elissa is living with Henri now. He says he needs her for his work at present." Clearly the sort of person who talked like this lived a much freer, a much wider, a much better life than the sort of person who merely said, "Good morning, mummy. Did you sleep well? When Alice brought my tea this morning she said a tree was blown down in the orchard last night."

I remember, growing up in the rural Midwest and steeped in modern literature, imagining just such routine profundity and radical chic permeating every second of city life.  I believe I thought that Hemingway’s representation of boozing expatriates in Paris and Fitzgerald’s portrayal of flappers and jazz age revels were still the realities I would encounter in 1990s Washington DC.  Ah, youthful exuberance!  And youthful stupidity…

Life in the big city!

Begin Again is not exactly plot-driven, but centers around the friction between the girls’ ideals and the reality around them.  Jane and Sylvia have boyfriends.  Jane's is a traditional, smotheringly needy doormat whom she seems to retain as a kind of whipping-boy, to torment with her indifference.  But as for Sylvia and her charming Claud, it's clear no matter how they assert their free love, anti-marriage ideals that they are truly in love, in spite of themselves.  Meanwhile, the plain-looking Florence channels her energies into what sounds an earnest, impassioned, and thoroughly dreadful novel about a young girl stultified by her school experience:

Of course much of the effect was lost when the book was read in extracts. Florence had quite given up reading it to Jane, chapter by chapter, because Jane seemed persistently to miss the point.

"I think it's terribly clever, Florence. But oughtn't something to—sort of—well—happen soon?"

"Happen!" cried Florence, deeply wounded. "What do you mean?"

"Well, you might make her do something awful and be expelled. Or have a fire, or she could elope with the head mistress's chauffeur or the riding-master or something like that."

"I don't remember anything in the least like that happening at St. Ethelburga's," said Florence coldly.

If, like Florence's literary effort, Orange's novel at times reads a bit like a case study or a tract on the difficulties facing women in a changing world, I found it no less fascinating and addictive as a result.  It's certainly not as cohesive and polished, nor as purely entertaining, as Orange's third novel Ask Me No Questions, which I've already reviewed.  But at the same time I can't think of very many other novels that present so many varied and thoughtful perspectives on the dilemmas that faced educated young girls in the 1930s (and perhaps still do?).  Plus, it's so immensely packed with quotable tidbits that I shall have trouble controlling myself and not typing the entire novel into this one blog post.  But this one, in which Florence muses about the qualifications an Oxford education has provided her, is clearly essential:

Oxford, it appeared, if it did not seem to have fitted her for any precise occupation, had at least unfitted her for a great many things. Impossible to stay at home. True, one could read and write as much as one liked; but experience proved that one did, in fact, read very little but novels, and found writing impossible without further stimulus. What kind of job can I get? Florence had soon asked herself, and bought a book on careers for women. The introductory chapter was encouraging. All careers, the author informed her grandly, were now open to women; but when the careers were enumerated in alphabetical order, all (with the possible exception of angora rabbit farming) appeared to need from one to five years' further training. In no profession except teaching did an Oxford honors degree appear to be a necessity, or even an advantage.

…

At the brief interview with her future employer, Florence, on mentioning apologetically her degree, got the impression that this could probably be lived down in course of time.

A short while later we see Florence again pondering the relevance of her school days to her day-to-day reality:

She sat down on the arm of a chair, and picked up a copy of her old school magazine which had arrived that morning. Fancy it's being still so much the same. Fancy it's going on and on like that! Fancy her having pressed her unfortunate parents to pay some enormous sum like five guineas in order that she might become a life-member of the Old Girls' Association. Fancy, thought Florence ungratefully and unkindly, fancy their being idiots enough to do so. Now the magazine would go on and on and on arriving. One never read it. One was not ruthless enough to put it into the waste-paper basket immediately. It hung about the flat, collecting dust. It found its way into that funny sort of heap (one could hardly call it a pile) on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, doubled up under a book of snapshots, mostly loose (last summer's holiday, never yet pasted in) and some copies of Vogue, extravagantly bought and economically hoarded.

The fact that these observations are both from the perspective of Florence, the secretary who is also a struggling novelist, makes me wonder if Florence might not contain—more than the other girls—some shades of Orange herself (no pun intended).  According to a note on the archival image of Orange from the Baltimore Sun which I posted in my "Possibly Persephone" post recently, Orange was able to write her first novel because she was one of the two winners of the Irish Sweepstakes (and she apparently married the other winner).  Reading the following amusing passage (well, amusing to me, as a secretary myself), I wondered if Orange might have been laboring over a hot typewriter before her lucky win:

With a harassed glance at the clock Florence went back to her typewriter for the third time. Let the beastly thing twitter. Let it ring its head off. She had plenty to do without getting up every minute to fuss over it. "Dear Sir," typed Florence (double space, indent), "I should like to have and opportunity of discussing—" Damn. "And" was always turning up instead of "a.n." Was it best to rub out (always a messy business with two carbons in the machine) or to correct in ink, a procedure frowned upon by Miss Locke, or to begin again, wasting paper, temper and time? Better perhaps go on and see if she made many more mistakes.... "Of discussing your suggestion that—" The telephone was twittering again. Let it. Florence's fingers, damp with sweat, pounded the keys furiously. The telephone's twitter shrilled into an insistent ring. With a groan Florence pushed back her chair and lifted the receiver. There was a faint buzz.

At any rate Orange seems to have a pretty good idea of what my days are sometimes like (though no more carbons these days, thank heavens). 

Ursula Orange (from the Baltimore Sun archive)

Eventually, Florence has a sad/funny meltdown and quits her job (and don't think I haven't had near misses of that kind of day too!).  Sylvia comes up against her own passionately-espoused philosophy when she discovers that her younger sister Henrietta, who has listened to and absorbed her half-baked theories for years, is planning to elope with a middle-aged man.  Jane's doormat boyfriend comes—rather belatedly—to his senses.  And Leslie—well, Leslie is preparing to follow in the other girls' glorious footsteps—to, as the title suggests, begin the whole process again.

I wouldn't compare Begin Again to D. E. Stevenson as I did Ask Me No Questions, but it's nevertheless true that this novel is perhaps what might have resulted if Stevenson had come of age reading Cosmopolitan and yearning for sexual freedom and liberation from social norms.  And that wouldn't be so surprising if Orange had been writing in, say, the 1970s, when Cosmopolitan was in full swing and free love was in the air.  But it seems like quite an accomplishment in a first novel from 1936!

*     *     *

As a brief addendum, this seems like a perfect opportunity to mention a new book that a friend of the blog pointed out to me (thanks, Julia!).  Women's University Fiction, 1880–1945, by Anna Bogen, has just been published by Pickering & Chatto.  You can read about it here, and you can also download the introduction and index, which mention some very intriguing and hitherto unknown (to me) titles. 

Barbara Silver’s Our Young Barbarians (1935)?  Mary Wilkes’s The Only Door Out (1945)?  Renée Haynes’s Neapolitan Ice (1928)?  Rose Marie Hodgson’s Rosy-Fingered Dawn (1934)?  Those are just a few of the tantalizing authors and titles mentioned—none of which have made it to my Overwhelming List yet. 

Clearly, if a woman's work is never done, neither is that of an obsessive cataloguer of British women writers!

URSULA ORANGE, Ask Me No Questions (aka Tom Tiddler's Ground) (1941)

Never heard of Ursula Orange?  Neither had I until recently (and neither, apparently, has Google).  But when I came across a review of her second novel To Sea in a Sieve (1937), wherein Orange was compared to E. M. Delafield (albeit not entirely favorably), I spontaneously requested the one easily available novel by her from the library—thus bypassing, willy-nilly, a looooonnnnggg list of other titles already on my "to read" list.

There must have been some kind of gut instinct involved, as Ask Me No Questions (originally published in the U.K. as Tom Tiddler's Ground), turns out to be exactly the kind of book that keeps me obsessively digging for unknown writers.  It has immediately become a favorite, and—as so often happens—it has me scratching my head as to why none of Orange's novels have ever been reprinted.  She apparently wrote only six—Begin Again (1936), To Sea in a Sieve (1937), Have Your Cake (1942), Company in the Evening (1944), Portrait of Adrian (1945), and this one. My first thought was that she must have written additional titles under a pseudonym, or perhaps Ursula Orange was her pseudonym.  It just seemed that she was too talented and polished a writer for her entire output to have been six novels.

However, with a bit of help from Andy (who has become extraordinarily talented and doggedly persistent in tracking down writers after I whine that I can't find any information about them—it can be a quite addictive pursuit), I discovered the sad truth—or part of it at least.  After publishing her final novel in 1945, Orange lived only another 10 years before dying at the tragically young age of 46.  We haven't located any details of how this came about, or much of anything beyond her life dates and her family names (her father was Hugh William Orange, who was knighted for his contributions to education), but her silence in the years before her death could perhaps suggest a long illness.  Regardless of the cause, I think anyone who reads the present novel will feel a tinge at the premature loss of Ursula Orange.

The novel opens in July, 1939, with Caroline Cameron awakening in the new house she and her husband of eight years, John, have just moved into.  She lies in bed questioning the taste of the furniture selected by her earlier self after her marriage—recalling that her mother was overheard to say of the dressing-table Caroline had selected, "My dear, I am giving my daughter a surgeon's trolley. It appears that that is what she really wants." Caroline muses:

She was quite ready to repudiate her past taste in furniture, together with most of her past opinions and ambitions. That perverted lamp-stand over there, for instance. That had been another horrible error of taste, and even John, who was not observant over such things, had said "My God!" when first it had risen from its wrappings in all its tormented, writhing, chromium ingenuity.

Although this seems like an (appropriately) idle and frivolous meditation on her part, in fact Caroline's questioning of her past, and even her present, soon becomes a significant plot element.

It's a somewhat bold move, I think, in what is basically a cozy, comforting novel of the very early days of World War II, for Orange to have presented her reader with a heroine who starts out quite lazy, superficial, and immoral.  Charming perhaps, and witty, but unquestionably selfish and self-absorbed.  She is exasperated and flustered by her rather spoiled daughter, Marguerite:

Caroline sometimes trembled aghast at the inexorable compulsion of life. Move on, move on, all the time like a policeman. Develop or die, no half-measures. Exhausting process! Fancy anyone choosing to be a children's nurse, Caroline would think, rushing to the sherry cupboard when Marguerite was at last safely in bed after Nanny's day off. (That absurd, that awful battle in the park. Anything for the sake of peace, but you can't let them take strange children's golliwogs home with them.)

And, more importantly, she is preparing, as the novel opens, to launch herself on an adulterous affair with a stage actor because she has become bored with her husband, who insistently babies her in an effort to make up for his shoddy treatment of his first wife.

This is more, you might think, like the setup of Peyton Place or a Jacqueline Susann novel than a warm, cozy tale of village life.  But it's a gutsy move for Orange to have made—presenting readers with a rather unsympathetic heroine who, in the course of the novel, gains self-knowledge, questions her own behavior, and makes amends.  And I found it very effective.  If it's not exactly Miss Buncle's Book, it's not as far off as it might sound.  Perhaps this novel is what would result from the mating of Miss Buncle's Book and one of E. M. Delafield's non-Provincial Lady, more seriously satirical works (with, okay, perhaps a bit of gene-splicing from Peyton Place).

In the second chapter, however, to ease any tension from having an initially-unsympathetic heroine, Orange presents us with a genuine D. E. Stevenson character, Caroline's old school-friend Constance Smith, who lives in the rural village of Chesterford.  Here is as warm-hearted, social, and loving a character as Stevenson herself could have created—a former social worker who takes the time and energy to really understand the people around her and try to help them.  But she is a bit naïve in her own relationships and has made a catastrophic marriage to the slimy Alfred, a social-climbing car salesman (though she doesn't quite realize yet just how catastrophic).

This type of Ursula Orange I was able to find a photo of, but
it's almost certainly not the one who wrote this lovely novel

We meet Constance first when the billeting officer, exhausted from making the rounds of the village and listening to various excuses as to why no evacuees can possibly be accommodated, shows up at her door:

"Wait till you hear what I've come about before you say you're glad to see me," interrupted Mrs. Latchford warningly. Everyone always interrupted Constance Smith. It was the only way of bringing the warmhearted, impulsive, voluble creature to the point.

But Mrs. Latchford underestimates Constance, who explains that she has already invited Caroline and Madeleine to stay with her but has another spare room.  She asks if Mrs. Latchford has any mothers with infants left:

"Any left! My dear Constance! What everybody says, if you want to know, is that a mother and baby is the one thing they absolutely and definitely draw the line at!"

"What, even people who are mothers themselves?" cried Constance, horrified.

"Oh, all the more so!"

"They'd rather have children?"

"Children of school age—yes!"

"Of course, children of school age are very interesting, but I'm afraid they'll find it more difficult than they think," said Constance rather surprisingly.

"Oh, do you?" (Of course, it will be perfectly frightful, but I should have thought she'd have taken the sentimental point of view.)

"Yes—school age, you know, eight or nine—it's too late already. You can't catch them too young in this job, you can't really. So terribly soon it's too late."

Job? Light suddenly dawned on Mrs. Latchford. Of course! Social work! That had been Constance's job before her mother died and she had come home to look after her father. A "Club Leader" in North Kensington or something of the sort. Fancy her forgetting!

(Of course, the unquestioned assumption here is that all the evacuated children will be a "job"—that all the urban mothers will have been incompetent at raising their own children to such an extent that a social worker with no children of her own will know what's better for them.  And in fact, the mother, when she arrives, is conveniently indifferent to her child and thankful for the opportunity to abandon all responsibility for him.)  At any rate, we soon see Constance's maternal instincts kick in and realize the extent of her discontent that the loathsome Alfred refuses to have children.

Caroline and Constance are perfect contrasts for one another.  Caroline begins to write a witty play for her actor lover, mocking and making light of the problems of Constance and the other villagers, but as she becomes more involved and more attached to the people in question, she loses interest in the play (and, finally, in her actor lover as well).  Constance brings out the empathy and depth in Caroline, and Caroline's sophistication and wit help the rather doormat-ish Constance face the realities of her unhappy marriage.  Complicating the situation are Constance's brother George, who has a history with Caroline's husband and his first wife; Alfred's working class half-sister, Mary, of whom he is ashamed (but whom Constance, predictably, loves); the naïve Lavinia Conway, daughter of Alfred's benefactor, who fancies herself in love with him; and the unexpected reappearance of Alfred's first wife, of whose existence Constance remains unaware.

It all gets worked out in predictable enough yet entertaining ways, and I just couldn't put it down.  There's not a lot in the way of riotous humor to quote—it's more a matter of charm and compulsive readability—but there are certainly moments of mirth.  In the closing of Caroline's first letter to her husband who has remained in London, we might wonder if there's a question of infidelity on his side as well as hers:

P.S.-Of course I loathe not being in London. Is Florence looking after the house all right? I thought it was rather touching of her to say she would like to stay and be bombed with you. Mind you put her underneath when you're lying down flat in an air-raid.

And Caroline's actor's phone call to her makes quite a contrast with the quiet life she's leading in Chesterford:

"Hello, darling. I say, we're having a terrific party in an air-raid shelter. I felt I must ring you up. I pinched the warden's telephone and he doesn't like it at all. Darling, how are you, and when are you coming up to see me?"

The wartime content of the novel generally takes a back seat to domestic complications, but there are still references here and there to shelters and blackouts and the ominous approach of war.  One comment that Caroline makes early on, about how she and John refuse to acknowledge the threat of war, somewhat bewildered me: "I mean John and I are pooh-poohers. Like Gugnuncs, you know, only not in the least like."  I tried to determine the meaning of "Gugnuncs," and found two articles about the World War I-era cartoons from which the name seems to come—this one and this one.  But I have to say neither gets me a lot closer to understanding Caroline's use of the term, which seems to imply a sort of ostrich-with-its-head-in-the-sand quality.  Anyone out there able to shed any light?

I admit that when I finished reading this novel, I was seriously tempted to turn back to page one and start all over again.  Although people are always saying such things, and it's a great way of stressing that a book really is quite good, it's not something I genuinely feel very often.  But in this case I did.  The novel is not a masterpiece.  It's not brilliant or profound or heartrendingly eloquent.  It's not War and Peace or Sense and Sensibility.  But it's definitely an addictive slice of life that will merit an occasional, blissful re-read. 

If other, more sporting types can have their Fantasy Football and Fantasy Baseball leagues, perhaps I should start my own Fantasy Publishing league?  At any rate, I've found the first title for "Furrowed Middlebrow Books" to reprint!  And I'm already in hot pursuit of Ursula Orange's other five novels, so you haven't heard the last of her here...