British Library Women Writers #2: My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes

I’ve left it far too long since I wrote about The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair – I’ve been meaning to write quick posts to let people know about the British Library Women Writers series that I am lucky enough to be series consultant for.

When they asked me, back in the dim and distant past, they’d already picked some of the titles to republish – and My Husband Simon was one of them. It was also the only one of the three they’d chosen that I’d already read. And luckily I liked it – and I liked it all the more when I re-read it to write my afterword (which is about class and reading matter in the novel).

The main character is Nevis, and she is a writer with an early success under her belt. Like Panter-Downes herself, she’d published a book as a teenager and had a follow-up that wasn’t as successful. How far it’s a self-portrait is hard to say – I don’t know if any such man as Simon existed, but Nevis is won over by him pretty quickly. He is proud of the fact that he doesn’t read and hasn’t heard of her. He also, she suspects, wouldn’t have heard of Virginia Woolf. Despite coming from different classes, with very different sets of likes and priorities, they get married. The original US title gives us a clue why: Nothing In Common But Sex.

Into this increasingly fragile marriage comes Nevis’s publisher – and a sort of love triangle forms. But the novel is much more than that. It’s about a meeting of classes that has nothing of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover fantasy to it. I’ve noticed a lot of the reviews have also drawn out the way that women’s work was (and always is) disparaged – that’s definitely in the mix too. It’s a really fascinating look at an incompatible marriage – told in a pacey, page-turning way. It doesn’t have the fine prose of One Fine Day, written substantially later, but it is still good writing with moments of real brilliance. This is the bit I excerpted when I reviewed it here years ago:

We climbed on top of the tram and away it snorted. A queer constraint was on us. We hardly said a word, but in some way all my perceptions were tremendously acute so that I took in everything that was going on in the streets. A shopping crowd surged over the pavements. In the windows were gaping carcases of meat, books, piles of vegetable marrows, terrible straw hats marked 6/11d. I though vaguely: “Who buys all the terrible things in the world? Artificial flowers and nasty little brooches of Sealyhams in bad paste, and clothes-brushes, shaped like Micky the Mouse and scarves worked in raffia?” A lovely, anaemic-looking girl stood on the kerb, anxiously tapping an envelope against her front teeth. Should she? Shouldn’t she? And suddenly, having made her decision, all the interest went out of her face and she was just one of the cow-like millions who were trying to look like Greta Garbo.

Wonderful, no?

It has been noted online that Mollie Panter-Downes didn’t rate the novel as highly as her later works, and didn’t want it republished during her lifetime. Interestingly, I’ve seen this noted by someone who has no qualms about biographies that reveal things their subject wouldn’t want revealed! It’s an interesting set of questions, but not one I’ll go into here – as with the George Orwell novel I reviewed recently, she definitely needn’t have worried. It is not her greatest work, but it is greater than many authors’ entire outputs.