British Library Women Writers #5: Father by Elizabeth von Arnim

I am getting behind with writing about these books – there are seven out, and I’m only on number five – but slow and steady wins the race! Much like when I chose Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay for the series, Elizabeth von Arnim was an author I knew I wanted to include. I just had to had a quick think which of her out-of-print novels to choose.

The series is intended to highlight women’s lives in different periods of the 20th century. That’s why I chose Dangerous Ages, which sheds such light onto different generations’ experience of the 1920s. And it’s why I chose Father: the focus on an unmarried woman said so much about the 1930s.

Father is a novel that reminded me an awful lot of Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. In both, an unmarried woman is desperate for her independence, and not to be subservient in her relative’s home. For Laura Willowes, it’s her brother’s home; in Father it’s – you guessed it! – the father’s. Jennifer is 31 and a slave to her widowed father, a writer; she laments ‘the years shut up in the back diningroom at a typewriter, with no hope that anything would ever be different’. Only things are different. Father is getting married again, to Netta, who is younger than Jennifer. She sees her opportunity for escape: she can move to the countryside.

Through and beyond father she saw doors flying open, walls falling flat, and herself running unhindered down the steps, along Gower Street, away through London, across suburbs, out, out into great sun-lit spaces where the wind, fresh and scented, rushed to meet her […] Jen, her wide-open eyes shining with the reflection of what she saw through and beyond father. She could feel the wind – she could feel it, the scented fresh wind, blowing up her hair as she ran and ran…

And, like Laura Willowes, she does move to the countryside. Only things aren’t quite as uncomplicated as she’d hoped. Waiting for her, in that village, are James and Alice – the vicar and his tyrannical sister – who make an interesting parallel to Jennifer and her father. Alice is also a spinster, but holds all the power in her brother’s house – and is keen to dissuade any possible sisters-in-law who might oust her from the vicarage. And yet – as she also comes to realise – she is dependent on her brother. She may hold the power at the moment, but it isn’t secure. It’s interesting to see two women who are so completely different both in the role of dependent female relative.

So, Father has a lot to say about unmarried women of the interwar period – but it’s also very funny. Jennifer is a delight, and her actions are always justifiable but often extremely eccentric. Deciding to sleep out on a mattress in the garden, for instance. You can’t help but love her and want freedom for her. And Father is every bit as frustrating as any fictional man who believes he is always right (or non-fictional, I daresay).

When I read Father in 2015, I loved it but didn’t think it was her best. On re-reading it, I think it’s actually one of the best novels Elizabeth von Arnim wrote – out of the ten I’ve read, anyway. It’s another one I’m delighted to see back in print, and with one of the prettiest covers in the series so far.