Conferencing (and my Guard Your Daughters paper)

I’ve just spent the weekend in Chichester, attending the British Women Writers 1930-1970 conference. It’s the third in the series, and the second I’ve been to – though the decades in question have now been extended from 1930-1960. As I’m most comfortable in the 1920s and ’30s, the extra ten years didn’t make me venture out – though it did mean more authors I hadn’t heard of being on the table – but I did go as far as the 1950s, talking about Diana Tutton’s Guard Your Daughters. That meant I got to read it again, which was lovely, and I thought I’d share my conference paper in case anybody wanted to have a gander.

The conference is brilliantly run by Miles and Dave, and had a great range of papers. Being a centre of Iris Murdoch studies, she always looms large – but they forgive me for my ambivalence towards her. And the papers on her were great, even if they didn’t make me want to read the books themselves. I did come away with a keenness to read Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford, and to hunt down the novels of Betty Askwith. Other writers who were spoken about included Rachel Ferguson, Elizabeth Taylor, Virginia Woolf, Clemence Dane, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rumer Godden, Jon Godden, and many more.

It’s lovely being in this company, with such enthusiastic, knowledgeable, friendly people – and to catch up with some people I’d met at previous conferences. I also chaired a panel for the first time ever, which was an enjoyable experience. Next year it’s going to be in Hull, and I’m already getting excited, deciding who I might speak about!

And here, to pretend you were there for at least some of it, is my conference paper (which, apologies, doesn’t have proper footnotes or referencing – I always take those out lest they distract me while reading).

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“I realise now that we’re an odd sort of family”: Diana Tutton’s Guard Your Daughters and the interrogation of female communities

If I were to recommend a mid-century novel about an eccentric family living in the middle of nowhere, with a father who’s a writer, narrated by a young woman with an unusual name – you might think of Dodie Smith’s 1948 novel I Capture the Castle. But if you change Suffolk to an unspecified county, Cassandra to Morgan, and an avant-garde novelist suffering writer’s block to a successful detective novelist, then you get Diana Tutton’s 1953 novel Guard Your Daughters (recently reprinted by Persephone Books).

It’s not clear how conscious the similarities between these novels was, on Tutton’s part – and they are very similar, down to the man turning up because his car has got stuck, catalysing a change in the main character’s life – but it didn’t prevent Guard Your Daughters becoming a Book of the Month choice and selling over 200,000 copies. And perhaps it was simply in the zeitgeist. This variety of novel, focalising the eccentric family and their interiority, was popualr – Rachel Ferguson opens her 1931 novel The Brontes Went to Woolworths with ‘How I loathe that kind of novel which is about a lot of sisters’, and can assume that others would recognise it. As the title of Ferguson’s novel suggests, a large part of this vogue involved looking to literary antecedents – and they become part of the interpretive structures used by the fictional characters to understand their world. The characters in Guard Your Daughters find themselves between the dual spheres of their literary precedents and domestic space – and, within these, trying to work out – to try on, discard, rearrange – the roles of sister and daughter, and potentially wife. Tutton’s two other, later novels distort these roles more drastically – in Mama, a mother is in a love triangle with her daughter and her daughter’s partner; in The Young Ones, a half-brother and half-sister knowingly enter an incestuous relationship. While mother, daughter, wife, and sister are overlapping quantities in these novels, collapsing in on themselves, Guard Your Daughters demonstrates the same difficulties of self-determination in microcosm.

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The novel is narrated by Morgan, one of five Harvey sisters – the others being Pandora, Thisbe, Cressida, and Teresa. Pandora has recently left the home to get married, but the others live together in relative isolation (none have been to school), in a family ostensively headed up by their detective novelist father. In actuality, it is the wishes and health of their mother that determine the domestic mores. She is often in bed – and, when appearing on the page, we usually only hear her through indirect dialogue. As such, she is distant from the reader, like an authoritative voice we can’t quite access – and her dictats mean that a matriarchal replacement for the traditional patriarchal family unit doesn’t create a safe space, or bring either normality or security. A couple of men arrive serendipitously, as potential suitors, but eventually it is Cressida’s running away that unravels the false assumption of the mother’s mental instability that has decreed the rules of the house and the guarding of the daughters.

Though Guard Your Daughters is, like I Capture the Castle, narrated by one of the family, it doesn’t have the same immediacy of Cassandra’s diary. While Cassandra is writing from the kitchen sink, Morgan is writing from outside the time and space she is describing. As the first lines show us: ‘I’m very fond of my new friends, but I do get angry when they tell me how dull my life must have been before I came to London. We were queer, I suppose, and restricted, and we used to fret and grumble, but the one thing our sort of family doesn’t suffer from is boredom.’ The change of tense, from ‘were’ to ‘doesn’t’, is indicative that this distance may not be unmarred.

A few lines later, Morgan satirises her own narration, in brackets ‘(I wanted to put in some lofty thoughts about that bit of flowering gorse)’. Dodie Smith’s Cassandra is famously described as ‘self-consciously naïve’, but self-consciousness is one of the hallmarks of Morgan’s narration – in the sense that she is constantly conscious of self, and how it is being (or, more pertinently, was being) performed. As Nicola Humble writes in The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, ‘Throughout Guard Your Daughters, the Harvey girls are torn between a desire to seem ‘normal’ and a pride in their familial eccentricity […] the clearest example of the conflict that operates in the middlebrow women’s novel of this period between a desire to display the home and family as original and ideal and a fear of failing to conform to the rules of bourgeois society.’

When Morgan and Thisbe are at a party, the latter says: “Morgan, the awful thing is – I don’t believe we’re as unique as we think we are. No one’s looking at us at all. Do you think we’re really quite ordinary?” Earlier in the novel, though, we see that Morgan doesn’t really understand what constitutes the ordinary. She can only depict it as a sort of disjointed still life: “All the virtues, and latchkeys, and domestic science diplomas, and cute little houses, and bijou gardens, and hockey, and beauty hints, and paper d’oyleys – ”. This bizarre miscellany is dominated by domestic objects, and gives the impression of a character who can only define herself against a norm that she has discovered through hearsay.

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Humble writes extensively about the eccentric fictional family of the mid-century – novelists like Rachel Ferguson and Barbara Comyns specialise in these – but terminology is important. While Tutton doesn’t use the word ‘eccentric’ (and Cassandra only uses it of people’s clothing and her father’s writing habits), the sisters in Guard Your Daughters often circle around synonyms to find the best way to place themselves, defining themselves against a contrast they don’t truly understand.

The original blurb for the novel suggested ‘this unconventional, happy-go-lucky family will endear itself to every reader’ – which, as Helen McGivering suggested in her review for Time and Tide, ‘sets one unfairly against the book’. Choosing the right term is a semantic minefield. Early in the novel Thisbe says ‘“We are rather quaint, aren’t we?”’, while Gregory (the first interloper) eventually replies: “You’re certainly an unusual family, with most unusual names.”’ Later, after another man (Patrick) is unveiled as a journalist writing about the family, Morgan reflects ‘I think a stranger reading his words would have pictured us as an unusual rather than a peculiar family’. There is some anxiety about the minutiae of their portrayal, perhaps particularly because it is a female community, and seemingly an important distinction between ‘unusual’ and ‘peculiar’ – the latter being the word Morgan uses scathingly to describe everyone else at the aforementioned party. In the opening pages of I Capture the Castle, Cassandra mentions ‘our peculiar home’ – though it is unclear whether she refers to the building itself or to the customs of the inhabitants.

The word was used, and is still used, in overlapping senses – ‘different to what is normal or expected; strange’, and ‘particular; special’. It is a locus for their sense of identity – both special and individual to their family, but also, as a cause of anxiety, potentially alienating. The word ‘unusual’ is perhaps less loaded, and thus less disturbing to embrace.

‘Odd’ – the word quoted in my title – leans towards the pejorative. It is the designation of an insider who has become an outsider: Pandora, visiting after her recent marriage. (As I quote in my abstract):

“I realise now that we’re an odd sort of family.”

“Well of course we are.”

“But I mean – Oh, Morgan, I do want you all to get married too!”

“Five of us?  I doubt if even Mrs. Bennet managed as well as that, unless she fell back on a few parsons to help out.”

While the leap from oddness singleness betokens something not yet spoken in the narrative about the mother’s control, it is telling that Morgan immediately moves from ‘odd’ to a reference to Pride and Prejudice (with, incidentally, the anticipation that all readers would know who Mrs Bennet was, without any guidance). The Austen allusion acts as a form of grounding; a life-raft of recognition to escape the censure of ‘oddness’. Oddness is a distinction from their contemporaries, not from their cultural past – for, like many middlebrow readers, they find their reflections and companions in literature.

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The question of ownership over the literary classics was a dominant thread of the interwar ‘battle of the brows’, between middlebrow and highbrow – and continued, at least to some extent, in the 1950s. The more vocal representatives of each side – the Bloomsbury Group vs JB Priestley, say – had subsided, but Guard Your Daughters exemplifies the association with literary heritage that characterises the debate. It was, essentially, one of quality vs intimacy, as both middlebrow and highbrow writers and readers considered themselves the true inheritors of the 19^th-century classics.

While recent adherents of middlebrow literature have sought to widen the canon, or promote anti-canonicity, interwar middlebrow writers rarely challenge the idea of an extant (past) canon. Even Hugh Walpole, when advocating literary egalitarianism in 1931, does not deny the existence of ‘Masters’:

I don’t know what the first class is. There are no classes in literature. There are about half a dozen Masters, and then the writers whom we prefer.

These ‘Masters’, for the middlebrow reader, are represented most significantly by Dickens, Shakespeare, the Brontes, and Austen. All are frequently alluded to, for instance, in E.M. Delafield’s quintessentially middlebrow Provincial Lady novels. Throughout the series, allusions are generated by everyday actions provoking the Provincial Lady’s memory, rather than direct acts of reading. The line is blurred between fiction and daily life, so that the novels are not so much distanced referents as effectively memories on the same relational level as everyday experience. Seasickness reminds her of Mrs. Gamp; the need to ‘make an effort’ of Mrs. Dombey. When her husband complains about an unsuccessful breakfast, she replies: ‘How impossible ever to encounter burnt porridge without vivid recollections of Jane Eyre at Lowood School, say I parenthetically! This literary allusion not a success.’ It isn’t a success because only a certain group of people both recognise and value these allusions – these passwords to a wide but still select sanctum, who do not just admire the classics of the past but enter them.

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In the quotation I cited earlier, of Mrs Bennet marrying off her daughters, Morgan refers to the hypothetical situation of ‘a few parsons to help out’. She does not see the end of the novel as the end of the characters; their vitality overflows their fictional boundaries, because of this readerly intimacy. These well-loved characters are also the models that Morgan et al have for learning how to be sisters and daughters. Humble calls the novel ‘a quite conscious reworking of Little Women’, and there is a direct comparison when Cressida prepares for a visit, but it is Jane Austen who gets the most mentions.

When Cressida is ill, ‘Mother sat wrapped in a fur coat by her window, reading Northanger Abbey aloud’; Thisbe suggests “I’m like Lydia Bennet – I long for a ‘regiment of Militia’ – whatever militia is’. On another occasion, Morgan says of Teresa, ‘Her lip curled like Mr. Darcy’s’. Nowhere in Pride and Prejudice is Mr Darcy described as curling his lips – indeed, the word ‘curl’ doesn’t appear. It’s unclear whether they are, again, extending their familiarity with the characters beyond the confines of Austen’s text – or if they are misreading their own texts, misattributing as a symptom of their own inability to properly analyse their isolated community.

In I Capture the Castle, Cassandra and Rose have a debate about whether they’d rather live in a Jane Austen novel or a Charlotte Bronte novel: ‘“Which would be nicest — Jane with a touch of Charlotte, or Charlotte with a touch of Jane?”’ (and Cassandra says: “Fifty per cent each way would be perfect”.’) But she also compares herself to Austen herself, wishing she had the infamous table at which Austen wrote. In both Guard Your Daughters and I Capture the Castle, it’s unclear whether the heroines prefer to align themselves with the characters or authors, when looking for paradigms of female communities and female ideals. There appears to be a line between the creator and created so porous as to be non-existent, even within their own household – Morgan is described is ‘a good detective’s daughter’ by one of her sisters, because their father is the creator of a detective. The Time and Tide review says of the novel ‘it’s not in the least like life, or literature either’. The critique is not intended to be too damning, but it is this same divide that the sisters are trapped in, and unable to place themselves fittingly within. The intimacy with literature that is a hallmark of the middlebrow reader causes a crisis of identity – not dismantling reality to the same level as Rachel Ferguson’s The Brontes Went to Woolworths, where the Brontes turn up in Woolworths, but still calling selfhood into question.

This goes as far back as their names – all literary, except Teresa’s (by which time, mother had ‘got tired’). As Morgan explains often, she is named after Morgan Le Fay of Arthurian legend – as she puts it, ‘She was a rather nasty witch’ – and when they put on a play at home, Thisbe and Cressida play their namesakes. They are performing their own identities, in the performative space of their home.

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This space has its own nomenclature dilemma. The heart of their community is a home referred to as ‘the Room’ – capital R – as ‘Mother and Father couldn’t agree on a name for it’, rejecting ‘drawing room’, because they don’t withdraw there, and ‘sitting’ room “because he says it’s always so full of women that there’s never a chair left for him”. Similar reasons dismissed smoking room, library, study, and music room. The epistemological uncertainty is reflected in the peculiar activities that take place there. Thisbe irons on the piano; stockings are hidden in the grandfather clock and fall out as Gregory passes. The role of the space is undetermined, or over-determined, echoed in the disconcerting and disruptive placement of domestic objects – and this impacts the roles of the women in the space. It is feminised, but they cannot choose whether to play the role of daughter or of sister – even Tutton herself, in a review in John O’London’s Weekly, is described as ‘so much more herself a daughter than a writer looking for the truth’.

In one scene, the sisters – and a newcomer, Suzanne – discuss whether or not they can see the rooms they read in literature – but how any room they read is always ‘the Room’ and always this house (“And if there’s a hall mentioned – even if it’s a big room with antlers and things and a huge fireplace – I somehow manage to enlarge our hall for it.”). It is uncertain whether morphing of their house into any fictive house is evidence of their malleability and ability to manipulate, or symptomatic of entrapment, circumscribing their understanding of real or illusory worlds.Throughout the novel, from the title onwards, there is evidence of being trapped in this space. In the opening pages, Morgan comments ‘we kept the gate shut’ – the tense suggesting change has happened, but also that it had been a continuous, unbroken ‘shutness’. As Humble says, of this type of novel, ‘the family becomes a fundamentally ambivalent space, functioning for its (largely female) members as a source of both creative energies and destructive neuroses, simultaneously a haven and a cage’. And this extends to the women themselves. When Pandora comes back to visit, and puts on Cressida’s coat: ‘It was much too long for her, but I loved to see her in it, for I felt that she had really come home to us, quite unchanged and as accessible as ever.’ The identity she is re-trying on, as daughter and sister rather than wife, is ill-fitting – but makes Pandora herself ‘accessible’, perhaps as a portal for Morgan.

The symbols of isolation often include the presence of modernity, shunned. They have a doorbell, but it is broken; they have telephone wires, but no telephone (because ‘it worried Mother’). One of the most treasured elements of Morgan’s view – and she spends a lot of the novel looking out of windows, comparing views, codifying the outside world – is a waterworks, which she loves but which is ‘generally deplored as spoiling the view’. These representations of modernity, either broken or out of reach, compile a semiotics of the outside, anti-atavistic world. They are present symbols of escape.

It is Cressida who does first escape – deserting her hated role in this odd community and, significantly, sending back her bedroom key in the post, to allow them to access it – but it also represents the end of her entrapment.

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We already know from the outset of the novel that Morgan has made the same escape – we are not trapped alongside the family, given our readerly and narrative distance – and it is this new distance that enables her to understand the space and the community that she has been made free from. Just as Cassandra has captured the castle on the page while being captured herself by the definitions imposed by the space, so the Harvey daughters have thus far been guarded in two senses of the word – protected against harm, and prevented from leaving. Tutton has shown us various codes by which daughter, sister, and potentially wife can try to understand themselves – through fiction, through domestic space, through searching for the correct synonym to self-define – but ultimately her title has given the reader the key to paratextually understand these roles and their confines in the novel from the outset.