Stuck in a Book

For years I’d heard three things about Vera (1921) – that it was Elizabeth von Arnim’s darkest novel, that it was autobiographical, and that it was possibly the inspiration for Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. For some reason that made me think that it might be a bit of an outlier in von Arnim’s output – but Vera is very clearly from the same pen of Father, The Caravaners and many of von Arnim’s other novels that feature a terrible man to a greater or lesser extent.

As it opens, Lucy is mourning her father. Or, rather, she is feeling numb in the first shock of his death – it has only been three hours. She cannot quite believe that it has happened, or imagine a world without him. Lucy has cared for him for years – not just this final illness, but a lifetime of delicacy. ‘She had had no thought since she grew up for anybody but her father. There was no room for any other thought, so completely did he fill her heart.’ We never truly get to know her father objectively – only through the deeply affectionate memories of his devoted daughter. And she is barely grown up herself, just a few years into adulthood.

It is in the midst of this grief that she meets Everard Wemyss. He, too, is in mourning – officially, at least. His wife has recently fallen to her death from their home, The Willows – and she, like du Maurier’s Rebecca, gives her name to the title. She has only been dead a fortnight.

Lucy sees someone who can be a companion in grief. Perhaps they can support each other as they face life without somebody they held so dear? But it quickly becomes clear that Everard has something else in mind. He has fallen for naïve, gentle Lucy and is determined to make her his wife. Lucy receives a charm offensive – he is lovable, loving, entirely confident that it is not too soon after Vera’s death – quashing her doubts on the subject. Von Arnim is very clever in the way she presents Everard. We get enough hints of his character to see that Lucy should probably run a thousand miles away – but also enough of his ability to charm that we can understand how Lucy, rocked by her loss, assents to his proposal of marriage.

It irked him that their engagement — Lucy demurred at first to the word engagement, but Wemyss, holding her tight in his arms, said he would very much like to know, then, by what word she would describe her position at that moment – it irked him that it had to be a secret. He wanted instantly to shout out to the whole world his glory and his pride. But this under the tragic circumstances of their mourning was even to Wemyss clearly impossible. Generally he brushed aside the word impossible if it tried to come between him and the smallest of his wishes, but that inquest was still too vividly in his mind, and the faces of his so-called friends. What the faces of his so-called friends would look like if he, before Vera had been dead a fortnight, should approach them with the news of his engagement even Wemyss, a person not greatly imaginative, could picture.

Everard gets his way – we are learning that he will always get his way – and they are not only engaged but married at incredible haste. This does take most of the first half of the novel, but it covers a very short time – and as soon as the marriage is complete, the veil starts to be lifted from Lucy’s eyes. Here they are, on honeymoon:

Marriage, Lucy found, was different from what she had supposed; Everard was different; everything was different. For one thing she was always sleepy. For another she was never alone. She hadn’t realised how completely she would never be alone, or, if alone, not sure for one minute to the other of going on being alone. Always in her life there had been intervals during which she recuperated in solitude from any strain; now there were none. Always there had been places she could go to and rest in quietly, safe from interruption; now there were none. 

Everard thinks only of his own happiness, and at the moment his happiness revolves around being with his lovely young wife. We don’t see much behind the bedroom door, as it were – being 1921, this is unlikely to be a big topic – but he monopolises her throughout every waking hour. Perhaps this is something that honeymooning couples would usually be very pleased about. But Lucy has previously seen Everard in courtship mode, and that was forceful but charming. Married Everard is forceful without the charm.

Von Arnim is very good at infantilising her ogres. From what I’d heard about Vera, I’d imagined that the husband would be brutal, perhaps violent. But he is like many of her terrible man: monstrously selfish. So many of her male figures are like toddlers, but toddlers with the power to live out their self-centredness, sulkiness, demand for attention. Everard is particularly childlike in his determination that his birthday be a hallowed day. He cannot believe that anybody would cross him or refuse him anything on his birthday, even if some of the ‘refused’ things are things he hasn’t mentioned.

And they go back to The Willows. Lucy doesn’t want to live there. If she has to live there, she doesn’t want Vera’s old sitting room. If she has to have Vera’s old sitting room, she wants it redecorated. None of these things happen. Everard dismisses all her concerns and anxieties. He twists them to be antagonistic to him. Her wishes and feelings clearly mean nothing to him – and von Arnim is brilliant (as ever) at the man who sounds logical even while he is being appalling. Like Father in Father, Otto in The Caravaners, Jocelyn in Introduction to Sally and probably others I’ve forgotten, Everard manipulates what other people say – retaining his cold sense of being hard done by, pouncing on any weakness so that he can seem calmly affronted. He does it with Lucy; he does it with the servants (who have long learned to put up with it, because he is in London most of the week); he does it with Lucy’s aunt Miss Entwhistle who is clear-eyed about what a disastrous marriage this is.

Oh, Everard is brilliantly infuriating to read! And Lucy has gone into the lion’s den without any defences. She is intimidated by the lingering presence of Vera in her possessions and her portrait – but the reader quickly realises that Vera is a fellow-victim of this monster. It’s an interesting choice for von Arnim to make Vera the title. I’m not quite sure she earns it. The reader feels sympathy for Vera from the outset, so despite Lucy’s fear around her, she doesn’t have the sort of narrative presence or power that du Maurier’s Rebecca does. If she did steal that idea, she does it better.

I was surprised by what a short time period it covers, particularly the time at The Willows – which is only a week, most of which Everard isn’t there. We only see Everard and Lucy at home together for a couple of days, which means von Arnim has to escalate the horror of marriage to him quite quickly. His brattiness, his selfishness, his cruelty – he locks Lucy out in the rain for petty reasons, then gets angry with her for being wet. I think it is meant to be all the more horrifying as a snapshot of what Lucy will have to endure for much longer, but I do wonder if it is sped up a little too much. This sort of horror might have worked even better as a gradual dawning.

But this is a quibble for a very good book. If someone came to this after only having read the charm of The Enchanted April, it must feel like a huge gearshift. But if you’ve read more widely in von Arnim’s oeuvre, this is very much in her wheelhouse. It’s bleak, though with trademark ironically funny moments and the amusingly detached narrator. Above all, it’s a brilliant character study.