1915

Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs

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I bought a couple of books by Winifred Boggs, as she sounded like the sort of author I’d like, from the scant information I could find online – and the gamble has paid off. Sally on the Rocks, from 1915, is a really wonderful book with a heroine I won’t forget in a hurry.

Winifred Boggs starts us with the sort of village community that has been the basis for many of the great works of literature. Little Crampton is an insular world, assured of its own superiority, and not necessarily very welcoming to outsiders. But how few outsiders would be interested in it, because any village would be equally convinced that it is the first and best village in its region. Little Crampton is ruled over by Miss Maggie Hopkins – an unofficial position, but her gossiping, her rigid adherence to morality when it can shame others, and her determination to root out the truth in any situation mean that she is feared and also a vital source of information.

As the novel opens, she writes to Sally, hinting that the curate, Mr Bingley, is looking for a wife. ”He’s so safe, and of course there’s the house and ‘perks’, as well as the fifteen hundred,” she writes, none too subtly. It is enough to bring Sally back to the village where she grew up, adopted by the vicar Mr Lovelady, who is still in residence but hears little from his ward. She is in France, wary of the probable coming invasion – for the war is underway – and she has is licking the wounds of an unsuccessful love affair. She comes back to Little Crampton.

As she says, ”You’re not out for romance at thirty-one; it’s a business.” She is truly fond of Mr Lovelady, but she does not want to end up dependent on him – rather, she sets her cap at Mr Bingley and is willing to do whatever it takes to become his wife. All is fair in love and war, perhaps – but there is neither love nor war here. It is a woman who has been broken by the world seeking to play the world’s rules against themselves. She is like a much more likeable Becky Sharp. She doesn’t seek power or position – just stability.

Sally on the Rocks is wonderfully feminist at many junctures. I shan’t spoil all the plot, but Sally’s lover from France comes back. When Sally is asked, by her ex-inamorato, if she can forgive him, she replies:

”There is no question of that, only you are a little illogical, aren’t you? You are to be permitted to forget, but never I. Yet you have paid no price. Your wife forgave you and married you just the same, as women, wise or foolish, do the whole world over. You look at the matter one way and I the other – the man’s and the woman’s way. You ran no real risk of losing your wife by confessing. I lose everything in this world; some think everything in the next. No, such things are not on the same footing, after all.”

Most wonderful is Boggs’ take on a love triangle. Mrs Dalton, a widow with a young daughter, is also keen to persuade Mr Bingley to marry her. We have seen, hundreds of times, the two women pitted against each other for the ‘prize’ of the man. Here, the women candidly agree that Mr Bingley is a repellent prospect but the financially savvy one, acknowledge that they will both fight hard to win his hand, but that they will play fair. There is a sense of comrades-in-arms between them that I haven’t seen in a novel before.

I should say, Sally on the Rocks is very funny, as well as having a lot to say about the status of women at the time. Sometimes simultaneously. My favourite, extended scene was when Sally takes Mr Bingley off on a walk in the woods, deliberately letting them get lost – her plan being that, lost alone with her in the woods, under a full moon, he will feel duty-bound AND romantically inclined to propose.

But much of the humour, as well as the enjoyment in the book, comes from Sally. She is determined, witty, bloody but unbowed. She is even rather ruthless, but there is plenty of humanity in her too – and, of course, there is another man who catches her eye. He is not at all the savvy choice. I shall leave it to your imagination to decide which path she ultimately takes…

It’s a joy to find a book so utterly forgotten and to love it. Or perhaps I am wrong, and there are many latent Boggs fans? I’ve now read another, with a better title and worse content, which was silly fun. And Sally on the Rocks is sold as being By the author of The Sale of Lady Daventry, which is an intriguing title. I couldn’t find cheap copies of many of her books, but I do have another on the way – I’m hoping to discover more and more joy from the unfortunately-named Winifred Boggs.

The Oakleyites by E.F. Benson

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I’m not doing well for A Century of Books choices at the moment, because I keep deciding that I ABSOLUTELY MUST read something written at the wrong time. Recently I was convinced that nothing would suit except for an E.F. Benson, and all the remaining slots of my ACOB list come after he died – so, sorry ACOB, but I turned to 1915’s The Oakleyites. For context, this falls roughly in the middle of Benson’s extraordinarily prolific output, and a few years before he started what would become the Mapp and Lucia series.

There are definitely marks of Lucia et al all over this, particularly in the first half of the novel. Oakley-on-Sea has the same sort of community – dimly aware that the rest of the world exists, but also certain that the only part of the world worth considering is Oakley. People vie for dominant position in society, and a newcomer is treated like the epoch-altering event that it is – especially when the newcomer is a noted (albeit not necessarily respected) novelist, Wilfred Easton.

There are even events in The Oakleyites that are directly repeated in the Mapp and Lucia series – such as an exhibition of paintings in the village hall that are judged by the community. A brief mention of a guru shows that Benson had such things on his mind. I don’t recall a replica of the three daughters squabbling over what they’ll receive as inheritance when their father dies (even while one of them, a Christian Scientist, maintains that he is not ill and could not be) – but it’s all of a piece. And it’s all great. Benson has such an eye for politely feuding communities. And that seeps in the narrative, as well as the dialogue – as a vegetarian, I self-deprecatingly laughed at the following:

Mrs Andrews had a sharp nippy way of movement and speech, and the brightness of eye which is noticeable in vegetarians and is attributed by them to their perfect health and entire absence of toxic ferments in the blood, might apart from that be supposed to have a sort of hungry look about it, which no amount of cauliflowers wholly dimmed.

Our focal point is Dorothy, who is nobler and less ambitious than other Oakleyites. No Lucia she. She is a bit subtle in her interest at Easton’s arrival, but not deceptive – and furiously embarrassed that she once read a paper about how unworthy his novels were to be feted. If Oakley has a moral compass, it is Dorothy.

It is also Dorothy who takes us into a different world within Benson’s oeuvre. For she is a spinster (of all of 35) and wishes that her life had not turned out quite as it has – and starts to wonder if Easton might make her a suitable husband. In Dorothy’s storyline, Benson gets rather more serious and earnest than one might expect. Increasingly so, as Dorothy’s sister Daisy arrives – selfish and dramatic, and not necessarily in an amusing way.

Benson was not a novice novelist at this point, but I did find that The Oakleyites wasn’t a universal success. It’s a curate’s egg. But too many scenes – whether comic or not – lingered too long, so it felt a bit odd to move between them. And the mix of sombre and comic tones didn’t quite work, for me. They remained too separate, as though they belonged in different novels.

I still enjoyed reading it, and it’s always interesting to see a novelist do something a bit different – but I wouldn’t recommend you seek it out over Benson’s zillions of other novels, and I doubt I’ll re-read. But, still – a mediocre Benson is better than no Benson at all.

I Pose – Stella Benson

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I know some people are very keen to end a reading year on a high, but for me it is more important that the first book of a new year is good.  Of course, I would love every book I read to be good, but somehow it feels as though a bad first book sets off a bad tone for the whole year.  So I deliberately finished off a book which I was already halfway through, and knew was brilliant… I Pose (1915) by Stella Benson, reprinted by Michael Walmer and sent to me as a review copy (more on this exciting new reprint publisher here).

I had read one book by Stella Benson before – Living Alone, about witches living in a boarding house – and I liked it, but would have preferred Benson to keep her feet more firmly on the ground.  The opening pages, satirising a council meeting, were entirely delicious.  Well – I Pose more than answered my request, and I found it very amusing.  The style is so fresh, lively, and not for a moment taking itself remotely seriously.

I Pose is set up as an allegory – the main characters are referred to solely as ‘the gardener’ and ‘the suffragette’.  The idea of an allegory rather terrifies me, as it does suggest earnestness (which I’m allergic to in fiction), but Benson has the same feelings as me.  She definitely has some important things to say – I’ll come on to those later – but she uses these characters chiefly to lampoon the notion of allegory.

Both gardener and suffragette – but particularly gardener – live life through epithets.  They are continually posing; the title refers to the mixture of sincerity and insincerity with which they adopt their stances.  For, yes, the suffragette cares deeply about suffrage – but when she claims not to care about life or limb, or to be unlovable and unloving, then it is decidedly a pose.  The gardener, too, is forever choosing poses which permit him to speak in riddles and epigrams.  Some might find it wearying, but I loved every moment.  When the gardener meets the suffragette, he instantly knows that she is one – she has, after all, the stereotypical appearance of the militant suffragette…

The woman was quite plain, and therefore worthy only of invisibility in the eyes of a self-respecting young man.  She had the sort of hair that plays truant over the ears, but has not vitality enough to do it prettily.  Her complexion was not worthy of the name.  Her eyes made no attempt to redeem her plainness, which is the only point of having eyes in fiction.  Her only outward virtue was that she did not attempt to dress as if she were pretty.  And even this is not a very attractive virtue.
He doesn’t agree with her methods (she intends to blow up a church) and Benson is at her satirical best on the topic:

The gardener, of course, shared the views of all decent men on this subject.  One may virtuously destroy life in a good cause, but to destroy property is a heinous crime, whatever its motive.(Yes, I know that made you tremble, but there are not many more paragraphs of it.)
There are plenty of moments where Benson addresses the reader, always tongue-in-cheek and often defending her choices as a novelist, against imagined criticisms.  She freely admits that the suffragette is not a typical heroine…

I quite admit that the suffragette was an infuriating person.  I yield to none in my admiration for any one who could manage to keep their temper with her.
The suffragette and gardener end up on a boat sailing abroad, posing as a married couple (albeit briefly), and they dash madly around various foreign climes, meeting some extraordinary people along the way.  My favourite was probably the always-antagonistic Mrs. Rust…

“I don’t agree with you at all,” said Mrs. Rust, who now made this remark mechanically in any pause in the conversation.
Earthquakes and suffrage clubs come and go, as do the adventures of an obnoxious young boy and an adorable Scottie dog, but the plot is certainly not the most important aspect of I Pose.  I loved it almost entirely for Benson’s style.  It reminded me a little of P.G. Wodehouse – certainly she has his affinity for the pleasures of understatement (‘She was not in the least miserly of a certain cheap smell of violets’) alongside just enough of Oscar Wilde to make the prose frothy and delightful, and not enough to make it tiring (to me).  Her way with words is astonishing, and shows a confidence which no début author deserves to possess – but it is a confidence which is, at the same time, entirely well-deserved.  This sort of novel is so difficult to do well – it could have very easily felt self-indulgent and overdone – but I think it is a wonder.

And, while I spent most of the novel thrilling to the writing and not caring too much about plot and character, I surprised myself by growing to care considerably about the possible romance between the gardener and the suffragette… now, making the reader care about characters with no names, when the narrator is openly and proudly dismissing their suitability to lead a novel, where nothing is said with a serious tone… well, Miss Benson, that is an achievement indeed.

The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford

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Of all the books to speed-read, The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Madox Ford was a poor choice.  I had to, because it was for book group and I started it only a day before the meeting, but I should have lingered, and savoured every paragraph, to get the full stylistic experience.

Most of the books I like, as I’ve mentioned before, I like primarily for style and character, rather than what happens.  The exception is Agatha Christie.  But it could hardly be more the case than in the present instance – there is a certain amount of things happening, but they are largely incidental to the way it is told.  Oh, and it’s not at all about war, as I had imagined it was.

You might be familiar with its (fairly) famous opening line: ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard.’  Apparently Ford wanted to call the novel The Saddest Story, but the publishers thought it would be inappropriate given the onset of World War One, and so it became The Good Soldier – the ‘good soldier’ in question is Captain Edward Ashburnham, although it quickly becomes clear to the reader that the narrator’s (John Dowell) opinion of him is flawed, and a bit changeable.

Have I conveyed to you the splendid fellow that he was—the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious magistrate, the upright, honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking, public character? I suppose I have not conveyed it to you.
Indeed he hasn’t, because at other times his opinion of Edward is very low.  I shall come on to that…

What isn’t so clear is what the ‘saddest story’ is – or, indeed, why Dowell claims to have ‘heard’ it, rather than acknowledging that he is telling it, and has been a principle figure in it.  The leading cast, as it were, are Dowell and his wife Florence, Captain Ashburnham and his wife Leonora, and… no, that will do for now.  Dowell starts off telling us all about his ‘poor wife’ Florence, who has died, and narrates the various experiences the two couples have gone through – and it becomes clearer and clearer that Florence is far from the poor invalid Dowell initially conveys, and all manner of other marital strife affects all four people in these marriages.

What makes The Good Soldier masterful is the way in which Ford portrays a voice – and it reminded me a little of John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure; a narrator who is not so much unreliable as unsteady, whose shifting thoughts and reflections pull the tone of the novel back and forth.  The Good Soldier is all told at one remove, as something that has happened – indeed, a flaw (perhaps) of the novel is this sense of detachment, as though it never really ‘gets going’ – but Dowell’s opinions are far from settled.  Depictions of the characters evolve; he is trapped in each changing increment of his opinions, even with the distance of time.

And, as I said at the beginning, it’s all about style in The Good Soldier. I’d been put off reading it for years, mostly because it was the main text analysed in some incomprehensible book I read called ‘Modernism and the Fragmented Self’, or something like that, and because I’d heard it compared to the multi-claused horror that is Henry James.  Well, neither terror was warranted – Ford’s writing has depth and rhythm, but certainly isn’t alienating or unreadable. At times it is deceptively conversational, and perhaps its most significant characteristic is how calm and undramatic Dowell’s tone always is.  Here’s an example, picked almost at random, but which demonstrates that many clauses need not mean unreadable:

I have forgotten the aspect of many things, but I shall never forget the aspect of the dining-room of the Hotel Excelsior on that evening—and on so many other evenings. Whole castles have vanished from my memory, whole cities that I have never visited again, but that white room, festooned with papier-maché fruits and flowers; the tall windows; the many tables; the black screen round the door with three golden cranes flying upward on each panel; the palm-tree in the centre of the room; the swish of the waiter’s feet; the cold expensive elegance; the mien of the diners as they came in every evening—their air of earnestness as if they must go through a meal prescribed by the Kur authorities and their air of sobriety as if they must seek not by any means to enjoy their meals—those things I shall not easily forget.
I expect that one day I will re-read The Good Soldier, more slowly and thoughtfully.  For now, I am impressed, and pleased that the choice of someone at book group finally made me read this.

Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“If you only ever read one more novel again in the course of your life, let it be this one.” – Harriet, Harriet Devine’s Blog


“That is what makes this book great – the characterization, the elegant prose and, most of all, the wonderfully clever structure.” – Jane, Fleur in Her World


“I feel it’s a rare and perfect thing that I am far from done with.” – Hayley, Desperate Reader

A few little reviews…

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It has come to my notice that it is December, and there are only 27 days left this year.  I have almost 20 reviews to write for A Century of Books… oops, didn’t work this out very well, did I?  (Well, I still have 10 books to read – but I have 4 of them on the go already.)  So I’m going to rush through five of them today – books that, for one reason or another, I didn’t want to write whole posts about.  But do still free to comment on them!

Daddy Long-Legs (1912) by Jean Webster
An orphaned girl is given a scholarship by a mysterious, anonymous man – she has only seen his back – and one of the conditions is that she must write updates to him, without getting any replies.  She nicknames him Daddy Long-Legs.  Can you guess what happens?  Well, I shan’t give away the ending.  I was mostly surprised at how modern this children’s book felt, despite being a hundred years old – a lot of it would have been at home in a Jacqueline Wilson story.  I enjoyed it, but did find it a little creepy, and rather repetitive, but these are probably signs of not having read it when I was the target age.

Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he is an enormous bug.  Which is going to make his job as a salesman somewhat difficult.  The reason I’m not giving this novella/short story its own review is that I don’t feel I have anything new to say about it.  Kafka is famed for his matter-of-fact approach to the surreality in this story, and rightly so.  What surprised me here was how middlebrow it all felt.  It is definitely comparable to David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox – which actually seems to have greater pretensions to literariness.

Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes
Another one which surprised me – I’d always heard that Marie Stopes started a sexual revolution in the UK, offering knowledge about sex to the everywoman for the first time.  Turns out she is much more conservative, and less revelatory, than a lot of the other guides written around the same time, and earlier.  I read these guides for my current DPhil chapter, by the way – my favourite so far being the person who argued that sexual intercourse and reproduction were acceptable as separate impulses, because protozoa separated them.  Sure, why not?  (I wonder if I’ve just made all sorts of inappropriate search terms for this blog now…)

Miss Hargreaves: the play (1952) by Frank Hargreaves
This is something of a cheat, since it was never published – but it was performed, with Margaret Rutherford in the lead role.  Tanya tipped me off that copies of all performed plays were in the Lord Chamberlain’s archives in the British Library – so I had the great privilege and pleasure of reading the play, with Baker’s own penned changes.  It’s pretty similar to the novel, only with the action restricted to a few settings.  Such fun!

V. Sackville West (1973) by Michael Stevens
I’m a sucker for a short biography, and I hadn’t read one of VSW before, so I gave this one a whirl.  It’s a critical biography, so Stevens discusses and analyses the work while giving an outline of VSW’s life.  About halfway through I thought, “this feels way too much like a doctoral dissertation.”  Turns out it was a doctoral dissertation.  I think I’ll be turning to a more charismatic writer for my next biography of Vita, as this one was rather prosaic and charmless, although very thoroughly researched.

Right, well that’s five down!  How are the other Century of Bookers getting on?