Boggs

Last year, Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs was one of my favourite reads, and I’ve made no secret about the fact that I’d love it to be a British Library Women Writers title at some point. But it wasn’t the first of her books that I read. The reason I got interested in Boggs in the first place was The Indignant Spinsters (1921). I figured I couldn’t help but love an author who would write a book with a title like that.

I love a slightly ridiculous premise, particularly if it involves convoluted lying and disguise, and that’s what The Indignant Spinsters provides in spades. The first section of the book tries to get the reader comfortable in what’s going on, and I’ll admit I had to re-read bits of it several times. The long and the short of it is that there are three unmarried sisters, the Miss Smiths – Kit, Doll, and the narrator whose name I can’t find. Maybe unnamed? They have lived oppressed lives with an uncle who, when he dies, leaves them with a fair chunk of money but not enough to live on forever.

How easy to be good on a few thousands a year! How difficult on a hundred or so! Oh, the daily grinding sordid things that threaten to make us sordid too! We may manage, a few of us, to afford a heart; we know we cannot afford a soul. We have got to ‘make two ends meet’ instead, perhaps spend fifty years at it – and fail at the last. I also told myself that there were few things I would not do to get a chance at the big things of life.

The Miss Smiths have some tangled connection with the housekeeper of a house where the son moved to Australia and cut ties with the Wanstead family – and had three daughters, all of whom died. As luck would have it, these three daughters are about the same age as the three Miss Smiths. They decide to announce themselves as the missing women, and move into the ancestral home.

The plan is concocted in order to find them eligible husbands, as they no longer wish to be indigent spinsters – or indignant, as is misheard, for such is the origin of the title. They know that wealthy women are far more likely to find men who want to marry them. Their plan is not cruel, as they don’t want to take anything away from the Wansteads. And there is no emotional manipulation at play, since nobody they’re meeting has any fondness for the absent son, or any personal knowledge of his three daughters. Boggs does a good job at keeping us on side, and sympathetic with them.

But – oh, of course – things go wrong. The missing women’s uncle John – also believed dead – turns up, and he is rather dubious about their claims. And that’s just the first of the obstacles that gets in their way, as they deal with their plan crumbling and their moral resolve following suit.

In all of this, there are a few delightful character-types – like straight-talking Aunt Susannah:

”I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I was discussing spinsters. Be good enough not to interrupt and to speak when you’re spoken to, Miss Pert! I say spinsters are maligned. If half of them are ‘couldn’ts’, the other half are certainly ‘wouldn’ts’, and when one sees what some of their fellow women pick up and endure with complacency one hardly wonders or blames them. In the old days they had a regrettable taste in curates; now they prefer motor cars, and again I don’t blame ’em!”

So, it’s a ridiculously silly plot and it’s good fun to read. And it’s not an awful lot more than that, but sometimes that’s all one needs. There isn’t much emotional depth to the characters, and the stakes feel relatively low. Which is why I found it a surprise when I read Sally on the Rocks which is so much more impactful – a genuine feeling of the desperation of unmarried poverty, and characters who are so well drawn. I found a lot to enjoy for a few frivolous afternoons. It was only when I saw what else Boggs was capable of that I realised this wouldn’t be the one of hers that I would be pushing on everyone.

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.