William – an Englishman by Cicely Hamilton (Novella a Day in May #2)

William – an Englishman (1919) by Cicely Hamilton isn’t really a novella, coming in at 226 pages, but I needed to reread it for Tea or Books? so I thought a Bank Holiday Monday was a great opportunity to read something a bit longer. Never too early to break the rules!

I can’t remember when I originally read this book, but not that much of it had stayed in my mind – except some searing scenes. And this is a decidedly searing book. It was the first novel published by Persephone Books, and it certainly dispels from the off the idea that they only publish cosy books. It’s hard to imagine anything less cosy – William – an Englishman is almost a work of horror at times.

It is titled after William but it is also about his wife, with the rather absurd name Griselda. As the novel opens, they have not met – but both have been swept up in the contemporary tide of socialism and suffragism. It is 1913 at this point, I think, and both movements are in full sway. William and Griselda are not paddling in the shallow waters of these movements either. They have dedicated their whole lives, their whole beings, to the cause.

From that day forwards he devoted himself to what he termed public life – a ferment of protestation and grievance; sometimes genuine, sometimes manufactured or, at least, artificially heightened. He was an extremist, passionately well-intentioned and with all the extremist’s contempt for those who balance, see difficulties and strive to give the other side its due.

Hamilton writes quite satirically about them. She doesn’t doubt their convictions, nor does she particularly undermine the causes for which they fight – she just portrays their extremism in the light of an authorial voice for whom calmness is the hallmark of good sense. The reader feels safe. There is a definite safety in seeing such passion from a distance, where we can turn it around in our mind, chuckling at its excesses.

But Hamilton has lured us into a false sense of security. The novel is about to become much less safe.

William and Griselda get married and set off to spend their honeymoon in Belgium, at the holiday home of a friend. They are three weeks into their time there, away from newspapers and letters and any contact with the outside world, when they spot some soldiers on the horizon. With their pacifist stances, they just mock the men out ‘playing at murder’. They do not realise that, since they last heard the news, a war has been declared – and Belgium has been invaded by German soldiers.

From here, William – an Englishman becomes much darker – even brutal. It is fast-paced, as the couple find themselves caught up with swift intensity in a situation they couldn’t have imagined. Hamilton switches tone expertly, and we can no longer smile at the naivety of this young pair. None of it feels melodramatic or gratuitous, simply because the horrors they are suddenly exposed to are horrors that genuinely happened to enormous numbers of people.

Later in the novel, I found the intensity flagged a little, and Hamilton loses a bit of her subtlety for a period – but the ending recaptures the pathos of the early novel. It’s extraordinary that this novel is more than a century old – it still feels fresh and vital, and one can’t help thinking about other invasions and violence happening in the world today.

Rachel and I will soon be recording an episode of Tea or Books? comparing this with a novel about a couple at the beginning of World War Two – Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune. Look out for that!