On this course, run on Zoom via the HLSI (Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution), we’re going to think about how film and fiction have influenced each other and shaped each other’s possibilities. Is it possible to write fiction without a cinematic horizon? Why do some adaptations of ‘much-loved’ classic texts arouse such alarm and hostility? What happens when the early 19th century context of Jane Austen’s Emma is transposed to a 1990s US high school, as in Amy Heckerling’s 1995 adaptation, Clueless? Are such re-contextualisations still adaptations, or do we need another word for them?
We’ll start by defining adaptation as a process whereby a text in one form or medium (print in this case) is translated or re-presented in another, in this case film. When a novel is adapted for film, dialogue may be retained but the narration is translated into images, speech, music and sound effects, edited into a particular order, shape and aesthetic. One of the aims of this course is to develop some ways of ‘reading’ and analysing films in ways comparable with how we read and analyse books. There have been many debates about how ‘faithful’ certain adaptations of well-known books have been. Armando Ianucci’s film David Copperfield (2019) and the recent furore about Steven Knight’s BBC serial of Great Expectations (2023) are two recent cases. Fidelity is one topic we will cover, but the course’s aim is to explore the relationship between film and literature in a broader and richer way. The boundaries between film (and television) and novels are much more porous than we often suppose. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, many novelists worked directly with film companies, writing scripts as well as novels and short stories, or adapting other novelists’ work, for example Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Graham Greene.
In the first term, we’ll focus on the 1930-50s and a context where there was a very fluid relationship between film and novels. First, we’ll think about the adaptation of American crime fiction into the film noir genre. We’ll then go on to look at some cases where directors used literary material in very different ways to develop their own characteristic style, e.g. Alfred Hitchcock used a French novel set in France during and after World War Two, Among the Dead, as the basis for the San Francisco-set Vertigo.
In the second term, we’re look at some adaptations of novels that have particular status, because of their perceived literary value, their place in a literary tradition or their categorisation as ‘much-loved’ (Little Women fits into this category, so does David Copperfield). How is the process of adaptation treated? Are there ways of signalling the value of such texts within contemporary culture, or to put this another way, can cinema represent literature and literariness?
It’s possible to do one or both terms. I’ve chosen both the books and the films because they are all interesting in themselves. As usual, we’ll be looking at a mixture of well and lesser known texts. Your ‘homework’ each week will often include watching a film as well as reading, though we’ll spend plenty of time on each text. I’ll be showing clips in the class via YouTube, but it will be up to you to watch the films complete as part of your preparation. I’ll make sure all the films are easily available as DVDs and/or on Netflix, Amazon or YouTube.
AUTUMN TERM (20th September to 29 November 2023)
Week 1
Introduction. What is adaptation? How do we ‘read’ films?
Weeks 2 – 5
The adaptation business
James M. Cain, Double Indemnity (1943) [novel]
Billy Wilder d., Double Indemnity (1944) [film]
Nicholas Ray d., In A Lonely Place (1950) [film]
Dorothy B. Hughes, In A Lonely Place (1947) [novel]
Weeks 6 – 10
Auteur adaptation
Graham Greene, ‘The Basement Room’ (1936) [short story]
Carol Reed d., The Fallen Idol / The Lost Illusion (1948) [film]
Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, D’entre les morts (1954) [novel]
Alfred Hitchcock d., Vertigo (1958) [film]
Rumer Godden, The River (192024)46) [novel]
Jean Renoir, The River (1951) [film]
SPRING TERM (January to March 2024)
Weeks 1 – 4
Adapting the 19th century novel
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849-50) [novel]
Armando Ianucci d. David Copperfield (2019) [film]
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868 and 1869) [novel]
Greta Gerwig, Little Women (2019)
Weeks 5 – 10
Adapting early 20th century fiction
My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin (1901) [novel]
Gillian Armstrong d. My Brilliant Career (1979) [film]
Nella Larsen, Passing (1929) [novella]
Rebecca Hall d., Passing (2021) [film]
Stefan Zweig, Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922) [novella]
Max Ophuls d. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
Reading and viewing
James M. Cain, Double Indemnity (1943) (Orion, 2010)
Billy Wilder d., Double Indemnity (1944) (DVD, Amazon Prime, YouTube rental)
Dorothy B. Hughes, In A Lonely Place (1947) (Penguin Modern Classics, 2010)
Nicholas Ray d., In A Lonely Place (1950) (YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Graham Greene, ‘The Basement Room’(1936) in Twenty One Stories (Penguin, 1992)
Carol Reed d., The Fallen Idol / The Lost Illusion (1948) (YouTube, DVD)
Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Vertigo (published in French as D’Entre les Morts, 1954) (Pushkin Press, 2015)
Alfred Hitchcock d., Vertigo (1958) (DVD, Amazon Prime)
Rumer Godden, The River (1946) (Virago, 2012)
Jean Renoir, The River (1951) (DVD, Amazon Prime)
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1849-50) [novel] (Penguin Classics, 2004)
Armando Ianucci d. David Copperfield (2019) [film] (DVD, Amazon Prime)
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868 and 1869) (Oxford World Classics, 1994)
Greta Gerwig, Little Women (2019) (DVD, Amazon Prime, Netflix)
Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career (1901) (Virago Classics, 1980)
Gillian Armstrong d. My Brilliant Career (1979) (DVD)
Nella Larsen, Passing (1929) (Signet, 2021)
Rebecca Hall d., Passing (2021) (DVD, Netflix or Amazon Prime)
Stefan Zweig, Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922) (Pushkin Press, 2015)
Max Ophuls d. Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) (DVD)
Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (Routledge, 2015)
This year I’m delighted to be teaching again and in person at The Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution in London. This course is full now but I’m hoping to develop this course and teach it again in the future. I’ve wanted to teach a course about contemporary literary fiction for a long time but it’s taken me a while to decide how to go about it. I’m going to post occasionally about what we’re discussing and tweet about it too @RachelMalik99
Contemporary Literature, Expanding Horizons.
What is contemporary literature? L/literature (as opposed to say ‘fiction’) always implies a qualitative judgement, but who makes these judgments about what contemporary Literature can be? And how and why might we want to expand it?
We’ll explore a range of novels and poetry (all published in English in or after 2017) and consider the role of publishing and reception, as well as writing, in shaping what comes to be called ‘literary’ and how it is read. Some books will be familiar, reviewed extensively in the broadsheet press, displayed prominently in bookshops, discussed or read on Radios 3 and 4. The rest will be less familiar e.g. published by small presses, shortlisted for lesser known prizes.
The course is shaped around three broad themes, central in much contemporary writing: form (the ways in which literature is or might be written); history (or histories: familiar and recovered, authorised or marginalised) and nature (human, animal, planetary). In each case a familiar text is the starting point: Sally Rooney’s Normal People (Faber, 2018), Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (Penguin Random House, 2020) and Max Porter’s Lanny (Faber, 2019). We’ll read these in and among less well-known texts, mainly chosen from the shortlists of various literary prizes awarded in the UK (Forward Prize for Poetry, Rathbone Folio, Republic of Consciousness Prize, Warwick Prize for Women in Translation). Writers include: Fiona Benson, Sam Byers, Wioletta Greg, Preti Taneja, Olga Tokarczuk and Zoe Wicomb. We will draw on students’ knowledge of 20th and/or contemporary literature to situate these texts in context and make use of online resources: blogs, podcasts, prize and publisher websites, literary reviews and journals.
Autumn Term: Form
Sally Rooney, Normal People (Faber, 2018)
Preti Taneja, We That Are Young (Galley Beggar, 2017)
Wioletta Greg, Swallowing Mercury, trans. Eliza Marciniak (Portobello Books, 2017)
Black Narcissus (1939) begins and ends with tea, brought to the Sisters in the open air in jade-green sandstone cups. The cups have no handles and the tea seems strange and exotic to them. But this is Darjeeling, tea is central to its economy and the book even features a tour of sorts around a tea factory. What could be more ‘English’ than tea? Besides, isn’t it the nuns who are exotic? The locals, who lead their ponies through the forest, liken them to ‘white snows’ and ‘a row of white teeth’. Some have already had experience of religious: they’ll want to ‘know everything and alter everything’ The nuns can’t understand a word of what’s being said about them in clear earshot. It’s the narrator who includes their point of view, ‘translates’ for us. Throughout the novel, perspectives multiply and shift. The shifts are as sure-footed as the little ponies that clamber up and down the mountains, it is only when you pause that you realise momentarily the utter strangeness of story and situation.
Black Narcissus is about a group of Anglo-Catholic Sisters who try to make a convent – ironically called Saint Faith’s – out of an isolated house, high on a hill in an Indian native state (The kernel of the story was a lonely grave that Godden discovered, high on a plateau in Assam, with the inscription ‘Sister Mary’). Mopu ‘palace’ was once a harem and is still redolent of forbidden pleasures but this doesn’t stop the nuns setting up a clinic and a school, and trying to build a chapel. Disoriented by the high-altitude, the abundance of beauty and the purity of the water, they find the task they have set themselves extraordinarily difficult. Their bodies rebel in ugly, humiliating ways. They all suffer from diarrhoea, one nun develops boils They are distracted from their labours and their faith by the distant Himalayan peak of Kanchenjunga and the wind blowing restlessly through the convent, allowing nothing new to settle. Both palace and the mountainous locale are powerful forces in the novel but there are no long descriptive set-pieces. Representations of place are lyrical but brief and brim with narrative possibility. At the start of the novel, the nuns approach the palace ‘in a state of green, dark, sleep.’ The greenery lulls them into an enchantment like a fairy tale with its own set of wishes and prohibitions. When Sister Ruth first rings the bell on the edge of the cliff, she thinks she ‘must look like a fly that had fallen into a green and blue bowl’ – intimations of the horror to come.
First edition of the novel
The familiar institutions we know from Kipling, Forster and Orwell – club and compound, army and courthouse, polo and Bridge parties – are entirely absent from Black Narcissus. There is one half-dissolute Englishman, Mr Dean, the ruler’s agent and general fixer. He helps the Sisters but upsets them more. Their only recourse to the familiar is their own church: the promise of visits from ailing Father Roberts and correspondence with the Mother Provincial. Mopu itself has been ‘given’ to the order by the local ruler to make obscure amends with his past – the Sisters are in some complex sense his ‘guests’. (The large house where Godden grew up on the banks of a tributary of the Brahmanaputra river in East Bengal was in fact owned by a household servant – something Godden only discovered much later.)
I first read the novel after seeing the Powell and Pressburger film, better known than the original novel, celebrated for its colour, complex atmospherics and moments of camp horror. I was probably about thirteen and raced through the book to find out if there was more about Sister Clodagh and Mister Dean (David Farrar), who epitomised masculine romantic pain in the penultimate frame of the film. I remember being disappointed. This novel wasn’t much of a love story, I thought. I read it again years later when I found it on a bookshelf somewhere I was staying, old enough to be interested in the ‘setting’ or context, and was gripped. One of the striking things about the novel – unlike the film – is just how specific its narrative moment is. Published in 1939, the main action takes place after the extensive Japanese bombing of Canton/Guangzhou which had ended in late 1938. Sister Adela, who joins the convent later on in the book has been injured in the attack. It is hoped that the new convent will help her recuperate. The bombing is also an element of the book’s ambiguous atmosphere. The nuns are never far from some definitive Eastern danger and malevolence, but the Japanese are also a violent, colonial power. The Massacre of Nanjing (1937) where up to 20,000 women and girls were raped and many also murdered is just a memory away for characters and readers, and Sister Adela has an angry, strawberry scar between chin and ear, not wholly concealed by her wimple.
Photo by AP ‘Looting adds new terror after air raids. Canton, China, June 13,1938. Canton has been blistered, fired and wrecked by hails of bombs and bullets that have hurtled down from Japanese warplanes. Great clouds of the machines have blackened the heavens, have loosed showers of death and devastations in vicious, intermittent air raids.’
As the Indian independence movement gained ground after World War One, the currency of Raj fiction declined. Novels such as E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), which Godden later said changed her life and made her reappraise her family: ‘we were like the Turtons’, or Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934), were highly critical of the British ‘in’ India. In this context, it’s tempting to see the convent as an allegory of the Raj itself:
The order had spread to the East and sent a stream of sisters to Egypt and Persia and India and China. In India Sister Clodagh had found the same brick buildings, the same green walls and echoing stone stairs, the same figures of saints in coloured plaster … The corridors were crowded with girls in neat blouses.
Parts of the chapel are shipped ready-made from England to replicate the Surrey mother house. The end of Forster’s novel looks to a horizon beyond Empire; Black Narcissus ends with a departure that is also a kind of defeat and the novel also upends many of the stock features of exotic romances. The conventional loyalty of the natives has mutated into pragmatism, cynicism, or, in Ayah’s case, active rebellion, as she tries to undermine the Sisters at every turn. Even, the little boy Anthony, who acts as a translator, won’t obey orders when the crisis comes. Indian characters have their own agendas and the nuns ignore these at their peril. The young General, Dilip Rai wants to be taught at the convent so his uncle will let him go to Cambridge – he has already been to England and is desperate to get back. He is also an object of forbidden desire, stirring Sister Clodagh’s memories of the man she loved as a young woman in Ireland. Near the end of the novel, he comes to discuss his clothes with her – what is a pinstripe and should he wear braces? He’s brought a catalogue to show her and wonders aloud about the properties of Viyella which he has read is ‘best for underwear.’ He has even ordered ties, socks and pyjamas to be delivered to the convent so the nuns can help him choose. Clodagh tries to explain the impropriety of this, tries to stop him talking, but she can’t summon the energy, plucked at by her painful memories. The young General is represented here as vain and childish, innocently but annoying self-absorbed. He’s an easily recognisable native stereotype. But his whole is more complex. For the young General is trying to construct a suitable persona for England and wants the Sisters’ help. The absurdity of their sexual rules are brilliantly exposed by his guileless questioning.
Clodagh is also distracted by the strong, tanned body of Mr Dean. Her memories disrupt her supervision of the convent and her prayer but she doesn’t agonise about the colour of the men who prompt them. Miscegenation was the explicit theme of Godden’s earlier novel The Lady and the Unicorn which explores the precarious existence of a mixed-race family. The Eurasian population that hovered on the fringes of official English society made the outcomes of mixed-race relationships an obvious topic in Raj fiction – though not perhaps in the way Godden treated it. When Godden set up her own dancing school in a big house in Calcutta in the early 1930s, including Indian and Eurasian girls in her classes and living ‘alone’, the rumour that she was Eurasian stood for much of the disapproval she attracted.
The other nuns also find Dilip Rai beautiful but they contain him (and their desire) in aesthetic terms. Only Sister Ruth holds out against him, fixated by his colour. ‘”He’s so vain”, she mocked, “like a … fine black peacock’. She is the nun who continues to insist ‘they all look alike to me’ and who shockingly accuses the guileless Sister Honey of wanting a ‘black brat of a baby’ of her own. But Ruth’s desires are not straightforward either. Her obsession with Mr Dean which drives the novel’s final crisis begins with her first close physical encounter:
Her shoulders were not as wide as half his chest: she was fragile and white beside him; his flesh was live and bronze like a Red Indian…
This is very much Ruth’s point of view and is pure Orientalist fantasy– ‘she was fragile and white beside him’. The lure of the primitive is present too, conjured by the Red Indian likeness. For Sister Ruth, Dean is a white man who incorporates an exotic, masculine other.
It is easy to summarise Black Narcissus as a melodrama: English nuns (though Clodagh is Irish) in a remote part of Darjeeling, illicit passions, long-repressed memories, the descent into madness.This is part of its pleasure, one of its threads. There are moments of lurid intensity, as when Ruth comes to Clodagh to describe with high excitement a woman who has been brought in for treatment: ‘covered in blood …I think it was an artery because it spurted blood’. The words ‘blood’ and ‘bleeding’ are used four times in seven lines. But it’s important that novel and film don’t get fused in memory. Powell and Pressburger’s film goes several steps further: Ruth enters the room in a blood-spattered habit. Melodrama and horror are vividly part of the film’s narration at this point, we see the blood on the white habit with its connotations of sexuality and violence, and hear what has happened. But in the novel, there is no description of Sister Ruth’s appearance. Tellingly her manner is prefaced and framed by the narrator’s comment: ‘She started and then said dramatically …’ The reader is warned.
1947 film poster
Sister Ruth quickly reveals many signs of madness: hysteria, paranoia, uncontrollable rage and jealousy towards Sister Clodagh, an insistent rigidity about how things should be and should be named. She dubs the young General ‘Black Narcissus’ but is this really Sister’s Ruth’s name to give? Naming and renaming the Other are classic colonial moves and the boundaries between East and West, self and other, in this novel can become suddenly precarious. The faraway exotic of Darjeeling turns out to be closer than the nuns can imagine in some ways. In the local market, Roger et Gallet soap and Lucky Strikes are on sale along with yak’s blood and cloth prints from Manchester and Japan; the shawls of the women drop in ‘Italian folds’. Ayah and her old mistress, the Princess Simatri have travelled in Europe: London, Paris, Baden. And ‘Black Narcissus’ is not another name for the ‘little General’ anyway but a perfume that Dilip Rai bought in the Army and Navy Stores, which had branches in Karachi and Bombay as well as Paris and London – another part of his self-fashioning. Everything is multiple, difficult to classify, including the narrator’s ambivalence to this world that is both radically other and pressingly familiar. At the very end, all that is clear is that the novel’s title encompasses both the bottled exoticism signalled by the perfume and something which far exceeds it.
Talk given as Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library in 2018
I’m posting a link to a talk I gave at Gladstone’s Library last year. I dislike the sound of my recorded voice intensely, so it has taken me more than a year to get up the courage to listen to this. And what a relief to discover that the first voice on the podcast was not my own, but the wonderful Louisa Yates, Director of Collections and Research, who introduced me.
It’s a three part talk. The first part is a kind of Bibliomemoire where I talk about the role of historical narrative and detail in my childhood reading, including Jean Plaidy and Winston Graham’s Poldark series. The second part is a very brief history of the development of the historical novel in the 19th century and its impact on the novel form more generally. Part three is about a particular form of historical novel, the kind that tries to recover or reconstruct the history of those who are usually forgotten, disregarded or silenced by louder voices or brighter, shinier pens – they are usually the losers, in conventional terms at least. It’s here that I talk a little bit about my own novel, Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves. There’s a really good discussion at the end of the talk too.
Below is a copy of the outline and links I circulated at the talk.
Gladstone’s Library, 10 April 2018: The Historical Novel: A Very Slippery Genre
This isn’t an outline of the lecture but a
selection of references, sources and links to material and discussions you may
find interesting.
1. Definitions
It is generally recognised that historical fiction is difficult to
define and that some aspects of the definition can be arbitrary.
‘To be deemed historical (in our sense),
a novel must have been written at least fifty years after the events described,
or have been written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events
(who therefore approaches them only by research).
We also consider the following styles of novel to be
historical fiction for our purposes: alternate histories (e.g. Robert
Harris’ Fatherland), pseudo-histories (e.g. Umberto
Eco’s Island of the Day Before), time-slip novels (e.g.
Barbara Erskine’s Lady of Hay), historical fantasies (e.g. Bernard
Cornwell’s King Arthur trilogy) and multiple-time novels (e.g. Michael
Cunningham’s The Hours).’
There’s a good selection of articles, short and long, which
take the discussion about definition further which you can access from the link
above.
2. Genre
Genres aren’t just ways of writing or sets of stylistic
tropes. They are also ways of organising
knowledge which shape how we read and think as well as markets and readers.
There are a number of organisations or institutions that play a part in the
definition, regulation and promotion of historical fiction. Here are a few of
the major ones in Britain, though they aren’t exclusively British.
The Historical
Writers’ Association: is an
association for writers, agents and publishers of historical writing, fiction
and non-fiction. The inclusion of both recognises the networks of writers
within the field, connections produced by conferences and festivals and authors
who write across both e.g. Alison Weir is one example.
The Historical Novel Society
(see above) has a more general promotional purpose and is more reader-oriented.
It is a membership organisation with a magazine, conference etc. The conference
intends to appeal to readers, writers, publishers and agents.
The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction is a relatively new prize established in 2010
and offers £25000 to the winner. You can read more about it here http://www.walterscottprize.co.uk
Cultural prizes are promotional, raising the image of the field,
in this case historical fiction and individual titles within it at a time when
there are a very large number of new fiction titles (In 2015, 32,882 fiction
titles deposited at British Library, a legal requirement for new books, out of
a 173,000 new or revised titles – figures are from various sources collated by
the Publishers’ Association.)
4. Examples of historical fiction (mentioned
in the lecture)
Peter Carey, Jack Maggs (1997)
Michel Faber, The Crimson
Petal and the White (2002)
Philippa Gregory, The Other
Boleyn Girl (2001)
Winston Graham, The Poldark
series (first published between 1945-53 from 1973 to 2002)
Benjamin Myers, The Gallows
Pole (2017)
Daphne Du Maurier, Frenchman’s
Creek (1941)
Graham Swift, Mothering
Sunday (2016)
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer
Will Show (1936) and The Corner That
Held Them (1948)
Sarah Waters, The Night
Watch (2006) and The Little Stranger
(2009) (and the others!)
5. Farming
Short, Brian, Watkins, Charles, Foot,
William and Kinsman, Phil The
National Farm Survey, 1941-1943: State Surveillance and the Countryside in
England and Wales in the Second World War (2000)
Ronald Blythe, Akenfield
(1969) [There’s also a film of the same name which was made by Peter Hall in
1974 and has recently been reissued on DVD – both book and film are highly
recommended]
I was twenty the first time I read Middlemarch and I couldn’t bear to reach the end. I read 700 pages in a growing hurry, then slowed to a snail’s pace and eked out the last hundred over an improbably long time. The pleasures of anticipation accounted for a good part of my sudden slowness. In that first reading love ruled, and when I was confident that Dorothea and Will would finally get it together – I was happy to watch this happy ending veer tantalisingly in and out of reach.
Eliot’s first readers couldn’t choose their pace through the novel as a whole. Published in eight parts beginning in December 1871, it provided ‘months of pausing and recurring literary excitement.’ wrote Sidney Colvin in the Fortnightly Review. Such a long drawn out experience of reading or viewing is unimaginable today, when we glut on box sets, or download Hilary Mantel in audio and print format in seconds. R. H. Hutton in The Spectator conjured a readership of one mind:
[W]e all grumble at Middlemarch; we all say that the action is too slow … but we all read it, and all feel that there is nothing to compare with it appearing at the present moment in the way of English Literature …
This same readership calculates nervously ‘whether the August number will come before the Autumn holidays.’ Though Victorian readers were used to consuming novels in serial form, either in magazines or as cheap autonomous part-works in short, monthly instalments, the first edition of Middlemarch was something of a publishing experiment: eight paperback books of between 174 and 212 pages at 5 shillings each, published to look ‘attractive but not bookstallish’ (George Lewes in a letter to the publisher John Blackwood).
Publishing then and now
Middlemarch came to publication as the unlikely convergence of a publisher, John Blackwood, eager to tempt a successful author back; a writer, Eliot, who had been struggling with one novel, begun another and then sought to combine the two; and her companion and quasi-agent, George Lewes, who wanted to create a capacious and profitable setting for what promised to be a long and demanding novel. All of them would have been eager to deal a blow to Mudie’s, the commercial library chain whose aggressive discounting swallowed so much potential publishing profit. Book publishing in the 1870s looked rather like it does today: fiercely competitive, and international in ambition and practice. Serial publication of Middlemarch began in the US in Harper’s Weekly in December 1871 and in Australia in February 1872. This was typical for popular novelists, as was speedy translation into European languages. Marketing and promotion were central processes and distributors held disproportionate power. One of Lewes’s aims in having Middlemarch published bimonthly was ‘to furnish the town with talk for some time … [to] keep up and swell the general interest.’ Both Eliot and Lewes had an astute understanding of the Victorian marketplace, playing publishers off against each other and ensuring that Eliot earned nearly £9,000 (roughly £400,000 in today’s money) from Middlemarch alone, between 1872 and 1879, on a 40% royalty deal. Publishing, then as now, was strongly shaped by other media, most obviously, drama, various types of newspaper and magazine writing, and a plethora of visual forms.
One marked difference was that new books were given a far greater time to prove their worth; another was the relatively weak status of intellectual property. Dickens’s works spawned numerous pirated offspring in book and theatrical form. Though Eliot did not approve theatrical adaptation of her work, dramatic versions of Silas Marner and Adam Bede circulated in her lifetime. In 1878, less than two years after the publication of Daniel Deronda, the spurious Gwendolen; or Reclaimed: A Sequel to Daniel Deronda by George Eliot was published in America. In Anna Clay Beecher’s virulently anti-semitic novel, Daniel’s new Bildung is to discover the degeneracy of the Jews and when Mirah conveniently dies, he returns to England and marries the blonde, Christian Gwendolen. ‘Spin-offs’ were not confined to print or drama. Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White generated perfume, a waltz, and various bonnets. In the decades after her death, Eliot’s name was used to sell products including bicycles (the advertising came complete with quotations), and the new type of rail-accessible literary tourism. You could also buy George Eliot Real Mushroom Ketchup with an image of Eliot on the bottle. Lewes and Eliot would have been appalled by the sauce, but the values on which such items traded – quality, authenticity, reliability – were central to their careful development and management of the Eliot name. As novel publishing proliferated in terms of genre and readership, writing and publishing became practices of increasingly careful differentiation. Lewes wanted the cover of Middlemarch to appeal to the eye in ways that turned novel readers into novel buyers, but to be free from the taint of cheap popular fiction, the ‘yellowbacks’. A shade of green proposed by Blackwoods was returned as ‘too yellow.’ The green eventually agreed on, Simon Frost suggests in The Business of the Novel may well have had a particular association with Dickens, and certainly Dickens’s recent death in 1870 left gaps in the market for several kinds of author.
By 1871, when Middlemarch was first published, ‘George Eliot’ was a highly successful brand on a slightly shaky track: the sales figures for her two most recent novels, Romola and Felix Holt, had been disappointing. Critical reaction had been mixed. A reviewer of Romola, set in the 15th century Florence of Savonarola, complained pettishly that ‘[i]t is not a bit like Adam Bede.’ For Eliot was above all the ‘author of Adam Bede’ and whilst many authors and artists have felt trapped to repetition or perversity by critical or popular success, Eliot and Lewes made ‘the author of Adam Bede’ – a continuing big seller in the Blackwood’s catalogue – a key part of Middlemarch. Frost mentions the trees – ‘young, mature and felled’ – in the foreground of the cover vignette of Middlemarch. The overall effect of the cover, as he says, is English bucolic but it is worth recalling just how full of wood Adam Bede is. The trees and wood on the first edition of Middlemarch promise a distinctive ‘George Eliot experience’, one satisfied inside by Caleb Garth, a good man in the tradition of Adam Bede himself. Vulnerable at the novel’s start, by the end his values have been planted at Stone Court where his daughter and son-in-law now live. ‘The Bedesman’ is only one of the novels in Middlemarch, though, and not all of them have happy endings. Must Middlemarch ‘leave us sad and hungry?’ asked Colvin.
Eliot is ‘a painter of human character,’ Hutton insisted, praising the novel’s comic characters. ‘Something of the cruelty of vivisection is natural in Thackeray’s style, and very unnatural in George Eliot’s.’ Sharply gendered of course but ‘unnatural’ is also a ‘brand criticism’ and perhaps Hutton should have thought about the novel’s subtitle more carefully: ‘A Study of Provincial Life.’ The study, with its numerous human categories, is crucially critical and satirical. From the very beginning, ‘Middlemarch’ is also the zone of the limited, the imitative, the frustrated, where local pride conflicts with nose-hard-against-the-window envy of the metropolis. We can well guess what will happen to Lydgate’s ambition to be a great scientist and his wish to stand aloof from small-town tyrants. ‘People in the provinces . . . know no difference between “Newby” and “Blackwoods” and can’t see the moral impossibility of the sequel being mine,’ wrote Eliot when she heard about an advertisement for an opportunistic Adam Bede, Junior: A Sequel – the same Eliot who changed her name from the homely, diminutive Mary Ann to Marian when she left Nuneaton and Coventry for London. Middlemarch incorporates many novels offering different, often discrepant, pleasures.
Its current status as classic, with connotations of something fixed or unmoving, make a look at its original publishing and reading context well worth the effort. The first edition of Middlemarch, with its superior green and George Eliot stamp, was also interleaved with adverts for chocolate, candles, perfumes, jewellery, medicines and single volume editions of Eliot’s works. A spin-off publication, Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings by George Eliot (1872), by a fan, Alexander Main, was produced with Eliot and Lewes’s encouragement, Main’s Sayings, offered a compact George Eliot experience – Lewes stressed the need for it to be pocket-size, a George Eliot you could take anywhere. Combining the homilistic, lapidary forms that Eliot specialised in, which could sound rather cryptic out of context (‘nettle seed needs no digging’), and memorable ‘scenes’ excerpted into dramatic form, Eliot was reportedly delighted with the result.
Novels within the novel
Perhaps because Middlemarch is such an undisputed ‘classic’, it is easy to forget how elastic novelistic narrative and style were during this period. The novel had a loose shape, the stories and tellings within it were usually lightly combined and could be unpicked and recombined with relative ease. Dickens is the master of this, but Middlemarch has its own less extreme version. Middlemarch began as two novels which were combined by Eliot to form one; but in the writing, it seems, the number of novels proliferates (F. R. Leavis’s plan to cut Gwendolen Harleth from Daniel Deronda seems quite unremarkable in this context). To read Middlemarch is to travel between stories. One of its pleasures lies in tracing the very fine, delicate links between them: Dorothea’s hand lies behind the rehabilitation of Caleb Garth, the Adam Bede ending is an effect of her diffused goodness. But, as various critics have pointed out, the novel is also out to disrupt our attention. Stories, like thoughts and feelings, move in and out of reach, leaving us in suspense. Near the end of Book One, Dorothea retires to dress and the reader follows as she starts to wonders about her coming marriage. But at the dinner that follows, Dorothea has become ‘Miss Brooke’, someone, or rather a woman, for the men present to assess and admire – literally a character in another story. ‘Dorothea’ remains tantalisingly inaccessible till we see her crying on her Roman honeymoon.
Just as today, the novel formed part of a multimedia culture, incorporating all manner of types of communication. When Adam Bede works on the coffin his father has abandoned, ‘his mind seemed as passive as a spectator at a diorama’ – not a simile Adam could have understood, given his rural, 18th century world. New media technologies and communications proliferated through the nineteenth century – shorthand, stenograph, telegraph, a plethora of optical inventions. Lewes and Eliot themselves attended a demonstration of a proto-telephone. These, and established media forms such as drama and journalism – are all metabolised by the 19th century novel. Many of the comic social scenes at which Eliot excels are cartoon-like in their sharp contrasts: the fading patriarch Featherstone on his deathbed in one room, still armed with a golden cane, whilst the parlour of Stone Court teems with would-be beneficiaries, speculating increasingly freely about outcomes; Mr Brooke’s visit to one of his dismal and unimproved farms, Freeman’s End, where he is berated by his tenant, Dagley and the two men’s dogs face each other off far more cautiously. Whilst Dickens became expert at verbally representing the photographic image, Eliot specialised in novelistic representations of the painterly. Take the family portrait of the Garths under an old apple tree: ‘[Fred] found the family group, dogs and cats included, under the great apple tree in the orchard.’ Jim is reading aloud from the ‘beloved’ Scott while his sister Letty watches him; another brother, Christie, lies by his mother’s feet with his hat over his eyes. Yet another brother plays at archery – the novel is Ivanhoe. The descriptive form is realist with its attention to the particular, the seemingly arbitrary detail – the ‘coral heap’ of cherries on the tea-table, the ‘grizzled’ Newfoundland dog – but in domestic genre painting, details become values: the healthy outside, the ease of family affections, the bounty of nature and labour – these are Garth values, above all father Caleb’s.
Middlemarch in a listening culture
In ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, Eliot mocked the various ‘species’ of women’s novel – ‘mind-and-millinery’, ‘white neck-cloth’ (evangelical), ‘modern-antique’ (historical-romantic) – each with its pattern-book plot and fixed-phrase diction. Being a Lady was something Eliot went to great lengths to avoid. Prescription writing inevitably attracts literary criticism, yet most genres are highly versatile – sets of possibilities, inflections – with little or nothing in common with recipe writing. Eliot’s fiction, like so many of her contemporaries, lives off numerous genres, literary and popular: Gothic , Bildungsroman, Sensation Fiction, melodrama, tragedy, romance, folk and fairy tale. In Adam Bede, a dashing young gentleman seduces a beautiful milkmaid, Hetty. Hetty has a baby who dies and she is tried and sentenced for murder. The death penalty is breathlessly commuted only on the morning she is due to hang. This is the melodrama through which the real heroine, the preacher Dinah, and the steadfast hero-with-a-temper, Adam, must morally grow. In Silas Marner, the semi-outcast weaver’s gold is stolen and replaced by a golden-haired baby – one of many brushes with the folk or fairyish in Eliot’s novels. In Felix Holt, set during the election after the 1832 Reform Act, the political rivalry between the ‘working man’ Felix Holt and the aristocrat, Harold Transome, is shadowed by a creaking Gothic inheritance plot but one that is central to the novel’s revelations and resolution. Esther Lyon turns out to be the true heir of Transome Court and she rejects her inheritance, including Harold, for Felix.
In Middlemarch, much of the action is provided by the struggle between characters over what type of novel they’re living in. Dorothea believes she’s the heroine of a religious narrative; her husband tries to cast her in a novel of adultery. Newly arrived in Middlemarch, Lydgate thinks he’s the hero in a story of scientific discovery, but Rosamond is waiting, determined that he will be the suitable stranger in her romance – bad news for Lydgate. Characters are often wrong about themselves and others and this is often where Eliot’s realism emerges: a more dependable and truthful alternative when other forms of representation falter in their ability to make sense of the world. Popular genres aren’t shown the door however; often they’re recast for different ends. Eliot can conjure any number of forms of Gothic disturbance. When Lydgate tries to moderate his wife’s brittle solipsism, we, as readers, are privy to his increasingly unhappy thinking, but Rosamond remains obscure, a set of opaque gestures: turning to look at a vase, or patting her perfect hair, even her tears are an accessory. At such points, Rosamond’s actions seem strangely out of synch, uncanny: as with a doll that isn’t quite working properly.
‘I have been struck,’ wrote Antonia White, ‘by finding the same thought within a few days in two very different places – in George Eliot and in an American magazine. That is the idea of a person’s horror at a crime coming not from the crime but from the fact that they have committed it.’ Eliot is especially fascinated by those whose fingerprints are found on the gun, even if, especially if, they didn’t pull the trigger. In Middlemarch, Bulstrode’s not-quite murder of the blackmailer Raffles is sensation fiction territory, where the excitable audience’s speculations exceed the evil of the act itself. Dorothea and Ladislaw are somehow tainted by Casaubon’s will with its intimations of their illicit desire. In Daniel Deronda, Gwendolen marries Grandcourt knowing he has thrown over his mistress and children for her – and thus becomes implicated in a moral bigamy. Fascination with this kind of taint plays out in Eliot’s relation to the circulation of her own fiction, her own highly ambivalent relationship to the novel as commodity form. On the one hand, the opportunity to influence readers was a real ‘good’. By August 1874, the novel had been published in parts, four volume sets and reprints, in a cheap six shilling one volume edition, even in three volume form. The cheap edition was the great success with 10,000 copies sold in 1874 alone. ‘The sale of Middlemarch is wonderful out of all whooping,’ she wrote to her publisher John Blackwood in August 1874. Clearly the original could vouch to some extent for the novel’s diffusion into less salubrious forms. Yet at the same time she worried about dirty fingerprints. There were disadvantages to being so easily accessible. She and Lewes were unhappy about Alexander Main’s second portable Eliot project, The George Eliot Birthday Book, which dispensed the same wisdom as the Sayings in a diary. Eliot didn’t like the form, birthday books were ‘puffing, gaudy, clap-trappy’; the extravagant binding was ‘adapted to the bookseller mind and the minds of those who buy birthday books,’ wrote Lewes. ‘We have to think of the colonial class,’ Blackwood replied briskly, and the book went ahead in its original vulgar form.
This deep ambivalence about commodity circulation take a distinctive form in Middlemarch, where the ideal form of communication is a Wordsworthian form of spontaneous speech, the exact opposite of mechanical, anonymous print. Will and Dorothea intermittently achieve a spontaneous authenticity derived from their mutual sympathy:
‘”I am indebted to the rain then. I am so glad to see you.” Dorothea uttered these common words with the simple sincerity of an unhappy child visited at school.
“I really came for the chance of seeing you alone,” said Will, mysteriously forced to be just as simple as she was.’
These dialogues are a touchstone. Casaubon calls himself a ‘fastidious’ listener, but he can never hear Dorothea when she speaks because to his anxious, resentful ears, she is the clamour of criticism, a ‘spy’. Yet this is the voice Will compares to an Aeolian harp; the more neutral Caleb Garth tells his wife that Dorothea has ‘a voice like music…’ Dorothea’s voice is compared with the alluring musical performances of Rosamond. But Rosamond’s playing, like Madame Merle’s in The Portrait of a Lady, is not to be trusted. Sound matters, voice matters. Yet this in itself is not anti-novelistic. After all, reading aloud, learning by heart and recitation were key aspects of quotidian literate culture. Books were written and published to be read aloud, semi-performed, shared sociably, discussed in situ, as well as consumed privately. Eliot’s lapidary tendencies and her extraordinary attention to the inflections of speech, like Dickens’s attention to idiolect, or the dramatic ‘scenes’ in so many novels of the period, are all aspects of a culture habituated to listening keenly to what was spoken and read: a novelistic culture.
This piece was originally written (but not published), as a review of The Business of the Novel: Economics, Aesthetics and the Case of Middlemarch by Simon R. Frost, Pickering and Chatto, 254pp., £60.00, January 2012, 978 1 84893 1947. Much of the detail about the original publication comes from this book.
Summer of Rockets was written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff and screened in the UK on BBC2 in May and June 2019.
CONTAINS SPOILERS
Summer of Rockets, Stephen Poliakoff’s latest TV series, makes a question out of belonging. What is it like to be English? How does ‘one’ become English and what are the costs – costs shown to be ethical and emotional, and damaging rather than advancing. Exploiting the formality and rigidity of its late 50s setting, Summer of Rockets starts off looking like a period drama until you realise that a good many of the institutions, occasions and character-types represented – private members’ clubs, country house parties, boarding schools, mad generals – are alive and far too well in contemporary Britain. In the opening scene, a family – mother, father, daughter and young son – arrive at a race meeting. Picked out by the camera individually, all but the father look somehow uncomfortable. Amongst the black and grey Bentleys and Roll Royces, their modest, bottle-green saloon stands out like a joke. A group of chauffeurs snigger, expensively dressed race-goers looked pained and disapproving. Who are these people? The family are the Petrukhins and we soon discover they are Jewish, but at this point the most visible sign of their otherness in this English upper-class microcosm is the blackness of their companion, Samuel’s friend and business partner, Courtney Johnson. Walking across the lush grass, the group is challenged at the entrance to the Royal enclosure, where all their names must be checked – as they are, Samuel explains, every year.
Yesterday and today
This boundary or border, where some are waved through because they are assumed to belong, and others, because of name, colour, religion or accent, are always asked for proof of identity, is one of many parallels between the late 50s and the late 2010s. Others include anxieties about uncertain futures, the transformational possibilities of new communications technologies, the seductions of Britain’s imperial moment and, hostility to new and earlier immigrants. The drama begins in the summer of 1957 when Britain’s place in the world is beginning to look precarious – the US is the ascendant Western power, it is a year since Suez and Sputnik 1 will soon be launched. The young are stirring, not to speak of the colonies; post-war austerity may be coming to an end but planetary annihilation via nuclear war or accident feels very close indeed. Samuel Petrukhin (Toby Stephens) is a middle-class inventor attracted to a particular form of upper-class English culture. When the series starts, his son, Sasha is about to be sent to boarding school and his daughter Hannah is set to embark on a London season. Neither of them is happy but as viewers, we don’t yet understand how thematically important this unwillingness is. Samuel’s story is partly based on Poliakoff’s own father. But it is also based on a very English, literary convention: the man who falls for an upper-class English family with a beautiful house and very dark secrets. The affair starts lightly enough. Richard Shaw is an MP and war hero, his wife Kathleen is beautiful and welcoming. They meet when Kathleen finds Sasha, who goes missing at the races. Samuel supplies Kathleen’s aunt with a small, modern hearing aid and the Petrukhins are invited to lunch. A kind of friendship is struck up and Samuel is enchanted. The Shaw’s house with its fishing lake and lush green views, summer house and pet donkeys is very different to the Petrukhins’ middle-class home – a comfortable house in a tree-lined suburban street, shot to appear dark and just a little cramped. Samuel has finally been welcomed to a world from which he’s always been either excluded or grudgingly tolerated.
The Shaws’ home appears bright and open to visitors, and Samuel is outraged when he is threatened by MI6 and tasked to spy on his new friends. He doesn’t want them to be anything other than the delightful, friendly people they seem to be. The charming Lord Wallington, (played by Timothy Spall with a dead voice that channels Voldemort) an almost permanent guest, and Richard’s closest friend, seems to like him too. If anyone seems sinister it is the MI6 operative Field (Mark Bonnar), who has no first name and a dog who understands Russian. Nevertheless, it’s clear to Samuel, and both his children, that all is not right in the Shaws’ world. Invited to a fishing party, he takes photographs of military-looking men gathering in the woods to talk about more than fishing tactics. Kathleen (Keeley Hawes, brilliantly shifting between graceful hospitality, outbreaks of angry desperation and painful self-questioning) is literally physically stifled by the world she lives in. Her husband Richard has ‘funny’ turns – flashbacks to battle – and nearly abandons his speech to the local Conservative Association. Most seriously, their son, Anthony, vanished from their lives with no explanation at the age of twenty-one. Wanting to flee or flout this world of ease and power is at least as important as wanting to be a part of it and a recurring motif. In a less fatal parallel with Anthony, Sasha runs away from his exclusive school. And although, Hannah is humiliated early on when she is barred from the stateroom and introduction to the Queen for being late, a couple of episodes later, she coolly sneaks her friend Esther into an exclusive party by lying about who she is.
A more modern world is working on everyone too. Hannah has an electrically glowing goldfish bowl in her bedroom, little Sasha listens to rock and roll radio on headphones while he writes letters home from his stultifying English prep school – until they’re confiscated. Most importantly, Samuel has invented a pager, he calls it a staff locator, with many potential uses. We see his first demonstration of it at a hospital where a group of nurses and doctors assemble to see if a doctor with a pager in his pocket can be summoned from a distance. He can. MI6 seem interested in adopting it but some of the important people Samuel meets at the Shaws’ parties don’t seem to understand its potential and dislike the idea of being summoned. Isn’t that something they do to servants?
Poliakoff as auteur
Summer of Rockets is pure Poliakoff in narrative and style. There are lost boys; young women with secret powers; characters too preoccupied with their everyday routines or personal selfishness to stop and see, and listen. (Ideas of listening, listening better, or choosing not to listen play out in numerous ways throughout.) As in Shooting the Past(1999) most memorably, photographs, and images more generally, are the key to mysteries, but only if characters learn to read them. And, these images are never singular in meaning. The stylised settings and colour continuities – the rich blues and reds, mustardy yellows, tangerine, turquoise and lilac – are clear warnings not to take everything too literally. The lush green of the Shaw house grounds spills out into a rolling countryside where, between flowering hedgerows, Samuel and Courtney are pursued by MI6. Hannah is dazzled in St James’s Park by a huge tree in the same green. Her vision of nuclear annihilation shrivels it, along with the surrounding sky. A green that is not only England then, but the world, the planet. These images can be wonderfully rich and strange. The array of animals that recur throughout the series – the Shaws’ calming donkeys, the rabbit rotten with myxomatosis , the bronze sculptures of dogs and birds kept by one of Sasha’s teachers, the raging pigs in Anthony’s drawings – set up a complex and powerful chain of associations and clues. Other images can seem heavy-handed, excessive, like the private tanks that parade in English fields.
The tanks are a carefully constructed spectacle, a performance – another Poliakoff speciality. Soldiers line up to watch a demonstration of the pager at a military base that looks as if it’s been decommissioned. Is this a ‘real’ demonstration, or simply an attempt to persuade Petrukhin that MI6 can offer him a substantial contract? Hannah and her friend Nicholas volunteer to take part in an exercise to test responses to a nuclear attack in London. Everyone is categorised as dead or alive before it even begins, and Hannah is made up with hideous burn injuries. Another rehearsal and one that terrifies her as a premonition of the real thing. Many scenes look and feel like always-already memories, or dreams that keep repeating: Sasha’s vision of the enormous, unapproachable staircase at his school for instance; the anonymous corridors where the main characters encounter untrustworthy or ambiguous others; Samuel’s final view of Wallington through the rear window of his taxi as he is conveyed back to a more ordinary, safer life.
The costs of belonging
Summer of Rockets captured me because of the moment at which it’s set, not least because I know something about it as lived from my parents, who both arrived in London in the middle 1950s. My father’s situation was very different from Samuel’s (who arrived in England as a young child after the Russian Revolution). My father arrived in London in his middle twenties as a relatively privileged student from Pakistan. He was not especially enthralled by the English upper class but he was always a committed Anglophile. The bedsits he lived in in Hampstead and Kensington were full of English ex-colonials, back from India in diminished circumstances. Maybe my dad reminded them of better days. Of course, these were the places he and latterly my mother (white) were able to rent. Some of her friends found my dad ‘exotic’, others tried to break them up and fix her up with someone more suitable – someone ‘English’. Racism in all its forms was rife – jobs, housing, jokes, silences. Yet my dad always insisted that he never experienced racism. This was clearly untrue – much later I witnessed it myself – but he was utterly determined that the country he had come to live in accepted and recognised him as one of their own.
This willingness of the outsider to collude with and ignore hostility is brilliantly at the fore in Summer of Rockets. Dropping his daughter off at etiquette school so she can learn to curtsey, he tells her: ‘I taught myself to speak with a perfect, English, upper-class accent. Nobody can tell the difference.’ His daughter smiles a little indulgently. She knows that her father is never going to pass, quite. Throughout the series, Samuel is addressed and referred to as Russian or/and Jewish – and always as an outsider who may have alternative and suspect loyalties. Making his way through a gentleman’s club to meet Winston Churchill and supply him with a new hearing aid, he is spotted by a man who turns to his companion. ‘They’re back,’ he grunts wearily, ‘the Darkie and the Jew.’ Samuel does not ignore the anti-Semitism that is all around him, indeed he challenges it. But he continues to want to be a part of one of the world that reproduces it.
Samuel gradually begins to realise that Shaw, Wallington and co., are up to something and it isn’t fishing or being snobbish about wine. They are ruthless reactionaries who wish to upend the social and political possibilities tentatively set in train by the Labour landslide of 1945. Contemptuous of democracy, they see a military coup as the only way to stop Britain sinking back into small island status. They also believe that the whole state has been penetrated by ‘the Reds’. Their plot is a little bonkers though less bonkers than some contemporary conspiracies. The plotters are also bonkers (led by a popular Tory MP, they are peers, generals, businessmen) and well-organised and resourced – hence the tanks at the bottom of the garden. The plot and the dangers it represents are real and the forces of reaction are only thwarted at the last. But they are not foiled by Samuel with his notebook and recording technology, or by MI6, or by any other law and order agency (Who would that be? What would they represent?). Instead, they are defeated by the brilliance of the young. A satirical sketch of their plan appears on a popular TV comedy programme and sends the plotters fleeing. It is only at the very end of the drama that Samuel begins to understand his daughter’s part in their defeat and how it might be connected to her ‘difficult’ behaviour over the Summer.
The rout has a formal elegance and it is great to see the young win. All those who defeat the coup exist on the edges of official late 50s cultures but unlike Samuel, they don’t hanker after belonging. They have an alternative, more vivid, better way of seeing – in itself highly plausible. Nicholas Hadley, who has tried to teach Hannah suitable etiquette, is a failed novelist who gets lucky writing sketches for a popular TV programme. He is also gay. Esther, who works at Petrukhin’s factory and becomes Hannah’s friend and sanctuary, is central to the unravelling of the Shaws’ son Anthony’s disappearance, which is itself tied to the values that underpin the plotters. Esther can see what others can’t. In the narrative, this ability is tied in part to her being deaf. She lipreads what’s going on in the boss’s office for her co-workers in an early scene. She has learnt to see better because she cannot hear.
But I was also left ambivalent. There is something too convenient about the younger characters’ simple alignment. Hannah chooses Esther as a friend, as she chooses Nicholas, because she is an outsider herself. But there is something expedient about her friendship with Esther, who at times can seem more like a convenient extension to Hannah than a character in her own right. Esther is the character or device that allows her to meet ‘ordinary’ black and working-class people and be touched by the Notting Hill Riots. Hannah and Joel, a black friend of Esther, are attacked for dancing together.
But can Hannah really represent everything that is good about the future? Via a pattern of friendships and associations, above all through a set of choices, she comes to stand for all the young outsiders. There are so many parallels between Sasha and Anthony in particular, echoes too between Anthony and Hannah. The metaphor of who listens or ‘reads’ well is so extensively deployed, as are the allegiances between those who listen and dance to rock and roll. But I also wonder whether the narrative and visual richness that makes these connections (and the progressive alliance they stand for) are at times any more than a moment of conjuring, a feat of magic that cannot be sustained.
In the final scene, Hannah hosts her own eccentric debutante party: a street party where everyone is invited: quite literally, open to all. It’s a beautiful scene and an inversion of the exclusive enclosure of the first scene: couples dance in the sunlight, on the street, on the grass, under the trees. There is bunting and a buffet and paper clocks everywhere – all set to the reassuring time of 8.30pm – Hannah’s optimistic challenge to the Doomsday Clock. It’s a scene of almost utopian conviviality. We know that Wallington and the dangers he represents haven’t been permanently defeated but we/they can be happy with this for now at least. And yet this party pushes further. Who should arrive right at the end but the Shaws (invited by Samuel, just as he invited them to join his picnic at the races). With the corroding influence of Wallington removed they are trying to be an ‘ordinary’ family, led now, it is suggested, by Anthony’s pacifist values. In the preceding scene, Samuel tells Field: ‘I no longer want to be the perfect English gentleman.’ He appears to have learnt his lesson. The invitation to the Shaws could be seen as a turning of the tables: it is Samuel and the Petrukhins deciding who belongs now. But it also demonstrates how hard it is for him to give up his fascination. This is the character’s privilege of course and his ambivalence is persuasive. But the ‘cleansing’ of the Shaws is a narrative choice of a different order and for me it rankles. We’re back to the ‘few bad apples’ or ‘bad influence’ school of history so convincingly challenged by so much of what went before.
All in all, it’s a hugely thought-provoking drama. Catch it while you can or let me know what you thought about it below.
I’m very excited to be teaching this course at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution. The course is outlined in detail below. There are limited places available so if you wish to book, contact HLSI on 020 8340 3343 asap. HLSI is close to Archway and Highgate Tubes and easily reached by bus. Further information about other courses and events at HLSI here.
Europe, Europe: European Literature in Translation 1919-1939
Some of the books I’ve read this year in preparation. Full syllabus below.
This course is aimed at those who are interested in studying the forms and languages of literature, and who wish to explore literary texts within the broader culture and histories of a particular period. The period between 1919 and 1939 was particularly rich and exciting in European fiction, poetry and drama, shaped by the continuing desire to capture modernity, conceived in a range of often conflicting ways. It was also moulded by cross-fertilisations in/with music, art, cinema, radio, and the many genres of mass print culture.
This complexity was shaped by the political and economic turmoil of the inter-war period in Europe. Germany and Austro-Hungary were grappling with war defeat and the end of Empires, as well as the physical and psychological impacts of the Great War. Italy was one of the Allied victors but disappointed with its ‘spoils’ and plunged into political crisis, almost immediately after the end of the war. The whole of Europe was transfixed by the Soviet ‘experiment’. The development of Fascisms in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 30s were fostered by complex contexts, including hostility and scepticism towards modern mass democracy and the instabilities and insecurities produced by international economic and financial crises. Writers in this period engaged directly with political and economic questions. Joseph Roth (author of The Radetsky March) was a remarkable journalist of the post-war period. Other writers found ways of ways of representing their anger or dissatisfaction with repressive regimes in various coded or not so coded forms, for example, Bertolt Brecht, Federico Garcia Lorca, and the Italian women writers – such as Ada Negri, Carola Prosperi, Pia Rimini – who wrote stories in the Italian popular press and hid their criticisms of women’s place ‘in plain sight’. A number of these writers were political refugees or victims of the regimes they wrote, for example Anna Gmeyner (Manja) and Ignazio Silone (author of Bread and Wine). The course focuses on two geographical areas: Germany and Austria in the Autumn term, and Italy in the Spring Term. In the short Summer term, we will take two reading excursions, the first to Spain with Lorca, the second to France with George Simenon.
Students will need to buy or borrow copies of the primary texts listed below. Apart from a course outline at the beginning of each term, students will be sent an outline by email before the class which includes general information about the author and text, further online reading and listening, and some questions to think about which suggest directions for our class discussion. The aim of this is to create a common starting point for all. We’ll use the class for a mixture of activities including reading aloud from the primary texts, close textual analysis and wider discussions which compare and contrast texts, topics and contexts.
You will need to be willing to use online resources such as BBC iplayer and BBC Sounds, YouTube etc. The list of texts below is not yet finally confirmed. Texts are listed below in the order in which we’ll be reading them.
Autumn Term: Germany and Austria
Joseph Roth, The Radetsky March (1932) (Penguin Modern Classics, 2016 translated by Joachim Neugroschel)
Irmgaud Keun, The Artificial Silk Girl (1932) (Penguin Classics, March 2019, translated by Kathie Von Ankum)
Anna Gmeyner – Manja (1939) (Persephone Books, translated by Kate Phillips)
Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1939) (Vintage Classics, 1989)
Bertolt Brecht The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941) (Methuen 1981, translated by R. Manheim); poems and extracts about political theatre – to be supplied as photocopy.
Spring Term: Italy
Jamie McKendrick, 20th Century Italian Poems. Poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, Umberto Saba and others (Faber and Faber, 2004, translated by various)
Maria Robin Pickering-Lazzi ed., Unspeakable Women, Selected Short Stories Written by Women During Fascism. Stories by Grazia Deledda, who won the Noble Prize for Literature in 1926, Luisa Astaldi, Gianna Manzini, Ada Negri, Carola Prosperi, Pia Rimini, and Clarice Tartufari (Feminist Press at CUNY, 1993, translated by various)
Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine (1936) (Signet Classics, 2008, translated by Eric Mossbacher)
Alberto Moravia, Agostino (1944) or possibly another Moravia novel depending on availability (NYRB, 2014, translated by Michael F. Moore)
Summer Term
Spain and France
Federico Garcia Lorca, The House of Bernarda Alba and Other Plays (1936) (Penguin Modern Classics, 2001 translated by Christopher Maurer
George Simenon, The Krull House (1939) (Penguin 2018, translated by Howard Curtis)
Secondary Reading
Christopher Duggan, Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (Bodley Head, 2012)
Michael R Ebner, Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy (CUP, 2014)
Richard J Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin 2012)
Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968) (Norton, 2001)
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (Abacus, 1995)
Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the 20th Century (Abacus, 2002)
About the tutor
Rachel Malik is a writer and a reader. Her first novel, Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize (2018) and she is currently working on her second. In a previous life, she was a university lecturer in English Literature.
Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile is published by Unbound . The description below is from the publisher.
The year is 1887. In a decaying country house Mary Ann Sate, an elderly maid servant, nurses Mr Cottrell, a man she knew well in her youth. Mr Cottrell does not have long to live and so asks Mary Ann to write down the story of his brother, Ned, who fought for The People’s Charter and for improved wages in the textile mills of the Stroud Valleys.
But as soon as Mary Ann begins to write, anger takes control of her pen. Which story should she write? Maybe it is time for the truth about the Cottrell brothers to be told. As Mary Ann unravels the knots of the past, she comes to see how her love for the brothers destroyed the life she might have had.
Should she now avenge the dead? Or can the mere power of her faltering pen enable her to reclaim her own truth?
Once the initial subscription has been raised then Alice’s share of the profits (50% of every book sold) will go to Emmaus – a charity who support homeless people in Gloucestershire and are part of a federation of 350 organisations in 37 countries around the world.
My review
Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile is a remarkable book: the fictional autobiography of a working-class woman who lives in the Five Valleys of Gloucestershire through much of the 19th century, a period of huge economic, political and social upheaval. Most of the story takes place in the turbulent first half century. Mary Ann is sceptical and wary of the strange new worlds she encounters whilst most of the other characters in the text are more decisive. Her friend Ambrose wants to embrace its possibilities, her first employer, Mrs Woebegone denounces anything new as evil. Others set fire to change, or try and flee. Some of these stories may be familiar to readers: developments in medicine, the Captain Swing rebellions, the 1832 Reform Act, Methodism, Chartism, machine breaking. But Mary Ann doesn’t have the luxury of hindsight to see them in what later became their familiar shapes. Through her eyes and in her words, events and processes are made strange as she grapples to find ways of representing what she sees and experiences. What comes at her is chaotic, partial, confusing and sometimes terrifying, and the book’s form is brilliantly shaped to capture this. The reader is drawn into a unique and compelling experience:
For all my fear, I feel my life beginning
The world generous eager stretchd out afore me
Like many yards of fine cloth
Ambrose and me dance long
Then walk on down the field and he tell me now
Look up and I tip back So many stars never seed
Stretch into blackness without end
It’s a form that allows patterns and repetitions – of the seasons, of labour – and continuities to be explored as richly as change. It’s open enough to encompass the stories of those Mary Ann has lived with and worked alongside: first the Woebegones and then, for many years, Harland Cottrell and his two sons, Blyth and Ned, where she goes unpaid except for food and lodging, and does most of the work of the resentful Nettie, as well as her own.
Mary Ann’s story has no full stops or commas and is textured by the idiosyncrasies of a particular life, a particular place. The only conventional markers of punctuation are capitals. The book is poem and novel and draws on the histories of both. Set out like a long narrative poem, it is rich with the poetry and hymns of the period, William Blake, William Wordsworth and John Clare amongst others. Gothic echoes play through the plot in the idea of the story rediscovered, crimes concealed and revealed. Within this rich texture, I saw or/and imagined many traces: Pip turned upside down by Magwitch, Heathcliff’s early days at Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre’s stubbornness. And Mary Ann is a 19th century outsider to the nth degree: orphan, ‘deformed’, routinely taken for a fool, always seeing more than she is supposed to, but not always seeing enough. As I read it, I thought too of the way Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton originated as John Barton, a story about Mary’s father, a factory worker and political activist and how Gaskell cannot follow that initial project through.
Mary Ann Sate Imbecile tells the stories that Gaskell and many other 19th century middle-class writers couldn’t write. Mary Ann’s text begins in the command to write someone else’s story, a demand she subverts to write her own. She becomes the witness to her own life, a life that stands for numerous others, lost and forgotten. Jolly’s representations of Mary Ann learning to read and write capture the power and exhilaration of both, of what they make possible:
There are lots of questions here, probably too many for a single discussion. I do hope you find some of them interesting. If you read Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves in your book group, I’d love to hear from you. Use the contact form below or contact me via Twitter @RachelMalik99 or on Instagram at RachelMalikWriter and let me know how you got on. Enjoy!
Available in paperback from February 2018
Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves starts in June 1940. Why do you think that it starts there and not earlier or later?
What are the key differences between Rene and Elsie?
What draws the two women together?
What are the things that make Elsie vulnerable? What makes her strong?
Some readers have said that they found it difficult to like Rene after they discover she has left her children. How did you feel about Rene? Did you change your mind in the course of the book? Do you think you have to like the main characters in novels?
How important are place/countryside/nature in the novel? Think about all the farming, gardening and walking that happens in the novel, and the visit to the White Horse…
What is the significance of the actress Mona Verity (Vicky), and cinema more generally, to Rene as a character?
What does home mean in the novel? How important is home to Rene and Elsie?
Did you feel any sympathy for Ernest?
Why is the trial so devastating for both Rene and Elsie? Arguably it isn’t either the verdict or their temporary separation …
In what ways does the flood affect the trial? [clue: there was no flood in Winchester at the time of Rene’s trial!)
How important is the wartime and post-war setting to the story? Are Rene and Elsie of their time?
Is Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves a love story? What other kind of story might it be?
Why do you think the novel is called Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves?
Rebecca West’s first novel The Return of the Soldier was first published in 1918 and has just been republished for the Virago 40 series. At the beginning of the novel, the soldier of the title is injured and sent back from France. But Chris Baldry, though an important character, is secondary to the women who must care for him. The novel itself is primarily about the role and labour of women in wartime. Not the nurses, ambulance drivers or munitions workers but all the nurturing, disciplining and symbolic work done by sisters, wives, mothers and lovers, who try to maintain the home fire and the soldiers who defend it.
A propaganda poster taken from an article by Jo Fox about the role of women in World War One from the British Library website
West’s first novel is a variation on a story familiar from romance and melodrama: two women who have claims on one man. What does each woman promise? What values does each represent? And who will the man eventually choose? Wife Kitty and old sweetheart Margaret are the undeclared rivals for Chris. But this is the scaffold for a far more complex and demanding drama about class and gender pressed to extremes in wartime.
For a start, the narrator Jenny is Chris’s cousin, half in love with Chris herself and alternately jealous of the other two women. Chris is also a man of substance, the owner of Baldry Court with its stables, kennels and views of wet ‘emerald pastureland’ – a home made beautiful by Kitty and Jenny. The novel begins when Jenny and Kitty discover that Chris has been injured. They don’t receive this news through the usual channel though – the dreaded letter or telegram. A woman called Margaret Grey arrives with the message – a stranger to Jenny and Kitty – and this is the first sign that something is wrong.
Chris’s injury isn’t immediately clear: he’s been ‘hurt’, ‘wounded, but not dangerously’; Kitty is soon speculating that Chris may be ‘all broken and queer.’ For Chris has amnesia (a ‘shellburst’, ‘shellshock’ – there isn’t a settled word) and he has lost – or rejected – fifteen years of his life. He is unable to remember his wife, his marriage, his business, or the birth and death of his young son. He is locked in a time before the onset of responsibilities, when he was in love with Margaret, then unmarried. After a disastrous first evening at Baldry Court, Chris declares: ‘If I don’t see Margaret Allington I shall die.’ Kitty reluctantly accedes to his request.
The competition between Kitty and Margaret is unequal – in so many ways. To Kitty and Jenny, Margaret’s class represents a crisis and a terrible disruption to the life of Baldry Court. Jenny’s first description of Margaret fixates on her cheap clothes – the re-dyed feather on her hat, her ‘red, seamed hands’ – with a particularly feminine antagonism. She is described as something dirty, ‘repulsively soiled with poverty and neglect’, likened to a forgotten glove in a hotel room.
Worse is what Margaret says to Kitty by way of an introduction: ‘”My general is sister to your second housemaid”’. Margaret has a maid, Kitty has numerous – Margaret is not working-class but lower middle class. Like the clerk Leonard Bast in Howards End (1910), it is Margaret’s social proximity that renders her repellent and dangerous, not her distance. Initially Kitty refuses to believe that Margaret could even know Chris, accusing her of extortion. Jenny is kinder and unwillingly senses Margaret is telling the truth. Nevertheless, Jenny quickly rewrites honesty from the standpoint of pity, likening Margaret to a ‘clumsy animal’, ‘a draught ox or the big trusted dog.’ The differences between Jenny and Kitty’s understanding of Margaret are central and as the novel progresses the question of who Margaret really is comes to the fore.
Rebecca West, born Cicely Fairfield, 1892-1983
When Kitty and Jenny allow Margaret into their lives for the sake of Chris, her social danger multiplies. Jenny must visit Margaret’s house Mariposa in ‘a town of people who could not do as they like’, too close to the railway line and with a sofa upholstered in a ‘sickish green’ velveteen. Margaret greets her with ‘disordered hair’ and ‘floury hands’. The novel is obsessed with hands and Margaret’s red, seamed ones in particular. In contrast, Baldry Court, redesigned by Kitty at enormous expense, is full of shining, shallow luxury and nearly invisible labour.
But whilst one part of Jenny’s narration focuses on the all too palpable social world, a second strand, consciously, sometimes awkwardly, symbolic, introduces another world or dimension. Associated first with Jenny’s anxious dreams about Chris in No Man’s Land and her childhood memories, Jenny’s Chris was the imaginative boy who believed that ‘the birch tree would really stir and shrink and quicken into an enchanted princess.’ Much later, Jenny has a vision of the Front as a literal hell in which Chris must choose between two crystal balls he is offered by a malevolent shopkeeper: one contains Jenny and Kitty, the other Margaret. This hell dreamt by Jenny has an alternative though, which is different from both Baldry Court and Mariposa. This place is Monkey Island, where Chris and Margaret fell in love.
1940 edition of The Return of the Soldier
Two long passages from Chris and Margaret’s points of view, look back to this past together (before they meet in the present). Monkey Island is a ‘real’ place, near Bray and the rural, water-bound inn, its garden fringed by chestnuts and walnuts, is where Margaret and her father live and work. Prosaically, Margaret is the innkeeper’s daughter but in Chris’s account she is the spirit of a secret pastoral. While Margaret’s father chases after his beloved ducks and rabbits and Margaret prepares tea, a Romantic evening settles, transforming everything and everyone. Later in the moonlight, Margaret becomes a goddess when she is lifted by Chris into one of the niches of a Greek-style temple. ‘By its light he could not tell if her hair was white or silver or yellow or gold … His love was changeless.’ And nothing changes when he sees her again. In Chris’s eyes, Margaret isn’t a publican’s daughter or a married woman with cheap, clicking stays and red hands, she is the woman he loves and the ageless and classless essence of the nurturing feminine. Later on, Margaret seems to acquire the powers of a medium when she seems able to conjure the very character of Chris’s dead son by touching the little boy’s things. The novel’s story is as much about Jenny’s learning to see Margaret in these same hallowed terms as it is about the struggle over Chris.
In a letter to The Observer from June 1928, responding to a negative review of a stage adaptation of the novel, West wrote that the idea for the story came:
from two sources … It happened that in 1914 I heard of one of the first cases of amnesia the war produced; this reminded me of a paper I had read in a medical journal before the war in which a factory doctor had recorded without comment the case of an elderly factory hand who fell down a staircase on his head and came to himself under the delusion that he was a boy of twenty; and later gave great pain to his wife by repudiating and demanding a sweetheart from whom he had been separated for many years.
Later she found the character model for Margaret and ‘the whole story slipped into wartime.’ West translated the story she read about the old factory hand who fell down the stairs into an upper middle class setting (probably not surprising) but the war – rather than a fall down the stairs – and Chris’s relative youth steer West’s narrative carefully away from any comic possibility. The phrase ‘slipped into wartime’ suggests both inevitability and chance, and this seems congruent with the peculiar status the war has in the novel. On the one hand there is a familiar juxtaposition between England and the Front.
Winifred Knights, Cliffs at Beer, Devon (1922)
England is represented as the land itself and a feminine that must be protected at all costs. John Buchan’s South African hero James Hannay, finally ‘gets’ England in Mr Standfast (1919) when he spends a charmed afternoon in the Cotswolds having met the woman – working as a nurse – whom he will later marry. Baldry Hall with its horses and dogs seems to be an emblem of the England that makes the war worth fighting. It certainly is for Kitty and Jenny at the start of the novel. But not it seems for Chris. By refusing to remember, by aligning with the Margaret of Monkey Island, he is also refusing to fight. The wartime horizon also means that this isn’t just Chris’s story but the story of any man who returns from the horrors of the front and finds home means nothing to him. The surplus of women in the novel, the failure of a new generation (Kitty and Margaret have both had children who die very young), the uncanny alienation and disorientation experienced by Chris but also Kitty and Jenny when the soldier returns – these too are the effects of war. There are moments too when the war blasts through the apparent solidity of home, of England (compare Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Repression of War Experience’ or Septimus Warren Smith’s visions of dead soldiers in Regents Park in Mrs Dalloway). Jenny sees Chris in No Man’s Land in her dream, but it is Margaret who finally brings the war home to roost when she goes out to meet Chris for the first time at Baldry Court:
How her near presence had been known by Chris I do not understand, but there he was, running across the lawn as night after night I had seen him in my dreams in No Man’s Land. I knew that so he would close his eyes as he ran; I knew that so he would pitch on his knees, when he reached safety. I assumed that at Margaret’s feet lay safety, even before I saw her arms brace him under the armpits with a gesture that was not passionate, but rather the movement of one carrying a wounded man from under fire.
Here Margaret becomes the comrade who rescues Chris’s battle-worn body. Her goodness and nurturing strength are what enable Jenny to understand that the world represented by Baldry Court is not worth fighting for. Positioning Margaret in an alternative realm allows the ‘horror’ that Jenny (and Kitty) feel at her class to be side-lined. By turning Margaret into an exceptional figure and giving Chris a kind of preternatural vision, she transcends the ugly stain of class. Goodness and love are not where you always expect to find them, the novel seems to say, but the ugly place from which Margaret comes remains ugly and dangerous. Part of what makes the novel so compelling is that it can’t quite shut the box of frogs it opens with Margaret’s calling card.
At the end, Margaret is once again the agent of change; she who, with regret, agrees to return Chris to the present, sharing with the psychiatrist brought in to treat Chris, the understanding that normality and happiness rarely align. Neither Chris nor Kitty, can choose their futures. Only Margaret the outsider (old sweetheart, other woman, lower middle class) can make the choice that remakes normality, but this is only possible through a profound act of renunciation. She gives up her own happiness and also any hope that Chris will have a good life. She has knowingly returned the soldier. The novel is also Jenny’s grim Bildungsroman, the story of her education, grim because she must then continue to live amongst what she knows to be ruins. She must conspire in the terrible twist that the ending adds to the novel’s title: remaking Chris as the soldier. This moment too is multiplied by the wartime context and the novel leaves us asking how many other women contributed to making soldiers fit for sacrifice in this way?
Virago 2018 edition
You can read more about the role of women in World War One propaganda at the British Library Website
For a very different account of the war, try Mary Borden’s Forbidden Zone, first published in 1929, which offers an extraordinary, nightmarish, and in places, surreal account of the front line and is based on her experience as a nurse. You can read it here:
Some of the books I’ve read this year in preparation. Full syllabus below.
