Archives: Persephone Forum

Holding the family blotter up to her mirror, among the patchy imprints of old letters and childish scribblings, Louisa Ashton makes out a recent address: ‘Miss Mabel Dawson, Springfield, Elton.’ That she should have been unaware of her son’s amorous ‘intentions’ neither shocks nor surprises her. Jim, in his thirties, has become ‘a mere lodger’. She is accustomed to the fact that he offers no information, and she asks no questions. But people, and events, leave traces.

Dorothy Whipple gently urges her reader to hold the mirror to the blotter. Having created fully rounded characters, she reveals them only gradually. They are true to life, precisely because we don’t know all there is to know about them. She never suspends the narrative to provide a back story but we don’t for a moment doubt that each character has one. Reading her novels (and her short stories) we learn to watch carefully for the most delicately dropped detail, and to listen for the slightest change of voice – her consummate mastery of indirect reported speech makes it easy to miss the moment when she exposes a character’s unspoken (never intended to be spoken) opinions, fears, regrets or desires.

Greenbanks opens in 1909, eight years after the death of Queen Victoria and a few months before the coronation of George V. It concludes a few years after the end of the First World War, covering a period of social upheaval in the course of which women’s expectations were radically transformed, and the certainties of men challenged. Fifty-six in 1909, Louisa Ashton was born a Victorian, reared her children in a Victorian nursery, and, while far from blind to the unfairnesses of convention, is as reluctant openly to question the authority of her husband, her sons and even her sons-in-law, as she is to exchange her unfashionable bonnet for a twentieth-century hat.

 

 

Though not exceptionally so for the period, the Ashtons are a large family: Louisa, a diffident matriarch, her serially unfaithful husband, Robert, and their children, Thomas, Jim, Rose, Letty, Laura, Charles, and ‘the two other babies who had died’, quiet little tragedies not forgotten, mentioned but not dwelt on. Thomas, Rose and Letty have married and moved out of the family home, Thomas to Birmingham, Rose to the suburbs of London. Only Letty has remained close by, with her controlling husband Ambrose Harding and their four children, three sons and a daughter, Rachel. Three of the Ashton children are still at home: Jim in charge of the family timber business, Laura, and Charles, at twenty-six, the youngest son, adored, pampered and indulged by his mother, and an irritation to his siblings.

Like many large families the Ashtons find silence safer than speech. Louisa must cosset her favourite inconspicuously. When Ambrose (who values his own opinions too highly to keep them to himself) complains of his young brother-in-law’s idleness, she must stifle a caustic response, ‘her policy was not to say anything, to let remarks like that slide away without the emphasis of a quarrel, so that nobody would notice when Charles wasn’t really working at the timber yard.’ When Laura announces her (second), most unwelcome, engagement, her mother takes no risks: ‘Tell me about it, love,’ invited Louisa gently. She smoothed her face of all anxiety, in case anxiety should annoy Laura who was now so easily annoyed.’ Laura’s father’s attitude is not very different, though more cynically expressed. ‘I’ve never talked to any of them about these things. Not in my line at all … But don’t worry, Lou. Children will go their own ways. Parents are utterly useless after infancy. We feed and shelter them. That’s our part. What theirs is, I’ve never been able to find out.’

But while Robert finds distracting comfort in the arms of a barmaid, or two, Louisa does worry. She worries about those who, in the eyes of others, she loves too much, ‘Always there was this need of defending your children; no matter how old you got, you had to keep on with that …’  She worries about the child she no longer loves enough, Jim, fastidious and critical, and more difficult to keep house for than all the others put together, reminding herself how she prayed for his life when he had scarlet fever, how she fainted when his delirium ceased. ‘God had answered her prayers and saved his life, and now she felt awkward with him at meals.’ The table which in the opening pages of the novel was fully expanded to accommodate three generations of Ashtons celebrating Christmas, has, over subsequent Christmases, required the addition of fewer and fewer leaves. Mother and son sit across it alone: ‘… the cloth touched the floor all the way round.’ What an image of emptiness.

Dorothy Whipple skilfully holds the shot, letting the camera, as it were, do the speaking. The shrinking table tells the story of the shrinking family; Louisa’s chip bonnet affirms her preference for the past. A cigar speaks volumes about Ambrose Hastings’ obsessive unease concerning his status in the family, and the mild contempt which his wife’s father feels for him: ‘remembering anew, that, although good, it was not one of his father-in-law’s best.’ All those staccato commas, and the ‘anew’ – he’s grinding an old axe – brilliant. ‘Plum: October 10th 1914’: a jam label heralds the tragedies of the First World War. The variety of going away presents Charles receives when he leaves (at his brothers’ insistence) for South Africa perfectly illustrates his indecisive and dilettante character: a fountain pen, a revolver, a writing case, a ground sheet, a patent foot-rule, a shooting-stick, sleeve-links, a folding stool, binoculars, books and other implements of war and peace.’ An ottoman in Louisa’s bedroom holds a wealth of tiny memory triggers: the boned bodice of her wedding dress, the silk and lace ‘fretted in holes by the years’; a piece of sprigged muslin from the dress she was wearing as a young wife when she first saw Robert kissing another woman; a little night gown with featherstitching on the hem, in which ‘Jane, the tiny red-headed one, had died’. Traces. The exquisite detail of the featherstitching is as heart-breaking as the defining red hair. Whipple’s sensitivity to the delight and despair of parenting is remarkable. She and her husband apparently had no children, but one does wonder if in the first ten years of their marriage, before she started writing, there weren’t perhaps some little tragedies.

 

 

Dorothy Whipple asks us not only to look, but to listen, and not only to what people say.  ‘Rachel’s feet made a light, quick patter, Louisa’s hardly any sound at all, because she wore flat shoes and did not nowadays lift them very high.’ We hear how, divided in age by more than half a century (which we already know and which Dorothy Whipple would not repeat) the old woman and the child keep step. The bond between Louisa and her youngest grandchild is central to the novel, the majority of whose characters are in their late thirties or early forties – what was then middle age, and they see life from very different angles: Rachel is too young, even in her teens, fully to understand the passions of the ‘grown-ups’, her grandmother too old.  Louisa cannot comprehend the unrest of her daughters. Rachel, for whom her grandmother is somehow beyond age, thinks of her parents’ generation as old, too old for change, and, although she does not quite challenge their right to it, too old for love.  Not assuming to understand each other, the two of them have a rich and fruitful relationship, which feeds both, and is, crucially, without expectations, or the consequent disappointments. Louisa can give as much as she feels able, and wishes to give, and asks nothing in return. ‘She wondered if she had taken the same deep pleasure in her own girls, and could not remember that she had.’ The comma most brilliantly captures a moment of reflection, and regret. Mozart is reported to have said that the most powerful effect in music was ‘no music’, the ‘perfectly placed rest’. Dorothy Whipple’s ‘rests’ are perfectly placed.

 

 

If Louisa and Letty were able to discuss it, which they aren’t – are any mothers and daughters? – they would find their experience of motherhood not so very different. Letty’s more hands-on approach has been no less dispiriting: ‘while the children were very young, it had been one long scramble to look after them; to get them up, put them to bed, feed them, see to their clothes, take them out, amuse them; and now that they were growing up they were growing away from her.’ Her husband’s lament is no less heartfelt, though more bitter than hers, less phlegmatic than Robert Ashton’s, and predictably to do with his own material sacrifice: ‘You denied yourself all the amenities of life; you lived in a small way in a small house, you had no car, you never travelled, you smoked inferior cigars, drank inferior wine, made your overcoat do three winters, did without what you wanted for years to pay for their education, and as soon as they were of an age to make some return, either in companionship or in money, they went off and left you …’

In addition, he finds that ‘Letty was no companion to him … It was as if she blamed him. Blamed him for what? Ambrose was bewildered and indignant.’ In terms of ‘return’, marriage is no less reliable in the long run than parenthood. Letty had liked Ambrose for being ‘solid’, unlike her father, and as the years went on found him (to her dismay) increasingly solid: ‘It was queer, it was frightening, she thought, how in life you got what you wanted.’ Her mother, Letty believes, lived for and through other people, but she ‘wanted something for herself’. Envious of her sister, Laura, who has made her bid for freedom and happiness, she pictures an ideal husband, no handsome Lothario, but one who would laugh at what she laughed at, enjoy ‘shop incidents, tram incidents, street incidents – all the queer, funny things that go to make up every day.’ Do we hear the author’s voice here?

In fact, Louisa’s resignation is not quite as complete as her daughter thinks. We have heard Louisa say ruefully (to herself), ‘it’s different for women; they bear what others do; they watch them come and go, they are torn and healed and torn again.’ Letty is brave, but so was her mother. Will Rachel come to recognise her mother’s enduring courage in staying in an unrewarding marriage, so poignantly described: ‘He gave her, more and more frequently, the same flat exhausted feeling she had when she tried to carry a mattress downstairs unaided … but of course you couldn’t give up; you couldn’t sit down in the middle of the stairs with a great burden like that; you had to carry it the whole way, until you could put it down somewhere final.’ Will Rachel later appreciate what it took for Letty to side with her against Ambrose, who disapproves of women’s education as fiercely as he disapproves of divorce and condemns illegitimacy.

Ambrose later recognises that he has made mistakes, but we are left in no doubt that he will continue to make them. This staunch upholder of the double standard, who clings to the old order, as firmly as Louisa clung to her bonnet,  feeling abandoned by his daughter and (more unreasonably) by his wife, plaintively asks himself what he has done not to be loved by them: a question which he lacks the self-awareness to answer.  He will never embrace change, and history is not on the side of men like him. ‘The war had blown most people’s ideas sky-high, and the pieces had not yet come down. When they did come down, they would never fit together again as they had done before the war.’

 

 

 

The future belongs to Rachel, and to John, the illegitimate son of Louisa Ashton’s one time protegée and later companion, Kate Barlowe, for whom motherhood brought only social opprobrium. Forced to give up her son at birth, she has known nothing of the delights or sorrows of parenting, a sad story which subtly counterpoints the Ashtons’. Where they regretfully watch their children leave the nest, she is unable to welcome back the child who wants to rebuild a nest, with her. ‘The lust for saying “no” grew and flourished when she fed it daily’, and Kate, who has reached out once too often for happiness, is unable to embrace the redemption that John is offering.

At the end of They Knew Mr Knight (PB No. 19) Celia Blake thanks God for the fact things have, after all, been ‘put into their right proportion’. Louisa Ashton does the same. In spite of everything, they are content, comfortable, as the French expression goes, in their skin. ‘Another nice day,’ says Louisa’s maid, Bella, unblessed in looks, or love, but cheerful nonetheless.  ‘For some, yes; for others no,’ adds Dorothy Whipple, from whom we do not expect conventionally ‘happy endings’. Her characters are so real that we can dare to speculate who might fall into the first group and who into the second. Laura, Letty and Louisa – yes; Jim, Kate and Ambrose – no.  Will Rachel and John be happy? Possibly, if they seize their luck, and don’t expect too much.

At the beginning of this month the Prime Minister announced that, in order to commemorate the centenary of British women’s enfranchisement, a statue of the pioneer of women’s suffrage, Millicent Fawcett, was to be erected next year in Parliament Square. Not, one might say, before time.

 

In October 1905 two women interrupted a Liberal rally: they wanted to hear Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Grey’s view on women’s suffrage. Getting no answer from the politicians, the women raised the banner which they had been concealing, demanding ‘Votes for Women’. The women were ejected from the meeting, charged with causing an obstruction and assaulting a policeman, and arrested. Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney refused to pay the fine imposed, choosing instead to go to prison. Christabel Pankhurst needs no introduction; Annie Kenney was a mill-worker from Yorkshire, one of the 37 000 Northern textile workers to sign the petition making the same demand, delivered to Parliament three years earlier.

 

Before the 1905 protest, a Private Members’ Bill to enfranchise women had been squeezed out of parliamentary time by one requiring carts using public roads to be fitted with lights, but much had improved for some women in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Married Women’s Property Act had been passed in 1882, the Guardianship of Infants Act in 1886: this increased, but far from ensured, a mother’s custody rights (mothers did not get full equal custody rights with fathers until 1973). The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act had made divorce possible for ordinary people, but it was expensive, and a wife was required to prove cruelty, rape or incest in addition to adultery. Although they would not be paid the same as men nor enjoy the same employment rights, some professions were open to women. None of these changes, although loudly trumpeted by anti-suffragists, meant a great deal to working-class women, who had no property, could not afford to leave a brutal husband nor fight his abduction of their children, who had little or no schooling after the age of ten, and who were still many decades away from equal pay with men. Only the vote would give women power over political decision making, only the vote would bring improved working conditions, support family life and, the Suffragists believed, change the sexual double standard.

Annie Kenney was twenty-six in 1905 and had only recently joined the Women’s Social and Political Union, the activist breakaway movement led by Christabel and her mother, Emmeline, which had split from Millicent Fawcett’s non-militant National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1903. The only working-class woman to rise to the senior hierarchy of the essentially middle-class WSPU, she would be imprisoned a dozen more times and subjected on several occasion to the vile and violent practice of force-feeding.

Ten years older than Annie, inspired by the young mill-worker, the Pankhursts and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Lady Constance Lytton joined the WSPU in 1909, one of a small number of upper-class members. She was soon imprisoned for damaging an official car, but, to her irritation, swiftly released when her identity was revealed. In the Museum of London there is a beautifully designed banner, made to raise funds for the WSPU (it was bought by Mrs Pethick-Lawrence for £10). The names of the Pankhursts and Annie Kenney feature prominently in the top corners. Below, embroidered in purple thread, are the signatures of eighty suffragettes who were on hunger strike in Holloway Jail in 1909-10. Constance’s name is at the top of the second column; beside it, in the third column, in strikingly similar handwriting, is one Jane Warton. Wanting to share the experience of her fellow suffragettes, Lady Constance Lytton had re-joined the WSPU, in a new coat, a cloth hat, itchy gloves and scarf, plain glasses, and under a new name. Jane Warton, would not be spared the horrors of force-feeding.

 

 

‘Deeds not Words’ was the Suffragette mantra, and though the deeds may not have won over many opponents, they undoubtedly brought publicity to the cause.’Let Them Starve’ railed The Standard,  ‘Destruction of an Academy Picture – Suffragette Outrage’ complained the Daily Telegraph, ‘The Henpecking of Parliament – the latest Suffragette outrage’ mocked The Bystander. Their very name had been eagerly taken up by the women themselves, from a contemptuous tag coined in 1906 by the Daily Mail for their more moderate sisters, the Suffragists. It did the activists no harm. Worse was the ‘fake news’ peddled by some newspapers. Many falsely affirmed that in countries where women had been enfranchised the “experiment” had proved a failure.  In No Surrender Constance Maud quotes from a fictional article, by a sharp- tongued woman journalist, clearly based on a genuine one, probably several, affirming that women did not want the vote.

Constance Maud joined the WSPU in 1908. Although her ‘deeds’ were less ‘frontline’ than some – she did not set fire to letter boxes, chain herself to railings, or stone cars – she made an important contribution. Her earlier writings had not been without a political message, and she swiftly set to writing for suffrage journals. No Surrender was her ambitious attempt to pull together in a novel the many and complex strands of the movement, covering the background history, describing major public events, setting out the arguments for and against the cause as she heard them in all variety of contexts. She shows us families riven at every level of society, men and women, young and old, constitutionalist Suffragists, activist Suffragettes, and vociferous Anti-Suffragettes. Every point of view has its voice. Every problem is personified, from the overworked factory worker, the ill-treated wife, and the impregnated servant, to the underpaid teacher and the young upper-class woman struggling to explain her beliefs to a kind but old fashioned fiancé. No Surrender is a very full novel, perhaps too full: it is hard at times to keep track of the extended families, parents, children, cousins, in-laws, whose paths cross unexpectedly (and sometimes barely credibly it must be said).  The plot, such as it is, is little more than a vehicle for the polemics, some of the minor characters mere mouthpieces. But the thrill of the novel is the certain sense that we are reading raw history, as it happened, with the outcome unknown, heroines and heroes not conclusively anointed, events not yet polished into the linear narrative with which we are familiar.

 

 

There can be no doubt that Constance Maud knew both Annie Kenney and Constance Lytton aka Jane Warton, and that they are the models for Jenny Clegg and Mary O’Neil. The graphic description of prison life, the cell, the coarse clothes stamped with the prisoner’s arrow, and ill-fitting shoes, the compulsory bath, are clearly drawn ‘from life’, down to the V scratched with a hairpin and coloured with blood –  a detail from Constance Lytton’s own time in Holloway. The harrowing account of force-feeding inflicted on Mary O’Neil by three hard-hearted and jaundiced wardresses  – ‘”they’re all that impudent, these Suffragitts”’  –  and two savagely facetious doctors – ‘”be prepared for her kicking – they always do”’ warns one, ‘”I should go for the nose, it’s less bother on the whole”‘ advises the second – is all the more convincing for the clinical checklist of necessary equipment: ‘tubes, pumps, straps, and cord, steel wedge, an instrument for prising, sponge, towels, a wooden chair, and a big quart jug of beef tea.’ Hard to say which is the most chilling.

 

 

We can feel the heat in the fictional Greyston mill, hear the roar of whirling machinery, smell the foul air, and sense the constant underlying fear of being injured, blinded even, by a flying shuttle. Annie Kenney had herself lost a finger, severed by a spinning bobbin. We can hear the bitter anger in Constance Maud’s reflection on the social injustice: ‘Modern invention, so active in other directions, has not yet succeeded in discovering a means of protecting the weavers from these accidents.’ And we recognise the cut-glass voice of the mill-owner’s wife.  ‘”They’re used to it”’ is Lady’s Walker’s dismissive response, when challenged about the working conditions by Mary, her cousin’s daughter, and later by own daughter Alice. Her husband shamelessly declares that he will sack any worker who joins the Suffragettes.

Sir Godfrey Walker is a Liberal (the least liberal of all the parties) and fiercely anti; he must seek the support of Jenny’s one-time suitor, a socialist MP, also anti but for different reasons. The politics of women’s suffrage was complicated. Who should come first? Married women, but they would vote with their husbands. Single women, but how would they know who to vote for, and furthermore there were a million more women than men, from which it would follow that women would decide who governed. Women didn’t fight in wars, so why should they vote? Not all men are soldiers, should only soldiers vote? The arguments were fierce but not always rational.

In 1911, when No Surrender was published, the Anti-Suffrage league was still strong. The membership was by no means entirely male. The reasons women had for being against the vote were more varied than those of the men, many, like those in the novel, taking the extreme view that is was against nature, that women would forfeit the chivalry of men (tell that to the mill-workers!), others considering it sufficient that women should have role in local government. A piece in The Persephone Biannually No. 18, ‘Women Against the Vote’, gives an interesting insight into a different more radical case, put by a number of thinking women, for a ‘third house’, where a distinctive feminine voice would be heard, and not drowned out in the bombast of a male-dominated parliament.

At a London dinner party Constance Maud puts together a smattering of politicians, mostly anti, with a number of titled men and their wives, also anti, a bemused French count, Jenny posing as a maid and two young footmen, suffrage supporters (evidently not unusual). The stage is set, the roles determined. A lively and lengthy discussion ensues. The overbearing Lady Thistlethwaite argues that women must look up to men, Mrs Prendergast puts the Nature case, while the politician’s wife, Mrs Weir Kemp, keeps her counsel,  ‘she was a good listener, and to all the men, therefore, a charming woman’ – possibly one of those in favour of a ‘Diet of Women’. Lady Walker’s political son-in-law eventually declares: ‘”I think we’ve had enough of this tiresome subject don’t you”‘, to which his neighbour, a strident ‘anti’, replies, ‘”though I loathe it, I can’t keep off it.”’ Other times, a different cause, but isn’t there something disturbingly familiar, in post-referendum 2017?

 

 

Constance Maud divides her novel not into chapters but into Scenes. ‘The Dinner Party’ is one, ‘Canterbury Tales’ another: this introduces five very different Suffragettes gathered in a prison cell: the American (five US states, along with New Zealand, Australia, Finland and Norway, had already given women the vote), the older textile worker, the young dressmaker who has served a two-week sentence and can talk about prison, Jenny Clegg, and an elderly widow, a veteran, like her late husband, of the fight for the Married Women’s Property Act. It is a contrived gathering in which the exchange of historical information is barely disguised as dialogue, but nonetheless revealing.

Scene IX, ‘In Middleham Church’ provides some comic relief, as the upper-class congregation slumbers through the young clergyman’s sermon, deliberately altered to promote the cause when he catches sight of Jenny and her companions, until Lady Walker’s older daughter, realising what is going on, frantically and unsuccessfully tries to to signal to her husband, while at the same time bribing her young son with the promise of chocolates to leave the church, only to have him, to her helpless fury, gleefully accept a bunch of purple violets from one of the Suffragettes.

Constance Maud was too close to the events about which she wrote, and too uncertain of what the future held, to introduce humour in the way that Cicely Hamilton, her near contemporary, does in her post-suffragette novel William – An Englishman (Persephone Book No. 1): ‘As a matter of course he was a supporter of votes for women; an adherent (equally as a matter of course) of the movement in its noisiest and most intolerant form. He signed petitions denouncing forcible feeding and attended meetings advocating civil war; where the civil warriors complained with bitterness that the other side had hit them back.’ No-one who had seen the bruised and wasted bodies of Suffragettes and heard their verbatim accounts could have written that.

Most of the Scenes are reliant, sometimes to excess, on dialogue, but the final one is wonderfully visual, a theatrical ‘reveal’. Standing beside a young Brahmin law student (little did Constance Maud know what lay ahead for him), Alice Walker watches the Great Procession of women in June 1908, a ‘living river of women’, reckoned at between 200 000 and 300 000, winding round Hyde Park Corner and down Piccadilly. Banner after banner: veterans were followed by the élite of the WSPU, then all those who had been imprisoned for the cause, the University students and the doctors, the textile workers, the post-office clerks, the jelly-makers … the list is endless. At its best Maud’s writing is that of a fine journalist, seeing everything, and telling it in vivid colour.

The Suffragettes were well served by early film, Pathé News being unusually sympathetic. While reading No Surrender I watched the 1913 footage of Emily Davison’s funeral. Most of it is familiar, some used recently at the end of the 2015 film Suffragette, starring Cary Mulligan as a working-class activist. I had seen the crowds, the women in white carrying lilies, the men in boaters, but the final moments were new to me. Her coffin is carried down the steps of St George’s Holborn (not five minutes walk from the Persephone Bookshop). On her plain shroud is sewn a single large broad arrow, the prisoner’s badge of disgrace. Constance Maud would have noticed that.