Archives: Persephone Forum

 

 

‘… no-one has treated the casual things of daily life with such reverent and penetrating imagination’ … Roger Fry spoke these words in a lecture given at the close of the first Post Impressionist Exhibition arranged by him at the Grafton Gallery in 1910. Fry, who would be a lifelong friend of Virginia Woolf, was speaking of Cézanne. He might have been speaking about Virginia. Woolf’s biographer, Hermione Lee, considers her response to the paintings to have been ‘somewhat sceptical’, but, looking back on the occasion in her biography of Fry (1940), Virginia is clear that ‘something very important was happening’. She had recognised that 1910 marked a turning point, when writers as well as painters would begin to think about new forms. No-one since Chardin, Fry continued, ‘has found as he has, in the statement of their material qualities, a language that passes altogether beyond their actual associations with common use and wont.’

 

 

Much, rightly is made, of Virginia Woolf’s decision to use painting as the central image in To the Lighthouse, a painter as a central character, the ‘eyes’ of the novel. Perhaps a better informed Persephone reader can correct me, but I am not aware of any critic thrilling to her decision to see (and hear and smell) through the eyes (ears and nose) of a dog. I don’t know what Roger Fry thought of Flush (can anyone help?), but I like to think of him acknowledging that Virginia had found a ‘language’ as close as could be to that of the Post Impressionists. If Flush makes associations, they are not those that we would make; his wont is not ours. How different the world is viewed from eighteen inches above the ground, and with none of the stale preconceptions that dull our responses. Fry asked that people approach pictures with ‘tense passivity and alert receptiveness’. Oddly enough, one might use just these words to describe the best sort of dog.

 

 

Few challenge the view that Flush is a ‘light’ (Virginia’s word) novel, meant she says for ‘a joke with Lytton [Strachey]’, a break after completing The Waves. On 19 December 1932 she wrote in her diary, ‘I shall take up Flush again to cool myself’ (quoted by Frances Spalding in the excellent catalogue to the informative and deeply moving recent exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery).  While bemoaning the time spent revising and rewriting it, Virginia frequently dismisses it as that ‘little book’, or ‘that silly book’. That silly book proved a commercial success and a good earner for the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. But when it was published in 1933 only a few critics praised it, some loathed it (the Granta reviewer predicted the end of a promising literary career), many ignored it, and have by and large continued to do so, affording it only a passing mention between The Waves (1931) and The Years (1937). Only feminist critics have consistently waved the flag for it.

 

There is a serious message, and we mustn’t forget that Flush, sandwiched between the two great novels, The Waves (1931) and The Years (1937), also lies midway between A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Confined to her dark, stifling, crowded room by illness and the whim of a domineering (but not unloved) father unable to let go of any of his children (12 in all, of which those who married were disinherited), Elizabeth Barrett in turn, and with similar, unintended selfishness, keeps her little dog close by, so that like her he is ‘cut off from air, light, freedom’, until his limbs are almost as stiff as hers. While his new mistress is metaphorically chained to the sofa, her spaniel, lately running free in the fields of Berkshire, must be literally chained for his daily walks along the asphalt paths of Regent’s Park. Having fathered a pup in his rural youth, Flush is emasculated by the over-upholstered, stuffy Wimpole Street sitting room; the one time hunting dog is fed with a silver fork and drinks from a porcelain bowl. If, occasionally he ran to the door on hearing another dog, ‘when Miss Barrett called him back, when she laid her hand on his collar, he could not deny that another feeling, urgent, contradictory, disagreeable – he did not know what to call it or why he obeyed it – restrained him.’

 

A dog could be tamed, like a Victorian woman, entrapped in silken skeins, of love and duty, even the most spirited, most aristocratic of dogs, even successful and respected poetesses. Although not laboured, Virginia Woolf’s feminism is never far below the surface, too far for some, who have criticised her for relegating the life story of Miss Barrett’s loyal maid Lily Wilson to a footnote: but it is a very long footnote, comically long, revealing more about the life of a servant than many employers even knew, and in any case the footnotes are hardly footnotes at all, but rather a series of asides.

 

Her social commentary is acute, sometimes angry. The upper class obsession with ancestry is roundly mocked in the opening pages charting Flush’s pedigree back into the mists of time. She does not contain her outrage concerning the appalling slums a stone’s throw from Bloomsbury, only cleared in her lifetime: the Rookeries, behind St Giles’ Circus, according to Peter Ackroyd ‘embodied the worst living conditions in all of London’s history’ – conditions actually little different from those in which Flush finds himself when he is kidnapped.

 

But above all Flush is light and witty, and though she hated the prospect of readers describing it as charming,  I defy anyone who has ever owned and loved a dog not to be charmed, seduced, convinced by the dogginess. Anyone who has walked with a dog and waited while they sniff, and sniff will be aware that beneath our feet is a world of delights which, with our rudimentary noses, we can never know. Nor do we have ‘more than two words and one half for what we smell.’ The scents of the city are quite as beguiling, more complex, than country ones: for all that Flush was to all intents and purposes like his mistress a prisoner in Wimpole Street, for a creature with a good nose life was never dull.

 

 

But the smells of London, though interesting, were as nothing compared to the Florentine richness that Flush would discover later on, when both he and Miss Barrett enjoyed the happiest years of their lives, and the most free. In two pages, Virginia Woolf writes a virtual Baedeker for dogs, describing in sensuous detail the attractions likely to appeal to the four legged visitor: wine, leather, garlic, grapes, incense and more. And Florence, it seems, is also a delight to the paws with its  ‘marmoreal smoothness’, ‘gritty and cobble roughness’; the sensitive pads of the canine connoisseur will also appreciate ‘the clear stamp of proud Latin inscriptions.’ This is Italy as we can never know it.

 

Nor can we hear a distant footfall and reliably distinguish the friendly step from the unfriendly, or accurately guess from the first sound of a broom at what time visitors are expected. Individual words are redundant when tone of voice is all a dog needs to interpret emotions. Hearing Miss Barrett and Mr Browning as they ‘cooed and clucked’ suffices to inflame Flush’s jealousy. Some American academics have, incidentally, recently published in a respected journal a long article, liberally scattered with symbols and formulae and graphs, proving that dogs are significantly more jealous when their human engages with another human, than when she reads a book, or (very American this) talks to a Halloween pumpkin  …  If dogs could laugh!

 

So, our human noses and ears are no match for those of a dog; our eyes serve us well enough, but few are able to appreciate objects for their appearance and not their function. On his first trip to Oxford Street, Flush ‘saw houses made almost entirely of glass. He saw windows laced across with glittering streamers; heaped with gleaming mounds of pink, purple, yellow, rose… He entered mysterious arcades filmed with clouds and webs of tinted gauze …’  Later he watched Miss Barrett’s fingers ‘forever crossing a white page with a straight stick and longed for the time when he too should blacken paper as she did.’ In a supreme example of showing, rather than telling, the reader is invited to see as a dog sees. We can then, with a (condescending?)  smile, congratulate ourselves on guessing correctly what the humans are doing . Miss Barrett and Wilson disappear for a while and when Miss B returns, Flush notices a gold band shining on her hand, watches her slip it off and hide it. Even if we knew nothing of the Barretts of Wimpole Street, we would speculate that a clandestine marriage has taken place. When Miss Barrett, now Mrs Browning and living in Florence is seen to become suddenly busy with a needle, we understand, long before Flush, what to expect.

 

 

Much later, as an old dog, sleeping, as dogs do, under a drawing-room table, he is startled to find himself hemmed in by ‘the billowing of skirts and the heaving of trousers’, and the table ‘swaying violently from side to side.’ The reader herself might be puzzled but here the authorial voice takes over, with a witty and cynical account of Victorian spiritualism, the popularity of which is astonishing to most people, and unfathomable to even the cleverest of dogs, which Flush most clearly is, cleverest and bravest, and it has to be said, most charming.

This ‘little book’ is a tiny treasure chest: vignettes of Victorian domestic life, nineteenth century womanhood, an improbable love affair and marriage, glimpses of Italian cities and political turmoil, and above all, although we can only guess at its accuracy, a rare glimpse into the rich inner life of a dog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘May we go up and see the house?’: a ghost story opening to a bitter-sweet fairy story, in which the rags to riches trajectory is reversed, and the heroine lives happily but at a terrible price.

 

 

 

It is the summer of 1935. A young English couple with an American friend arrive at the gates of a fine, apparently uninhabited, eighteenth century house on the shores of Fife, not far from Edinburgh. Before the echoes of their knocking have died away, in true fairy-story fashion the door is opened by a tiny figure in a black dress, who asks no questions. While the two men admire the architecture of Keepsfield, the interiors, the fine furniture, the paintings, Helen Dacre hangs on the enigmatic caretaker’s stories of the absent Countess of Lochlule, to whom the house belongs. Helen is entranced, quite literally. Questions spring from her mouth which she had not thought of asking: the mysterious Mrs Memmary seems somehow to be prompting her.  A ‘chance’ (or is it?) encounter with a woman of a different era, has enabled Mrs Memmary, with the help of an anthropomorphised figure of Time (this is a fairy story), to recount the life of Lady Rose, fully and for the first time – or so we are inclined to believe.

 

 

 

 

The more Helen learns about the Countess, Lady Rose, the more probing her questions become, and the better she is able to anticipate the answers. She watches Mrs Memmary, she listens and, most importantly, she feels, so that when the story of Lady Rose’s life reaches its pivotal point, she knows that there will be no ‘happy ever after’ dénouement. ‘It should have been like that – but from your face I see – I feel – it was different. You’re going to tell me that something dreadful happened!’ ‘It was dreadful,’ replies Mrs Memmary, ‘because of those days she lived in.’ The italics are mine.

Lady Rose’s story opens in 1861, her sixth birthday. ‘She was the happiest little girl in Scotland’, and one of the richest. She has big, bonny Nanny and a devoted governess. Her birthday breakfast is served to her by the schoolroom maid and an under-footman. Her birthday dress is of the softest grey merino with a wide rose-coloured sash, and her presents six gold sovereigns, and a pony and trap. When she demands an apple and sugar for her pony, these are brought by a footman, on a silver salver, with a silver knife, and a silver bowl. So far so fairy-story, and every little girl’s dream (Ruby Ferguson would later write very successfully for children – I was a devotee of her ‘pony books). Only the adult reader pauses for thought. Was this perhaps the same footman who had to enquire for her if Papa had time to see her before leaving for London to see the Queen, Rose’s Mama’s plans for the day being to complete her embroidery and visit a friend in Edinburgh?

We are in the age and the social stratum (and literary genre) where the presence of a loving mother and father was not thought to be a prerequisite of a ‘happy’ childhood. If Mrs Memmary sounds a little wistful when asked if the Earl and Countess of Lochlule later missed their daughter when they had sent her away to school, replying, ‘I can’t say that, but she wrote to her Mamma very often’, there is no hint of criticism. And, though she did not like her teachers and failed at most lessons, plucky Lady Rose made good friends at school, her absent parents sent her lavish presents and generous amounts of pocket money, and she could be confident that when buttons were in fashion her dress would have the most, and then when cakes were delivered to the girls, hers would be the biggest. Bizarre as it seems to post-Freudian generations, Rose’s childhood is not an unhappy one.

As a child she could from time to time roam beyond the castle walls – one unaccompanied walk leads to a charming beach encounter with Charles Kingsley and a lifelong love for The Water Babies. School had rules, but she was grand enough to stand up to them. As they approach their first ‘season’ she and her friends can begin to entertain fantasies of married life, ‘a kind of ideal and undefined state when you lived blissfully under another name, and had your own carriage and didn’t have to ask permission from Mamma when you wanted to go out.’  They do not notice how gradually in fact their little freedoms are being eroded.  As Rose and her friends grow up, the clouds are gathering.

 

 

For an eighteen-year old girl of the upper classes in the 1870s there was no future without marriage, and outside the pages of novels, which Rose’s aunt would have her stopped from reading, bliss was very far from guaranteed, freedom a chimera. Unmarried after three seasons a girl could be assumed to be ‘on the shelf’, and her parents could no longer pretend to have any control over her. Daughters were to be ‘disposed of’ as swiftly as possible, like an unwanted litter of puppies’.

And the mothers know it. They too have been disposed of, and many of them will have spent years in a loveless marriage, love, as Rose’s aunt (the same aunt) so bluntly puts it, being ‘an emotion to be enjoyed only by the middle classes’. Perhaps still only in their thirties, the mothers find themselves on the chaperones’ chairs ensuring that their daughters make the right impression. ‘People are watching you,’ warns the Countess. A girl’s reputation hangs on a slender thread. Once their daughters are ‘out’ (what a curious but telling word), the mothers cannot protect them from society’s strictures.  Young Rose does not challenge the conventions. Therein lie the seeds of her tragedy.

 

 

 

The idyll of childhood, which makes the first part of the novel so enchanting, as full of froth as the carriage carrying Rose and her friends to their first ball, where every inch ‘foamed with their billowing dresses’, is over. A marriage has been arranged. Poor Rose, only her future husband’s Aunt Katy expresses any sympathy, ‘she doesn’t know what love is. Hope to God she never will’ (what shadow, we wonder, lies in Katy’s past? Did she at some point slip her leash?). But Rose is stoical, and her obedience is unquestioning. ‘I have to get married; and he’s a Scot and Redlace is so near, and everybody seems pleased and so am I.’

Redlace is her husband’s home, but as a result of the Earl’s untimely death, and the peculiarity of Scottish inheritance laws, Rose will never live there. As the heiress to the title and to her father’s estate, she remains at her beloved Keepsfield, where her husband, to his chagrin, must join her. What might have brought her rare status for a woman in the nineteenth century, have given her a measure of equality within her marriage, does nothing of the sort. ‘“I don’t think Sir Hector ever quite forgave Queen Victoria”, said Mrs Memmary.’ But Helen’s suggestion that Sir Hector might have displayed ‘a sense of ranklement’ is summarily dismissed, ‘People of position would rather have died than reveal to the common public that there was anything wrong in their domestic relations.’

How different reflects Helen from couples of her day, and of her class, who ‘expect everything in marriage, and if we don’t get it we announce our dissatisfaction in no uncertain terms.’ The lives of the two women differ in almost every possible way. Helen’s middle-class but austere upbringing, her University education, intellectual friends and marriage of equals are in stark contrast to those of Lady Rose. What they have in common is their respective lack of knowledge of a world outside their own. If the young Rose knows anything (at all) of middle class life, or Helen of the upper classes, it is from books. Ruby Ferguson reminds us that we all have our blind spots, that it can be unwise to pass judgement too swiftly.

She is clear, nevertheless, on the need for women to embrace freedom where they can, and speaks through Rose’s delightful friend Susan, still single at 29 – ‘they couldn’t get anyone to marry me’ – who fiercely believes that women should be free to do the same things as men, and be doctors and lawyers and financiers.  For her own part Susan has managed little on the feminist front apart from reading the newspapers and riding astride, and her one dream for herself is limited, ‘to belong to the middle-classes. They fall in love, and marry who they like, and become nurses, and write books.’ Ironically that is also unachievable. Social barrier read ‘no entry’ on both sides. When Lady Rose herself does break through, the consequences (I am trying to avoid spoilers!) go far, far beyond a simple breach in the fence. She must face what Ruby Ferguson brilliantly summarises as ‘the accumulated horror of social remonstrance’.

 

 

 

Ghost story, fairy story, stark realism, deeply felt but subtly expressed feminism, tragedy as well as occasional sharp humour, Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary contains all of these, wrapped in a page-turning narrative studded with unexpected twists, and lyrical descriptions of Scotland. No wonder the Queen Mother admired it so.