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What Maisie Knew

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What Maisie Knew (1897) comes from the late period of Henry James’ long and prolific career as a novelist, and yet it is written in a relatively straightforward manner compared with The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). The narrative is split into mercifully short chapters, and since the protagonist is a young girl, the first part of the book at least is psychologically uncomplicated – by James’ standards. It’s also (rather unusually) quite funny.

Henry James portrait

Henry James – by John Singer Sargeant

As a subject, or as James would call it a donnée, the story is quite ahead of its time. It deals with what we would now call a ‘dysfunctional family’. Two adults behave appallingly both to each other and to their only child. Maisie is only six years old when the story begins, and she has to endure neglect of both a physical and emotional kind. She never receives any schooling – though that would not be altogether unusual for a girl at the end of the nineteenth century (even Virginia Woolf didn’t go to school) – and she is protected only by the presence of paid governesses.

The triumph of the novel is to persuade us that as she becomes older, Masie begins to understand what is happening around her and develops ‘a moral sense’. She is an entirely passive heroine – rather like Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. She can only sit tight and watch as adults manoeuvre around her, manipulating her vulnerability for their own ends. But eventually, as she becomes older (her age is always left vague) she is confronted with a situation in which she is able to make a moral choice which reveals her inner maturity.

What Maisie Knew – critical commentary

Social conventions

There are a number of forces at work in this novel that stem from conventions in the upper echelons of society in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. These might be difficult to understand for contemporary readers.

A married couple were free to do more or less what they wished – so long as the appearance of respectability was maintained. Married men could absent themselves from home on the pretext that they were visiting friends or staying at their club. A married woman could entertain single men in her home – but only if there were others present – either other single men, or in the case of What Masie Knew if a child was present, acting as a sort of under-age chaperone.

Most of these conventions were designed to preserve power structures and concentrations of wealth in the form of both capital and income. People marrying outside (that is beneath) their social class were endangering the accumulation of capital via inheritance. To marry into a higher class was desirable but rare.

Many of James’s novels are concerned with this connection between money and social prestige. This is often presented in the form of newly rich Americans seeking to establish social prestige with Europeans who have social caché but no money (The Golden Bowl). In Masie figures such as Mr Perriam and the ‘Countess’ perform this role. Mr Perriam is viewed with suspicion because he is newly rich – and might even be Jewish. The American ‘Countess’ (who is of course not a countess) is very rich but is black and is therefore unacceptable.

But this social phenomenon is complicated by the fact that there is also a great deal of prestige attached to the source of the capital. To marry into an old family with centuries of inherited wealth as the acme of success. But to accumulate capital via commerce or trade was simply not acceptable – unless of course the capital accumulation was so enormous as to either pay off the debts or buy a way into the upper class.

Many of James’s novels have these conventions as a basis of their morality, but they are unstated, as are many ideological constructs in society. They are taken for granted, as if part of the ‘natural’ order of things. The characters of his novels must know these conventions to survive socially, and part of the interest in Masie’s case is that being very young, she is only in the very early stages of developing this understanding.

Marriage

The novel sheds a very negative light on the state of marriage. It begins with the divorce of Beale Farange and Ida, who go on to despise each other. They then re-marry – both of them to younger people than themselves. These second marriages are no more successful than the first. Beale Farange marries Miss Overmore, but eventually spends most of his time away from the family house – in clubs (the Chrysanthemum) at Cowes yachting week, and eventually as the paid lover of the black American ‘Countess’. Ida has a succession of lovers (a City broker who goes bust, the Captain, and Lord Eric) and when last seen she is threatening to go abroad. Even Sir Claude’s relationship with Miss Overmore/Mrs Beale eventually turns sour.

It is also interesting to note the subtle relationship between geography and morals. In the late nineteenth century it was quite common for people (usually males) to travel outside Britain to indulge in what is today called sexual tourism. Once the physical border of the Channel had been crossed, the social and psychological landscape changed. Unconventional social and sexual relations were tolerated – partly because of less puritanical mores, and partly because any deviant behaviour was being conducted beyond the sharp-eyed scrutiny of British society.

Ida Farange, possibly the most raffish of the characters, goes to Florence and ‘picks up’ a gentleman en route; and when Sir Claude takes Maisie away to try and persuade her to live with him and Mrs Beale, they go to Boulogne. He proposes that they live together in the south of France, and even when Maisie is trying to persuade Sir Claude to accept her alone on her own terms, it is to Paris that she wants him to take her. They almost do make that journey, narrowly missing the train by just a few moments.

Point of view

James very cleverly gives the impression that he is telling the story from Maisie’s point of view. There are no scenes in which she is not present for instance, and the separate chapters invariably begin with an account of events as Maisie perceives them. But in fact the controlling point of view is that of James himself. From time to time he shows his hand as first person narrator – “We have already learned … on a certain occasion hereafter to be described … in the manner I have mentioned”.

She met at present no demand whatever of her obligation, she simply plunged, to avoid it, deeper into the company of Sir Claude. She saw nothing that she had seen hitherto – no touch in the foreign picture that had at first been always before her. The only touch was that of Sir Claude’s hand, and to feel her own in it was her mute resistance to time. She went about as sightlessly as if he had been leading her blindfold. If they were afraid of themselves it was themselves they would find at the inn.

The young girl is foregrounded, the detail of the hand is one she might realistically notice – but the controlling vision here is that of an outsider – James himself commenting on her position and that of her stepfather.

Motifs

Careful readers will have no difficulty recognising the repeated motifs that occur in the novel. Whenever Beale Farange makes an appearance in the narrative he is described in terms of his teeth. In Ida’s case it is her over-use of jewellery and cosmetics – her “huge painted eyes … like Japanese lanterns”. In Sir Claude’s case it is his addiction to cigarettes. After repeatedly blowing smoke into Masie’s face throughout the novel, there is one scene where James describes them as smoking together – in the plural. “After dinner she smoked with her friend – for that was exactly what she felt she did … they stood smoking together under the stars”.

What Masie Knew – study resources

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Dover Thrift – Amazon UK

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Dover Thrift – Amazon US

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Kindle eBook (includes 60 James books for £2.23)

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – Audio book edition at LibriVox

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – 2012 film version – Amazon UK

What Maisie Knew What Maisie Knew – 2012 film version – Amazon US

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

What Maisie Knew Henry James – biographical notes

What Maisie Knew Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Pointer Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

What Masie Knew

What Maisie Knew – plot summary

Maisie is the young daughter of louche and divorced parents Beale and Ida Farange. She is looked after by two governesses – the attractive Miss Overmore at her father’s house and the unattractive Mrs Wix at her mother’s house in six monthly intervals. Both parents use Masie as a bargaining counter and neglect her emotionally whilst in pursuit of their own self-indulgent ends and their psychological war games against each other.

What Masie KnewBoth parents subsequently re-marry, to people much younger than themselves. Ida’s marriage to Sir Claude quickly deteriorates, and Ida takes up with other men, leaving Sir Claude to look after the interests of Masie and Mrs Wix.

Beale Farange meanwhile marries Miss Overmore (who becomes Mrs Beale) but spends most of his time living away from home. Sir Claude establishes a romantic liaison with Mrs Beale which enables him to place Maisie back in her (absent) father’s household.

Maisie is used (and abused) by most of these adults as a screen of respectability for conducting liaisons with other people. Sir Claude alone tries to maintain a degree of social respectability that will leave Maisie protected, but it becomes apparent that he is in thrall to Mrs Beale.

When both her natural parents abandon her completely, Sir Claude takes Maisie to France, and Mrs Wix follows. They are then joined by Mrs Beale. Maisie is confronted with the choice of living with Sir Claude and Mrs Beale (who are not married to each other) in the south of France, or staying with Mrs Wix in an indefinite future. Maisie is deeply enamoured with Sir Claude, but she chooses Mrs Wix, and the two of them return to England.

Principal characters
Beale Farange tall, handsome, lounge lizard – Maisie’s father
Ida Farange tall, attractive, billiard player – Maisie’s mother
Maisie Farange six years old at the start of the novel, a teenager at the end
Moddle Masie’s nurse at the original Farange household
Miss Overmore Maisie’s attractive first governess, later to become Mrs Beale Farange
Mrs Wix cross-eyed and unfashionable – Maisie’s governess at Ida’s
Clara Matilda Mrs Wix’s (possibly imaginary) dead daughter
Lisette Maisie’s french doll at Ida’s
Susan Ash an under-housemaid at Beale Farange’s
Sir Claude handsome, young, Ida’s second husband
Mr Perriam rich City businessman, a suitor of Ida’s who goes bust
Lord Eric a suitor of Ida’s who is mentioned but never appears in the novel
The Captain sun-tanned and short-lived suitor of Ida’s
The ‘Countess’ rich but ugly black woman who pays Beale Farange to be her lover

Henry James's Study

Henry James’s study

Literary criticism

Martha Banta, ‘The Quality of Experience in What Maisie ‘Knew, New England Quarterly, 42 (Dec 1969) 483-510.

Jean Frantz Blackall, ‘Moral Geography in What Maisie Knew‘, University of Toronto Quarterly, 48 (1978) 130-148.

Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood, London: Penguin, 1967.

Randall Craig, ‘”Reading the Unspoken into the Spoken”: Interpreting What Maisie Knew‘ Henry James Review, 2/3 (1981), 204-212.

Lloyd Davis, Sexuality and Textuality: Reading Through the Virginal, New York, 1988.

Barbara Eckstein, ‘Unsquaring the Squared Route of What Maisie Knew‘, Henry James Review, 5/3 (1984), 207-215

James W. Gargano, ‘What Maisie Knew: The Evolution of a Moral Sense’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 16 (June 1961), 33-46.

F.R.Leavis, ‘What Maisie Knew: A Disagreement’, in Anna Karenina and Other Essays, London, 1967.

Juliet Mitchell, ‘What Masie Knew: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl’, in John Goode (ed), The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James, London, 1973.

Muriel Shine, The Fictional Children of Henry James< Chapel Hill, NC, 1969.

Harris W. Wilson, ‘What Did Maisie Know?’ College English, 17 (February 1956), 279-282.

Ward S. Worden, ‘A Cut Version of What Maisie ‘Knew, American Literature, 24/4 (September 1953), 493-504.

Further reading

Biographical

Red button Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Red button F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Red button Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Red button Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Red button Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Red button Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Red button F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Red button Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Red button Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Red button Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Red button Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Red button J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Red button Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Red button Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Red button Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Red button Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Red button Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Red button Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Red button Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Red button Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Red button John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Red button Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Red button Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Red button Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Red button Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Henry James Daisy MillerDaisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
Henry James Daisy Miller Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James Daisy Miller Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James – web links

Henry James web links Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

Henry James web links The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

Henry James web links The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

Red button A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

Henry James web links The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Henry James web links Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James web links Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

Henry James web links The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Henry James web links The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James web links Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James web links Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

© Roy Johnson 2010

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Where Angels Fear to Tread

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tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

Where Angels Fear to Tread, (1902) is Forster’s first novel and a witty debut. A spirited middle-class English girl goes to Italy and becomes involved with a local man. The English family send out a party to ‘rescue’ her (shades of Henry James) – but they are too late; she has already married him. But when a baby is born, the family returns with renewed hostility. The clash between living spirit and deadly rectitude is played out with amusing and tragic consequences.

E.M.Forster - portrait

E.M.Forster

E.M. Forster is a bridge between the nineteenth and the twentieth century novel. He documents the Edwardian and Georgian periods in a witty and elegant prose, satirising the middle and upper classes he knew so well. He was a friend of Virginia Woolf, with whom he worked out some of the ground rules of literary modernism. These included the concept of ‘tea-tabling’ – making the substance of serious fiction the ordinary events of everyday life. He was also a member of The Bloomsbury Group.

His novels grew in complexity and depth, until he eventually gave up fiction in 1923. This was because he no longer felt he could write about the subject of heterosexual love which he did not know or feel. Instead, he turned to essays – which are well worth reading.

Where Angels Fear to Tread – plot summary

Where Angels Fear to TreadLilia Herriton is a young woman whose huband has recently died. Leaving her daughter in the care of her in-laws (whose money she has inherited) she makes a journey to Tuscany with her young friend and traveling companion Caroline Abbott. She falls in love with both Italy and Gino Carella, a handsome Italian much younger than herself, and decides to stay. Furious, her dead husband’s family send Lilia’s brother-in-law to Italy to prevent a misalliance, but he arrives too late. Lilia has already married the Italian and in due course she becomes pregnant.

When she dies giving birth to a son, the Herritons learn that Lilia’s one-time traveling companion, Caroline Abbott, wishes to travel to Italy once again, this time to save the infant boy from an uncivilized life. Not wanting to be outdone – or considered any less moral or concerned than Caroline for the child’s welfare – Lilia’s in-laws try to take the lead in traveling to Italy. Philip is despatched again, but this time accompanied by his sister Harriet.

They make it known that it is both their right and their duty to travel to Monteriano to obtain custody of the infant so that he can be raised as an Englishman. Secretly, though, they have little regard for the child, only for public appearances. Both Italy and its inhabitants are presented as exuding an irresistible charm, to which eventually Caroline Abbott also succumbs.

The family manage to kidnap the child, but they bungle the event and the child is killed in an accident. Gino’s physical outburst toward Philip in response to the news makes Philip realize what it is like to truly be alive. The guilt felt by Harriet causes her to lose her mind. Finally, Philip realizes that he is in love with Caroline Abbott but that he can never have her, because she too admits to being in love with Gino.

Study resources

Where Angels Fear to Tread Where Angels Fear to Tread – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Where Angels Fear to Tread Where Angels Fear to Tread – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Where Angels Fear to Tread Where Angels Fear to Tread – BBC audio books – Amazon UK

Where Angels Fear to Tread Where Angels Fear to Tread – film adaptation on DVD – Amazon UK

Where Angels Fear to Tread Where Angels Fear to Tread – eBook versions at Gutenberg

Where Angels Fear to Tread Where Angels Fear to Tread – audioBook version at LibriVox

Red button The Cambridge Companion to E.M.Forster – Amazon UK

Red button E.M.Forster at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button E.M.Forster at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Principal characters
Lilia Herriton a young widow
Caroline Abbott her friend and travelling companion
Mrs Herriton Lilia’s mother-in-law
Philip Herriton Lilia’s young brother-in-law
Gino Carella a handsome but poor Italian
Harriet Herriton Lilia’s sister-in-law
Irma Herriton Lilia’s young daughter
Where Angels Fear to Tread – film version

1991 Charles Sturridge film adaptation

This film version is not a Merchant-Ivory production, although it’s done very much in their style. But it is accurate and entirely sympathetic to the spirit of the novel, possibly even stronger in satirical edge, well acted, and superbly beautiful to watch. Much is made of the visual contrast between the beautiful Italian setting and the straight-laced English capital from which the prudery and imperialist spirit emerges. The lovely Helena Bonham-Carter establishes herself as the perfect English Rose in this production, and she carried it through to several more. Helen Mirren is wonderful as the spirited Lilia who defies English prudery and narrow-mindedness and marries for love – with results which manage to upset everyone.

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

The novel title

The title Where Angels Fear to Tread is taken from Alexander Pope’s Essay in Criticism (1711). This is a verse essay written in the Horatian mode and is primarily concerned with how writers and critics behave in the new literary commerce of Pope’s contemporary age. The poem covers a range of good criticism and advice. It also represents many of the chief literary ideals of Pope’s age.

Part II of An Essay on Criticism includes a famous phrase A little learning is a dangerous thing, which is often misquoted as ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’.

Part II is also the source of this famous line: To err is human, to forgive divine.

Further reading

Red button David Bradshaw, The Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forster, Cambridge University Press, 2007

Red button Richard Canning, Brief Lives: E.M. Forster, London: Hesperus Press, 2009

Red button G.K. Das and John Beer, E. M. Forster: A Human Exploration, Centenary Essays, New York: New York University Press, 1979.

Red button Mike Edwards, E.M. Forster: The Novels, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001

Red button E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, London: Penguin Classics, 2005

Red button P.N. Furbank, E.M. Forster: A Life, Manner Books, 1994

Red button Frank Kermode, Concerning E.M. Forsterl, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009

Red button Rose Macaulay, The Writings of E. M. Forster, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970.

Red button Nigel Messenger, How to Study an E.M. Forster Novel, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991

Red button Wendy Moffatt, E.M. Forster: A New Life, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010

Red button Nicolas Royle, E.M. Forster (Writers and Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1999

Red button Jeremy Tambling (ed), E.M. Forster: Contemporary Critical Essays, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995

Where Angels Fear to Tread

first edition – Blackwood 1905

Other work by E.M. Forster

A Room with a ViewA Room with a View (1905) This is another comedy of manners and a satirical critique of English stuffiness and hypocrisy. The impulsive and cultivated Lucy Honeychurch must choose between taklented but emotionally frozen Cecil Vyse and the impulsive George Emerson. The staid Surrey stockbroker belt is contrasted with the magic of Florence, where she eventually ends up on her honeymoon. Upper middle-class English tourists in Italy are an easy target for Forster in some very amusing scenes.

E.M.Forster greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
E.M.Forster greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

 

Howards EndHowards End (1910) is a State of England novel, and possibly Forster’s greatest work – though that’s just my opinion. Two families are contrasted: the intellectual and cultivated Schlegels, and the capitalist Wilcoxes. A marriage between the two leads to spiritual rivalry over the possession of property. Following on their social coat tails is a working-class would-be intellectual who is caught between two conflicting worlds. The outcome is a mixture of tragedy and resignation, leavened by hope for the future in the young and free-spirited.

E.M.Forster greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
E.M.Forster greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2010

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Wilkie Collins biography

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biography, study resources, and web links

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was one of the best-selling authors of the nineteenth century. He was a friend of Charles Dickens, and like his more famous contemporary he maximised his commercial success by publishing in all available formats. His work appeared as newspaper journalism, short stories, magazine serials, novels in three volume format, and adaptations for the stage. Even in his private life he was similarly prolific. He supported two separate families who lived round the corner from each other.

Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins was born in London in 1824. His father William was a reasonably successful painter – a member of the Royal Academy – but ‘constitutionally insecure and self-critical’. His mother Harriet was a governess and proved to be the principal agent in Wilkie’s early education.

The family lived in Cavendish Street and took their summer holidays in what was then the outlying rural area of Hampstead. This was a location favoured by artists, and family friends included the painter Constable and the poet and ‘philosopher’ Coleridge.

Wilkie was educated largely by his mother, but in 1836 when he was an impressionable twelve year old the whole family went on a two year tour of Italy. This included visits to museums, mixing with English expatriate artists in Rome, and Collins’ first erotic adventure when he became enraptured by a married woman. The tour also took in Naples, Sorrento, Bologna, and Venice – all the time pursued by the threat of cholera.

Collins was fourteen before he entered formal education – a boarding school in Highbury where he was bullied and regarded by staff as a model bad student. He was glad to leave at seventeen, when his father found him a virtually unpaid job as a clerk.

By the time he was twenty he had begun placing short stories and sketches in various magazines – almost all anonymously. He also made the first of many visits to Paris, where he indulged his taste for wine, good food, and the habits of a flaneur.

He switched from working as a clerk to studying law at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and began Antonina, a historical novel. However, when his father died in 1847, he dropped everything for six months and wrote a paternal biography – which was dedicated to family friend Sir Robert Peel. The book was well reviewed and even a modest commercial success.

Collins developed an interest in the theatre, and through his work in amateur productions he eventually came into contact with Charles Dickens. The two got on very well together. Dickens appreciated Wilkie’s hard work and professional attitude to writing: Wilkie enjoyed the older man’s appetite for adventurism – fuelled by the disappointment of his marriage. They went on late night sorties into the underworld of Soho and the East End.

He became active as a journalist, writing for the radical newspaper The Leader founded by George Henry Lewes (Mr George Eliot). In religious terms he was a sceptic and critic of the Church, but not an atheist. He took an interest in hypnotism and clairvoyance which were both fashionable at that time. In 1852 he was called to the Bar – not having worked for or passed any exams, which was quite common in the Law at that period.

He contributed to Household Words and Bentley’s Miscellany, but in 1852 published his first serious novel, Basil, for which he wrote a long preface explaining his artistic intentions. The novel was well received and has the distinction of being perhaps the first ‘sensation novel’.

Despite his commercial success and social connections with the Coutts banking family, the odd thing is he didn’t have his own bank account. He placed all his earnings in his mother’s account and drew off cash when he needed it.

He grew closer and closer to Dickens, acting as a sort of bachelor support at a time that Dickens’ marriage was floundering. There were long expeditions together with painter Augustus Egg to France, Switzerland, and Italy. However, Wilkie’s revelries were slowed down somewhat by a venereal infection he picked up around this time.

He continued to produce enormous amounts of magazine sketches and journalism, and made his first efforts to break into the theatre with plays such as The Lighthouse and The Frozen Deep. These were not initially successful, whereas he was able to turn any number of his holiday jaunts and seagoing cruises into profitable non-fiction.

Rather surprisingly (since his best work was yet to come) he started to develop a Europe-wide reputation. A critical study of his early work appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes and his next novel, After Dark (1856), was published by Tauschnitz for circulation on the Continent.

Although he was still quite young at thirty-two, he began to suffer from the various pains and ‘rheumatic gout’ which would affect him for the rest of his life. However, this did not affect his prodigious output, and around this time he added to the pressures under which he worked by embarking on serial publication. He worked out the plots of his novels in advance, but had to maintain a crushing level of production to stay a fortnight ahead of the printers – on both sides of the Atlantic.

As his international reputation took flight and his income rose as a consequence, he developed more interest in the establishment of copyright agreements. Like his friend Dickens, he took exception to unscupulous publishers issuing pirated editions of his work for which they had paid nothing. It was not until much later in the century that this practice was prohibited.

United as they were by many of their literary works, Dickens and Wilkie also shared central roles in two sexual scandals that developed around the same time. Dickens, the now world-famous author and family man, left his wife and nine children and took up secretly with the eighteen year old actress Ellen Ternan. Wilkie Collins did almost the opposite, but with the same effect. He started living openly with Caoline Graves, an older widow with a young daughter. They never married but stayed together (with one interruption) for the rest of his life. Caroline occupied the role of common-law wife, rather than that of mistress.

In 1859 he produced what was to become one of the most successful and best-selling novels of the nineteenth century. The Woman in White is a mystery story, a sensation novel, and a subtle critique of conventional values that piles up one thrilling incident after another. It became the talk of London, and when published in volume form sold out immediately in England and France.

Wilkie Collins

It was around this time that Wilkie, still suffering from the pains of his ‘rheumatic gout’, began the regular use of opium as an analgesic. Laudanum (opium disolved in alcohol) was available at any pharmacy for three pence an ounce around that time. Half an ounce was enough to kill a horse.

He started work on his next novel, spurred on by an advance from publishers Smith and Elder of £5,000 – the equivalent of half a million pounds today. After that he took Caroline and her daughter Carrie on an extended stay in Italy, where all three of them seemed to improve their health.

His next major work was Armadale which had been two years in the planning. It was successful both in England and America.even though the States were in the middle of a civil war. In order to protect his theatrical rights he immediately wrote a stage adaptation. He still hankered after success in the theatre, despite the fact tha a production of The Frozen Deep had been a flop.

In 1868 he had just started the serialisation of what was to be his second major success, The Moonstone when he suffered a double blow. First his mother died, then he suffered a savage attack of ‘gout’ which affected his eyes – though it is now thought that this affliction was actually a strain of venereal disease. He was forced to dictate some passages of the novel.

Wilkie Collins

Wilkie had always used his mother’s snobbish objection to the lower-class Caroline as a reason for not marrying. But even with maternal opposition now removed he still didn’t make the relationship decent and legal. Caroline’s reaction was understandable: she married someone else under an assumed name. Wilkie’s was less so – he actually went to the wedding.

But by then he also had another working class servant girl in his life. Martha Rudd was about have the first of his three children. He installed her in lodgings a short walk from his large house in Marylebone and gave her an annual allowance and the name ‘Mrs Dawson’. Caroline’s daughter stayed on with Wilkie as his occasional amanuensis.

If this arrangement was not complex enough, it became so two years later when Caroline (now Mrs Crow) returned ‘home’ when her marriage failed. Yet like the plot of a Henry James novel, the respectability of her young daughter Carrie (seen socially as Wilkie’s adopted child) conferred social acceptability back onto her mother, even though she was married to one man and living with another.

Throughout all this personal upheaval Wilkie was working on The Moonstone which when it was published made him a lot of money. It also profited Dickens, even though he was critical of the novel’s over-elaborate construction. Not long after this, even though the two friends had so much in common, the relationship between them deteriorated. Shortly afterwards Dickens died.

Wilkie’s next book was Man and Wife (1870) which was based on an idea he had originally conceived as a play. At a personal level he was now a man with two wives and two families. The next year he had his first taste of theatrical success when The Woman in White was staged at the Olympic Theatre. The original novel was completely changed by Wilkie himself, and whole scenes either omitted or added. The performance lasted four hours, but the play was a popular and critical success.

It is possible that this very success was detrimental to his later works, because the novels he went on to produce were always written with potential dramatisation in mind. They are full of long conversations between leading characters, set in a limited range of indoor locations. It proved to be the case that what was dramatic in a prose narrative was not necessarily so before the footlights – and vice versa.

In 1873 Wilkie embarked on a reading tour of America. He was well received as a famous author and a friend of Charles Dickens, but the trip was not profitable financially, largely because of poor management.

His next book, The Law and the Lady (1875) was not successful, but he was compensated by continued triumphs on the stage, even though his adaptation of Armadale altered and watered down the story until it was almost unrecognisable.

He was forever thinking of new ways to present old material – so much so that at times he sailed very close to self-plagiarism. But he was very keen to exploit all the avenues of publication open to him. He had an idea that there was an enormous audience or readership for literary entertainment ‘out there’ which had not yet been reached. He was right – and he also had not one but two families to keep.

He found assistance in this quest by hiring A.P. Watt – the first person to set himself up as what we now call a literary agent. The relationship was a good one – but Watt found difficulty in placing material that was considered too highbrow for provincial newspapers. The masses were not to be reached quite so easily.

As he got older his physical ailments multiplied and he became virtually a self-made invalid, living on cold soup and champagne. This did not prevent his conducting, at over sixty years of age, a flirtacious relationship with a twelve year old girl he befriended locally.

He continued to push himself right up to the end, sometimes working twelve hours a day to produce more stories and journalism. But he was sinking fast, and his last novel had to be passed over to Walter Besant for completion. Wilkie died in his recently acquired Wimpole Street apartment in September 1889.

His popular reputation continued to decline in the years after his death, even though the influence of sensation novels was still present in the work of younger writers such as Thomas Hardy. But there has been a revival of interest in his work starting in the late twentieth century, and now there is no reason why he should not be considred as a talented and major literary figure of his era, along with the equally neglected (and prolific) Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

© Roy Johnson 2016

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Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, London: Secker and Warburg, 1992, pp.498, ISBN: 0436367122

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William Faulkner – notes on his novels

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William Faulkner - portraitWilliam Faulkner (1897—1962) grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, and lived there for the rest of his life – with only brief intermissions for travel and working in Hollywood as a screenwriter. He was one of the major American writers of the early twentieth century. He established the white protestant version of the American south, reflecting its values of that period – the collapse of the white land owning aristocracy and the inability (at that time) of the blacks to shake off the legacy of slavery. Faulkner was a literary experimentalist, influenced by the modernist period, and he sometimes makes extreme demands on his readers. He uses stream of consciousness, fragmented chronology, shifting point of view, and multiple narrative voices. Even in some of his plain narratives, the story is expressed in sentences which sometimes go on for two or three pages at a time.

Much of his fictional output centres on an imaginary part of the south which he called Yoknapatwapha County. He was also partly responsible for generating the modern version of the literary genre called ‘Southern Gothic’ – stories which often feature grotesque scenes, violence and horror, distorted characters, melodrama, and sensationalism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, but rather like his famous contemporary Ernest Hemingway, his reputation seems not to be wearing too well with time.

 

William Faulkner - As I Lay DyingAs I Lay Dying (1930) is a good point to start. It charts the journey of a poor family to bury their mother Addie Bundren in Jefferson. They make the coffin themselves and survive crossing the flooded Yoknapatwapha river, a fire, and other largely self-inflicted problems, to finally reach their goal. The novel is told in the rapidly intercut voices of the family members – including the dead mother. It is simultaneously funny, and tragic – a small scale epic which Faulkner wrote in the space of six weeks.

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William Faulkner - The Sound and the FuryThe Sound and The Fury is generally regarded as his greatest work. It is a narrative tour de force in which Faulkner views the decline of the south through the point of view of four characters. The novel centres on the once-aristocratic Compson family, who appear in his other novels. The siblings Quentin and Caddy fall from a state of innocence and succumb to the family pattern of incest, erotomania, and suicide. One of their brothers is severely mentally handicapped. The first part of the novel is told entirely from his point of view – and of course he ‘sees’ the truth of much that is going on. The other narrator is the black servant who is powerless but ‘endures’. It is a work of astonishing brilliance, written in a sombre and lyrical mood.

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William Faulkner - SanctuarySanctuary (1931) is an example of Faulkner writing simultaneously at his best and worst. The novel was produced to make money, and is a sort of rural South whodunit which centres on a particularly grizzly crime. All the southern Gothic elements are here. The main plot revolves around Temple Drake, a coquettish college girl who likes to secretly sneak out of her college dorm to attend dances. She takes one step too far onto the wild side, and the result is a helter-skelter ride down into the moral abyss. The novel also includes a psychopathic bootlegger, corrupt local officials, the trial of an innocent man, and a public lynching. It was Faulkner’s only best-seller.

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© Roy Johnson 2009

William Plomer – Sado

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Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

 

Sado - first edition

 
William Plomer, Sado (1931) Cover design by John Armstrong.

“The first version of Sado ran to some 170,000 words, as Plomer wrote to Woolf in February, but he soon boiled it down to half that length. He sent the revised typescript to the Woolfs two months later just as they returned to London after driving through western France for two weeks on their annual outing. Refreshed from their trip, the Woolfs read Plomer’s novel immediately, Leonard writing to him five days later on Friday that both he and Virginia liked the book very much. They were struck by Plomer’s writing and his psychological insights, finding the theme [of homo-eroticism] “extraordinarily interesting” and his prose less uneven than his previous writing, with “fewer, if any, air pockets”. With the publication of Sado, Plomer reached maturity as a writer. Leonard had over 1,500 copies of the novel printed and issued with a handsomely stylized dust jacket in white and blue designed by John Armstrong. In spite of its promising send-off, Sado disappointed by selling only 837 copies in the first six months and by going in the red over £64 in the first year.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

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Hogarth Press studies

Woolf's-head Publishing Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

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The Hogarth Press Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

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© Roy Johnson 2005

William Wilson

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

William Wilson was first published in the October 1839 issue of Burton Gentleman’s Magazine. Later in 1844 it was translated into French and published in the Paris newspaper La Quotidienne. This marked the first introduction of Poe’s work into France, where it has been highly regarded ever since.

The story has surprisingly autobiographical elements. During his youth Poe spent some time at Manor House School in Stoke Newington in north London, on which the ‘academy’ in the story is based. However, he did not go on to either Eton or Oxford University – which he describes in the tale as ‘the most dissolute university in Europe’.

Edgar Allan Poe

William Wilson – critical summary

The double

This is an early and now-famous example of the double in literature – sometimes known by its German term the ‘Doppelganger’. The elements of a double in the story should be quite clear from the start. William Wilson is confronted by another schoolboy at the academy who has the same name as himself. They have the same birthday; they are the same height; they wear the same clothes; and they both join the academy and leave it on exactly the same day.

Wilson is exasperated by the appearances of what he perceives as a ‘rival’, and yet the double gives him ‘advice’ which Wilson, writing in retrospect, now wishes he had heeded. It is also significant that nobody else in the story seems to be aware of the double; he ‘appears’ only to Wilson himself.

“Yet this superiority — even this equality — was in truth acknowledged by no one but myself; our associates, by some unaccountable blindness, seemed not even to suspect it.”

It is one of the common features of the double in literature that it appears only to the protagonist of the story or the novel. The double figure acts as ‘another self’ to the protagonist which acts as the embodiment of good, evil, or ‘otherness’. It is for this reason that stories featuring a double are often seen as studies in psychological aberration or what is often called ‘the divided self’.

It should be fairly clear that William Wilson’s double is a manifestation of his conscience. The double appears at crucial moments when Wilson is about to commit a morally dubious act. Because the story is narrated from Wilson’s point of view, there is a strong tendency for the reader to be sympathetic to the account of events he gives us. He sees the double as a source of irritation and interference. But the double, the conscience, is merely giving him advice, and warnings – always in a low tone of voice.

The epitaph to this story provides an unmistakable clue to Poe’s intended meaning.

What say of it? what say Conscience grim,
That spectre in my path?

The essential conflict is between Wilson who wishes to do wrong, and his conscience which is warning him against himself. The two finally clash at the Roman ball, where Wilson finally kills off his double, only to discover that he is killing himself. The double tells him – no longer in a whisper – “In me didst thou exist—and in my death, see … how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

The Double An extended tutorial on The Double

Structure

William Wilson follows all of Poe’s own rules for the constituents of a successful short story. It strikes its distinctive tone from the opening sentence – ‘Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson’. And the story deals with that one topic alone – the inner identity (and conflict) of the protagonist.

Poe also claimed that a story should have a ‘unity of effect’. That is, all the elements of the story should be directed towards the point it is trying to make. This means in its turn that there should not be any digressions or the inclusion of unrelated material. William Wilson certainly does follow this rule. The story begins with Wilson’s anguish over his personal identity, and the focus of attention remains on that topic until the story’s dramatic finale.

Oscar Wilde

The striking image of ‘self’ destruction at the conclusion of the story was echoed famously by Oscar Wilde in the conclusion to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Wilde’s is another story of moral decline, in which the protagonist becomes progressively degenerate yet remains amazingly youthful in appearance. He finally confronts a portrait painting of himself which has aged in an attic to reveal his corruption. In a rage he stabs the painting with a knife and is found dead with the knife in his own heart – and the portrait has become young once again.

The idea of a portrait hidden in an attic which reveals the unpleasant truth about someone’s behaviour and age has become a commonplace image and figure of speech – often humorously applied. It is rightly attributed to Wilde, but it has its origins in Edgar Allan Poe.

William Wilson – study resources

William Wilson Poe: The Ultimate Collection – Amazon UK

William Wilson Poe: The Ultimate Collection – Amazon US

William Wilson Poe: Collected Tales – Penguin – Amazon UK

William Wilson Poe: Collected Tales – Penguin – Amazon US

William Wilson Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Kindle illustrated – UK

William Wilson Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Kindle illustrated – US

William Wilson William Wilson at Wikipedia

William Wilson – plot summary

William Wilson’s reputation has been ruined, and as death approaches him he wishes to make a record of his descent into wickedness.

Believing that he has inherited a ‘remarkable’ nature, he recalls his youth as a schoolboy in England. His academy school is like a Gothic prison, and its ethos is disciplinarian. Another boy with the same name becomes a competitor and a rival.

Wilson is worried by the other boy’s easy superiority, but it is not noticed by anybody else. The two boys have the same birthday, they are the same height, and they join the school on the same day.

They become inseparable companions. The rival can only speak in a very low voice, but he dresses in the same clothes as Wilson. He also takes pleasure in his superiority – though this is noticed only by Wilson himself.

The rival patronises Wilson and gives him advice, which Wilson now wishes he had heeded. Wilson visits the rival’s bedroom at night whilst he is asleep – but he does not look the same.

Wilson leaves the academy and goes to Eton where he plunges himself into a life of folly and vice. One drunken night he is visited by the rival who raises a warning finger then disappears.

Wilson moves on to Oxford University where he uses his wealth to gamble and take advantage of others. On the occasion of completely ruining a young nobleman he is visited again by the rival, who reveals to the company that Wilson has been cheating at cards. Next morning he leaves the university in disgrace and flees to the Continent.

The double figure pursues him throughout Europe, thwarting his plans for ‘bitter mischief’. Finally at a masked ball in Rome, the figure appears when Wilson is about to seduce a young married woman. Wilson draws a rapier to kill the figure, but finds himself confronting his own image in a full length mirror, spattered with blood, and saying ‘thou hast murdered thyself’.

© Roy Johnson 2017

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Wingstroke

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Wingstroke was written in October 1923 and was first published in the Russian emigré periodical Russkoye Ekho for January 1924. It is quite possible that the story is unfinished, since Nabokov mentioned in a letter to his mother that he had written a continuation to the tale. The story also has numbered sections, which suggests that it is a fragment of what was planned as a longer work.

Wingstroke

Vladimir Nabokov

Wingstroke – critical commentary

Young men in states of existential anxiety are quite common in Nabokov’s early fiction. One thinks of the 1924 story, A Matter of Chance (1924) – and indeed they persist as late as the novella The Eye (1930) and his novel Despair (1936). This is not counting the inspired madmen who continue through to Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955) and Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire (1962).

The protagonist Kern has a rational source for his state of unease: his wife has betrayed him with another man, then killed herself on discovering her lover was a rogue and a thief. But there are also hints that Kern might be unwell. He is repeatedly beset by pains in his chest and presentiments of death.

In fact there are several pre-echoes of death throughout the story. Isabel explains to Kern her exhilaration at skiing dangerously at night, pre-figuring exactly what does happen to her, only a few pages later:.

“It was extraordinary. I hurtled down the slopes in the dark. I flew off the bumps. Right up into the stars.”
”You might have killed yourself,” said Kern.

Shortly afterwards Kern feels that ‘He had the sensation that he had glanced into death.’ There are far too many symbolic references for a simple short story, and another reason to believe that what exists of Wingstroke is a fragment of what was originally conceived as a longer work.

There is also the problem of what is presumably an unintended suggestion. Whilst Kern is grappling with his desire for Isabel he is picked up by the character Monfiori, who is clearly a homosexual Monfiori warns Kern against Isabel: “She’s a woman. And I, you see, have other tastes.” He is quite open about his intentions, telling Kern:

“I search everywhere for the likes of you – in expensive hotels, on trains, in seaside resorts, at night on the quays of big cities.”

Yet at the conclusion to the story, as the two males return to the hotel following Isabel’s fatal accident on the ski slope, Kern makes a very suggestive invitation to Monfiori:

”I am going upstairs to my room now … Upstairs … If you wish to accompany me”

By all the conventions of fictional development and narrative logic, this can only be interpreted as a suggestion that Kern is accepting Monfiori’s gay advances.

Nabokov has a number of homosexual characters in his fiction, but they only ever feature as figures of derision. It is very unlikely (and it would be unique in his oeuvre) if he were suggesting that Kern is escaping from disappointment over his wife’s death and his fascination regarding Isabel – into the arms of a short man with red hair and ‘pointed ears, packed with canary-coloured dust, with reddish fluff on their tips’. This is simply not Nabokov’s style at all.

Study resources

The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov – Amazon UK

Zembla – the official Nabokov web site

The Paris Review – Interview

First editions in English – Bob Nelson’s collection

Vladimir Nabokov at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Vladimir Nabokov at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study materials

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Laurie Clancy, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Neil Cornwell, Vladimir Nabokov: Writers and their Work, Northcote House, 2008.

Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: An Illustrated Life, Overlook Press, 2005.

Norman Page, Vladimir Nabokov: Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1997

David Rampton, Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Wingstroke – plot summary

1   Kern is a thirty-five year old man staying in a Zermatt hotel during the winter skiing season. He is in an emotionally depressed state since his wife of seven years has fallen in love with someone else, then when he turned out to be a thief and a liar, has killed herself by taking poison. Kern is attracted to Isabel, a glamorous English fellow guest in the hotel. He dances with her, then finds it difficult to get to sleep afterwards, because she is in the next room, is playing a guitar, and has a noisy dog.

2   Next day she denies having made any noise. Kern is invited to the bar by the homosexual Monfiori who advises him to forget Isabel. The two men consume lots of cocktails, and Kern tell Monfiori that he is planning to kill himself next day. Monfiori says he wants to watch.

Kern goes up to his room quite drunk, then remembers that Isabel is next door. When he goes to her room she rushes out, and Kern is confronted by what he perceives as a dishevelled Angel who has come in through the window, but is clearly the dog that has followed Isabel to the hotel. He stuffs the dog into a wardrobe, collects Isabel, and goes back to his room where he tries to write an important letter announcing his suicide.

3   Next day he cannot find the letter, but still plans to shoot himself at lunch time. He goes to watch the ski jumping event where Isabel is competing. But on her jump, she falls from mid air and is killed. Kern returns to the hotel and invites Monfiori to join him in his room.

Other work by Vladimir Nabokov

PninPnin is one of his most popular short novels. It deals with the culture clash and catalogue of misunderstandings which occur when a Russian professor of literature arrives on an American university campus. Like many of Nabokov’s novels, the subject matter mirrors his life – but without ever descending into cheap autobiography. This is a witty and tender account of one form of naivete trying to come to terms with another. This particular novel has always been very popular with the general reading public – probably because it does not contain any of the dark and often gruesome humour that pervades much of Nabokov’s other work.
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Collected StoriesCollected Stories Nabokov is also a master of the short story form, and like many writers he tried some of his literary experiments there first, before giving them wider reign in his novels. This collection of sixty-five complete stories is drawn from his entire working life. They range from the early meditations on love, loss, and memory, through to the later technical experiments, with unreliable story-tellers and the games of literary hide-and-seek. All of them are characterised by a stunning command of language, rich imagery, and a powerful lyrical inventiveness.
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Vladimir Nabokov links

Red button Vladimir Nabokov – life and works

Red button Nabokov’s Complete Short Stories – critical analyses

Red button Vladimir Nabokov: an illustrated life

© Roy Johnson 2017

Women in Love

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tutorial, textual history, study resources, and web links

Women in Love (1921) begins where Lawrence’s earlier novel The Rainbow leaves off and features the Brangwen sisters as they try to forge new types of liberated personal relationships. The men they choose are trying to do the same thing – so the results are problematic and often disturbing. Many regard this as his finest novel, where his ideas are matched with passages of superb writing. The locations combine urban Bohemia with a symbolic climax which takes place in the icy snow caps of the Alps.

Women in Love

D.H. Lawrence is a writer who excites great passions in his readers – which is entirely appropriate, since that is how he wrote. He is the first really great writer to come from the (more or less) working class, and much of his work deals with issues of class, as well as other fundamentals such as the relationships between men, women, and the natural world.

At times he becomes mystic and visionary, and his prose style can be poetic, didactic, symbolic, and bombastic all within the space of a few pages. He also deals with issues of sexuality and politics in a manner which is often controversial.

Women in Love – textual history

Both The Rainbow and Women in Love have their origins in a 1913 draft called ‘The Sisters.’ The next year, Lawrence revised it further into a novel entitled The Wedding Ring, which Methuen agreed to publish in 1914. The outbreak of war late that year caused the publisher to renege on the agreement, and Lawrence decided to rework the source material, separating it into two novels.

The Rainbow, treating the early lives of the sisters, was suppressed shortly after its publication in 1915 on grounds of obscenity. Lawrence then spent four years revising the remainder of The Wedding Ring into a second novel, shopping it to publishers without success until 1920, when Thomas Seltzer published the first American edition.

Women in Love - first editionWomen in Love was originally published in New York City as a limited edition (1250 books), available only to subscribers; this was due to the controversy caused by The Rainbow. Because the two books were originally written as parts of a single novel, the publisher had decided to publish them separately and in rapid succession. The first book’s treatment of sexuality, while tame by today’s standards, was rather too frank for the Edwardian era. There was an obscenity trial and The Rainbow was banned in the UK for 11 years, although it was available in the US. The publisher then backed out of publishing the second book in the UK, so it first appeared in the US in 1920.

It was printed in England the following year by Martin Secker. Although both editions were based on the same copies prepared by Lawrence, the fate of The Rainbow led Secker to limit his exposure by cutting sections of the text which might run foul of the censors. In fact, in the English second printing, Heseltine’s threat to sue for libel resulted in changes to the descriptions of Halliday and the Pussum, changing the one from pale and fair-haired to swarthy and the other from red-haired to blonde.

In fact such are the textual complications behind the text that there are now two or more versions, some of which reproduce the original, and others which include formerly deleted scenes. The most authoritative are those published in the Cambridge University Press series of the definitive works of D.H.Lawrence.

Women in Love – study resources

Red button Women in Love – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Women in Love – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Women in Love – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Women in Love – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Red button Women in Love – Kindle eBook edition

Red button Women in Love – York Notes – Amazon UK

Red button Women in Love – A Casebook (Criticism) – Amazon UK

Red button The First Women in Love – definitive edition – Amazon UK

Red button Women in Love – eBook editions at Project Gutenberg

Red button Women in Love – audioBook edition at LibriVox

Red button Women in Love – audioBook (Talking Classics) – Amazon UK

Red button The Complete Critical Guide to D.H. Lawrence – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to D.H.Lawrence – Amazon UK

Red button The Complete Short Novels of D.H.Lawrence – Amazon UK

Women in Love – plot summary

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are two sisters living in the Midlands of England in the 1910s. Ursula is a teacher, Gudrun an artist. They meet two men who live nearby, school inspector Rupert Birkin and coal-mine heir Gerald Crich. The four become friends. Ursula and Birkin become involved, and Gudrun eventually begins a love affair with Gerald. The dynamics between them all are complicated, however, by the strong connection between the sisters, as well as the more ambiguous bond between the two male friends.

Women in LoveAll four are deeply concerned with questions of society, politics, and the relationship between men and women. Ultimately however, the two relationships go in very different directions. The initial strife between Birkin and Ursula over his lingering attachment to the controlling Hermione Roddice is resolved by his eventual willingness to break off their relationship, and Birkin and Ursula give up their jobs as teachers to take up a more bohemian lifestyle.

Gerald and Gudrun begin on the firm ground of mutual sexual attraction, and their bond intensifies when Gerald’s ailing father invites Gudrun to become the art tutor for the family’s young daughter Winifred.

At a party at Gerald’s estate, Gerald’s sister Diana drowns. Soon Gerald’s coal-mine-owning father dies as well, after a long illness. After the funeral, Gerald goes to Gudrun’s house and spends the night with her, while her parents sleep in another room.

Birkin asks Ursula to marry him, and she agrees. Gerald and Gudrun’s relationship, however, becomes stormy. The four vacation in the Alps. Gudrun begins an intense friendship with Loerke, a physically puny but emotionally commanding artist from Dresden. Gerald is enraged by Loerke, by Gudrun’s verbal abuse, and by his own destructive nature. He tries to murder Gudrun, and when he fails he retreats back over the mountains and falls to a sort of voluntary death in the snow.

Principal characters
Rupert Birkin a schoolteacher
Ursula Brangwen a schoolteacher
Gudrun Brangwen her sister, an artist
Gerald Crich the son of a wealthy industrialist
Loerke a German artist
Film version

Director Ken Russell 1969
Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson, Jennie Linden

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Further reading

Biography

Pointer Frieda Lawrence, Not I, But the Wind…, New York: Viking Press, 1934.

Pointer Harry T. Moore, The Life and Works of D.H. Lawrence, London: Unwin Books, 1951.

Pointer Keith Sagar, The Life of D.H.Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography, London: Eyre Methuen, 1980.

Pointer John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence: The Early Years: 1885-1912: The Cambridge Biography of D.H. Lawrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Pointer Brenda Maddox, The Married Man: A Biography of D.H.Lawrence, London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1994.

Letters

Pointer J.T. Boulton (ed), The Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Criticism

Pointer David Ellis, D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’: A Casebook, Oxford University Press, 2006.

Pointer John Worthen, The First ‘Women in Love’ (Cambridge Edition of the Works of D.HLawrence), Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Pointer Graham Handley, Brodie’s Notes on D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’, London: Macmillan, 1992.

Pointer Harold Bloom, D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’ (Modern Critical Interpretations), Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Pointer Anne Fernihough, The Cambridge Companion to D.H.Lawrence, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Pointer Fiona Becket, The Complete Critical Guide to D.H. Lawrence, London: Routledge, 2002.

Background reading

Pointer button Mary Freeman, D.H.Lawrence A Basic Study of His Ideas, Grosset and Dunlap, 1955.

Pointer button F.R.Leavis, D.H.Lawrence: Novelist, London: Chatto and Windus, 1955.

Pointer button Mark Spilka, The Love Ethic of D.H.Lawrence, Dobson, 1955.

Pointer button Graham Hough, The Dark Sun: A Study of D.H.Lawrence, New York: Capricorn Books, 1956.

Pointer button Eliseo Vivas, D.H.Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art, General Books 1960.

Pointer button Kingsley Widmer, The Art of Perversity: D.H.Lawrence’s Shorter Fiction, University of Washington Press, 1962.

Pointer button Eugene Goodheart, The Utopian Vision of D.H.Lawrence, Transaction Publishers, 1963.

Pointer button Julian Moynahan, The Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales of D.H.Lawrence, Oxford University Press, 1963.

Pointer button George Panichas, Adventure in Consciousness: Lawrence’s Religious Quest, Folcroft Library Editions, 1964.

Pointer button Helen Corke, D.H. Lawrence: The Croydon Years, Austin (Tex): University of Texas Press, 1965.

Pointer button George Ford, Double Measure; A Study of D.H.Lawrence, New York: Holt Reinhart and Winston, 1965.

Pointer button H M Daleski, The Forked Flame: A Study of D.H.Lawrence, Evanston (Ill): Northwestern University Press, 1965.

Pointer button Keith Sagar, The Art of D.H.Lawrence, Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Pointer button David Cavitch, D.H.Lawrence and the New World, Oxford University Press, 1969.

Pointer button Colin Clarke, River of Dissolution: D.H.Lawrence and English Romanticism, London: Routledge, 1969.

Pointer button Baruch Hochman, Another Ego: Self and Society in D.H.Lawrence, University of South Carolina Press, 1970.

Pointer button Keith Aldritt, The Visual Imagination of D.H.Lawrence, Hodder and Stoughton, 1971.

Pointer button R E Pritchard, D.H.Lawrence: Body of Darkness, Hutchinson, 1971.

Pointer button John E Stoll, The Novels of D.H.Lawrence: A Search for Integration, University of Missouri Press, 1971.

Pointer button Frank Kermode, D.H. Lawrence, London: Fontana, 1973.

Pointer button Scott Sanders, D.H.Lawrence: The World of the Major Novels, Vision Press, 1973.

Pointer button F.R.Leavis, Thought, Words, and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence, Chatto and Windus, 1976.

Pointer button Marguerite Beede Howe, The Art of the Self in D.H.Lawrence, Ohio University Press, 1977.

Pointer button Alastair Niven, D.H.Lawrence: The Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Pointer button Anne Smith, Lawrence and Women, London: Vision Press, 1978.

Pointer button R.P. Draper (ed), D.H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1979.

Pointer button John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel, London: Macmillan, 1979.

Pointer button Aidan Burns, Nature and Culture in D.H.Lawrence, London: Macmillan, 1980.

Pointer button L D Clark, The Minoan Distance: Symbolism of Travel in D.H.Lawrence, University of Arizona Press, 1980.

Pointer button Roger Ebbatson, D.H.Lawrence and the Nature Tradition: A Theme in English Fiction 1859-1914, Humanities Oress, 1980.

Pointer button Alastair Niven, D.H.Lawrence: The Writer and His Work, New York: Scribner, 1980.

Pointer button Philip Hobsbaum, A Reader’s Guide to D.H.Lawrence, Thames and Hudson, 1981.

Pointer button Kim A.Herzinger , D.H.Lawrence in His Time: 1908-1915, Bucknell University Press, 1982.

Pointer button Graham Holderness, D.H.Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1982.

Pointer button Hilary Simpson, D.H.Lawrence and Feminism, London: Croom Helm, 1982.

Pointer button Gamini Salgado, A Preface to D.H. Lawrence, London: Longman, 1983.

Pointer button Judith Ruderman, D.H.Lawrence and the Devouring Mother, Duke University Press, 1984.

Pointer button Anthony Burgess, Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H.Lawrence, London: Heinemann, 1985.

Pointer button Sheila McLeod, Lawrence’s Men and Women, London: Heinemann, 1985.

Pointer button Henry Miller, The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation, London: Calder Publications, [1930] 1985.

Pointer button Keith Sagar, D.H.Lawrence: Life Into Art, London: Penguin Books, 1985.

Pointer button Mara Kalnins (ed), D.H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays, Bristol: Classical Press, 1986.

Pointer button Michael Black, D.H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction, Cambridge University Press, 1986

Pointer button Peter Scheckner, Class, Politics, and the Individual: A Study of the Major Works of D.H.Lawrence, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986.

Pointer button Cornelia Nixon, D.H.Lawrence’s Leadership Novels and the Turn Against Women, University of California Press, 1986.

Pointer button Colin Milton, Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence, Mercat Press, 1988.

Pointer button Peter Balbert, D.H.Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading, London: Macmillan, 1989.

Pointer button Wayne Templeton, States of Estrangement: the Novels of D.H.Lawrence 1912-17, Whiston Publishing, 1989.

Pointer button Janet Barron, D.H.Lawrence: (Feminist Readings), Prentice Hall, 1990.

Pointer button Keith Brown (ed), Rethinking Lawrence, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990.

Pointer button James C Cowan, D.H.Lawrence and the Trembling Balance, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990.

Pointer button John B Humma, Metaphor and Meaning in D.H.Lawrence’s Later Novels, University of Missouri Press 1990.

Pointer button G M Hyde, D.H.Lawrence (Modern Novelists), London: Macmillan, 1990.

Pointer button Allan Ingram, The Language of D.H. Lawrence, London: Macmillan, 1990.

Pointer button Nancy Kushigian, Pictures and Fictions: Visual Modernism and the Pre-War Novels of D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1990.

Pointer button Tony Pinkney, Lawrence (New Readings), Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Weatsheaf, 1990.

Pointer button Leo J.Dorisach, Sexually Balanced Relationships in the Novels of D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1991.

Pointer button Nigel Kelsey, D.H.Lawrence: Sexual Crisis (Studies in 20th Century Literature), London: Macmillan, 1991.

Pointer button Barbara Mensch, D.H.Lawrence and the Authoritarian Personality, London: Macmillan, 1991.

Pointer button John Worthen, D H Lawrence (Modern Fiction), London: Arnold, 1991.

Pointer button Michael Bell, D.H.Lawrence: Language and Being, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Pointer button Michael Black, D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Pointer button Virginia Hyde, The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence’s Revisionist Typology, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

Pointer button James B.Sipple, Passionate Form: life process as artistic paradigm in D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1992.

Pointer button Kingsley Widmer, Defiant Desire: Some Dialectical Legacies of D.H.Lawrence, Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.

Pointer button Anne Fernihough, D.H.Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, Clarendon Press, 1993.

Pointer button Linda R Williams, Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D.H.Lawrence, Prentice Hall, 1993.

Pointer button Katherine Waltenscheid, The Resurrection of the Body: Touch in D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1993.

Pointer button Robert E.Montgomery, The Visionary D.H.Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Pointer button Leo Hamalian, D.H.Lawrence and Nine Women Writers, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.

Pointer button Anne Fernihough, The Cambridge Companion to D.H.Lawrence, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Pointer button Fiona Becket, The Complete Critical Guide to D.H.Lawrence, London: Routledge, 2002.

Pointer button James C Cowan, D.H. Lawrence: Self and Sexuality, Ohio State University Press, 2003.

Pointer button John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, London: Penguin, 2006.

Pointer button David Ellis (ed), D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’: A Casebook, Oxford University Press, 2006.

Other work by D.H.Lawrence

Sons and LoversSons and Lovers This is Lawrence’s first great novel. It’s a quasi-autobiographical account of a young man’s coming of age in the early years of the twentieth century. Set in working class Nottinghamshire, it focuses on class conflicts and gender issues as young Paul Morrell is torn between a passionate relationship with his mother and his attraction to other women. He also has a quasi-Oedipal conflict with his coal miner father. If you are new to Lawrence and his work, this is a good place to start.

Lawrence greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Lawrence greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

The RainbowThe Rainbow This is Lawrence’s version of a social saga, spanning three generations of the Brangwen family. It is the women characters in this novel who remain memorable as they strive to express their feelings. The story concludes with the struggle of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, to liberate themselves from the stifling pressures of Edwardian English society. They also feature in his next and some say greatest novel, Women in Love – so it would be a good idea to read this first.

Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

D.H.Lawrence – web links

D.H.Lawrence web links D.H.Lawrence at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, study guides, videos, bibliographies, critical studies, and web links.

Project Gutenberg D.H.Lawrence at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts of the novels, stories, travel writing, and poetry – available in a variety of formats.

Wikipedia D.H.Lawrence at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, publishing history, the Lady Chatterley trial, critical reputation, bibliography, archives, and web links.

Film adaptations D.H.Lawrence at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of Lawrence’s work for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production, box office, trivia, and even quizzes.

D.H.Lawrence D.H.Lawrence archive at the University of Nottingham
Biography, further reading, textual genetics, frequently asked questions, his local reputation, research centre, bibliographies, and lists of holdings.

Red button D.H.Lawrence and Eastwood
Nottinhamshire local enthusiast web site featuring biography, historical and recent photographs of the Eastwood area and places associated with Lawrence.

D.H.Lawrence The World of D.H.Lawrence
Yet another University of Nottingham web site featuring biography, interactive timeline, maps, virtual tour, photographs, and web links.

Red buttonD.H.Lawrence Heritage
Local authority style web site, with maps, educational centre, and details of lectures, visits, and forthcoming events.

© Roy Johnson 2010

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Women Who Did

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Stories about the New Woman 1890-1914

Women Who Did present a collection of stories featuring the ‘new woman’. The short story came into its own as a literary genre at the end of the nineteenth century, as the three-decker novel died its death and the rising numbers of magazines and journals created a new market for shorter fiction. Moreover, the short story, as Angelique Richardson points out in this charming collection, “was concerned with questions rather than answers [and] was perfectly suited to give expression to the turbulence and uncertainties of the late nineteenth century”.

Women Who DidThis was also the age which gave rise to the ‘new woman’ – the female who claimed her independence, wore what clothes she liked, flirted openly with men, smoked cigarettes, and rode a bicycle. These are the issues which form the background to this very entertaining compilation of stories from the fin de ciécle, which only really ended with the start of the First World War. Editor Angelique Richardson offers an expansive introduction which explains the developments that were taking place at that time and puts the stories into a rich context.

She makes the very good point that in the struggle for women’s emancipation, some women were in reactionary opposition to it, and some men were strong supporters. It’s for such reasons that she includes stories on the Woman Question written by both sexes – though it has to be said that those written by women (in this collection) are on the whole superior.

Some well known pieces are included: Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper; Kate Chopin‘s The Storm; Katherine Mansfield‘s The Tiredness of Rosabel. Others are less well known. Mona Caird’s The Yellow Drawing Room rings somewhat comic changes on the use of yellow as a symbol of something challenging. New woman Venora Haydon has decorated an entire room in this colour, which confuses the opinionated male narrator because he cannot square her radicalism (of which he disapproves) with the fact that he is attracted to her.

There’s also a swirlingly romantic piece by George Edgerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne) in which a new woman seems to catechise every man in her life (including her husband) before possibly running away with a chance acquaintance. Richardson has the good sense to include a parody of this story taken from Punch the following year.

It’s not surprising that the best stories are written by the most famous writers – Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Kate Chopin – but there are a number of unexpected gems by writers who will be new to most readers and who certainly deserve the sort of reconsideration that Richardson’s excellent compilation brings to our attention. As one Amazon reviewer remarks – “It’s worth reading for the introduction alone”.

Women Who Did   Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women Who Did   Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2003

Angelique Richardson (ed), Women Who Did: Stories 1890-1914, London: Penguin, 2005, pp.528, ISBN: 0141441569

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Women, Marriage, and Art

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Mistress, Muse, Mrs, and Miss

Here’s a sample of recommended studies featuring women, marriage, and art. Women not as artists themselves so much as the wives, mistresses, and the muses who have inspired creation. Some have had the misfortune to partner with monsters of egoism, but others have been women brave enough to defy social norms and live successfully in an unconventional manner.

Alma Mahler - The Bride of the WindThe Bride of the Wind   [full review]
Alma Mahler was an aristocratic beauty from Vienna with an appetite for painters, musicians, and artists. Her first major lover was Gustav Klimt: (that’s her portrait in his famous painting The Kiss). She then went on to marry the composer Gustav Mahler, and when Mahler died she started an affair with the painter Oskar Kokoshka. Once again, she inspired one of his most-admired paintings, The Bride of the Wind. Kokoshka wanted to marry her, but she refused, saying “I only marry geniuses”. He went off to war and was wounded. Whilst he was convalescing, she married the architect Walter Gropius, who was also serving in the war. When he was summoned from military duty to the birth of their second child, he was disappointed to learn it was not his own, but that of her current lover, the writer Franz Werfel. She stuck with Werfel through the 1920s and 1930s, but when he died after the second world war, she didn’t even go to his funeral.
Women, Marriage, and Art The Life of Alma Mahler Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art The Life of Alma Mahler Buy the book at Amazon US

Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of ModernismMistress of Modernism   [full review]
Peggy Guggenheim was a rich American heiress – though she protested that she was from the ‘poorer side’ of the family. The first of her many husbands introduced her to the bohemian art world of post-war Paris in the 1920s, and from that point onwards she made a habit of collecting modern art (mainly surrealism) and turning her favourite painters into lovers and husbands. Her list of conquests is fairly extensive: Giorgio Joyce (son of James), Yves Tanguay, Roland Penrose, E.L.T.Mesens, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and even Samuel Beckett. She established the museum in Venice that now bears her name, and ended her days surrounded by gay assistants and being punted round the canals in her own private gondola.
Women, Marriage, and Art Peggy Guggenheim Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Peggy Guggenheim Buy the book at Amazon US

Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov   [full review]
This is a fascinating biography of a woman who devoted the whole of her life to her husband’s literary production. Vera Slonim became Vladimir Nabokov’s secretary, his editor, proofreader, and literary agent, his driver, protector (she carried a revolver in her handbag) and sometimes she even delivered his lectures. She was just as imperious and aristocratic as he was, but gave herself up entirely to his ambitions. Nevertheless, after suspecting him of dalliance with a young American college girl, she took the precaution of attending all his classes to keep a watchful eye on him.
Women, Marriage, and Art Vera Nabokov Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Vera Nabokov Buy the book at Amazon US

Among the Bohemians Among the Bohemians   [full review]
The early part of the twentieth century was a period that gave rise to bohemianism in British life. People (and women in particular) kicked off the social restraints that were still hanging round as a shabby residue of the Victorian era. Most of the female figures Virginia Nicholson deals with in this study were artists and writers: Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, painters Dora Carrington (who lived with two men) Nina Hamnet and the illustrator Kathleen Hale (who was secretary and lover to Augustus John) and the society Lady Ottoline Morrell, who had affairs with both her gardener and Bertrand Russell amongst others. These women took up smoking, wore jumble sale clothes, drank to excess, tried drugs, and refused to do any housework. Very politically incorrect role models – but fascinating characters.
Women, Marriage, and Art Among the Bohemians Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Among the Bohemians Buy the book at Amazon US

Parallel Lives Parallel Lives   [full review]
This has become a classic study of four Victorian marriages. John Ruskin was an authority on art and beauty, but he is famous for never having consummated his marriage. What’s not so well known is that when his wife divorced him on these grounds, he offered to prove his virility in the courtroom. John Stuart Mill also had a marriage blanche – but on the principle that men ought to compensate women for the social injustices they suffered. George Eliot on the other hand defied conventions by living with a married man, then when he died married a man twenty years younger than herself. She meanwhile wrote some of the classics of nineteenth century English literature.
Women, Marriage, and Art Parallel Lives Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Parallel Lives Buy the book at Amazon US

Singled Out Singled Out   [full review]
By the time the first world war ended, more than three-quarters of a million young British servicemen had lost their lives. The single young women who had ‘kept the home fires burning’ and waited for them faced an alarming shortage of marriage prospects. And matrimony was the one escape from the shame of spinsterhood offered to women at that time. This searching original study by Virginia Nicolson (grand-daughter of the painter Vanessa Bell) tells the stories of women who were forced to invent careers for themselves. They became teachers, librarians, journalists, doctors, archeologists, members of parliament, and even in one case the curator of London Zoo. Some sacrificed emotional ties to further their careers; others invented new forms of friendships and intimacy.
Women, Marriage, and Art Singled Out Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Singled Out Buy the book at Amazon US

Uncommon ArrangementsUncommon Arrangements   [full review]
In an age where one third of marriages end in divorce, it’s refreshing to look at alternative arrangements some people have explored. Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister) managed to keep her husband Clive Bell, her lover Duncan Grant, and her ex-lover Roger Fry all frioends with each other. Ottoline Morell helped her husband cope when he revealed to her that both his lovers were pregnant at the same time. Una Troubridge remained loyal as lesbian ‘wife’ to Radcliffe Hall (of The Well of Loneliness fame) whilst Hall (who called herself ‘John’) enjoyed a nine year long affair with a young Russian girl. Troubridge however took economic revenge when she was made executrix to her ‘husband’s will. Katie Roiphe’s study of radical alternatives to conventional marriage in artistic circles includes a fair amount of emotional suffering and masochism – but it’s certainly thought provoking to see what lengths people will go to in enjoying a little sexual self-indulgence.
Women, Marriage, and Art Uncommon Arrangements Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Uncommon Arrangements Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012

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