I wandered into my little local library the other day and there was this on a shelf. Everyone but me seemed to be reading it a while ago but, though I am a great admirer of the work of this most excellent novelist, I had not felt particularly impelled to get hold of it. Partly I think this was because I'd read so many reviews, all of which made much of the book's supposedly startling revelation -- that ET, apparently a contented suburban housewife, had a love affair which lasted throughout the first twelve years of her marriage -- that I thought it would hold no surprises. In a sense that was true, but it didn't detract from my enjoyment of this very impressively researched biography.
I fairly recently re-read ET's Angel, thought by many people to be her masterpiece. This brilliant, funny, disturbing novel is about a young girl from a suburban home who has a passionate desire to write. She churns out novel after novel, all pretty ghastly, but becomes a huge success for a time though she is quite unable to see that her work is viewed as trashy and absurd. Angel is a tragic figure, with no self-knowledge and no irony, so quite unlike her creator in that way. Nevertheless, her childhood obsession with writing, and her endless production of novels and stories, clearly owes a lot to ET herself, who wrote and wrote and wrote, stories and novels, for over ten years before getting anything accepted for publication. This in itself makes really remarkable reading -- to be so completely driven, so sure that you had something to say, that you were able to persist in the face of endless rejection, is a most extraordinary trait. Why and how ET came by it is anybody's guess -- nothing in her family background would seem to have prepared her for it. Add to that her early and long-standing membership of the communist party, and her long and passionate affair with Ray Russell, both carried on while she was, on the surface, living the life of a totally conventional small town wife and mother, and you have a most intriguing story. In the end I thought it was rather sad. Though ET did finally get published and was recognised after a fashion in her own day, she was certainly a victim of the male-dominated literary establishment who viewed her books as low-brow women's fiction. In fact, as Nicola Beauman points out, ET was a ground-breaker both in style and content, a true modernist following in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf.
Reading this I realised there are a number of ET's novels I have not yet read, something I mean to put right as soon as possible. So watch this space!
