Harriet Devine's Blog

A Victorian Actress

The picture on the left here is from the front cover of a book I was sent for review:  A Chronicle of Small Beer: the life and times of a Victorian actress by Winifred Dolan, edited by Andy Moreton, foreword by Katherine Newey, which was published this month by the Society for Theatre Research. It was surprisingly enthralling, giving the most fascinating glimpses not only into theatre history but also into women's lives, careers and expectations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Even if you know something about British theatre in the late 1800s you almost certainly would not have heard of Winifred Dolan. Born into a middle-class Roman Catholic family in Leeds, Winifred developed a powerful desire to go on the stage at the age of about six, and, rather amazingly, when she rather tentatively expressed this as a young adult, her family did not stand in her way. But, though she managed to get trained and to get some small parts in the West End, she never became a star -- she was, in fact, what was known as a jobbing actor, useful for understudying and a reliable member of touring companies. The only reason we now know about her life is that, aged over 80 and living in a convent in the south of England, she decided to write her memoirs -- not for publication, but just for her own pleasure -- and by chance these turned up at a London auction. 

Winifred's meetings with the great Henry Irving and with her idol, Ellen Terry, who became a friend and supporter, her long working relationship with the producer George Alexander, her friendships with Teddy (Edward Gordon) Craig, Oscar Wilde, and many others are, of course,  valuable as theatre history. But it's the story of her struggles to establish herself as an actress, the extraordinarily long hours she had to work, the drudgery of touring, even in a special Pullman hired for the cast, and the challenges of living on a pathetically small salary that make this story so fascinating. Winifred is keenly conscious of being a woman in a man's world, and she meets with a great deal of chauvinism along the way even though, during her so-called resting periods she works as a secretary, a front-of-house manager, a script reader and even a director, sometimes simultaneously. One chapter is devoted to her attempts to write a successful play which, rather worryingly, generally fail because the person to whom she has submitted it manages to die before he has a chance to put it on.

No-one could fail to love Winifred,  who writes with great wit and charm, and shows herself to have had real strength and spirit. This is delightfully illustrated by her response when a harassed stage manager, having failed to train any understudies, found himself stuck with no-one to replace a leading actress who had sprained her ankle. All the ladies to whom he appealed to save him from getting the sack by reading the part on stage that night refused --' "never done such a thing, would die of fright" etc' -- but Winifred, bless her, got up and said: "Send out for a dozen oysters and a bottle of stout, shut me up in the star room, keep the cleaners off the stairs and I'll play the part tonight". And so she did, word perfect in a three act play. 

Winifred abandoned the theatre at the age of 36 and spent the rest of her working life on a steady salary from the Women's Unionist Association. Why she decided to write her theatre memoirs in her 80s we will never know, but we should be really glad she did. 

The Shrimp and the Anemone

I'm guessing that L P Hartley is not exactly a name to conjure with these days. If you've been around long enough you might have seen the 1970 film of his most famous novel, The Go-Between ("The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there"), or indeed read the novel itself. Beautiful, romantic, and ultimately tragic, that novel is celebrated for its portrayal of childhood innocence betrayed by a pair of socially ill-matched lovers.

Here we have another take on early 20th-century childhood, though written in the early 1940s.The protagonist, from whose perspective the story is told, is Eustace, aged just nine when the novel begins. Gentle, sensitive, imaginative, Eustace lives much of his life in a dream world, from which he often has to be dragged unwillingly by his older sister Hilda. Their mother having died a few years earlier, Hilda has taken it upon herself to bring Eustace up according to her own strict and puritanical standards. Generally speaking Eustace is willing to comply -- his occasional inner rebellion against her educational policies is usually tempered by his own sense of guilt and unworthiness. In fact the only time he does really rebel, going off on a long cross-country run with lively, pretty Nancy Steptoe, ends in disaster as he has a weak heart and becomes seriously ill as a result. In retribution he has to obey Hilda's demand that he go and have tea with an old lady, Miss Fothergill, of whom he is terrified on account of her appearance and her inability to walk. Once he does overcome his fear, though, he takes great pleasure in his visits to her house, and after her death he gets a legacy which changes his entire future.

This is a beautifully written novel, fascinating in its depiction of these two children. We see Hilda only through the eyes of Eustace, who adores and fears her, but her motives are clearer to the reader. This is particularly true of her unwillingness to accept the frequent invitations she gets from wealthy, privileged Dick Staveley, who has noticed her beauty and tries to persuade her to go to tea or to go riding with him. Eustace thinks Hilda dislikes Dick and hates horses, but in fact the opposite seems to be true, and her refusal is probably owing to her puritanism and to an instinctive feeling that any relationship with Dick will turn out badly for her. But it is Eustace whose inner life is most clearly seen and this is most wonderfully and perceptively done. I was a little bit reminded at times of William Maxwell's great novel, They Came Like Swallows, another book about a sensitive small boy.

Hartley went on to write two more novels about these two, ending up with a trilogy which now often appears as one book under the title Eustace and Hilda. I'm onto the second part now so perhaps you'll hear more about this at a later date.

Jude the Obscure

Oh dear oh dear. Poor Jude. This has to be one of the saddest novels in the known universe, surely. I first read it about a quarter of a century ago and have just re-read it for my reading group, and it is still just as gloomy as I remembered. Really good, though. I know Hardy isn't to everyone's taste, but I love him both for his novels and his poems. My overall favourite of the fiction must be The Mayor of Casterbridge , which would certainly be on my list of desert island books if I had one. But on to Jude -- what's so sad about it, you may be asking. Pretty much everything, really. 

In brief: little Jude is an orphan, living in a tiny village with his unsympathetic aunt. He is clever and wants an education, and when he discovers that, 20 miles away, there's big city called Christminster which is devoted to learning, he longs to go there. He starts to study on his own but is hopelessly sidetracked by a buxom girl, Arabella, who attracts his attention by throwing a pig's "pizzle" at him and then traps him into a marriage that soon fails. In Christminster at last, Jude tries and fails to get admitted to one of the ancient colleges. He also meets and falls in love with his cousin Sue, an intellectual and a free-thinker with an aversion to physical love. She marries an elderly schoolmaster, but she does end up living with Jude though their beliefs prevent them from marrying even when they are bringing up three children -- Jude's son by Arabella and two of their own. More than this I cannot say, just in case you want to go off and read it for the first time. But I can tell you that things do not turn out well at all.

There's so much you could say about this novel. Christminster is, of course, Oxford, where Hardy himself would undoubtedly have loved to go. But Christminster does not come out all that well -- the dons, who Jude so much admires and envies, have closed minds and ignore his appeals for a hearing. Intellectual life of all kinds is really called into question here -- Jude's early and straightforward love of Christianity is undermined by Sue's agnosticism, but Sue's agnosticism is overthrown by her personal tragedies. Sex is problematic, too: Sue's cool dislike of sexuality suggests frigidity, but Arabella's more apparently natural openness is linked to dissolute living. Jude is drawn to sex and to alcohol but feels deeply guilty about both.

Of course none of this questioning and problematising is resolved, and this would be a far less interesting novel if it was. Hardy used the novel to voice his own beliefs about marriage and religion, and his contemporary readers were deeply shocked by it, but his own ambivalence shows through sometimes, I think. I enjoyed it immensely though I did feel, as I did on the first reading too, that the last part is the least satisfactory. Partly of course that may be because it is so unbearably painful, but I think it's partly because the character of Jude's little son, known as Father Time, has never really convinced me. What he finally does -- and if you don't know you will have to read it to find out -- is not only tragic and horrific but also seems to me a bit unlikely, though I suppose nothing is impossible.

I'm really looking forward to hearing what the reading group thinks of this, but I'm so glad I got a chance to re-read it. Great stuff.

Embracing Technology

 I don't get cross very often these days, but I did get very cross a year or two ago when my friend Lewis said that women over fifty "couldn't handle technology". I'm getting cross now just thinking about it. But never mind that. The fact is I have always loved gadgets, and most of all ones that allowed you to communicate. On the left here you will see a picture of my very first computer, the Amstrad PC 1512. I bought one in the late 1980s, when I was writing up my DPhil thesis, and very useful it was -- no more pages of illegible notes covered in asterisks marked "insert C" or whatever. It nearly gave me a nervous breakdown, though, when, with ten days to go before my submission date, it suddenly swallowed up large chunks of a chapter that had proved to be too long for its floppy disk -- especially as it did this by removing every fifth word. I had to retype the whole thing from rough notes over Christmas, not a happy experience.

It wasn't all that long afterwards that I fell in love with my first Apple Mac, which looked a bit like this.  And, though this clunky looking thing doesn't bear much resemblance to the nice little Macbook I'm writing this on, I've stayed loyal to Macs ever since. I used to get a lot of stick for this, but as I spent many years with a PC at work and a Mac at home I really did have enough information to make what seemed to me to be a clear and sensible choice. And of course I've branched out into ipods, and now I have an ipod touch which I am completely in love with, and which I use for for reading books, listening to music, playing games, emailing, and much much more.

Naturally I leaped on email and the web with huge enthusiasm and I simply cannot any longer imagine what life could have been like without them. But it took me a while to cotton on to blogs and I think this had something to do with the name, which I found repellent. Also I got the idea that they were just for people who wanted to tell you about their rather boring lives. Then I discovered dovegreyreader, and things just took off from there. I've been on facebook for a while and because my family is rather scattered around the place it's a good way to see what they are all up to.

But it has taken me a long time to even consider the possibility of twitter. Not only, again, is the name so hideous and off-putting, but also the whole concept seemed to me profoundly unappealing. Too short, too self-obsessed, too boring. But I've got curious lately, as some bloggers I respect seem to have taken it up. So that's why I thought I'd give it a go. To be honest I don't yet even fully understand how it works (perhaps that's because I'm over fifty?) but I'm willing to experiment and see what happens, if anything. I'm still pretty dubious, but time will tell.

Woman Playing the Virginals (Vermeer again)

Vermeer painted several pictures of women playing various musical instruments. Last week I showed you his Woman Playing the Lute and here we have Woman Seated at the Virginals -- virginals being "a smaller and simpler rectangular form of the harpsichord with only one string per note running more or less parallel to the keyboard on the long side of the case", says Wikipedia. If you want to know what they sound like you can find out by clicking here. 

I never thought I'd join twitter but I think I just did!

The Twisted Heart

I read about this on someone's blog, ordered it from the library, and promptly forgot all about it. I got rather indignant, in fact, when I went to the library a few days ago and they told me I owed them 85p. for it -- I denied all knowledge of it till they produced it from under the counter and then I remembered what it was.  "A literary murder mystery and a tale of modern love" -- oh yes. And of course the reason I wanted it was that it was set in Oxford. Not that I have to read absolutely everything that is set in Oxford but I do enjoy recognising places in novels. I'm deep into Jude the Obscure for my reading group at the moment and having a lot of fun -- if fun is a word one can use in conjunction with Hardy's melancholy masterpiece -- following poor Jude as he tramps the alleys and gazes into the colleges he will never be admitted to. But more on that later.

The Twisted Heart is an altogether more up to date take on the city of dreaming spires, as Matthew Arnold rather poetically called it. Here we have Kit, a postgraduate student working on nineteenth-century literature (rather as I used to do myself in those far off days of the 1980s). Kit is getting sidetracked from the thesis she is supposed to be writing by an obsessive idea she has had that the violent and bloody murder of a prostitute in the mid-nineteenth century is linked in some way with Dickens' depiction, in Oliver Twist, of the murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes. Lonely, mistrustful, insomniac, so tall that she sometimes faints because the blood fails to reach her head, Kit's only human contacts are with her flatmate Michaela and her American student Orson McMurphy, to whom she is trying to impart some knowledge of female detectives in Victorian fiction. She decides “to leave the word ‘transgressive’ to Orson. She bet herself he wouldn’t be able to resist, the bet being that if Orson dropped ‘transgressive’ into his essay, she would buy herself a fancy new pair of knickers.” He does, and she does -- useful, in a way, as, going on a whim to a dance class in an insalubrious part of Cowley, she meets a man called Joe who, though at first she thinks he may be an unemployed layabout, turns out to be a maths lecturer. Really this novel is about their relationship and it does deal with it quite brilliantly. Kit is so unused to relating to anyone that she mistrusts Joe and refuses to let him get close to her. And Joe is awkward, nervous, sometimes distant, struggling with the huge problems presented by his addicted brother. It seems most unlikely that these two difficult, spiky, over-sensitive people will actually work things out, but it is great fun watching them try.

Rebecca Gowers writes the most lively, spirited prose, very modern, disjointed, witty. I took a while to get used to it but in the end warmed to it, and to this book, tremendously. 

Springtime in Oxford

The cherry and the magnolia blossoming together in my back garden. Nice. 

Woman Playing the Lute

You can't go wrong with Vermeer (1632-1675) -- his paintings are exceptionally beautiful, with a wonderful quality of stillness. I love the way he has composed this painting -- the chair at the front, the map on the wall -- the woman is taking up a relatively small amount of space on the canvas, but you are immediately drawn to her face, illuminated by the light coming through the window. Lovely.

Interviewing Sam Mills

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed Sam Mills' excellent novel, Blackout, and now I am happy to say Sam has agreed to be interviewed for this blog. Here's a transcript of our conversation.

Hi Sam -- thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. The first thing I wanted to ask you is, when did you first realise you were going to be a writer?

 At a very young age - by the age of seven or eight I had already started scribbling stories and I wrote my first novel when I was eleven. Obviously, it was crap. But it was a start!

Your three published novels are all aimed at young adults. What made you choose this market?

I didn't choose it. I sent the first chapter of my first 'YA' novel, 'A Nicer Way to Die' to Faber and they pulled it off their slush-pile and wrote back within 24 hours saying they liked it and wanted to see more. The editor who liked it was a children's book editor, but I was never certain whether they would publish it on this list. A big-name agent who was excited about the book at the time said he thought the book 'had the imagination of Mark Haddon and the verve of Brett Easton Ellis' (I was so chuffed by his summary I have not forgotten it!) and he wanted to sell it solely as an adult novel. So it could have been published in different ways. My books have been translated into various languages and in some countries they are published as adult novels. But as I enjoy writing from the viewpoint of a teenage boy, I feel very comfortable in the YA arena.

You have chosen some challenging themes for your novels – bullying in A Nicer Way to Die, terrorism and religious fundamentalism in The Boys Who Saved the World, and censorship, brainwashing and a generally dystopian future in Blackout. What drew you to writing about these things?

 When I wrote 'A Nicer Way to Die' bullying - which I agree is an important theme - wasn't really the heart of the novel for me. I remember someone saying 'you can't set an entire novel in a house with just two boys and make it work', so the challenge for me was whether I could do it and make it compelling. It's a very introspective, claustrophobic novel and also very dark, but I wanted it to be gothic-dark, and have moments of unexpected beauty - such as the broken-winged bird James discovers. I was interested in tone. When I came to the next two books, I discovered the themes that fascinate me - war, religion and politics. I could write about them endlessly.

 I am drawn to controversial subject-matter. I like films and books that stir me or unsettle me. I don't like formulaic films/books, or contrived happy endings, or narrative being served on a plate where everything is as it seems. One of my favourite film makers is Michael Hanneke, who is a master of ambiguity, and a superb film-maker; he has definitely been an influence on me. 

 How much research did you do for these novels?

 When I wrote 'Blackout' I studied the newspapers a lot, and so I was pleased with the review that SFX magazine gave the book - 'It’s fiction, it’s ridiculous, it’s fantastical – but read a paper after you’ve finished and prepare to be disturbed by the parallels ... this is a thought-provoking read that will leave you more than a little nervous about where our society is heading.' One of the real life incidents that inspired the novel was the story of a teenage girl in the US who was arrested, hauled out of class and interrogated by the FBI - because she had a jokey image on her MySpace page about wanting to kill the President. I used a similar incident in my book and my editor said, "Well would people believe such a thing?" - when I told her it had happened in real life, she was quite shocked. I am taken aback on a daily basis by the attack on our civil liberties and corrosion of freedom of speech. I still can't believe that a few years back, a girl was arrested for wearing a 'Bollocks to Blair' T-shirt.

 What’s the process of writing like for you? Pencil, pen, computer? A special place? A special time of day? Any essential rituals? How disciplined are you?

I write around 6 days a week. I used to like staying in and writing in a environment of absolute silence. But I've changed over the past few years. Now I like writing on trains and in cafes, with my notepad and pen. I feed off the buzz around me and feel energised by company rather than solitude.

 What do you enjoy doing when you’re not writing?

 I like watching movies very much. The last film I saw that I loved was 'Fish Tank' which I thought definitely deserved the BAFTA it received for 'Best British Film'.

 What books have influenced you? And who or what would you recommend as a writer/book that simply must be read?

 My favourite novel is 'The English Patient' by Michael Ondaatje. I've read it over 20 times and I still enjoy just opening the book at random and just savouring the prose. I think it is the most beautifully written book I've ever read.

When I was a teenager I loved 'The Outsiders' by S E Hinton which is a teen classic and a ground-breaking novel, too, as it created more freedom for YA authors to explore challenging issues.

I also like 'Vernon God Little' by DBC Pierre, which is one of he best Booker winners ever. It's like a modern day 'Catcher in the Rye'. It swings from savage satire to black comedy to sweet lyricism to poignant tragedy from one page to the next - all captured in the voice of 15-year-old Vernon, when he is wrongly accused of a high school massacre.

What’s next for Sam Mills? Are you working on anything at the moment?

I am writing about 4 books at once and trying to work out which one to focus on. And I'm involved in the film adaptation of 'Boys Who Saved the World', which is an exciting experience!

Thanks so much! I'm very much looking forward to the next book, when you decide what it is, and to the film.