Bagnold, Sinclair, and a Dorothy Whipple surprise

Lying in front of the fan on Tuesday afternoon I tore through both the Bagnold and Sinclair I mentioned in my earlier post, as well as a novel by Dorothy Whipple that was just too appealing to ignore.

May Sinclair's Superseded was a very short book (ah, shades of the Provincial Lady), taking a rather pessimistic view of the "Woman Question." Superseded suggests that most women will be destroyed by competition in a labour market, and that education merely unfits them for experiencing the emotional side of life as wives and mothers. As it was published with another short novel in a volume titled Two Sides of the Question I can only assume that the other half of the novel gave the other half of the argument.

The focus of the book is Miss Juliana Quincey, an "old maid" teacher at a school for girls. At forty-five Miss Quincey's emotions have never been truly engaged, and she expects little from her thankless students, her fault-finding aunt, and her critical peers. The Head of the school would love to replace Miss Quincey with someone younger and more intelligent, which poses some of the tension in the book, but the real conflict comes as she encounters for the first time both a man and a woman who treat her with kindness and respect. Her stifled emotions blossom into attachment to each of them, but the environment she's in is unforgiving of emotional development in a woman of forty-five. It's a painful book, probably all too realistic for its time, and made me grateful to be living in urban Northern California where a woman is never too old to discover herself.

Enid Bagnold's The Happy Foreigner was an entirely different experience, and to be honest I'm not really sure what to make of it. The prose is beautifully vague... perhaps impressionistic is the right word? Despite the novel being entirely from the perspective of Fanny, the young Englishwoman who goes to France to drive for the French Army immediately after the first World War, I never really understood who Fanny was. Bagnold details Fanny's immediate emotional reactions to events, but never describes her past or her hope for the future, which gives the novel a very dream-like sense to it. I see the art in that, the way that a woman after the war might feel like all she had was the present, both past and future irrelevant, but it meant that I was never able to connect with Fanny emotionally, and thus I didn't really care what happened to her.

Now that I think about it, the title is even more appropriate than I realised; Fanny really is the happy foreigner, the woman whose past does not haunt her, whose future does not trouble her, who can visit a devastated, desolate France and then leave again, seemingly untouched by the experience. How much of that was Bagnold's own self, and how much a wish for integrity so complete that she is completely unscathed by the war? Perhaps I should find a biography of Bagnold...

My final Tuesday novel was High Wages by Dorothy Whipple, and oh it was a pleasant surprise. I rarely find a book I can just sink into without my terrible page-counting habit interfering, but this was one. The heroine, Jane, makes her way in the world through determination and intelligence, discovers her avocation in selling clothing, and manages to make a vocation of it. She is shown as paying for her success, both through hard work and difficult personal relationships, but the overall tone of the novel is so optimisitc that I never doubted for a moment that Jane would make it through. Objectively speaking the novel has plenty of painful and depressing moments, but I still finished the book feeling pleased with the world and convinced that Jane would be all right. This is the fourth of Whipple's novels I've read, and they've neatly divided up into two which were heart-rending (Someone at a Distance and They Knew Mr. Knight), and two which left me happy -- this one and The Priory. It makes me nervous to read a fifth, since my all rights it ought to be another upsetting one!