Authors: Virginia Nicholson
are lovely and serene. Every evening after supper she chats with her friendly landlady over a glass of home-made dandelion and mangold wine. In the village the neighbours are unconcerned by her ways, for theirs are just as
odd: the clergyman keeps a tame owl, Misses Minnie and Jane Larpent
cook stewed rabbit for the Bishop, Mr Gurdon the parish clerk has a curly
red beard and bullies the choirboys. Slowly, Lolly takes on the life of this curious village, and then one day a small kitten comes into her room.
Surprised by the uninvited guest, Lolly bends to stroke it; it bites and claws her ferociously, streaking her hand with red scratches. And now she knows for certain what she has always guessed:
She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year , had entered into a compact with the Devil. The compact was made, and affirmed, and sealed with the round red seal of her blood.
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’
Laura is a witch.
She joins the Great Mop coven. Unerringly, her Master has led her to
his place. She has come home. And finally, in a graveyard, she meets
him. Lolly’s evolution is complete, and yet she is what she always was:
adventurous, independent, odd and unsafe. Sylvia Townsend Warner –
herself unmarried – challenged propriety in her own life. She loved women,
not men. Her impatience with the conventions that governed single
women’s lives takes form in
Lolly Willowes
, a triumphant vindication of the spinster. Lolly refuses to be patronised, to be ‘Poor Lolly’ or ‘Dear Lolly’.
She will not submit to being the kind of maiden aunt who gets given hot
water bottles for birthdays. What does she care if men disdain her body as
unattractive, when the Devil himself has sought out her soul? Satan offers
secrecy, charm, danger, and immunity from judgement:
That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending that life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure . . . One doesn’t become a witch to run round being harmful, or to run round being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others . . .
Lolly Willowes
is witty, lyrical and affirmative, not agitprop in the war of the sexes, but a profound
cri de cœur
: ‘Leave me alone, and let me be what I am.’
There were other novels whose heroines, though they did not go so far
as to sell their souls to Satan, still resolutely turned their backs on hot water bottles and knitting needles. As an apologist for despairing, embattled singles fighting for identity and independence in hostile territory, Winifred Holtby was unequalled. Her heroines Muriel Hammond and Sarah Burton emerge from setbacks strong and self-sufficient. Muriel’s sick terror at being
unwanted, of never becoming a wife, has evolved into a determination not
to compromise with an unhappy marriage. She has been taught that there
are other things in life, has glimpsed ideals that may be even more significant for her than marriage; and though a lover eventually comes to Muriel, she turns him away: ‘ ‘‘I can’t be a good wife until I’ve learnt to be a person,’’
said Muriel, ‘‘and perhaps in the end I’ll never be a wife at all.’’ ’
Sarah Burton’s shame, sorrow and loss of hope after Robert Carne’s
death are finally tested when the pilot of the light aircraft she is in momentarily loses control; at that moment she knows she wants to live. ‘Comforted by death, she faced the future.’ And Sarah’s future will see her finishing the task before her. It is school speech day. Bandaged from her near-miss,
Singled Out
she stands before her pupils and delivers an eloquent address on
anti-authoritarianism: ‘ ‘‘. . . Question your government’s policy, question the arms race, question the Kingsport slums, and the rule that makes women have to renounce their jobs on marriage, and why the derelict areas still are derelict . . . Questioning does not mean the end of loving . . .’’ ’
Even F. M. Mayor’s melancholy spinster Mary Jocelyn in
The Rector’s
Daughter
() makes a heartfelt case for the single woman, delving deep into the inner life of its heroine. Mary
is
the kind of aunt who gets given hot water bottles; dutiful to her demanding father, humble and ‘nice’, her unassertive, indoor nature is the antithesis of the witch. Not for Mary the
freedom of sleeping in a leafy ditch like Lolly Willowes. She will never
orate from a platform like Sarah Burton, nor seek political fulfilment like
Muriel Hammond. Her father squashes her literary ambitions, and after
losing the one man she loves to a rival, Mary’s romantic hopes are blighted
too. Her life is not entirely empty; in late middle age she finds gentle
happiness with a group of other spinsters like her, who invite her to lectures, matineés and philanthropic meetings. She dies quietly, resignedly, lovable to the last. But Mary’s creator F. M. Mayor, herself a bereaved, thwarted
single, unflinchingly lays bare the quiet torments of her heroine. Anguish
always lies close to the surface, breaking through even at the end, when
she has a meeting with her rival, now married to the man she once loved.
Despite Mary’s ‘busy, happy life’, she suffers bitter pangs:
She was seized with jealousy of him and Kathy – the primal jealousy of an
unsuccessful rival. Kathy had him, had children, had everything.
F. M Mayor’s tale of a woman’s buried, intense emotions, its detailing
of the loneliness, the crushed passions and the fear, is deeply true. The
courage of this novel is in its recognition of individual hopes and fears.
The
Rector’s Daughter
is not palliative, it is not comforting. ‘Don’t be deluded,’
is its message, ‘life is hard for single women, so don’t expect other people to be kind or understanding. Make your own way in life. Seek integrity.’
Where Mary wins is in her painful honesty, disconcerting as that may be
to her few friends – like Dora:
‘To love and be loved,’ said Mary musingly. ‘Did you feel it like a key, Dora, to let you out of prison, and open a treasure-house to you?’
‘Is that a pretty bit out of your writings?’ said Dora with a kindness that
would have checked the flow, but Mary was not listening. ‘I have
longed
for it,’
she went on.
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’
She spoke with an intensity that startled Dora . . . [her] eyes burnt too, with a fire which made Dora uncomfortable . . .
‘I have sometimes thought – ’ Mary said with feeling, ‘the kisses – ’
The gorgon Aunt Jane, the tweed-clad figures of fun and the wispy-bunned
virgins of popular fiction never smouldered with longing. They weren’t
even allowed to. F. M. Mayor never denies how hard it could be.
Punch
, August Bank Holiday weekend, : the caption ‘A Holiday Tragedy’ seems barely an exaggeration
When Vera Brittain first met her, Winifred Holtby was wearing a boldly
striped costume, topped with an emerald green hat; as she was exceptionally
tall and well-built, the effect was astonishing. Winifred, throughout her
tragically short life (she died of an incurable disease aged thirty-eight*), made a career out of her refusal to be pigeonholed, denounced or ignored.
* Vera Brittain and her husband Gordon Catlin persuaded Harry Pearson to come to Winifred’s deathbed, and in her diary Vera recorded that the pair had there come to an understanding that they would marry. However, Winifred’s biographer has no doubt that Harry Pearson was under pressure from Gordon to show compassion to a dying woman and would never have agreed to this on his own account.
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And in the same spirit as F. M. Mayor, she publicly confronted frustration.
Winifred was eventually so goaded by the attacks on spinsters (Oswald
Mosley had publicly referred to them as ‘this distressing type’) that she sat down to write a robust defence of the millions like herself. The single woman was in need of social rehabilitation, and Winifred was not one to shirk the task. Her essay ‘Are Spinsters Frustrated?’ is a war-cry, challenging the assumption that sex is the only channel for fulfilment. Yes, she conceded, frustration was bad; but we have to get our terms sorted out. Popular psychologists were wrong that marital sex was the only alleviation for frustration; this was a misconception based on the Protestant emphasis on women as primarily wives. It was dismaying to see Mosley and the others so fixated on the idea
that women without sex lives would ‘become riddled with complexes like
a rotting fruit’. Holtby refuted the notion that pleasure, ecstasy, happiness, achievement and a full life were dependent on this one circumstance. Many wives were utterly miserable, yet society had taught girls to dread the fate of the ‘old maid’. The muddled thinking that made spinsterhood seem so unenviable prevented the world from recognising the reality:
The spinster may have work which delights her, personal intimacies which comfort her, power which satisfies her. She may have known that rare light of ecstasy.
Funny, intelligent and courageous, Winifred Holtby was herself a powerful embodiment of her own creation Sarah Burton’s compressed philosophy: ‘I was born to be a spinster, and by God, I’m going to spin.’ Thus armed
with courage, humour and pride, Sarah Burton/Winifred Holtby looked
to the future. The war was past. It had taken the husbands from two million
potential wives, but along with it, it had removed the shame. Being one of
two million felt less blameworthy than in the past, when the spinster suffered from the shame of being unable to attract a man. Now, being unmarried could be regarded as a misfortune rather than a fault, and with this recovery came a renewed sense of their own power and importance. ‘I was off to conquer the world,’ wrote Amy Gomm, ‘. . . the sky was the limit.’ ‘I was
a high-flyer, and I was too much interested in what I was doing in the way
of writing to think at all about marriage . . .’ remembered Elizabeth Jenkins.
And Rani Cartwright’s ‘no-ties’ approach brought her travel and a hectic
social life: ‘I was never lonely, never bored. You’re too busy, living out of a suitcase, always with different people. I want my freedom, I still do!’
Conviction and solidarity gave these women their momentum.
There was so much that still needed to be achieved for unmarried women
in the wide world, not just in dispelling prejudice (hot water bottles, tweed
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’
suits and sex-starved old maids), but also in righting the balance for single women economically and socially. The men were dead who might have led Britain, but they had left behind them women who felt there was much
that needed changing. Winifred Holtby made the point that wives were
hampered by the responsibilities of husband and children, whereas the
unmarried had liberty to make progress in many fields – education, medicine, politics, art and exploration. This remains true. Provided they were prepared to make the break from their families, and turn their backs on the
expectation that they would live unmarried under the parental roof as
unpaid – and often unthanked – carers, the s and s were full of
openings for talented ambitious women.
Those glimmerings of change from the turn of the century were becoming brighter, steadier. Slowly but surely, the barricades were being dismantled from traditional male preserves – the law, medicine, politics, journalism, academe and finance. It could be uphill, but if you were prepared to work hard and fight your corner, there were rewards. After she left Oxford in Vera Brittain, with Winifred Holtby, removed her ‘disappointing spinsterhood’ to Bloomsbury and took up a career as journalist, writer and political activist. She lectured for the League of Nations and
travelled widely. Her parents tolerated their breakaway daughter: ‘They
understood now that freedom, however uncomfortable, and self-support,
however hard to achieve, were the only conditions in which a feminist of
the War generation . . . could do her work and maintain self-respect.’
Vera Brittain’s father generously made over to her a small private income
– not enough to live on, but enough to save her from penury. With this,
her Oxford education and her middle-class confidence, Vera was in a good
position to follow her star. But there were also women who had never
studied medieval economics or Greek verbs who were beginning to realise
that lack of a husband might be a beginning and not an end.
*
In and two daughters, Florence and Annie, were born to an
illegitimate vaudeville singer and an illiterate mill-worker in Bradford.
James White, their father, was talented, politically minded and unstable.
Before Annie’s birth, James abandoned the family, and before long found
himself imprisoned on a petty charge; he died in jail of pneumonia aged
fifty. Though they weren’t on the bottom rung, the girls and their brother
Albert grew up in poverty. They lived in a back-to-back house, and
Caroline, their mother, took in washing and baking. Florence went to
school in clogs, but she wasn’t barefooted like many of the backstreet
Singled Out
children who lived around them. The lesson Florence learnt from her
childhood was one of self-reliance. Men couldn’t be depended upon.
At twelve, Florence White left school and went to work at Tankard’s
Mill, the biggest employer in that area of Bradford. For the next six years
she spent ten and a half hours a day weighing skeins of wool in the