Dorothy Whipple

Dorothy Whipple was a provincial novelist in the first half of the 20^th Century.  She was born in 1893 in Blackburn and lived most of her life in Lancashire... and wrote novels mainly about the middle classes there.  So her works, not being about the upper class, have fallen out of print... till Persephone Press republished several in the past few years.

One of her best-known works is “High Wages” which is about Jane, a girl from a lower middle class family, who loses her parents when very young and is forced to get a job as a shop assistant.  The book is a “social problem” novel in that it details the horrible working conditions that young shop assistants, particularly female ones, suffered in the years before World War One.  Jane is barely fed; she is exploited and underpaid...She works in a shop at the time when they were just beginning to sell ready-made clothes.   Her boss tries to deprive her of her rightful commissions on sales.  She enjoys the work however and has an eye for clothes and for what women want.  So she tries to persuade her boss to smarten up the shop and to sell ready-made clothes, but he refuses, believing that a young girl like her knows nothing.

Jane is a normal young woman, who enjoys life, in spite of having to work hard, and struggle against poverty…. she has romances but she is also very interested in doing well in her job.  She finds support from an older woman, who invests money in her so that she can start a shop of her own... And through hard work, Jane finds that her new shop prospers.   It is something of a feminist novel… Jane also acquires a little family of people who depend on her, like her hapless and foolish cleaner, Lily who has a feckless and drunken husband… and she tries to help and straighten out their lives.

Whipple married during the war, to Henry Whipple, an educational administrator who was a good deal older than her.  Her marriage was happy, and gave her freedom to work on her writing…

I enjoy many of her books because she was sharp and witty and a good observer..and is often compared to Jane Austen.  However her range is broader than Austen’s, since she was writing at a later date and came from a more middle class background.  She knew about working life, and women having careers, in a way that was not possible for women of Austen’s class and time.

I hope to write later bout some of Whipple’s other works, particularly my favourite of her novels, “Because of the Lockwoods”.

Winifred Holtby Part I

Winifred Holtby is most famous for her novel, South Riding, and she is also well known for her close friendship with Vera Brittain, the writer and political activist.

She was born to a well to do “gentleman farmer” in Yorkshire in 1898, and her mother was a pioneer as one of the first women to be active in local politics, serving in the East Riding County council.

Winifred was educated at home and was planning to go to Oxford, like Brittain.  However, she joined the WAACs towards the end of the war and went to France.   

After the War, she came back to England and entered Somerville College, where many famous women writers at the time were educated, including Dorothy Sayers.   She met Vera Brittain and the 2 of them formed a close friends.  Winifred Holtby’s life was tragically short, but it was busy, and fulfilling.  She wrote several novels and a lot of journalism.  She was also a director of the liberal paper “Time and Tide” which was owned by the wealthy and liberal minded Margaret Lady Rhondda who used it to promulgate “good causes”, including the improvement of women’s lives.  This was a cause that appeared to Winifred and to her friend Vera Brittain.  They were both also pacifists but it is possible that had Holtby lived long enough, she and Vera might have disagreed about whether it was necessary at times to abandon their  pacifism and declare war, when Hitler was trying to conquer Europe. 

Winifred wanted equal rights for women but she was more involved with working in Africa for equal rights for Africans, as it was still the colonial era….One of her novels “Manoa Manoa” is set in Africa and her most famous heroine, Sarah Burton in South Riding, has worked for years as a teacher in South Africa and has been engaged to a man there who did not share her views about Africans
The 2 women were both ardently socialist and feminist…and both were pacifists  -as were many people just after the War... Having seen its horrors, they were deeply opposed to the idea of ever having another War.   Sayers was more conservative.  She had not engaged in war work, and while she believed in women’s rights, she was generally speaking of a different political complexion to many other young women at Oxford.
Brittain and Holtby decided to move to London and become writers.  Both had well to do families, who were able to help financially until they were successful. However both found that being women, their families weren’t as supportive of their having careers as they might have been in helping a son.  Also, both of them were expected to “drop everything” and go home to help if any of their relatives had need of someone to help out with any family problems or illness.

They shared a flat and were active in support of the League of Nations.  Winifred was a prolific journalist and public speaker and one of her major interests was working for the unionisation of black workers in South Africa. She began to write novels, as did Brittain, but Holtby had more writing talent. Her early novels included Anderby Wold and the Crowded Street, which were set in provincial England… although she was increasingly part of the metropolitan London “set” of writers and thinkers.   

Winifred and Vera had a very special and unusual relationship… in that they lived together even after Vera married George Catlin, an American academic.  Brittain comes across to me at least as egotistical.  While she loved Winifred, it seems to me that her relationship with Winifred and her husband involved her demanding love and devotion from as many people as possible.  She made conditions for her husband, that he was to accept Winifred living with them and that he would live partly in America and then spend the rest of his time with them.

Winifred seems to have loved Vera better than anyone else, though she herself also had boyfriends.  Winifred also had intense friendships with other women at various times. It was of course a different era, in the earlier part of the 20^th century, where close friendships with someone of the same gender wasn’t looked on as possibly homosexual.  But Winifred and Vera had very intense friendships with women, which almost rivalled in emotion, their relationships with men….

Winifred had an on and off relationship with Harry Pearson, a young man whom she had known from her youth in Yorkshire.  Harry was good natured but not always reliable. He led a peripatetic life, drifting in and out of jobs and moving around.

Winifred worked very hard and began to have health problems. But she continued to do her writing and other work, to help Vera to run their house and be an aunt to Vera’s children, (though they did have servants) and she often had to rush off to her own home at times when there was a family crisis.

Winifred Watson and Miss Pettigrew

Last week I picked up this book by Winifred Watson, “Miss Pettigrew lives for a day”, wanting something light to read on the bus. 

Winifred was from Newcastle and spent all her life there.  She only wrote a few novels, and this one seems to be the only one that is easily available, as it was republished a few years ago and made into a film.

Her father was a businessman but lost money in the Depression, so she wasn’t able to attend University as she had hoped.  She trained as a secretary and during her first jobs, she had little to do.   Her brother in law jokingly dared her to try to write herself, as she had complained that the novel she was then reading was rubbish... So she wrote “Fell Top” a rural melodrama of the kind that was popular in the 1920s and 30s.

Having written it she put it away for some time and only offered it to a publisher when her sister saw an advertisement looking for new material.  Methuen accepted it and it was published in 1935, and they asked to see more of her work.  She was about to get married, but she produced another novel Odd Shoes.

Miss Pettigrew was her third novel and her most popular.  It is a comic fantasy about a middle aged spinster governess who accidentally goes to the flat of a pretty young actress and singer, for a job interview.  When there, she gets involved in the girl’s tangled love life and she herself begin to realise that life can be fun…She drinks, goes to a nightclub and helps the girl decide which of her suitors to marry.   

She finds that in spite of having lived a very narrow life, she is able to cope with a lot of unusual situations and she slips away from her father’s rigid morality.   It is a rather light work, entertaining but not deep.  In fact it is downright improbable, but I think with good acting, it would probably work very well as a frothy feel good kind of film.

I’d like to try and find some of the other works, as I think she certainly had writing talent and I might enjoy her more serious works more.

However she gave up writing during the War.  Her house was bombed and her baby son had a narrow escape from death.  After that, she moved into a house with her mother in law, and found it very difficult to write, when she was “never alone”.  She devoted herself to motherhood and gave up on writing.

Winifred died in Newcastle in 2002.  She was very pleased that her favourite novel had been re printed and had had a belated success.

Beds and Blue Jeans BY Nadine Sutton

Beds and Blue Jeans is set in present day America.  It is about a love affair between a young couple who drift into living together and having a baby.  Will they make it succeed or will Sam just go on having flings? 

http://www.amazon.com/Beds-Blue-Jeans-everyday-mayhem-ebook/dp/B01370SMFO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1443265304&sr=8-2&keywords=nadine+sutton

Wodehouse the war years

During the 20’s, Ethel and Plum travelled between America and England, but this led to tax problems.  Wodehouse was being taxed as a resident in the US and in England. So in the 1930s they settled in France.   Plum was happy provided he could work.  Ethel’s daughter Leonora got married.  But in 1939 France and England were at war with Germany.  The Wodehouses did not leave, partly because they adored their pet dogs and didn’t want to have to put them into quarantine.  Partly however it was because Plum was as always absorbed in his work and did not take much interest in politics.  The German invasion took them by surprise.

And once the Germans invaded France, they were caught there and unable to get away.  They made an effort to flee from the advancing Germans in May 1940, trying to drive down to Portugal and thence go back to America.  However, their car broke down and then roads were so clogged with refugees that they gave up the attempt.

 This led to the one big disaster of Wodehouse’s life.   Soon after the invasion, the Germans imprisoned all male enemy nationals under 60, and Wodehouse was sent to a prison in Lille.  Later he was transferred to other prisons, ending up in one in Germany.   His wife had a difficult time getting news of him, and some prominent Americans tried to get him released.  However, Wodehouse made the best of internment, and was cheerful enough. Conditions were uncomfortable but he was naturally inclined to be good tempered and get on with life…

 He managed to get permission to use a typewriter and did some writing, and also used his typewriter to write to his literary agent, to  try to send messages to various Canadian families, to let them know that their sons were alive and well….  it was evading the German censorship but he got away with it.

However in 1941, he was allowed to leave the prison some months before his 60^th birthday,   the age at which internees were usually released.  But it was suggested by the German authorities that he should do some broadcasts. Wodehouse, being naïve and uninterested in politics, did not see the obvious trap.  He was quite keen on the idea, wanting to get in touch with his readers in America in particular…

He lived at a hotel in Germany, going on with his writing and living off his own money.  However, he was incredibly foolish to agree to the broadcasts.  While they were simply amusing anecdotes about life in prison, and in no way “supportive to Germany”, they cause a storm in Britain.  Not surprisingly, the British, who were suffering privations and difficulties, and who didn’t hear the broadcasts, got a general idea that Wodehouse had been given privileges for “playing along” with the Nazis. Journalists and writers who tried to calm the outrage, pointing out that there was no evidence of collaboration, were shouted down. 

When Paris was liberated, the British authorities interviewed him and concluded that he had been stupid and naive but there was no evidence of wrong doing.... but when the War was over, Wodehouse and his wife moved back to America.....and there was a certain estrangement between him and his native country. 
He continued to write and to lead a solitary life, keeping in touch with friends by letter while Ethel still managed his affairs and his daily life.  Ethel's daughter had died during the war, and they gave their affection to a brood of pet dogs.   Over time, Plum's wartime "folly" was forgiven.. and it was realised that it had been the result of naivety rather than any kind of political intent.   In his later years, he was finally offered a knighthood but was not well enough to travel to England.  He lived to be over 90.. writing to the end....

Rough Music by Nadine Sutton

A “band” story set in the US, in the late 1970s.  I wanted to write about this era as I remember it as a kid and I love the music from it.

It is the story of a country rock band and its 2 lead singers and how they cope with life on the road.  It’s not a conventional love story, but more about marriage, life in the music world and life in the later 1970’s.  

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rough-Music-Nadine-Sutton-ebook/dp/B01AEQS0G0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1452977780&sr=8-1&keywords=nadine+sutton

Wodehouse Part II

Wodehouse began to spend much of this time in America, and since his poor eyesight debarred im from war service, he was somewhat detached from the War in the UK and life there.  He married Ethel- an English widow, who had a daughter -Leonora.  Plum loved his stepdaughter and was very close to her, and his marriage was happy, with Ethel managing his life and letting him concentrate on his writing.  However he became somewhat reclusive, as time passed and didn’t take much interest in the world outside which was later to cause him problems.

He was content to let Ethel manage the practical details of life for him, and to enjoy a busy social life, though he had little interest in such things.

He began to write his stories of Jeeves and Wooster, and about Blandings Castle, where Lord Emsworth, a dotty amiable country loving peer, lives, trying to avoid being bullied and managed by his large family of domineering sisters, obsessed with the well-being of his prize Pig, the Empress of Blandings.

his plots were intricate and brilliant and funny.  As he said it was a sort of musical comedy with the music left out, all about misunderstandings, farcical situations, and it all ended happily.  

Jeeves  is much cleverer than his master Bertie, who is “mentally negligible”  and who has a fatal knack of accidentally getting engaged to various strong minded girls.  Jeeves rescues him from these and other situations.  He also smooth the path of true love for many of Berties friends, like Bingo Little and helps Bertie to keep on good terms with his domineering but affectionate Aunt Dahlia.  

PG Wodehouse Part I

PG Wodehouse was born in Guildford in England, in 1881.

His family was the sort of upper middle class people, who served in the Empire, and spent a lot of time abroad. This usually meant that their children would be sent home to England at some stage, to go to school or live with relatives.   His father worked as a magistrate in Hong Kong.  Pelham was taken to Hong Kong and spent a few years there but was sent back to England, with his brothers, to live in the care of a nanny and other relatives.   He saw little of his parents and seems to have never become close to them.  Named Pelham Grenville, he was usually called “Plum”. 

He was sent to various schools in England, and enjoyed some more than others.  His Father intended him for the Navy but his eyesight was too poor for that.  His favourite of his schools was Dulwich College... He was good at games, enjoyed music and entertainment and was happy and popular.  He was not academic but was far from stupid.

With his parents living abroad, he spent holidays with his extended family in the UK, which may have accounted for the place that domineering and amusing aunts and large families played in his fiction.  He was used to being with aunts and uncles, rather than with his own parents. He also had a kindly Nanny as a boy and was accustomed to spend a lot of time with the servants in his families’ homes.  This again is reflected in his books where the servants take an important part in the action... And of course the most famous servant of all, is Jeeves, the valet and general manservant to the amiable but idiotic Bertie Wooster.

When he left school his father had retired and his pension was not enough to allow Plum to go to University, so he had to take some genteel employment and went into a commercial bank... But he never really enjoyed the life there.   He was not a practical young man and found the work boring and had no interest in getting on there. 

 He began to write in the evenings, he produced comic short stories and a school book and generally he did well enough for him to give up his day job by 1902...

After this, now that he was settled as a full time, he began to think of going to the US.   He found the country congenial and made a good income, writing stories and light journalism.   He also met people in the musical theatre and started to work as a lyricist