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”.