Margaret Kennedy Day - The Wild Swan

Roy Collins is a scriptwriter with B.B.B, a major English film studio. He has ambitions to write & direct his own scripts but his current assignment is to work on the shooting script for a historical picture selected for one of the studio's leading stars, Kitty Fletcher. Dorothea Harding was a Victorian lady writer of children's stories & twee poetry. After her death, however, a diary & passionate poetry was discovered & literary critics, including Alec Mundy, interpreted the poems as an expression of illicit love between Dorothea & her brother-in-law, Grant Forrester. Grant's early death was seen as suicidal despair over the impossibility of his love for Dorothea. Mundy's biography was the basis of a play by Adelaide Lassiter, a writer of sentimental platitudes who calls Dorothea Doda & is now writing the screenplay for the movie.

Adelaide wants to absorb the atmosphere of Bramstock, Dorothea's home which is still owned by members of the Harding family so she goes down to see the house, accompanied by Roy, Mundy & hanger-on Basil Cope. Now very hard up, the Hardings have reluctantly agreed to allow their house to be used for the filming, knowing that the money will pay for daughter Cecilia's college education. Cecilia is proud & resentful of the whole idea, dismissing Dorothea's work as Victorian tosh but she becomes interested in Roy despite looking down on his origins (his aunt lives in the village where the Hardings are the local squires) & what she perceives as his lack of ambition. Roy begins to feel an affinity with Dorothea as he walks around the grounds of Bramstock & begins to realise that the sentimental story of her life is wrong. He becomes determined to stop the movie from going ahead because he feels somehow akin to Dorothea & protective of her story.

But it's not Cecilia's fault that she doesn't understand, thought Roy. None of them do. They all think it's their job to tell us what to put. And we have to laugh it off.
They, to him, were the entire human race. We were Dorothea Harding, himself, and a myriad nameless others, swimming, sinking, fighting for life, in the same inclement ocean.
He lifted his head, smiled, and went back to the hotel in better spirits than he had known for many a day, sensible that he had, after all, got company.

Another descendant of the Harding family, Shattock, is in possession of potentially explosive documents that could change the image of Dorothea as the Victorian poetess & potentially scupper the making of the movie. The central section of the book takes us back to the time of Dorothea herself & we learn just how mistaken the ideas of biographers can be as the truth of her life & the reason she wrote her inane but successful novels becomes clear.

The Wild Swan is a novel that reminded me of other books about writers & their literary afterlives. Like A S Byatt's Possession & Carol Shields' Mary Swann, the central conceit of a writer from the past whose life has been misinterpreted & taken over by modern academics is one that has always fascinated me. The idea that we can ever really know a person from another age, no matter how much material they leave behind is fraught with danger. Material is always turning up & there are plenty of real life examples as well as fictional ones. Charlotte Brontë's letters to Monsieur Heger are probably the most famous example but there are plenty of gaps in our knowledge of historical figures that novelists & playwrights have tried to fill in & sometimes their version becomes the truth.

I enjoyed seeing the real Dorothea, who was a much tougher, more resilient woman than her admirers imagined. Her life was circumscribed by the duties of a Victorian daughter. She was able to get on with her writing & go her own way while her older sister, Mary, was at home. Mary's marriage to Grant will be the catalyst that reluctantly forces Dorothea into the role of housekeeper to her demanding father. Her invalid brother & his wife & children also live at Bramstock & Dorothea's relationship with her sister-in-law, Selina, is difficult. Dorothea's cousin, Effie Creighton, is sympathetic, & as one of the few people who know about Clone, the imaginary world Dorothea & her sister invented as children, she understands how important Dorothea's work is to her. However, her mother does not approve of Dorothea & eventually marriage takes Effie away. The rector, Mr Winthorpe, is seen as a benign presence & an influence on Dorothea's writing by Mundy but his desire to control Dorothea is typical of a conventionally Victorian moral world. He's disconcerted by Dorothea's unusual self-possession & tries to persuade her into a more conventional role while he fears that she is secretly laughing at him.

The contemporary story was also fascinating. Written in 1957, it's set in that awkward post-war period when upper & middle class families were having to adjust their expectations. The Hardings are still the local squires but they're poor. Cecilia may still boss around the women of the local W.I but Bramstock is rundown & she knows her father can't afford to send her to college. The offer from the film company is embraced by Cecilia's practical mother although her father is horrified by the implication of stooping to the depths of taking money from something as vulgar as a movie company & about a family member at that. Cecilia's contempt for Roy (her father initially mistakes him for "the plumber's mate" & Cecilia calls him that in her mind for quite a while) changes to interest as she discovers more about him. When she learns that he's written an avant garde short film that she's seen & enjoyed, she has to reassess her prejudices & finds herself liking him quite a lot. Roy's feelings for her are more ambiguous. I also enjoyed the pompous Mundy & his superior attitude to Adelaide's play while she was much more like the accepted image of Dorothea than the real woman could ever have been. Everyone has an image of Dorothea in their minds that suits their own plans but the truth will surprise them all.

Thank you to Jane at Beyond Eden Rock for hosting Margaret Kennedy Day. It was a great incentive to read another of her novels.

Literary Ramblings

I thought I'd do a quick roundup of events to look forward to & new books to anticipate (really old books in new covers, my favourite kind of new book).

Margaret Kennedy Day is only about six weeks away. This is organised by Jane from Beyond Eden Rock & all the details are here. I've enjoyed the Kennedys I've read so far & have several more on the tbr shelves to choose from.

Simon & Karen are planning The 1947 Club after the great success of The 1938 & 1924 Clubs. It's going to be in October but more details to come.

A new batch of British Library Crime Classics are now available for preordering. They include Crimson Snow, an anthology of winter stories edited by Martin Edwards, more titles by Freeman Wills Crofts & John Bude, two books by George Bellairs & two of the Sergeant Cluff novels by Gil North. Publication dates are from July to October in the UK.

More crime from Dean Street Press. I know there are lots of fans of Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver novels. I didn't know that Wentworth published many other novels & Dean Street Press are reprinting the lot. The first ten are available now with more to come.

Arnold Bennett is an author I want to read more of. I loved The Old Wives' Tale & now three more of his novels are about to become Penguin Modern Classics. The Card, Anna of the Five Towns & Riceyman Steps will be published from July to September in the UK.

I'm also tempted by this book, mostly because of the gorgeous cover (shallow, I know). I don't know anything about Dutch literature but this volume of short stories might be a good place to start. It's published in September in the UK.

Where Stands A Wingéd Sentry - Margaret Kennedy

In the Foreword of this book, written in May, 1941, novelist Margaret Kennedy looks back over the last year.

A year ago today the French line was broken near Mézières. From that day until the end of the first phase of the Battle of Britain, in October, we in this country were living through a supreme experience: supreme in the collective life which is our history and supreme in our individual lives. Many of us were more frightened than we had ever expected to be. Many, before the year was out, found themselves being braver than they had ever expected to be.. We discovered unsuspected passions and loyalties. We realised which things we valued most.

Where Stands A Wingéd Sentry is Kennedy's account of life in England from May to September 1940. The book was written up from her diaries of the time, for an American audience. She changed the names of people & places & acknowledges that much has changed even in the short period between the summer of 1940 & 1941 when the book was published. I found it to be an incredibly honest account of the emotions & fears of one woman & her family in a period when a German invasion seemed imminent & inevitable. It reminded me of the comforts of hindsight & of what I really value in the fiction & memoirs I've read of this period. The knowledge that we have, that Germany would not invade & that although there would be hardship, destruction & death, Britain would survive, was not available to Margaret Kennedy. No matter how much research a modern novelist does into the period, they can never create the atmosphere & the immediacy of a first-hand account like this one.

In 1940, Margaret Kennedy was living in Surrey with her three children, a friend's daughter, her mother-in-law & her children's Nanny. Her husband, David, was a barrister in London, coming down for evenings & weekends. The invasion of France seems unbelievable at first, even after the German invasions of  Norway, Holland, Denmark & Belgium. However, the reality soon hits home with air raid drills & road blocks being placed along the coast roads in preparation for Hitler's inevitable invasion of England.

Cotter says they are hastily putting up log barricades on all the roads and taking down the signposts, and the farmers have orders to put obstructions in large fields where troop-carrying planes might be landed. The British Legion has been told to guard the local telephone exchange. There are notices in the village telling us what to do if we see parachute troops coming down. We are to lock up all cars and bicycles at night and if we leave a car unattended it must pretty well be disembowelled. Apparently it won't do to just take out the ignition key because the Germans know about hairpins.

Kennedy & her husband decide that she & the children should move to Porthmerryn, a Welsh coastal village where Kennedy lived as a child. David will stay in London to work & also because he's an air raid warden & his mother will return with him. Nanny & the children go on ahead while Margaret closes up the Surrey house. As the children set off for Porthmerryn, they see trainloads of soldiers returning from the evacuation at Dunkirk. Friends come down to say goodbye & Margaret is reminded of the Munich crisis. The same feelings of unreality & the same conversations with friends canvassing all the many possibilities.

Porthmerryn is a village of three communities. Downalong, where the fisherman & local people live; Upalong, full of retired middle class professionals who've bought houses there to take advantage of the fishing & the golf; & the Artists, who live between the two communities. The Artists arrived in the 1890s to paint the coast & the seagulls & more artists come every year to live cheaply & soak up the atmosphere. Kennedy is surprised that Porthmerryn has not changed at all since she was last there. The war doesn't seem to have touched it at all except that all the fishing boats went off to Dunkirk & haven't yet returned. even that didn't matter much because it's not the fishing season so they weren't needed. There's still plenty to eat, the blackout is very sketchily enforced & the weekenders come down for their holidays as usual. People who went to the East coast for their holiday last year have come to Wales this year.

The Kennedys consider sending the children overseas but worry about the dangers of the voyage. They're also uncomfortable about the inequality of the schemes on offer. Middle class children will have advantages that working class children would never be offered & eventually they decide that the children will not go. In July, the first air raid warning causes considerable panic but, apart from the harbour, there seem to be no obvious targets in the area. Nevertheless everyone goes through their drills & the children take it all in their stride, incorporating air raids into their games & dropping to the ground just as they've been taught when a loud bang goes off unexpectedly. Margaret's reaction to the raids is not so much fear as anger with a rueful realisation that she's essentially helpless to change her circumstances.

After luncheon I climbed along the cliffs to Spaniard's Point and sat on the end of it and contemplated the sea. Suddenly a huge plane shot down out of the sky. I don't know where it cam from, but as it roared over Spaniard's Point I could see the black crosses on it.
I wasn't frightened, I was in such a rage. My skin crawled on my bones and I jumped up and shouted:
"You ...!" (A word no lady would use.)
And I picked up a small stone and flung it at the plane. At least I meant to fling it at the plane, but it went in the opposite direction, as things always do when I throw them.

There is humour in the book as well as the constant worry & uncertainty about the future. I loved her description, half serious, half embarrassed, about the village's reaction to the young R.A.F. pilots,

Everybody loves the R.A.F. Today i saw a young pilot walking down Fore Street - one of those pink, stodgy-looking boys who are working these miracles ... People turned to look after him, as they passed, with a kind of worship in their eyes. The shop people came to their doors, and all the way up the hill people turned round to stare. We did not cheer. There was a feeling in the air which went far beyond cheering.

Then there's her description of the influx of those she calls the Gluebottoms, people who have left the cities for the safety of the country but expect all the facilities they had at home. She's most annoyed at the number of able-bodied young women who seem to have no thought of joining the services.

I look at the Gluebottoms, sitting on the sands until it is safe for them to go back to their comfortable lives. It's well for them that the shelterers (those who have been left homeless from raids) are not all Communists and that there is such a strong feeling in this country for tolerance and common sense. England after the war is going to belong to the shelterers. And it won't be the England Bob (a Communist friend) wants, or the Gluebottoms' England either. It will be a land fir for human beings.

Meanwhile, Margaret worries about David, living in London & spending his nights as an air raid warden. His experiences give a different perspective to the family's life on the coast.

One of the wardens, bombed out of his sleeping place, pulled himself from the wreckage and walked along the street to get to a friend's house to ask if he could sleep there the rest of the night. In the blackout he walked into a rope stretched between two houses to stop people going up that street because the houses were unsafe. He fell over the rope and both the houses fell down. In the warden's log the entry just says, "At 3.30 A.M. Mr Gamble collided with two houses and demolished them."

Margaret is often worried about the morality or otherwise of the decisions she & David make - about the children, about where they live & the contribution they can make to the war effort. She knows how lucky she is & spends a lot of time praying for the country as well as for her family's safety, while also realising that Germans & Italians are praying the same prayers to the same God & wondering how to reconcile that. Early in the book, she attends a service for the National Day of Prayer & remembers singing the same hymn, O God our help in ages past, at the memorial service for her brother, killed in Palestine in 1918, then again, only a few months later, at the Armistice. At the end of the summer of 1940, the invasion scare seems to have died away and, although the bombing raids continue, the weather will deter any plans of invasion until the following year.

The leaves are beginning to turn and today I have rinsed through and dried our bathing dresses and put them away till next year. The summer is over.
What a summer!
I was just going to write that I wouldn't have missed it for anything. But when I think how lucky we have been so far, and what others have had to suffer, I feel I have no right to say that. Some great sorrow may come to this family still. I may then earn my right to say it.
But we have certainly taken life to pieces and found out what it is made of. We have come a long, long way since we all went to church on the National Day of Prayer.

I read about Where Stands A Wingéd Sentry from the extensive list of books on WWII by women on Scott's blog, Furrowed Middlebrow, & I was able to borrow a PDF copy of the book from Open Library. The title is a quotation from a poem by Henry Vaughan which I posted in Sunday Poetry last weekend.

Sunday Poetry - Henry Vaughan

I've just finished reading a memoir by the novelist Margaret Kennedy which describes life in England from May-September 1940. It was written for an American audience & I found it fascinating. I'll be reviewing it properly in a few days but I was intrigued by the title, Where Stands a Wingéd Sentry, & wondered where it came from. I discovered that it was from a poem called Peace by the Welsh 17th century poet, Henry Vaughan.

My Soul, there is a country
       Afar beyond the stars,
Where stands a wingéd sentry
       All skillful in the wars;
There, above noise and danger
       Sweet Peace sits, crown’d with smiles,
And One born in a manger
       Commands the beauteous files.
He is thy gracious friend
       And (O my Soul awake!)
Did in pure love descend,
       To die here for thy sake.
If thou canst get but thither,
       There grows the flow’r of peace,
The rose that cannot wither,
       Thy fortress, and thy ease.
Leave then thy foolish ranges,
       For none can thee secure,
But One, who never changes,
       Thy God, thy life, thy cure.

Together and Apart - Margaret Kennedy

The Christmas edition of Shiny New Books is now available. There are lots of new reviews & I'm very pleased that my review of Together and Apart by Margaret Kennedy is among them. You can read it here.

The reprints section of Shiny New Books is my favourite (& not just because I have a review there). Edited by Simon of Stuck in a Book fame, there are also reviews of Gogol's A Night Before Christmas, R A Dick's The Ghost and Mrs Muir & another of the British Library Crime Classics, Mystery in White : a Christmas crime story by J Jefferson Farjeon.

A book lovers idea of Heaven

First, some very exciting news. I mentioned in this post on Pushkin the other week that one of my favourite books when I was young was Mara Kay's The Youngest Lady In Waiting (cover photo from here). It was the book that began my lifelong interest in Russian history. It's the sequel to Masha, the story of a young orphan's life in early 19th century Russia. Both books were published around 1970 & are incredibly hard to get hold of. I read the copies in my school library & have always wanted to reread them. Well, Karoline, who commented on the post, asked if I knew that Margin Notes Books were reprinting both books later this year? Well, I didn't but I'm so excited! There's nothing on the website just yet but I'm so looking forward to ordering these. Hooray for another small publisher bringing back beautiful books. I have the Margin Notes Books edition of Five Farthings by Monica Redlich on the tbr shelves & I'm looking forward to reading it while I wait for the Mara Kays. Also, have a look at the publisher's blog, there's a link on the website. I'll be monitoring both blog & website very closely for the next few months.

I'm not sure if I should be mentioning this next fact as it could be evidence of serious derangement when it comes to book buying. I'm closing in on 1000 books on the tbr shelves (maybe I should have written 1000 books, does that make it seem less obvious?). Should I be whispering with shame or shouting with glee? I'll never be short of a book to read, that's for sure. I'm up to 968 (according to Library Thing) with several more books on the way even now. The trouble is, I'm seeing the magic 1000 books as a challenge that I must complete by the end of the year so there's definitely more glee than shame in my unrepentant attitude! I'll just mention quietly that this is only the number of physical books. The ebooks are also out of control but they're also invisible.

One book I bought recently was Summer's Day by Mary Bell. I'd been reading admiring references about it on Scott's blog, Furrowed Middlebrow, for some time now. From the original review to his search for the real identity of the author, to the most recent mention, when my resistance broke & I searched for a second hand copy (the Greyladies edition is out of print). Searching Abebooks sent me to Anglophile Books, where there were several copies of the Greyladies edition. I've been an occasional customer of Anglophile Books for some years now (unfortunately the postage costs from the US to Australia are quite high but I wasn't going to let that stop me on my quest for this book & may I say, it hasn't stopped me in the past).




Anglophile Books has the most wonderful selection of books for lovers of the middlebrow novel. Lots of my favourite authors - D E Stevenson, Dorothy L Sayers, Barbara Pym, Josephine Tey, Vera Brittain, E M Delafield - & many more. The owner, Laura, is also the convener of the D E Stevenson Yahoo group I've recently joined & she has very kindly linked to my blog on the website. If you have a look here, there are links to any books by my favourite authors that Laura has in stock. I'm not making any money out of the link, I'm just happy to point potential customers in the direction of a great secondhand bookshop.

Edited to add: Laura from Anglophile Books has created that little button which I am thrilled to say I have just successfully added to the post (thanks for the instructions, Laura). So, I'll add the button to my post if Anglophile Books has a copy of a book I'm reviewing (& gradually go back through the archive) & you'll be taken straight to the homepage if you're interested in buying a copy. I feel quite technologically competent all of a sudden!

Two themed reading weeks are coming up in the next few months that I'm very excited about. Anbolyn at Gudrun's Tights is hosting a Mary Stewart reading week from September 14th to 21st in honour of the novelist who died earlier this year. I've been planning to reread Mary Stewart ever since the last lot of reprints were published but I haven't gotten very far. However, I have lots of her novels on my shelves (no excuse there for buying more books), & I plan to read at least one for that week.

Margaret Kennedy is an author who has been on the periphery of my reading world for quite some time. I've only read The Constant Nymph but I have a couple of others on the tbr shelves & I've ordered a few of the Vintage reprints that are to be published soon. Fleur Fisher is hosting the reading week from October 6th to 12th. You'll find a comprehensive reading list on her blog. I'm leaning towards Lucy Carmichael, which seems to be a universal favourite but there are several others that look interesting. Kennedy was one of the group of novelists who went to Somerville College, Oxford in the 1920s. Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby & Dorothy L Sayers are the most famous names but maybe Margaret Kennedy is about to join them? It won't be for want of trying if Fleur has anything to do with it.

I'm a big fan of Delphi Classics who produce complete collections of the work of out of copyright authors as very reasonably priced ebooks. They're beautifully formatted & always include some rare gems or additional material about the author. Series Five has just been announced. These titles will be published in coming months & I'm especially excited about Margaret Oliphant & Frances Hodgson Burnett. As I said above, at least they're invisible...