Scars upon my heart

Vera Brittain is one of my favourite authors. I don’t know whether I would call her most famous book, Testament of Youth, comfort reading, but I’ve read it many times over the last 30 years & I’m always moved by it. Vera Brittain was one of the most famous feminists & pacifists of the 20th century. Growing up in “provincial young-ladyhood” in the spa town of Buxton, Vera longed for more than a constant round of tennis parties & visits with marriage to a businessman like her father at the end of it. She fought her parents to be allowed to go to Oxford like her brother Edward. She was successful but her time at Oxford was interrupted by the outbreak of WWI. Edward & his two best friends, Roland Leighton & Victor Richardson, joined up. Vera soon found herself frustrated by Oxford when she longed to do something to help the war effort. Her feelings were intensified by her growing love for Roland & she enlisted as a VAD, training in hospitals in London before serving overseas in Malta & France.

The War was the defining experience of Vera’s life. She lost everyone who really mattered to her. Roland was killed just before Christmas 1915. Vera was in Brighton with her parents, waiting for Roland to come on leave when she received the news that he was dead,

The next morning I had just finished dressing, and was putting the final touches to the pastel-blue crepe –de-Chine blouse, when the expected message came to say I was wanted on the telephone. Believing that I was at last to hear the voice for which I had waited for twenty-four hours, I dashed joyously into the corridor. But the message was not from Roland but from Clare (Roland’s sister); it was not to say that he had arrived home that morning, but to tell me that he had died of wounds at a Casualty Clearing Station on December 23rd.

When Vera was serving in Malta, she received word that Victor had been seriously wounded & she returned home to care for him. She planned to marry him in a spirit of self-sacrifice but fortunately, as she admits in Testament of Youth, she wasn’t called on to make that sacrifice, because Victor died soon after. Vera’s honesty is what makes Testament of Youth such a remarkable book. She is able to look back & realise that her feelings for Victor were a reaction to Roland’s death & a feeling that her life was over so she may as well help someone else as she would never be happy again.

She rejoined the nursing service & served in France, hoping to be near Edward. However, he was sent to Italy where he was killed on the Asiago Plateau in 1918. Vera wrote this poem to commemorate Edward’s wounding at the Somme (for which he was awarded the Military Cross) & sent it to him, inscribed in an anthology of poetry. It’s doubtful that he ever saw the poem as he was killed soon after.

TO MY BROTHER
(In memory of July 1st, 1916)
Your battle-wounds are scars upon my heart,
Received when in that grand and tragic ‘show’
You played your part
Two years ago,

And silver in the summer morning sun
I see the symbol of your courage glow-
That Cross you won
Two years ago.

Though now again you watch the shrapnel fly,
And hear the guns that daily louder grow,
As in July
Two years ago,

May you endure to lead the Last Advance
And with your men pursue the flying foe
As once in France
Two years ago.

At the end of the War, feeling empty & hopeless, Vera went back to Oxford to finish her degree. She was older than the other undergraduates, had lived through four years of grief, misery & hard work, & felt that all her sacrifice had been for nothing. Her experiences were neither respected nor valued, in her eyes, & her mental state was precarious,

Although persistent dreams recurred of Roland and Edward -  the one missing and purposely hiding his identity because facially mutilated, the other suffering some odd psychological complex which made him turn against us all and keep silence – I endured none of those nightmare recapitulations of hospital sounds of which other wartime nurses complained... Only the horrible delusion... that my face was changing, persisted until it became a permanent, fixed obsession.

The delusion that she was growing a beard or turning into a witch persisted for some time. It was only the friendship of another student, Winifred Holtby, which saved Vera’s sanity & brought her some happiness. Their friendship is immortalised in Testament of Friendship, Vera’s biography of Winifred. Vera & Winifred moved to London after Oxford, determined to earn their living as writers. They both worked on novels & journalism & were active members of the League of Nations. Vera received a letter from George Catlin, a student at Oxford who admired her first novel, The Dark Tide. Their friendship grew through correspondence & they married in 1925. Roland wrote a beautiful poem to Vera while he was in France, foreseeing just such a situation if he should be killed.

Hedauville, November 1915

The sunshine on the long white road
That ribboned down the hill,
The velvet clematis that clung
Around your window-sill,
Are waiting for you still.

Again the shadowed pool shall break
In dimples round your feet,
And when the thrush sings in your wood,
Unknowing you may meet
Another stranger, Sweet.

And if he is not quite so old
As the boy you used to know,
And less proud, too, and worthier,
You may not let him go –
(And daisies are truer than passion-flowers)
It will be better so.

Testament of Youth was an immediate success when it was published in 1933. The late 1920s & 1930s saw many war memoirs published. Enough time had passed & readers were interested in reading about the War again. Vera’s book is so moving because it is a such an honest account of a woman’s experience of war. Her losses are so terrible – if it was fiction, it would be unbelievable - & yet, she survived. Testament of Youth was reprinted by Virago in the 1970s when the feminist movement led to a resurgent interest in women’s history.

It was made into an excellent TV series with Cheryl Campbell, Rupert Frazer & Peter Woodward as Vera, Edward & Roland. Vera’s letters, diaries & journalism were reprinted. Her diaries of the 1930s & WWII are fascinating & give an insight into London literary life as well as the Home Front during WWII. Vera Brittain was a passionate pacifist & her stance led her into some controversy during WWII.  Letters from a Lost Generation is a collection of letters between Vera, Edward, Roland, Victor & Geoffrey Thurlow, another friend killed in action. A couple of years ago, Virago published Because You Died, a collection of Vera’s poetry & prose about the War, in a lovely hardback edition.

Reading Testament of Youth all those years ago has led me to all these books & more – about Vera Brittain, women’s experiences at war & afterwards, the war poets, other memoirs. I find the experiences of the young men & women who were caught up in WWI intensely moving & I marvel at their courage.

Coming Back - Marcia Muller

I’ve been reading Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone novels for almost 30 years. Sharon McCone was the first of the female PIs in the tradition of Sam Spade & Philip Marlowe. Marcia Muller’s early books were published by The Women’s Press, a great feminist publishing house that had a fantastic crime list. There have been many other female PIs since, especially in the 1980s. Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone & Sara Paretsky’s V I Warshawski are still going strong but most of the others have long since disappeared, replaced by forensic pathologists like Kay Scarpetta & Tempe Brennan.

Sharon McCone is a private investigator in San Francisco. Back in the 70s she was working at the All Soul’s Legal Co Op, steeped in the social justice ethics of the 1960s. I loved the All Soul’s days. But, times changed & the Co Op was taken over by lawyers who wanted to make a profit, the atmosphere changed & McCone struck out on her own, eventually starting up her own company, McCone Investigations. The business has grown, the technology has kept pace with the cutting edge, the new employees have become familiar.

It’s interesting to read both Muller & Grafton’s series. The Kinsey Millhone novels are still set in the 1980s, they’re almost historical novels now. Kinsey uses pay phones & index cards rather than mobiles & computers. She trots along to Government agencies trying to get information using her contacts & smart talking instead of tapping into a database. I love the fact that Kinsey has stayed in the 80s, it’s part of the charm of the series. But, I don’t regret that Sharon McCone has moved with the times.

Keeping a long series fresh for the author as well as the reader must be a constant challenge. In the last book in the series, Locked In, Sharon had been shot in the head by an intruder & was seriously wounded. She had locked-in syndrome & spent the whole book only able to communicate by blinking. Surprisingly, this worked really well. I was amazed at the clever way Muller took us inside Sharon’s mind while also moving the investigation along through shifting the point of view around between Sharon’s husband, Hy Ripinsky, her operatives, Craig Morland, Adah Joslyn, Mick Savage (also Sharon’s nephew) & Patrick Neilan. By the end of the book, Sharon had emerged from locked-in syndrome but still had a long way to go physically & mentally before she would be back to her old self. In the sequel, Coming Back, Sharon is still at the beginning of that long journey.

After several months of rehab, she’s still struggling with the repercussions of the trauma she’s suffered. Fiercely independent, she is reluctant to ask for help, which infuriates Hy & her family. She stubbornly uses inefficient public transport inside of asking for lifts as she can’t drive. She works at her rehab as hard as she works at anything else in her life & is frustrated by her lack of progress. Her employees are frustrated by her moods & her refusal to let them help her. Some of them are also concerned that the old Sharon will never come back. Is the new Sharon fit enough for the job, physically & mentally? When Piper Quinn, a young woman she met at rehab goes missing, Sharon’s instincts sense trouble. Piper had been the victim of a hit & run driver, just getting back to work with a new apartment. When she doesn’t turn up at rehab, Sharon visits her home, only to find Piper semi-conscious on the couch & a strange woman who claims to be her aunt, hustling Sharon out the door as fast as possible. Sharon goes back the next day to find the apartment empty, stripped of everything, freshly painted & Piper is gone.

Sharon gets the investigation moving but when Adah Joslyn goes back to check the apartment again, she is attacked & then kidnapped, presumably by the same people who made Piper disappear. The investigation uncovers the fact that Piper had been married to an marine stationed in Iraq. She had filed for divorce & then he was killed in a roadside bombing. However, the way she was kidnapped & the apartment cleaned up suggests a covert intelligence operation by rogue agents who can’t let go of the more unsavoury aspects of intelligence gathering in Iraq & Afghanistan under the previous Administration. What could Piper know or have that these people would go to such lengths to get hold of?

The narrative moves from Sharon’s first person account to the third person viewpoints of Hy, Adah, Craig & the rest of the team. I could barely read quickly enough to keep up with the pace of the narrative. I read it in two sittings, like I do all Marcia Muller’s books. The tension is unbearable. Marcia Muller keeps the suspense of the investigation at a high level while also revealing more of the characters' private lives. I think that’s important in a series. Sharon & Hy’s marriage is under strain from the repercussions of her condition & her refusal to accept help. She values her independence & is frightened to think she may never get back to her old self. She’s constantly pushing at her limits, resenting the things she can no longer do. She has to work out how to repair her relationship with Hy & get her old life back – or how to cope if she can’t. That's just as interesting to a long-time fan like me as the investigation. Coming Back is the 27th book in the series. I can’t wait to read no 28.

A Month in the Country - J L Carr

The marvellous thing was coming into this haven of calm water and, for a season, not having to worry my head with anything but uncovering their wall-painting for them. And, afterwards, perhaps I could make a new start, forget what the War and the rows with Vinny had done to me and begin where I’d left off. This is what I need, I thought – a new start and, afterwards, maybe I won’t be a casualty anymore.

A Month in the Country is a perfect gem of a novel. It’s the story of Tom Birkin, a young man, a shell-shocked survivor of WWI & the weeks he spends in a Yorkshire village that begin to heal him. Tom arrives in Oxgodby to reveal a medieval wall-painting in the church. Miss Hebron, a local landowner, had left money in her will to the church’s restoration fund but only on the proviso that they employ someone to uncover the painting. The vicar, Rev Keach, is not happy about the intrusion or the fact that he wasn’t consulted by Miss Hebron.  He’s an outsider, a Southerner in the North, a Churchman in a village of Chapel-goers. He’s unhappy about Tom’s work & unhappy that Tom wants to live in the bell-chamber. Tom is broke & can’t afford to stay anywhere else. He’s worked out his expenses very carefully, living frugally from one instalment of his pay to the next & he stubbornly insists on his right to stay in the church.

Tom begins to heal almost from the moment he arrives. Afflicted with a stammer & a facial twitch, deserted by his wife, Vinny, trying to make a living in the very specialized field of restoration work, he’s nevertheless excited by the possibilities of the job at hand. He quickly realises that the wall-painting, a representation of the Judgment Day, with Christ in majesty at the top & the saved & the damned on either side, is of exceptional quality.

As he slowly removes the whitewash that has hidden the painting since the Reformation, he comes to know the master artist who painted it. He even finds the hairs from his beard where he’s leant into the paint while it was still tacky. Artists often put recognisable portraits of locals in these paintings & Tom is sure that one soul falling head first into the fires of Hell, is a portrait of someone the artist knew. This man, with a crescent on his forehead, is so life-like, but who was he?

Tom also meets the locals. Kathy Ellerbeck, daughter of the stationmaster, takes Tom in hand. She brings her father’s gramophone so he can listen to music while he works & food from her mother, who has soon discovered Tom’s poverty. Kathy & her family draw him into the life of the village. He has Sunday dinner with them, goes on the Sunday School treat, is taken along on a trip to Ripon to buy a new (secondhand) organ for the Chapel. On one memorable occasion, Tom is sent to deputize as preacher for Mr Ellerbeck at a nearby Chapel. He chooses the longest hymns he can think of but, in the end, tells the tiny congregation of his work on the painting, what it meant to the people who saw it in church every Sunday & how he is revealing its beauty again after so many centuries.

Miss Hebron had also left money for an archaeologist to locate the grave of her ancestor, Piers Hebron, who would have been the squire in the 14th century when the wall=painting was done. Charles Moon, another survivor of the War, is camping in the field next to the church, in a tent over a pit because he feels safest underground. He befriends Tom, recognizing a fellow sufferer. They drink a mug of tea every morning before they start work, although Moon never becomes part of the village as Tom does. More importantly for Tom he meets Alice, the beautiful wife of the Rev Keach. Alice comes to sit in the church & watch him work,


She would discreetly leave the door slightly ajar and the seat herself in the back pew and then shelter behind her wide-brimmed straw hat (a rose pushed into its band). But for the occasional creak in the scaffold whenever I shuffled back a pace to see what I’d been doing, the building was so still that, although I was a good thirty paces away and my back towards her, we talked casually as we might have talked in a parlour. Not a conventional conversation – no more than a remark, a question, answer, exclamation. Really, there was no need to look: from the way she put things I could see her face.


Tom speculates about the lovely Alice & the awkward, unprepossessing Rev Keach. He goes to the Vicarage to ask for his pay & wonders how they live together in the large house, surrounded by trees, but almost bare of furniture.

By the end of the summer, with the painting uncovered & the weather turning to autumn, the idyll must end. Tom’s love for Alice is acknowledged but remains unexpressed, Moon discovers Piers Hebron’s tomb, which contains a surprise, & Tom realises that he must move on.

A letter from his wife, asking for a reconciliation, calls him back to his old life.  The healing that has begun in Oxgodby will continue as the memories of the War recede & the confidence Tom has gained set him up for the next stage of his life.

This is one of my favourite books. Although not strictly about WWI, the melancholy sadness of the War is everywhere. The experiences of Birkin & Moon, the photographs in living rooms of sons who didn’t return, the atmosphere of renewal in the rural landscape. It’s heightened by the story being told by Tom in old age, looking back at that golden summer when he began to live again. It’s nostalgic without sentimentality. There’s a lot of humour & irony in the story as well as the fascinating details of how the wall-painting would have been created. I have two copies of A Month in the Country – an old Penguin & a new, beautiful Folio Society edition with lovely illustrations by Ian Stephens, as you can see above.

There’s also a movie that was made in the 80s with Colin Firth as Tom, Kenneth Branagh as Charles Moon, Natasha Richardson as Alice & Patrick Malahide as Rev Keach. I recommend this, it’s a beautiful recreation of the book. I like to read A Month in the Country in November, along with the poetry of Owen, Sassoon & Edward Thomas. Although the novel was published in 1980 (it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize), it evokes all the feelings of melancholy & the need for healing that so many must have felt after the War. Reading A Month in the Country is a moving experience.

The English Poets of the First World War - John Lehmann

In November, my thoughts turn to Remembrance Day & I often decide to read about WWI & WWII. This year, I’ve begun with the poets of WWI. I first read Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon & Rupert Brooke as a teenager & I’m still moved by their work & their lives. Since then, I’ve read many anthologies, biographies & critical books about the period & the writers.

John Lehmann’s book, English Poets of the First World War, was published in 1981. I rescued this copy from a library book sale & I’ve been reading it over the last couple of days as well as dipping into some of the other books you can see in the photo below. Lehmann concentrates on 15 major poets & looks at the work they wrote during the war, rather than the poetry & prose they wrote long afterwards, if, indeed, they survived. The poetry of the war fell into two distinct phases.

From the beginning of the war in 1914 until the Battle of the Somme in 1916, it was still possible for patriotic young men to write poetry glorifying war & revelling in the opportunity to be a part of this great adventure. Rupert Brooke’s 1914 Sonnets & Julian Grenfell’s Into Battle are the most famous examples. Brooke & Grenfell both died in 1915 so there’s no way of knowing how their work would have changed as the optimism of the first part of the war was replaced by the despair of trench warfare that seemed neverending. Another poet who was killed in 1915 at the age of 20 was Charles Hamilton Sorley (the photo above is from the suffolkregiment.org website). I’ve always loved this poem. The image of the dead being oblivious to our pity & grief is intensely moving & comforting as well. Their pain is past.

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you’ll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, ‘They are dead.’ Then add thereto,
‘Yet many a better one has died before.’
Then, scanning all the o’ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

Sassoon & Owen are the most famous of the war poets. Their meeting at the hospital at Craiglockhart has been written about many times, both as fact & fiction. That meeting led to Owen’s miraculous last year when he wrote the poems that made his name after his death just a week before the Armistice. Sassoon survived the war & continued writing poetry but his War Poems remained his most famous & best-loved work. He also wrote three volumes of fictionalised autobiography, collected by Faber as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. His poem, Does It Matter?, exemplifies the bitter, almost brutal poetry of the last years of the war. The feeling of hopelessness & pity of the speaker contrasts with the bitter undertone accusing those safe at home of not valuing the sacrifice made by the men at the Front.

Does it matter? – losing your legs?...
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.

Does it matter? – losing your sight?...
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.

Do they matter? – those dreams from the pit?...
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they’ll know that you’ve fought for your country,
And no one will worry a bit.

Wilfred Owen could also write with bitterness of the horrors of war but I find the quiet, elegiac tone of Anthem for Doomed Youth so moving. The final image of the families left at home for long years without the men who will never come home, quietly grieving in that long period of mourning after the war is filled with melancholy.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,-
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Isaac Rosenberg was killed in April 1918 (The photo below is from iwm.org.uk). His poem, Break of Day in the Trenches, is a meditation in a moment of peace before the madness of battle. It reminds me of John Donne & the metaphysical poets in the humour in which he sticks a poppy behind his ear & addresses a rat that has strayed into his trench from No Man’s Land.

The darkness crumbles away -
It is the same old druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand –
A queer sardonic rat –
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German –
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver – what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.

John Lehmann’s book is an excellent introduction to the WWI poets but it might be hard to get hold of. Jon Silkin’s Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (1979) has an extensive Introduction & there should be lots of second hand copies around. There’s an updated Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (2006) edited by Matthew George Walter which is in print but I haven’t seen it. Penguin Classics always have good notes & introductions so I’m sure this would be a good choice. I’ll continue my Remembrance reading throughout the month.

NYRB Reading Week - Jessica Mitford

It’s NYRB Reading Week & I haven’t chosen any of the NYRB titles sitting on the tbr shelves. I borrowed one from the library instead. I’m continuing my Mitford theme this year with Jessica Mitford’s Poison Penmanship : the gentle art of muckraking. This is a collection of articles Mitford wrote for various American magazines. Most of the articles come under the heading of muckraking, “one who seeks out and publishes scandals and the like about prominent people”, as Mitford quotes in her Introduction from the OED.

Mitford was first called Queen of the Muckrakers by Time magazine after her article on the Famous Writers School was published. This is one of the most interesting articles in the book. The Famous Writers School was a company that put big, full-page ads in magazines & newspapers to sell their correspondence courses on how to be a freelance writer. They exaggerated the ease of becoming a freelance & how much money one could earn. Their door-to-door salesmen used hard sell tactics & they engaged well-known writers to lend their names to the ads. It turned out that these writers had very little to do with the company, apart from accepting large fees for the use of their name & photo. They didn’t teach the courses, read the submissions & hadn’t even read the course material. The courses were expensive & most of the students never completed the assignments. They were dissatisfied with the lack of direction & personal contact. Not surprising when each assignment would be corrected by a different person, using standard phrases & jargon from a script they followed.

Mitford’s article was published in Atlantic Magazine, but only after it had been rejected by several other journals because they were afraid of losing the advertising revenue they made from the Famous Writers School. When the article was published, the reaction was immediate. Stock in the company plunged & their profits dropped dramatically. A wonderful example of the power of the Press to alert consumers to a scam & expose crooks. Even more interesting than the articles are the Comments Mitford adds at the end of each one. She sets the article in context & examines the impact the article had, what she would have done differently, & how she went about researching & structuring the piece.

The most famous article in the collection is St Peter, Don’t You Call Me, which is about the funeral business. This led to the bestselling book, The American Way of Death. The article examines the way funeral directors take advantage of grieving families to make a profit. There are many wonderful examples of the euphemistic language used to describe coffins, shrouds, embalming techniques. It’s funny & gruesome at the same time. It’s also shocking to realise how often funeral directors would discreetly find out how much families could afford to pay & tailor the costs so they would exactly match the amount of the insurance payout or funeral plan fund. Mitford’s article led to a backlash against unnecessarily expensive funerals & the growth of co-operative societies that provided a service while keeping costs down.

In the Introduction, Mitford explains how to research such articles. The importance of getting hold of trade journals for background information (this was crucial in the funeral article), compiling a list of questions ranging from Kind to Cruel when interviewing potentially hostile subjects, how to structure the article & avoid libel actions. Poison Penmanship could still be used as a textbook for journalism students today, although, as it was originally published in the 1970s, they would have to take account of the internet as a research tool. I read Jessica Mitford’s Letters earlier this year & it was fascinating to read the articles she wrote about in her letters. It enriched the experience of reading this book so much. I’d recommend the letters to anyone who loves reading other people’s letters but they also gave a lot of insight into the process of researching & writing these articles as she often wrote to family & friends while she was working on them. Poison Penmanship is an insight into radical journalism in the 60s & 70s when it was perhaps easier to enrage & shock the public about injustice & dishonesty than it is today.

You can find all the details of NYRB Reading Week on The Literary Stew & Coffeespoons blogs, where you’ll also find links to lots of other reviews of NYRB titles. It's not too late to join in if you have NYRB books on the tbr shelves, and there are prizes to be won for posting a review. Thank you to Mrs B & Honey for hosting the Reading Week.

And furthermore - Judi Dench

Judi Dench is one of the best-loved actors in the world. She’s a National Treasure in the UK & has had a long career on stage, screen & TV. I’ve just read her autobiography And Furthermore. Actually, in the Preface, Dame Judi says it's not an autobiography, more a follow-up to the other books John Miller has written about her career. It's an enjoyable book, full of anecdotes about her career, the actors & directors she’s worked with, the productions she’s enjoyed & the few she hasn’t. There’s very little about her personal life. Her childhood in York; her time at the Quaker school, The Mount; her early desire to be a theatre designer & then the realisation that she wouldn’t have been able to do the job to her own satisfaction; discovering that acting was what she really wanted to do are dealt with in a short first chapter.

Her marriage to Michael Williams & their happy 30 years together are barely mentioned. She talks about the productions they were in together but nothing more personal. She writes about the house she & Michael bought for themselves, their daughter, Finty, & their parents to live in. I would have liked to know more about how that worked. Three generations living together was the norm for hundreds of years but by the late 20th century it was unusual. Judi Dench is reticent about all these more personal areas of her life & I respect that reticence. This is no tell-all book about the awful life she’s had & the horrible people who have made her life a misery.

It’s the story of her professional life & if you’re even mildly interested in the British stage over the last 60 years, you will be enthralled, as I was, in her stories about the great actors of the last century. John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Kenneth Branagh, Ian McKellen are all written about fondly. One of the best chapters is about Dame Judi’s directing debut for Kenneth Branagh’s production of Much Ado About Nothing. I really got a feeling of being in the rehearsal room. I could feel her surprise, terror & delight at being on the other side of the fence for a change. This section of the book really came alive, after a long series of anecdotes about productions of Shakespeare interspersed with her film & television roles.

Movies came late in her career with Oscar-nominated performances as Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown & Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love, when she won the Oscar for “eight quick minutes with bad teeth” as Dame Judi memorably describes her performance! Her role as the first female M in the James Bond movies is her most high-profile role.

The book is “as told to John Miller” & that’s probably why it feels like a series of interviews. I did have a real sense of Dame Judi’s voice telling me the stories but there isn’t a lot of depth. John Miller has written a biography of Dame Judi, With a Crack In Her Voice as well as Darling Judi, a celebration of her career & a book of photos & anecdotes, Scenes From My Life. The “as told to” is probably why the book wasn’t as engaging as I’d hoped, but I did enjoy reading it. I’m interested in the theatre & I’ve seen a lot of Dame Judi’s film & TV work so I was interested to read her stories of working on those productions. The photos are also terrific, mostly from her own collection. So, definitely a book for the fans, but there are a lot of us out there. I have the DVD of her wonderful performance in Macbeth with Ian McKellen & also a new release DVD I borrowed from work called Playing Shakespeare, a series of master classes with RSC actors, including Dame Judi. I'm looking forward to watching both of these even more after reading And Furthermore.

Effie : a Victorian scandal - Merryn Williams

Effie Gray was married to two of the giants of the Victorian art world. When she was not quite 18, she married John Ruskin, the most famous art critic of the day. Their marriage was famously unconsummated & after six years of increasingly unhappy frustration, Effie had her marriage annulled. After a year or so, she married the Pre-Raphaelite artist, John Everett Millais. The story of Effie’s marriage & the way it ended was the greatest scandal of the 1850s & the consequences haunted all three of the participants until the end of their lives.

The story of Effie, Ruskin & Millais is a fascinating one. John Ruskin had known Effie & her family for some years. The Grays lived in the house where Ruskin’s grandfather had lived & where he committed suicide. Ruskin’s parents, especially his mother, were so horrified by this that they left Scotland, never to return. When Ruskin & Effie were married, they lived very closely with the elder Ruskins for much of the time. Ruskin was devoted to his parents & they considered him a genius. Effie was quite innocent & didn’t really understand what the physical relationship should be between a husband & wife. There are many theories as to why Ruskin didn’t or couldn’t consummate the marriage. He claimed that Effie had agreed initially not to have a physical relationship as they planned to travel & if she became pregnant it would interfere with their plans. Then, they decided that the marriage would be consummated when Effie was 25. Another theory was that Ruskin had never seen a naked woman, only classical statues & was revolted by Effie’s body. Ruskin also seemed more attracted to quite young women. He first knew Effie when she was just in her teens & his later relationship with Rose La Touche followed a similar pattern. As the girls grew older, his interest in them waned.

Effie felt this lack of interest in her personally as well as the physical rejection. Her relationship with her husband grew more distant as he would go out in the morning to work in his parents’ house close by, leaving her alone all day. She was forced to spend a lot of time with her mother-in-law who was not a sympathetic woman. Her attempts to discuss their relationship with Ruskin were rebuffed & her feelings of loneliness & dissatisfaction grew as the years passed. Effie’s parents were concerned about the amount of time Effie & Ruskin spent apart but she hadn’t told them the truth about her marriage.

The catalyst for change was Ruskin’s involvement with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This was a group of young artists who burst on to the London art scene in the late 1840s. Their reverence for early artists like Raphael & their desire to strip away the conventions of the artistic establishment & paint in a purer, more natural way, at first found little favour at the Royal Academy. At the core of the group were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt & John Everett Millais. Millais was a boy genius, the youngest artist ever accepted at the Royal Academy schools. Although Ruskin was at first scathing about their work & the subjects they chose, he eventually came to recognise their talent & champion their work.

He invited Millais to accompany himself & Effie on a trip to Scotland so that Millais could paint his portrait. The trip to Glenfinlas resulted in a magnificent portrait of Ruskin staring down a Highland stream, water rushing past him as he contemplates his genius (image above from minutiarum.blogspot.com). Millais & Effie became friends & spent a lot of time together when Ruskin was working. When they returned to London, Millais asked if Effie would model for a figure in one of his greatest pictures, The Order of Release (seen below from the Wikimedia Commons website). Ruskin was happy to agree & it was during the sessions in Millais’s studio that they fell in love. Effie confided to Millais about the state of her marriage & he was torn between his love for Effie & his loyalty & gratitude to Ruskin.

Effie’s 25th birthday passed & Ruskin now declared that he wouldn’t consummate the marriage because he feared Effie was mentally ill & shouldn’t have children. By this time, the last thing Effie wanted was for her marriage to be consummated. She told her parents the true state of affairs & her father, a lawyer, investigated her legal options. Divorce was almost impossible in the Victorian period & Effie’s reputation would be ruined by the scandal. The Church eventually granted her an annulment of her marriage on the grounds of non-consummation & in their judgment said that it was as if she had never been married at all. Ruskin wrote an extraordinary document outlining his side of the story but it was never used as he decided not to contest the action. It was only discovered & published more than 70 years later. He seems to have honestly believed that Effie’s wish to consummate the marriage was unreasonable & a symptom of her diseased mind.

The scandal among London’s artistic community was enormous. Ruskin was the butt of some very crude jokes among the younger men although his standing as a critic remained intact. Effie retreated to her family home, having no contact with Millais for over a year to avoid any more scandal. They were married in 1855 & enjoyed a long & happy marriage. This story is fascinating for the light it throws on Victorian attitudes towards marriage. Many people blamed Effie for the whole scandal. They thought she should have accepted whatever her husband decided & that she was deliberately trying to ruin his reputation. Her decision to have the marriage annulled was seen as deeply unfeminine & immodest. She had to undergo several physical examinations to prove her virginity to make her case.

Supporters of Ruskin, including his 20th century biographers, have seen Effie as a commonplace woman who made a great man into a laughing stock. There were rumours that Effie & Millais had started an affair on the trip to Scotland & had been deceiving Ruskin all the time. Ruskin’s parents turned against Effie completely & thought her mad or bad. The story refused to go away. Years later when Ruskin became involved with the La Touche family & fell in love with the young Rose, Mrs La Touche wrote to Effie to ask about the circumstances of her marriage to Ruskin. She was wary of Ruskin’s interest in her daughter, almost 30 years his junior, & concerned as to what his intentions were. This correspondence brought all the memories of her life with Ruskin back but Effie bravely wrote detailed responses to Mrs La Touche, telling her all she knew of Ruskin without bitterness or reproach. She knew how devastated she had been by the experience & wanted to prevent another young girl suffering in the same way.

Merryn Williams has written a fascinating book about this story. She has also come up with an intriguing theory that I hadn’t heard before. Williams believes that George Eliot was influenced by the story of Effie & Ruskin when she wrote her masterpiece, Middlemarch. It seems obvious now that it’s been suggested to me. The story of Dorothea married to the dry scholar, Casaubon, & falling in love with the young artist, Will Ladislaw, is very close to the story of the Ruskins & Millais. The conventions of fiction mean that Dorothea doesn’t have to endure the scandal of an annulment or a divorce to escape her marriage but there are parallels. I really enjoyed this book. I’ve read many books about the Pre-Raphaelites & I knew the story but it was fascinating to follow the events in such detail. There are lots of quotes from the letters & statements of all the protagonists. I especially enjoyed the insight into personal relationships & the expectations of society. I admired Effie’s courage in exposing herself to rumour & embarrassment in her quest to change her life & escape from an unhappy situation.