Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)
Katherine Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp on 14 October 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand, the third child and daughter of Harold Beauchamp, a businessman and later a successful banker, and Annie Dyer. A fourth daughter died in infancy. A fifth survived and was followed by the Beauchamps’ only son, Leslie, born in Karori, outside Wellington, where the family spent five years from 1893 before returning to the city. In 1903 the three older girls were taken to London where they completed their education at Queens’s College. Kathleen/Katherine showed musical promise, whilea the same time editing and contributing stories to the school magazine. It was at Queen’s College that she met her lifelong friend and support, Ida Baker. Having returned, reluctantly, to New Zealand in 1906, she persuaded her parents to let her leave for England once again in 1908, with an allowance of £100, eventually increasing to £300, a year. She never went back to New Zealand.
Her life in London was bohemian and chaotic. Pregnant as the result of a brief affair with a musician, Garnet Trowell, she married a singing teacher, George Bowden, in March 1909. The marriage was very short lived but they would not finally divorce until 1918. The baby was stillborn, and a number of affairs, with women and men, followed, one of her lovers infecting her with gonorrhoea, which had a lasting effect on her health.
Meanwhile her stories began to appear in New Age, a radical weekly, edited by a friend of Bowden’s, AR.Orage. The first collection, In a German Pension, was published in 1911, and not long afterwards, she met John Middleton Murry, then editing the avant-garde review, Rhythm. Among their friends were D.H. Lawrence and Frieda. The two couples moved to neighbouring cottages in Berkshire at the outbreak of war in 1914. Katherine’s own writing, which had rather dried up, seems to have gained new life following a brief affair in Paris, and the devastating death of her brother in Flanders.
Reunited with Murry in 1916, the pair continued their peripatetic life. An attempt at communal living with the Lawrences in Cornwall was a failure, but Katherine’s circle was growing. She could count Ottoline Morrell, Dora Carrington, Lytton Strachey and the Woolfs among her friends. Her story Prelude was published with the Hogarth Press in 1918, by which time she had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, and, finally, married Murry. The next four years which were spent largely abroad, in the South of France and in Switzerland, for the sake of her health, were the most productive of her life. Bliss and Other Stories was published in 1920. A stay in Paris for radium treatment for TB, was followed by a final move in search of a spiritual cure at the Gurdjieff Institute in Fontainebleau. Neither were successful and she died there on 9 January. She is buried in the Protestant cemetery in Fontainebleau.
The Garden Party , containing most of her final stories was published shortly after her death. Murry continued to publish her remaining stories, reviews, letters and her journal over the next twenty years.
Richmal Crompton (1890-1969)
Richmal Crompton Lamburn was born in Bury, Lancashire on 15th November 1890, second child of Rev Edward John Sewell Lamburn, a classics teacher at Bury Grammar School, and his wife Clara (née Crompton). Her brother, John Battersby Crompton Lamburn was also a writer of novels and books on natural history.
She was educated at St Elphin’s boarding school for the daughters of the clergy, first in Warrington, Lancashire, and later in Matlock, Derbyshire. Winning a scholarship to Royal Holloway College in London, she graduated in 1914 with a BA in Classics. She became a Classics mistress first at her old school, and later at Bromley High School. In 1923 she suffered a serious attack of polio, which left her right leg paralysed. She gave up teaching to concentrate on her writing.
Crompton is best known for her William stories, the first of which was published in Home Magazine in 1919. Between 1922 and 1970 thirty-nine collections of William stories were published. In addition to these she wrote and published forty-one novels for adults and nine collections of short stories: she considered these to be her real work, and was disappointed that they did not receive the same recognition as the William books.
She never married and had no children. Shortly after retiring from teaching at the age of thirtythree, she had a house built in Bromley Common for herself and her mother, who had cared for her during her illness. In spite of her partial paralysis she volunteered as a Fire Officer during World War II.
She died at her home in Chislehurst in 1969 .
Virginia Graham (1910-1991)
Virginia Graham was born in London on 1st November 1910 into a well-connected affluent family. Her father, Harry Graham, was a successful journalist and later a well-known lyricist, now best remembered as a writer of humorous verse, particularly the cheerfully cruel Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes, published in 1899. Her mother, Dorothy Villiers, was the grand-daughter of the Earl of Clarendon. Virginia grew up near Marble Arch in the West End of London. Apart from the wartime years spent near Bristol, she lived in the same part of London almost all her life, moving to Chelsea two years before her death. Educated at a girls’ day school in London, she went, with her childhood friend, Joyce Grenfell, to finishing school in Paris. The two young girls did the London ‘season’ together in 1928 and remained lifelong friends.
In 1939 Virginia Graham married Tony Thesiger, who was tall, handsome, charming and rich. Her mother wrote that he proved the exception to the rule that ‘no nice man ever had more than £500 a year.’ There were no children.
Her first poem was published in Punch in 1935 the year before her father died. She continued to contribute poems to Punch, Truth and Lilliput. The collection Consider the Years was published by Cape in 1946. A columnist for House and Garden, she wrote film criticism for the Spectator from 1947 to 1956, and from 1952 reviewed books and films for the Evening Standard. Say Please, a none-too-serious, book of etiquette for ladies, was published in 1949, and in 1951 Here’s How, an unreliable instruction manual on everything from singing to laying a carpet.
When Joyce Grenfell began performing in public, Virginia wrote the lyrics to several of her songs. Like Joyce Grenfell she was a committed Christian Scientist and many of her poems were published in the Christian Science Monitor.
Tony Thesiger died in August 1969 following a long illness. Virginia continued writing and died of a stroke in 1991, three months after her 83rd birthday.
Amy Levy (1861-1889)
Amy Levy was born in Clapham, South London, in 1861. One of seven brothers and sisters, she was the second daughter of Lewis Levy and Isobel Levin, whose ancestors had arrived in England in the early eighteenth century. At the time of her birth her father described himself as an export merchant, but by 1881 he is listed as a stock and share merchant. A comfortably upper middle-class family, the Levys lived in Dorset Square, Marylebone, before moving to Brighton, where Amy was educated at the High School for Girls. Constance Black, later Garnett, the great translator of Russian literature, was one of her fellow pupils. The headmistress, Miss Creak had been one of the first five students at Newnham College, Cambridge. Amy Levy was their first Jewish student, going up in 1879, but leaving after only four terms, for reasons which are unclear.
The family returned to London, living first in Sussex Place, Bayswater, and later, following a downturn in family finances in Bloomsbury, where Amy became a regular in the Reading Room of the British Museum, along with her close friends Eleanor Marx and Beatrice Webb.
She began writing as a young teenager, winning the junior prize for an essay published in the children’s journal Kind Words. Her first collection of poetry, Xantippe and Other Verse appeared in 1881, and was followed by several short stories and a second collection of poetry. A series of essays on Jewish culture and literature were published in the Jewish Chronicle in 1886. She wrote a number of sentimental stories, at the same time as publishing her two principal novels, The Romance of the Shop and Reuben Sachs in 1888.
She travelled widely in Europe during her twenties, meeting among others the writer Vernon Lee, in Florence, with whom she may have fallen in love.
For many years she had suffered from depression. This and worsening deafness most probably caused her suicide on September 10 1889, shortly before her twenty-eighth birthday.
Amy had contributed to Oscar Wilde’s journal Woman’s World, and it was here in 1890 in his obituary of her that he wrote, ‘To write thus at six-and-twenty is given to very few’
Winifred Watson (1906-2002)
Winifred Watson was born in October 1906, in Whitley Bay, near Newcastle, where her father owned four shoe shops. One of five children, she was educated like her two sisters at St Ronan’s, a boarding school in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Her father’s business was badly hit by the Depression and she was forced to find work as a typist. The work seems not to have been unduly arduous. Her employer suggested that she bring in knitting to while away empty hours, but she chose instead to write, completing Fell Top, a Northumbrian rustic novel, in six weeks. It was some years before she submitted it for publication by Methuen, who had advertised for new writers. Fell Top was published in 1934, and followed in 1936 by Odd Shoes, a historical novel set in Newcastle.
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day was Winifred Watson’s third novel. Anxious at the lack of seriousness, and at Watson’s complete lack of familiarity with the subject matter, Methuen agreed to publish it only in tandem with another novel in her ‘usual’ style. Upyonder and Miss Pettigrew were published in 1938. Miss Pettigrew was an immediate success in the English speaking world. It was translated into French and film rights sold to Hollywood. Because of the war the film was never made.
Winifred had married Leslie Pickering, the manager of a timber business, in 1936, and together they had one son. Keith. Her husband was supportive of her writing and she published two more novels, Hop, Step and Jump in 1939 and Leave and Bequeath, a murder-mystery in 1943. This was to be her last novel. Bombing forced the family to move in with her mother-in-law, which made writing impossible for her. “One cannot write if one is never alone”, she explained.
Leslie died in 1969, and Winifred continued living in Jesmond, in the suburbs of Newcastle, until her death in August 2002, at the age of 95.
Ruth Adam (1907-1977)
Ruth Adam (née King) (1907-1977). Ruth, the second of four children, was born in December 1907 in the mining village of Arnold in Nottinghamshire, where her father was vicar. Educated at a girls’ boarding school in Derbyshire, she taught for five years in elementary schools in poor mining areas of Nottinghamshire. In May 1932 she married Kenneth Adam, a journalist on the Manchester Guardian and later the first director of BBC television. They would have four children.
Her first novel was published in 1938, I’m not Complaining, set during the Depression and written from the point of view of an unmarried woman teacher. During the War she worked for the Ministry of Information, at the same time writing scripts and plays for radio (she would later write for Woman’s Hour, launched in 1946), and continuing to write novels. She became a regular contributor to Church of England Newspaper writing over 2000 weekly articles over the next thirty years, covering issues such as paid work for married women, childcare, juvenile offenders, refugees and the Suffragettes. Girl the ‘sister’ comic to Eagle was founded in 1951. It included strips by Ruth Adam featuring independent and clever young girls.
In 1955, with the London County Councillor Peggy Jay, she founded the Fisher Group, a social policy think-tank advising the government, which played an important part in a number of legislative reforms. She continued to write, publishing in all twelve novels, including A House in the Country (1957), a comic account of living with her family in a commune, and biographies of George Bernard Shaw, and Beatrice Webb, the latter with Kitty Muggerdige. A Woman’s Place 1910-1975, a social history of women in the twentieth history, was published in 1975.
Ruth Adam died in London in February 1977.
Isobel English (1920 – 1994)
June Guesdon Jolliffe – she adopted the pseudonym Isobel English in 1954 when her first work was published – was born in Kensington, in West London, in June 1920, the second daughter of a Welsh civil servant, and his Tasmanian wife, whose musical ambitions had been interrupted by domestic duties. Because of illness she spent her early childhood in Brittany where she underwent a salt water cure. Educated at a convent school in Somerset, she briefly attended a secretarial college before starting work for the critic and poet Kenneth Allott. Like her mother she abandoned an early ambition to pursue a musical career.
In 1941 she married Ronald Orr-Ewing, an executive officer with the Metropolitan Police and later an inspector of prisons. Their daughter, Victoria, was born in 1942. It was Ronald Orr-Ewing who first encouraged her to write and she continued to show him her work in manuscript long after they were divorced in 1953. She converted to Roman Catholicism, in 1953, a move which she had been contemplating for many years, and married the writer and editor Neville Braybrooke. They moved to a small house near Hampstead Heath bought for them by Neville’s mother. This would be their home together until her death.
Every Eye, published in 1956 is the second of her three novels, the first The Key that Rusts was published in 1954, the third, Four Voices, in 1961. She also published a number of short stories, some of which were collected in Life After All, which won the Katherine Mansfield prize in 1973. In spite of her success, June assiduously avoided publicity, rarely giving interviews and refusing to lecture or read from her work.
The Braybrookes numbered many writers among their friends, including Stevie Smith, Beryl Bainbridge, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Bowen and Olivia Manning, who valued her both as a writer and a friend. Olivia Manning is reported to have said, ‘I always feel safe with June’.
June and Neville were working on Manning’s biography when June died of leukaemia on 30th May 1994. She is buried in Hampstead cemetery.
Noel Streatfeild (1895-1986)
(Mary) Noël Sreatfeild was born on Christmas Eve 1895 in Frant, Sussex, the second child of the Bishop of Lewes, and great-great-grand-daughter of the prison reformer, Elizabeth Fry. The second of five daughters, she recalled herself being a plain, bad-tempered child. Educated at the Hastings and St Leonard’s Ladies’ College and Laleham School in Eastborue, during the First World War she worked in Woolwich arsenal, the wartime munitions factory, before going to RADA in 1919. For ten years she enjoyed a modest success in repertory and pantomime, touring in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
Her career as a writer began in 1929, with three fairy stories for children. Her first novels were for adults, one of which, The Whicharts (1931), at the suggestion of her agent, she rewrote for children: Ballet Shoes (1936) became a best-seller and is still in print. Among her other children’s classics were Tennis Shoes (1937), The Circus is Coming (1938) and White Boots (1951).
She wrote over eighty books, all but seventeen of them for children, some serialised for radio and television. Among her non-fiction books was a three volume autobiography and a life of the children’s writer Edith Nesbit.
Appointed OBE in 1983, she died in London, following a stroke, in September 1986
Elizabeth Berridge (1919-2009)
Elizabeth Berridge was born in 1919 in the South London suburb of Wandsworth, the daughter of a successful land agent. Educated in London and Switzerland, she started work at the Bank of England, leaving after a year for a far less conventional job, writing captions for a photographic news agency. In 1940 she married Reginald Moore, founder and editor of Modern Reading and other literary magazines. They spent the first years of their marriage in various houses in London. In 1943 after the birth of her son they moved to a cottage in Montgomeryshire (now part of Powys) in Wales, where her second child, a daughter, was born on D-Day.
She achieved the goal which she had set herself of producing two children and two novels by the time she was twenty-five, at the same time writing short stories, which appeared in a number of a periodicals. Her first collection, Selected Stories reprinted by Persephone Books as Tell it to a Stranger was published in 1947. The Moores returned to London in 1950.
As well as reviewing fiction for The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Literary Review and The Tablet, she published nine novels and two books for children, and edited the early diary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (The Barretts of Hope End). Her 1964 novel Across the Common won the Yorkshire Post award for Best Novel of the Year, and she served as judge for a number of literary prizes: the David Higham award for first novel, the Katherine Mansfield award and the Dylan Thomas short story award. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Elizabeth Berridge died in 2009 the day before her 90th birthday.
Betty Miller (1910-65)
Betty Miller, seen here in a photograph by Bassano taken in 1935 © National PortraitGallery, was born in Ireland to a Lithuanian businessman – he owned a number of tobacco shops – and a Swedish teacher whose (Polish) family was distantly related to the philosopher Henri Bergson. The family moved, with their four children, from Ireland to Sweden in 1920, spending two years there before moving to London in 1922. Betty went to school in London and completed a diploma in journalism at University College before publishing the first of her seven novels. Her younger brother, Juilian, worked for Gaumont-British.
In 1933 she married the psychiatrist Emanuel Miller (1892-1970) and then wrote two more well-received novels and Farewell Leicester Square (unpublished until 1941). During the war she lived in the country with her children, Jonathan (b.1934) and Sarah (b.1937), writing On the Side of the Angels (1945, repr. 1985) and a biography of Robert Browning (1952). Her London circle included Olivia Manning, Stevie Smith, Marghanita Laski and Isaiah Berlin – who remarked on her ‘moral charm’, calling her ‘gentle, acutely sensitive, receptive, infinitely truthful and accurate’.
She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at the age of forty-nine and died six years later.
E.M. Delafield (1890-1943)
Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood née de la Pasture , seen here in a photograph taken during the First World War, was born in June 1890 in Aldrington, near Hove, Sussex, the elder daughter of Comte Henry Philip Ducarel de la Pasture and Elizabeth Lydia Rosabel, née Bonham. Her mother was a successful novelist, writing as Mrs Henry de la Pasture. Edmée, was brought up in London and Devon, and later Monthouthshire, and educated by French governesses and at several schools. A débutante in 1909, she failed to attract a husband, and entered a convent in Belgium, where she remained for nine months.
At the outbreak of World War I, Edmée, now known as Elizabeth, became a VAD nurse in Exeter, and began her first novel. Zella Sees Herself was published in 1917, under the pen name E.M. Delafield, a loose translation of her maiden name. Three more novels followed, The War Workers and The Pelicans in 1918, and Consequences in 1919. In the same year she married Major (Arthur) Paul Dashwood, and left for Malaya, where her husband worked as a civil engineer. A son was born in 1920. Disliking expatriate life, the Dashwoods returned to England in 1922 settling in Croyle, Devon, where Paul became a land agent. In 1924, a daughter was born, and in the same year Elizabeth was elected president of her local Women’s Institute, a post she retained until the end of her life.
Elizabeth continued to write, both journalism and novels, publishing over thirty, as well as sketches, essays, short stories and a play. She never forgot her mother’s advice to write ‘about something of which I had personal experience’. The Way Things Are (1927), is about a women not unlike herself, with a husband not unlike Paul. In late 1929, the first episodes of The Diary of Provincial Lady began to appear in the magazine Time and Tide. Thank Heaven Fasting, an account of an Edwardian girl’s struggle to find a husband, thought by many to be her best book, was published in 1932. Nothing is Safe (1937), describing the effects of divorce on children, was followed by a travel book on Russia.
Described by those who knew her as having a ‘gift for laughter’, E.M. Delafield, never recovered from the death of her son in 1940, probably by suicide. She died of cancer on 2 December 1943 in Kentisbeare, Devon, where she is buried.
Judith Viorst (b.1931)
Judith Viorst (b.1931) was born and brought up in New Jersey. She graduated from Rutgers University in 1952 and moved to Greenwich Village. She has lived in Washington DC since 1960, when she married the political writer, Milton Viorst. They have three sons, Anthony, Nick and Alexander, and seven grandchildren. She is the author of several books of poetry on the theme of aging, from When Did I Stop Being Twenty and Other Injustices to her most recent Unexpectedly Eighty and Other Adaptations published in 2010. As well as poetry for adults and children, she has written a novel, three musical, several works of non-fiction and a number of children’s picture books, including Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (1972), which has sold over two million copies.
A graduate of the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, she published in 1986 Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow, which appeared in The New York Times best-seller list for almost two years, Imperfect Control: Our Lifelong Struggles With Power and Surrender in 1998 and Grown-Up Marriage: What We Know, Wish We Had Known, and Still Need to Know About Being Married in 2003.
Nicholas Mosley (b.1923)
Educated at Eton, Nicholas Mosley fought in Italy from 1943-5 (being awarded the MC) and read philosophy at Oxford for a year. His early novels - Spaces of the Dark(1951) and Accident (1965), filmed by Losey – were essentially experimental; in the ’70s and ’80s he wrote the sequence that culminated inHopeful Monsters (1990). He has published a two-volume biography of his father, Oswald Mosley, and an autobiography. Julian Grenfell: His Life and the Times of His Death (1976) is one of the most original of post-war biographies, drawing on his own work as a novelist of ideas, on the Grenfell family papers (inherited by his first wife) and on his own family background. Mosley, who bears the title 3rd Baron Ravensdale through his mother Cynthia, the daughter of Lord Curzon, has five children; he married for the second time in 1975 and lives in North London.
Vere Hodgson (1901-79)
Winifred Vere Hodgson was born in Edgbaston, Birmingham, where her widowed mother ran the family home as a boarding house. Vere, named after an uncle who was the marine biologist on Captain Scott’s ship, read History at Birmingham University, taught first at the Poggio Imperiale, the former Summer Palace of the grand dukes of Tuscany which had been turned into a ‘rather select girls’ school’ (Mussolini’s daughter was a pupil), and later on at a school in Folkestone. From the early 1930s she helped to run a local charity in Notting Hill Gate, the Greater World Association. Founded by Winifred Moyes, a journalist turned psychic, the GWA was both a Spiritualist association, and a welfare organization. Vere was involved only with welfare work.
Vere kept a diary from girlhood onwards and in 1976 edited her 1940-45 diaries for publication as Few Eggs and No Oranges. In his book Austerity Britain, a history of Britain 1945-1979, David Kynaston, makes frequent reference to her postwar diaries.
After her retirement she went to live in the village of Church Stretton in Shropshire.
Mollie Panter Downes (1906-97)
Mary Patricia [Mollie] Panter Downes, seen here in a wartime photograph taken by Lee Miller, was brought up by her mother in Sussex, after her father, a major in the 2nd Battalion Royal Irish Regiment, was killed in August 1914 at Mons. Mollie published her first novel, The Shoreless Sea, when she was seventeen. It was a bestseller, going into eight editions in eighteen months. Mollie wrote short stories and two more romantic novels in 1929 and 1931. She would later disown her early work, referring to One Fine Day (1947) as her only novel. In 1929 she married Clare Robinson. They travelled widely before moving in 1931 to Chiddingford in Surrey, where she would live for over sixty years. Two daughters were born, in 1932 and 1935, but never got in the way of her writing routine. She had a small writing hut in the woods to which she would retire each day with her lunch in her basket.
Mollie Panter-Downes published her first short story in the The New Yorker in 1938, and in 1939 began her column, ‘Letter from London’, which she continued until 1984. In all she wrote 852 pieces for The New Yorker, Letters from London, book reviews, Reporter at Large, and short stories. She also wrote two non-fiction works, Ooty Preserved: a Victorian Hill Station in India (1967) and At The Pines: Swinburneand Watts-Dunton in Putney (1971).
To find out more about Mollie Panter-Downes’s life go to http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/65675
Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958)
Dorothea ‘Dorothy’ Canfield Fisher was the daughter of an academic and an artist. Brought up in the Midwest, she went to university in Ohio and in New York. After marrying James Fisher in 1907, she spent the rest of her life in Arlington, Vermont, the home of her pioneering ancestors (apart from 1916-19 in France helping with the war effort); here she lived in a community of writers that included Robert Frost. He remarked that ‘everything that ever happened or occurred to her converged as into a napkin ring and came out wide on the other side of it Vermontly.’ A popular and prolific writer, Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote 22 novels and 18 non-fiction books. Persephone Books publishes The Home-Maker (1924). Appointed to the Vermont Board of Education, she was also on the editorial board of the Book-of-the-Month Club for 25 years. Her son was killed in the Philippines in 1945, after which she wrote no more fiction; she died in 1958.
Marghanita Laski (1915-88)
Marghanita Laski was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School and went on to read English at Somerville College, Oxford.
She wrote a number of novels, of which four have been re-published by Persephone Books: The Victorian Chaise-Longue (Perephone Book No. 6); Little Boy Lost (Persephone Book No. 28); The Village (Persephone Book No. 52); and To Bed with Grand Music (Persephone Book No. 86) .
As well as being a novelist, she was also a broadcaster and journalist and appeared on a number of radio programmes such as Any Questions, The Brains Trust and The Critics. For several years in the 1970s, she served as Vice-Chairman of the Arts Council. She was also keen on lexicography and provided the Oxford English Dictionary with huge numbers of examples of instances of words and their changes of usages drawn from her readings and research.
Etty Hillesum (1914-43)
Esther (Etty) Hillesum was born in Middelburg, The Netherlands. Her father, Levie (Louis) Hillesum was a teacher of classical languages and later became Headmaster of a school in Deventer. Her mother, Riva (Rebecca) Bernstein was Russian and had fled the pogroms in her native country and married Etty’s father in 1912. Etty had two younger brothers: Jacob (Jaap), born in 1916, who became a doctor Michael (Mischa), born in 1920, who was musically gifted from an early age and became a pianist.
Etty attended school in Deventer and then went to Amsterdam to study law, completing Masters examinations in 1939. She also studied Slavic languages at Amsterdam and Leiden and subsequently continued to study Russian language and literature and gave private lessons.
Her diaries were written largely in her room on the Gabriel Metsustraat 61, overlooking the Museumplein in Amsterdam, where she had taken a room in 1937 and which was her home until her final departure for Westerbork in 1943. The house belonged to an accountant, Hendrik (Hans) J. Wegerif. Wegerif, a widower, hired Etty as his housekeeper, but they also began an affair. Wegerif’s son, Hans, and a chemistry student by the name of Bernard Meylink also lived in the house. They were later joined by Maria Tuinzing who became Etty’s close friend.
In 1941, Etty met the psycho-chirologist Julius Spier (often referred to in the diaries as “S.”). Spier was born at Frankfurt in 1887. He had a business career and ran a publishing house before undergoing analysis with Jung in Zurich, and at Jung’s recommendation, opening a psycho-chirology practice in Berlin 1929. His Berlin practice was extremely successful. Spier left Germany in 1939. His non-Jewish wife – from whom who was divorced – and his two children remained there. At the time Etty met him, he had set up a practice in Amsterdam and was engaged to Hertha Levi, who had emigrated to London in 1938 or 1939.
Etty was immediately impressed by Spier’s personality, and decided to undergo therapy with him. She subsequently became Spier’s secretary and they had a close relationship. Spier had a great influence on Etty’s psychological and spiritual development and introduced her to the Bible and St. Augustine. He died on 15 September 1942.
As Etty was writing her diaries, ever more stringent anti-Jewish measures were being implemented in Holland. At the recommendation of her brother Jaap, she applied for a position with the Jewish Council and in July 1942 she was appointed to undertake administrative duties there. Later that month, she was – at her own request – transferred to Westerbork. By mid-August she was back in Amsterdam, and she visited her parents in Deventer before returning to the camp once more. Illness forced her back to Amsterdam in early December 1942. Though she was keen to return to the camp to continue her work there supporting people preparing themselves for transport, it was not until early June 1943 that she had recovered sufficiently to be allowed to return. Etty consistently turned down offers to go into hiding.
Her departure from Amsterdam in early June proved to be final. In early July 1943, the special status granted to personnel at the Westerbork section of the Jewish Council was taken away. Half of the personnel had to return to Amsterdam, while the other half became camp internees. Etty opted to stay, wishing to remain with her father, mother and brother Mischa, who had by then also been interned there. Mischa, on the grounds of his musical talent, was given the option of internment at a special camp at Barnveld but he refused to go unless his parents were allowed to accompany him. On 7 September 1943, Etty, Mischa and their parents were deported to Aushcwitz. Etty’s father and mother died on 10 September 1943, Etty on 30 November 1943 and her brother, Mischa, on 31 March 1944. Her brother Jaap was still in Amsterdam. He arrived in Westerbork in late September 1943 and was deported to Bergen-Belsen in February 1944. He survived the camp but died on the return journey after the camp was liberated.
Before her final departure for Westerbork, Etty gave her Amsterdam diaries to Maria Tuinzing and asked her to pass them along to the writer Klaas Smelik, with the request that they be published if she did not return. Smelik’s daughter, Johanna (Jopie) Smelik, typed out sections of the diaries, but attempts to have the diaries published in the 1950s proved fruitless. Two letters Etty had written in December 1942 and on 24 August 1943, concerning conditions in Westerbork were illegally published in autumn 1943 by the Dutch resistance.
The diaries were finally published in Dutch in 1981 and the Dutch publication of all her known writings followed in 1986.
Susan Glaspell (1876-1948)
Susan Glaspell was born in Davenport, Iowa. Her first job was writing for a Davenport newspaper after which she studied at Drake University in Des Moines, graduating in 1899. She worked as a reporter for a Des Moines paper, spent a short period at graduate school at the University of Chicago and then began publishing fiction. Fidelity, her third novel, was published in 1915.
Back in Davenport, she met George Cook, a man who had many interests, including being a classics professor, a novelist, poet and farmer. They moved east together to Provincetown, Massachusetts, also spending time in Greenwich Village in New York City. The couple wrote a play together called ‘Suppressed Desires’ and subsequently founded the Provincetown Players in an abandoned wharf building. Glaspell wrote and acted in a number of plays for the Players including ‘Trifles‘ and ‘The Verge’. In 1922, the couple left their theatre and travelled to Greece where Cook intended to write and study. He died in 1924. Glaspell returned to Cape Cod and wrote a biography of her husband followed by three novels, including a best seller, Brook Evans, which has also been re-published by Persephone Books. She also wrote ‘Alison’s House’, a play for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1931. During this period she struggled with alcoholism and poor health; she spent a further period in Chicago and was involved in a theatre project there, then returned to Provincetown, where she wrote three further novels. She died in Provincetown in 1948.
Her short story ‘A Jury of Her Peers’ has been made into a film which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1981. The Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond has revived a number of her plays beginning in March 1996 with The Verge, and followed by her one-act play Trifles, The Inheritors, The Outside and, most recently, Chains of Dew in March 2008. For more information about Susan Glaspell, see the Susan Glaspell Society website.
Dorothy Whipple (1893-1966)
Dorothy Whipple (née Stirrup) had an intensely happy childhood in Blackburn as part of the large family of a local architect. Her close friend George Owen having been killed in the first week of the war, for three years she worked as secretary to Henry Whipple, an educational administrator who was a widower twenty-four years her senior and whom she married in 1917. Their life was mostly spent in Nottingham; here she wrote Young Anne(1927), the first of nine extremely successful novels which included Greenbanks (1932) and The Priory (1939). Almost all her books were Book Society Choices or Recommendations and two of them, They Knew Mr Knight (1934) and They were Sisters (1943), were made into films. She also wrote short stories and two volumes of memoirs. Someone at a Distance (1953) was her last novel. Returning in her last years to Blackburn, Dorothy Whipple died there in 1966.
The characters Dorothy Whipple creates in her fiction are ordinary and aspire to ordinary sorts of things. They live in ordinary sorts of places, often provincial towns. Yet their emotions are very real, their weaknesses and failings, their humanity, and often their good-heartedness, are very much there, laid bare on the pages. She created vivid characters and had a natural story-telling instinct, creating strong stories and telling them in an intelligent, understated, no-nonsense sort of way. Her characters sit within stories where their fates seem to be an almost inevitable result of their own psychological make-ups, but into this is woven the random intervention of chance. So like life! The emotional currents that underlie the stories are not ones that go away – the fragility of emotional fulfillment or the cruelty and folly that may be latent in relationships of love. Yet despite the emotion in her writing, she simultaneously sustains flashes of arch humour. When, in Someone at a Distance, Ellen apologises to Louise for not having been there to meet her at the station, Louise’s response is cutting but at the same time, it’s hard not to feel the humour of the situation: ‘Madame,’ said Louise, shutting her eyes briefly, ‘since I did not know of your existence, I did not miss you from the platform.’
Although an extremely popular writer in the ’30s and ’40s (her 1932 novel Greenbanks topped the bestseller lists in the Observer and The Sunday Times) by the time she published her last novel, Someone at a Distance, in 1953 she had fallen out of favour. The novel had no reviews and did not sell. Her publisher suggested a reason: ‘editors have gone mad about action and passion’. Her novels are understated: action and passion are there but they are seething beneath the surface of the everyday, the fabric composed of domestic details, dish-washing, gardening, provincial shop-keeping, everyday conversations. But make no mistake, they are there.
In addition to Someone at a Distance, Persephone have re-published a number of Dorothy Whipple’s novels: They Knew Mr Knight, They Were Sisters (both of which have been made into films, the latter starring James Mason, premiered at the Gaumont Theatre in Haymarket at the end of the Second World War), The Priory, High Wages and a collection of short stories, The Closed Door and Other Stories.
Monica Dickens (1915-92)
‘Monica Dickens wrote prolifically (she published more than fifty books) but much of what she wrote draws on the other things she did with her time. She was born in 1915 and her family lived in Chepstow Villas in London’s Notting Hill. She was the daughter of a barrister and Alderman, Henry ‘Hal’ Dickens and a great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens. She was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School (until she was expelled for poor conduct which included throwing her school uniform over Hammersmith Bridge!). She was presented as a debutant at Court in 1935 but it was a fairly radical departure from her upper-middle class world that led her into writing.
Her initial wayward decision to go ‘into service’ as a cook seems to echo an engagement with other social worlds which ran in the family. This engagement is everywhere in her great-grandfather’s fiction and it is also apparent in her father’s involvement with causes like municipal housing (which led to an area of housing – opened in 1953 by the Queen Mother in North Kensington, near Holland Park – being named after him). But her decision seems to have been inspired at least in part by a sense of fun. Having observed waiters and butlers at balls she attended as a guest, she noted that they seemed to be ‘having a much better time’ than she was so she ‘wanted to belong to them, down there, where there was a bit of life’. Her first book came out of this experience. She met a salesman at a ball who introduced to his employer, a publisher. The publisher told her to ‘imagine something exciting that’s just happened’ and write about it. She obliged and wrote a work of non-fiction, One Pair of Hands, in about three weeks in a notebook bought from Woolworths.
Mariana came next, bashed out on a typewriter in a rented flat in Mayfair. This time she wrote fiction, albeit fiction which drew very heavily on her own childhood experiences. She went on to train to be a nurse, and drew on that experience to write One Pair of Feet. Then she moved on to factory work, repairing spitfires, which in turn inspired The Fancy. Her next move was to become a reporter on a local newspaper, and she turned that bit of her life into My Turn to Make the Tea. She continued with journalism though a twenty year stint writing a column for Woman’s Own. In 1951, she married, aged 36. Her husband was Roy Stratton, a Commander in the US Navy (who was also a writer, though his genre was detective fiction), and they went to live in Washington, before settling in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. They subsequently adopted two daughters, Prudence and Pamela. Monica continued to write – The Winds of Heaven, to be republished by Persephone in the autumn of this year, appeared in 1955 – but also immersed herself in other activities which continued to inspire her writing. She supported the NSPCC and her work in this area inspired two novels - No More Meadows and Kate and Emma. She went on to found the American branch of the Samaritans and wrote about this experience in The Listeners. She kept horses and loved to ride – hence the Follyfoot novels. She also wrote an autobiography called An Open Book. After her husband’s death she moved to a cottage in the village of Brightwalden on the Berkshire Downs. She died in 1992.
Monica Dickens writes about all her experiences with a lightness which suggests that she found much fascination and a good measure of joy in the worlds she inhabited and the characters she encountered within them. She also writes with the eye of a reporter, noticing the small details that convey the whole, as is very apparent in Mariana.
Her experiences in life – and what she wrote about – were, in Mariana, the experiences of a woman waiting for the right sort of man to come along, and subsequently, her experiences as a woman with a career, a family and multiple other interests in the middle decades of the C20th. This sounds strikingly modern in many ways and yet a glance at a few of Monica Dickens’ Woman’s Own columns from the 1950s seems to place her very much at odds with views that women who have grown up in later decades of the C20th might want to embrace.
In 1950 she used her column to present a dire warning of the potential impact of the television on family life and indeed the nation. ‘Television — not for me!’ is a sort of moral fable about the evils of television. The task of the British housewife seems to be to hold back the onslaught of the evils of television, to cling on to the past and, in doing so, to protect the nation from descending into depravity. In perhaps the most startling section of the article (and one can imagine her shuddering in horror), she anticipates what might become of women if there were ever to be such a thing as daytime TV: ‘If they ever start having TV programmes all day long we might become a nation, not of housewives, but of sluts!’
Later, in 1955 – and somewhat hypocritically given her own career and interests – she was exhorting women to stay put in the kitchen where they belonged. ‘Don’t try to be the boss,’ she warns. She attacks ‘the slightly abnormal woman who wants to have her cake and eat it.’ In other words: ‘She wants a man to give her love, companionship, a home, children, and the wherewithal to support life comfortably; but she cannot bring herself to let her man be the head of the household.’ A woman’s place is in the kitchen. The kitchen ‘is the heart and centre of the meaning of home, the place where, day after day, you make with your hands the gifts of love.’
Just because we (most of us!) wouldn’t accept such claims and exhortations today, I don’t think we should shrink from them or from their author. We might just dismiss them as a product of their time – an era in which the possibilities available to most women were more limited and women perhaps tended to see themselves, their lives and their relationships in a narrower way. Or we might accept that there was a degree of confusion about the role of women during that period (which is not to say that all the confusion has been completely cleared up today). But that said, not betraying ‘the cause’ of being a woman in our own times sometimes seems to entail a (largely implicit) dismissal of the relevance or value of the lives of endless numbers of women who came before, who lived in less ‘enlightened’ times, and who in many cases did not have careers outside the home. Despite the message that seems to emerge from some of her Woman’s Own columns, Monica Dickens’ own experiences suggest a much more nuanced picture of the way a woman might shape her life.
Cicely Hamilton (1872-1952)
William – an Englishman was written by Cicely Hamilton whilst she was on war service in France. Its tone is one of gentle mockery together with seemingly genuine empathy with the predicament of her characters. Its sources can perhaps be traced through the author’s own involvement in various pre-war causes and the changes in her own views and in those around her following her wartime experiences.
Cicely Hamilton was independently-minded. An actress turned writer, she was involved in the founding of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League and wrote extensively for the suffrage cause though she seems to have retained a degree of skepticism about the suffrage movement itself: she considered sexual stereotyping and economic discrimination to be more fundamental issues for women than disenfranchisement.
In the pre-war period, she wrote numerous plays. Her second play, Diana of Dobson’s, was first performed in 1908 and portrays the lives of underpaid, overworked shop workers in a Clapham department store, one of whom comes into a small inheritance which she decides to blow on a trip to a Swiss resort, masquerading as a rich widow. The play was made into a film in 1917 and was revived at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, Surrey in 2007.
In this period, Cicely Hamilton also wrote a polemic, Marriage as a Trade (1909), which confronts the fact that, at the time, marriage was effectively the only real means of livelihood available to women and as a result, women were being raised for marriage alone, which tended to have adverse consequences for their mental, physical and moral development. In 1911 she wrote her first novel, Just to Get Married (1911) about the lengths women would go to to win a husband. She wrote a number of other plays during this period, including A Pageant of Great Women which was performed in venues across the country. She also spoke at public meetings and published pamphlets relating to women’s suffrage.
During the war, she joined a women’s ambulance unit and worked as an administrator in a military hospital outside Paris where she was also a member of a repertory company which provided wartime entertainment for the troops. In 1916 she wrote Senlis, a non-fiction description of a small town in Northern France where she witnessed a ‘violent contrast’ between order and ‘black desolation’, ‘bare gaunt walls’ and piles of rubble alongside ‘well-set shop fronts’ and ‘decorated spires’ brought about by the German forces. This is echoed in some of the scenes in William – for example, the seemingly untouched house in the German-occupied village with the calm white cat. Her experiences of the war may well have left her disillusioned with her former ideals and made her suspicious of the kind of ‘herd instinct’ she saw amongst people caught up in pre-war causes and in the war-effort itself.
After the war, Cicely Hamilton continued to write and worked as a freelance journalist, also publishing commentaries about her travels in Europe in the 1930s, an autobiography called Life Errant (1935) and, during the Second World War, a non-fiction book called Lament for Democracy (1940) in which she expressed her doubts about the survival of civilisation and its institutions in the face of modern scientific warfare.
