E. H. Young (1880–1949)

E.H Young is a fabulous Virago author – and Chatterton Square – her final novel proved to be a fantastic pick for my third All Virago/All August read of the month. Although I have still to read a few of her novels – especially those early hard to find ones – I feel confident in saying that Chatterton Square is almost certainly her best novel. It is complex, multi-layered and fantastically readable.

The setting is Upper Radstowe – the setting of the majority of E H Young’s novels, show more a thinly disguised Clifton – the genteel, prosperous suburb of Bristol where she herself lived for a time. However, the canvas of this novel like many of her others is far smaller than that, almost the entire story taking place at the titular address.

We are in familiar territory with many of the themes of this novel, those of marriage, provincial life and morality. However, the novel also explores pre-war attitudes, it is the late 1930s and the prospect of another war is at the back of everyone’s mind. Naturally, the possibility of war is contemplated with some pain by those who lived through one war and still bear the scars – either physical or mental. Meanwhile the next generation, face the possibility of having the best years of their lives stolen – and well they know it.

Chatterton Square – not really a square is more of an oblong – has seen better days. Still although fashion has deserted this small corner of Upper Radstowe, these are houses with small gardens, basement kitchens and some – like the Frasers – have balconies. The Frasers occupy a corner of Chatterton square – here live – Rosamund Fraser, her childhood friend Agnes Spanner and Rosamund’s five almost adult children. Agnes, we learn lived a sad, small diminished life with her controlling parents. So, with Rosamund’s husband; Fergus, choosing to live abroad, away from his family – Rosamund took the opportunity to save her friend – bringing her in to the warm, lively family she has never had for herself.

Sitting at right angles to the Fraser household, live the Blacketts; Herbert and Bertha – and their three daughters, Flora, Rhoda and Mary. Herbert Blackett is one of the most pompous, self-obsessed, self-deluded men I have come across in fiction, I could cheerfully have throttled him. He is however, a brilliantly complex character deftly explored. It is testament to Young’s extraordinary skill, that towards the end of the novel, when the reader has spent almost 400 pages loathing him, she allows us to see him defeated, and it is a surprisingly poignant moment.

Mr Blackett is proud of his quiet little submissive wife, in his eyes she is perfectly proper, conventional and loyal. He loves to see her blush if he mentions their honeymoon in Florence almost twenty years earlier. Yet, unknown to him, Bertha loathes him, she suffers his embraces, quietly despising him. Her one consolation that he has no idea what goes on in her mind, mocking him silently keeps her sane – but the reader longs for her to tell him exactly what she thinks – as surely must at some point. There is breath-taking complexity in the characters of the Blackett household, Flora so like her father that her mother can criticise him, through her irritation with a daughter she is unable to like. Rhoda so like her mother – more and more so as the novel progresses. Her father simply cannot understand his middle daughter – and she in turn doesn’t like him at all, and doesn’t really try to hide it. There is a wonderful moment when Rhoda catches a cold, angry look on her mother’s face directed at her unseeing husband, and understands all.

“He pitied widows but he distrusted them. They knew too much. As free as unmarried women, they were fully armed; this was an unfair advantage, and when it was combined with beauty, and air of well-being, a gaiety which, in women over forty had an unsuitable hint of mischief in it, he felt that in this easy conquest over, or incapacity for grief, all manhood was insulted, while all manhood, including his own, was probably viewed by that woman as a likely prey.”

Of course, Herbert Blackett does not approve of the Fraser household. Suspicious of Rosamund as she is without a husband, he is appalled when he discovers she is not, as he had assumed a widow, declaring that her husband must have found himself obliged to leave her. Rosamund, manages her family very differently to Mr Blackett, she doesn’t interfere in her children’s lives, they enjoy an enormous amount of freedom, but come to her often nevertheless. Late at night as the household settles down, Miss Spanner or one or other of the children visit Rosamund in her bedroom, where confidences are shared, worries discussed, minds put at rest.

The two households are brought together partly by their proximity to one another and by the friendships which begin to develop between some members of the two houses. Piers Lindsay, disfigured by his injures picked up in the First World War, is Bertha Blackett’s cousin, we sense that there were some tenderer feelings between them once – but Piers returned just too late from the war, which Herbert had not fought in. Now Piers has returned unexpectedly to the area. Herbert Blackett is deeply resentful of Piers and his war wounds he considers an easy way of eliciting sympathy. Rosamund Fraser is drawn to Piers, recognising the goodness in him, his companionship is easy and comforting. Bertha is also fond of Piers, noticing of course, his visits to her neighbour.

“She blushed to remember how once, and for a short time, she had listened for certain tones of Mr Blackett’s voice and watched for certain movements of his long hands and found delight in what was only endurable now because she had learnt to enjoy disliking it. And he did not know, he had not the slightest suspicion, that was the best of it, and suddenly, when she and Piers were sitting in the twilight as Rosamund had pictured them and while Rhoda had left them for a few minutes, Mrs Blackett laughed aloud, a rare occurrence, and it was yet another kind of laughter which Mr Blackett had never heard.”

Alongside the anxieties of a possible war – are the burgeoning friendships and romances between various characters from the two households. However, it is the depiction of the Blackett marriage that will live long in my mind, Rosamund Fraser is a fabulous character, wise, warm unconventional and loving, but for me it is Bertha Blackett (what a name!) who is the real heroine of Chatterton Square. show less

'The Malletts don't marry, Henrietta. Look at us, as happy as the day is long, with all the fun and none of the trouble. We've been terrible flirts, Sophia and I. Rose is different, but at least she hasn't married. The three Miss Malletts of Nelson Lodge! Now there are four of us, and you must keep up our reputation.' (p. 79)

And that's the book, in a nutshell. Caroline, Sophia, and their stepsister Rose are all unmarried women of a certain age, although Rose is several years younger and show more still considered attractive. When their niece Henrietta comes to live with them, she upsets the gentle rhythm of spinsterhood. These women have become very, very comfortable just being themselves:
Sitting up in bed looking grotesquely terrible, they discussed the event. Caroline, like Medusa, but with hair curlers instead of snakes sprouting from her head, and Sophia with her heavy plait hanging over her shoulder and defying with its luxuriance the yellowness of her skin, they sat side by side, propped up with pillows, inured to the sight of each other in undress. (p. 32)

Hmm ... perhaps they're a little too comfortable!

Henrietta is young and has a mind of her own. While she loves and admires her aunts, she has no intention of following in their footsteps. And so she sets her sights on local heart-throb Francis Sales who, incidentally, has had a secret "thing" with Rose for some time. And who, incidentally, is also married to an invalid confined to her bed. Meanwhile Henrietta is being pursued by the dull but caring Charles Batty, a man who loves music, but can't stand to attend concerts because other patrons whisper and crinkle their programs. Rose attempts to resolve the conflict with Henrietta in many ways, all indirect because heaven forbid the situation be brought out into the open. I found this infuriating, and lost patience with them more than once.

While Young's social satire is amusing, autobiographical details add much interest to this story. E. H. Young's husband died at Ypres, and later she went to live with Ralph Henderson, a school headmaster, and his wife, who was a wife in name only. They were inseparable, and while those in their social circle understood the situation, their relationship was not publicly acknowledged. Young wrote The Misses Mallett when her living arrangement was still fairly new, and I can see how she used the experience to work through issues she must have wrestled with at the time. Oh, how I wish she could have written more openly about that situation! show less

Comparisons to Jane Austen are inevitable. "Jane Austen" becomes a kind of shorthand for an English novel that concerns itself primarily with the lives and relationships of women, and in particular their pursuit of husbands. Jenny Wren centers on the lives of two sisters, Dahlia and Jenny Rendall, who live with their mother in the upscale suburb of Upper Radstowe, where the widowed Mrs. Rendall keeps a boarding house. The girls' father, Sidney Rendall, was a scholar who married below his show more class, and his younger daughter, Jenny, has inherited his cultured distaste for her mother's rusticity. She dreams of marrying a squire—and when she actually meets one, she hides the shame of her mother's origins, and the deeper shame of her mother's affair with the farmer Thomas Grimshaw.

Like Jane Austen, E.H. Young has a a subtle sense of humor, a satirical attitude toward the British class system, and a beautiful prose style. Like Jane Austen, E.H. Young explores the conflicts between the inner lives of her characters and the external reality in which they are forced to live and interact with other people. Jenny, with her prejudices and her self-absorption, is in many ways an unsympathetic character, but Young is interested in exploring the ability of people to love each other despite, and perhaps even because of their flaws. One of the most affecting aspects of the novel is the relationship between Louisa Rendall and her daughters: Young beautifully renders the ways in which their antagonism—Jenny's shame, Louisa's resentment—shades into loyalty and mutual affection.

Unlike Jane Austen, E.H. Young is acutely aware that her characters possess physical bodies, with all of the desires or aversions that accompany those bodies. In her longing for intimacy, unfulfilled in her unequal marriage to Sidney Rendall, Louisa has an extramarital affair with Thomas Grimshaw. The pious young curate, Cecil Sproat, discovers, in his attraction to Dahlia, that he can be motivated by concerns of the flesh as well as by concerns of the spirit. Miss Morrison, a spinster who would have been more at home in a novel by Barbara Pym, comes to realize that, having entirely repressed her sexual nature, her charm even for a pious curate is incomplete. Sidney Rendall represents mind and spirit; Louisa Rendall represents sexuality: the question is whether Jenny and Dahlia can reconcile both sides of their inheritance, and express them in a healthy and fulfilling manner in their own lives.

E.H. Young writes beautiful sentences, many or which are like short stories in themselves. Here, for example, is a description of Miss Morrison, who comes to board with the Rendalls: "Here was the desired respectable spinster, without the fussiness Dahlia feared: here, also, was money punctually paid, but Miss Morrison's desire to be at home in Beulah Mount, to be sisterly with her young hostesses, sympathetic with their mother and comradely with Mr. Cummings, to assert, by practice, her belief that all was right with the world, had the nature of a lesson disguised as a play."

I wish I could regularly write sentences that say so much, so flowingly, and that come around to such a witty and astute summing up. show less

This is quintessential domestic fiction, but with a slight difference. Miss Mole is not married to the head of household Robert Corder. She is merely (perhaps invisibly) an employee, a spinster hired to be his housekeeper. Her cousin engineers the arrangement, as she doesn’t choose to have it be known that Miss Mole is a relative of hers anymore than she wants to have to take in a superfluous woman as a member of her own household.. Lilla wants Miss Hannah Mole to be self-sufficient, quite show more as much as Miss Mole herself wishes it. It’s just that Hannah has a mischievous streak in her that inevitably seems to create problems. She creates fictions, and she has an unfortunate tendency to burst out of the approved social grooves.

Before you’ve completed the first four chapters of this book, you understand that Hannah Mole appreciates the natural rhythms of the seasons. You know she has the on-going resilience of the competent optimist. Virago’s marketing blurb refers to her as “indomitable” and the word fits. Despite the difficulties of her situation, Miss Mole doesn’t accept the disdain or the snubs of the world around her. Hannah has an internal strength. She has a sense of fun, a sense of irony, a passionate love of beauty, and “the power to drag it from its hidden places”. She maintains a careful face to the adults who employ her, but there are those observant neighbors who see her for who she truly is. Miss Mole is a heroine though few about her understand that. She is, after all, an unmarried woman and she is therefore a superfluous woman.

“...she was as feminine as anyone else and she had suffered too much from being treated as a machine, but she was a human being more abundantly than she was a woman…”

Hannah does well, caring for Reverend Corder’s family -- Ethel, a fretful and repressed teenager, Ruth, a too-thin and too-sensitive child, and Wilfred -- a nephew with a spirit equal to the mischief of Miss Mole’s brain. She offers sound counsel to both Ethel and Ruth. One such bit -- entirely indicative of the lesson women at the time were finding they needed -- is “...Be anything you like, but be something. Simply being a useful woman like me isn’t enough…”

But Hannah Mole also has a past. A secret that we don’t even suspect until about two-thirds of the way through the novel. It may not strike today’s young women as being much of either a secret or a scandal, but at the time of the novel’s publication (1934), in that cultural framework, it would have been more than sufficient to lose Miss Mole her position in the polite society of Radstowe.

This is wonderful domestic fiction, but it’s also a surprisingly satisfying character study. Young renders family dynamics and tensions very well. Miss Mole isn’t a magical Mary Poppins figure and not everyone in the story accepts her advice or warmth. I had a quibble with the final resolution, but I would still recommend this book. (So good!) There is a feminist undertone to it, but again, it's well-handled and doesn't overwhelm the characterization. show less