MARGARET HASSETT, Educating Elizabeth (1937)

I'll be getting back to my World War II Book List in the next few days, but in the meantime I wanted to talk about a book I read recently that belongs on another list I'll be finishing up soon—my list of grown-up school stories.

It's a sad fact of life for all readers—and perhaps particularly for a blogger focused on the most obscure of obscure titles, some of which surely have perfectly good reasons for being forgotten—that disappointments are inevitable. Sometimes even the most highly anticipated books—those books we imagine blissfully curling up with on a rainy day with a nice hot cup of tea and losing ourselves in for hours—just don't quite live up to their potential. Sometimes even on a rainy day, we find ourselves putting down the highly-anticipated book, getting back out of bed, and cleaning out our closets instead of continuing to face the disappointment.

Okay, it's true that books are very rarely that disappointing for me—it takes a lot to drive me back into the closet for any reason. Ahem. But the principle is sound.

Now, I don't want to overstate the case when it comes to Margaret Hassett's Educating Elizabeth. In all truth, I enjoyed quite a lot of it, it had many unquestionably high points, and I imagine a few of you reading this might enjoy it as well (I'll try to explain both the strengths and the weaknesses I found in it as clearly as possible). But I had been anticipating this novel ever since I stumbled across Hassett's Austen-esque later novel, Sallypark, and enthusiastically reviewed it last year. And the anticipation had been building during a relatively extended search for a library willing to lend the book (thank you kindly, University of Alberta!).

Add to that the fact that I've become increasingly obsessed in the past year with school stories written for adults, as you may already have noticed from several recent posts, and such a story from an author I already knew and liked—and one that practically no one had heard of to boot—seemed to hold great potential for being memorable and bloggable-about. So perhaps I just brought too much anticipation with me.

At any rate, on the spectrum of girls' school novels written for adults, Educating Elizabeth falls somewhere between Clemence Dane's rather mean-spirited Regiment of Women and Mary Bell's joyful, smart, funny Summer's Day. It's certainly funny, and it's certainly a bit spiteful—most of the women teachers presented are little more than caricatures to be mocked for their various oddities and idiosyncrasies—but it's not out-and-out vicious, and even caricature can be entertaining sometimes, even if it doesn't provide much in the way of character development.

Educating Elizabeth follows the travails of 37-year-old Elizabeth Hillary, who has just left a happy, secure teaching post at a lovely, successful Suffolk girls' school with a kindly, supportive headmistress, in order to become a headmistress herself at the Ellen Jebb Memorial High School in a town called Roytoun (fictional as far as I can tell) in Scotland—a school whose glory days are but a distant memory:

The dingiest classroom in a slum school was not more dingy than the Ellen Jebb Staffroom; even Miss Dinwiddie could not remember when it was painted last. It would be hard to say whether it was more depressing empty or full; one was more conscious of its drabness and untidiness and of the bars outside the windows when it was empty, but on the rare occasions when every mistress was in her place, the spectacle of all those mature forms seated in silence at desks too small for them, with the grizzled heads of the ladies Dinwiddie, Mutch and Shillen in the front row, had something nightmarish about it, suggesting that they had all died and gone to a hell for teachers.

Elizabeth's new staff, particularly her second in command, the aforementioned Miss Dinwiddie, is, er, problematic to say the least—ridiculously, exaggeratedly so. And this description, early on, of the decidedly bleak staffroom sets the stage for the epic conflict that forms the centerpiece of the story. For Elizabeth, bless her heart, decides to relocate said staffroom to some storage rooms on an upper floor of the school and decorate it brightly and cheerfully. The difficulty is that the rooms currently hold the accumulations of Miss Dinwiddie's many years of teaching, and Miss Dinwiddie takes a deep personal affront at the enthusiastic new headmistress's plan.

A full scale pitched battle ensues, with the pettiest of details taking on trembling, hyperventilating-with-rage importance (as they so easily tend to do in almost any workplace). Although there are numerous smaller sub-plots—Miss Shillen's tendency to be overly intimate with the other women, Miss Boax's recurring and probably psychosomatic illnesses, school officials and inspectors who are charmed by Elizabeth and disconcertingly increase their visits as a result, and occasional letters from Elizabeth's friend Anne, who is having adventures serving as secretary to a woman lecturer touring the U.S., among other things—the staffroom wars are at center stage throughout. Quite often, the conflicts are amusing and entertaining, especially the ways in which Miss Dinwiddie's barely suppressed lividity reveals itself in her seething glares:

"[A]nd where, may I ask, has the stuff to go out of my storerooms?"

"What about your Sewing Room, Miss Dinwiddie?" suggested Elizabeth blandly. "So much of it seems to be needlework apparatus and so on that I'm sure you would find it much more convenient to have it near you in your own room. Of course, it's all only a temporary arrangement until the present Staffroom is available. The Scripture illustrations and other books could be distributed among the various Form Rooms perhaps."

For a full moment Miss Dinwiddie was perfectly speechless. Out of the corner of her eye Elizabeth could see her extract a long hairpin from her bun and examine it from end to end in a half-ruminating, half-frenzied sort of way as if she were calculating exactly how far it could be run into the body of her Head.

Some of these scenes are hilarious, despite the fact that neither the terrible Miss Dinwiddie nor the idealized Elizabeth are particularly convincing characters. However, as this plotline must sustain a 300+ page novel, I have to admit that it did start to wear just a little thin by the time that a white flag was finally waved (by one character or the other—I won't tell). This was Hassett's debut novel, and she already had great charm as a writer, but her development over the next several years until Sallypark's appearance in 1945 must have been rather extraordinary. There is nothing here to compare with Sallypark's eloquent, subtle humor and charming characters. But nevertheless, if you're as entertained by school stories as I am, you may want to check it out for the charm and humor it does offer. Just don't expect too much. (Have I made my mixed feelings clear enough in this rather schizophrenic paragraph?)

But having made the disclaimers I felt I had to make about a novel that has its ups and downs, I have to share a couple of rather wonderful examples of Hassett at her best. These are both digressions from the main plotline (and, honestly, all the stronger for that). First are Elizabeth's musings (slightly exaggerated), upon reading some old school reports, on the ideals of education:

Searching for some light on the Bulloch correspondence, she had come across in a locked cupboard containing dog-eared registers and faded memoranda, a pile of old school reports, and had been speedily fascinated by the romantic richness of their style. They all bore the signature of one Charles Kinnear Minto, H.M.C.I., and they all began or ended with a grand disquisition on Education of which the writer spoke in the very highest terms of figurative language and with a wealth of synonyms. Thus, Education was possessed of an essence and a being, not to mention an entity, a nature, a substance, a spirit and a fabric, each of which had its appropriate adjective; it had an aim as well as an object, an objective, an end, a purpose and a goal; it had a direction, a tendency, an orientation and a course. It was, moreover, burdened with a something that was variously called a task, a work, a charge, a business, a mission, a function, a duty, an office, which nobody from Aristotle downwards could exactly define, but which, as far as Elizabeth could make out, seemed to involve much painful though noble exertion on one side of the transaction and an almost equal amount of spirited but futile resistance on the other. Somebody whom Charles K. Minto had horridly christened the Educand filled those dusty pages with his mute sufferings. Elizabeth's heart went out to him. He was being perpetually dragged blinking out of dark caverns into the light, or hauled along lordly avenues to temples or fanes or sanctuaries or edifices of that sort which by some coincidence always stood at the end of wondrous vistas and always had doors of gold. Or he was hoisted up to towering mountain-peaks for views and prospects, or plunged down into the depths of the sea and compelled to build like the coral insect on the work of the hapless Educands who had gone before him. When he was not thus engaged, he was either handing on a blazing torch to somebody or other, or waving a banner, or playing a game (by preference in the dust), or fighting the good fight to the end. There was no limit to the things he had to do and suffer.

Happily, Hassett would learn a bit more restraint in her humor over the years, but I still got some chuckles from this passage. I think education—as well as other similarly abstract social issues—are often still treated with similar sentimentality and idealization.

And finally, I have to confess to a rabid curiosity about whether Lady Espie, the lecturer with whom Elizabeth's friend Anne is travelling across North American, might be based on a real figure. Undoubtedly there were numerous such women who travelled the lecture circuit in the 1930s (E. M. Delafield having written hilariously about one such tour in The Provincial Lady in America), so perhaps Lady Espie is merely a fictional approximation of them. But she is given a fair amount of time in the sun, as Anne describes her at length in her letters, and her traumatic wartime experiences brought to mind Vera Brittain, though of course Brittain had already published her memoir several years before. Here's a choice passage:

"Goodness knows when we shall see England again, for apart from the lectures, some publishers have now got hold of Judy and actually started her on an autobiography. In fact, I may tell you in the strictest confidence that we're well away with our confessions; they simply pour out of Judy; opening the sluices isn't the word for it. My dear, the most gorgeous muck! I hate having to interfere with it, but I suppose I must do something about her blooming participles (Judy always was unstable on the participial question). It's a shame though. But we're getting along like a house on fire—you can figure out our rate of progress when I tell you that despite lectures and parties and travelling millions of miles we're already through with Judy's infantile repressions and indoctrinations (where the heck, as Stansfeldt has a most undeanlike habit of saying, does the woman get the words?) not to mention her suffocated Victorian maidenhood, and we're now nursing at the Front. I feel in my bones that the War bits are going to be stupendous: the revelations up to date are horrible. Didn't they say some of the men's War books were of the Latrine School? Well, Judy's is going to be the female equivalent—what you might call the Bedpan School-pure Bedpan in fact. Judy never lets you off a B.P.; there's one on every page…"

All quite amusing. If there were just a few more such digressions and a tiny bit less focus on the Staffroom War, the book could have been a favorite.

However, I have to admit that I must—quite shockingly to most people who know me well—be some kind of an optimist. Because I happen to have acquired a copy of Hassett's fourth (and final) novel, Beezer's End, which is apparently a sequel to Educating Elizabeth. Now, perhaps it's foolhardy to be excited about a sequel to a novel that has proven a bit disappointing. But the fact that Beezer's End didn't appear until 12 years after its predecessor, and until 4 years after the lovely Sallypark, makes me believe that it could have considerable pleasures in store for me.

Perhaps I'll save it for a rainy day?

MARGARET HASSETT, Sallypark (1945)

It's been over six months since I last wrote about my fantasy publishing enterprise, Furrowed Middlebrow Books, so it's high time to add another title to my list of (purely imaginary) reprints.

Margaret Hassett is a writer who was only added to my Overwhelming List in its most recent update, and she remains something of an enigma.  Since posting that update, I've learned that she was apparently born circa 1898, and she seems to have published only four novels in all (unless she also published under a pseudonym not yet known to me).  The first, Educating Elizabeth (1937), was apparently successful enough to warrant a sequel, 1949's Beezer's End, which proved to be her final published work, as far as I can tell.  In between came Next to These Ladies (1940) and Sallypark (1945).

Now, that update to my list contained nearly 160 writers, all hitherto unknown to me.  Many of them seem quite intriguing and have been added to my endless "to read" list.  So I can't quite explain what it was about a short description of Sallypark that made me immediately seek out a copy and buy it.  It would be intriguing to assure you that I had a sudden flash of certainty that it would be worthwhile.  More likely, it was just a whim.  But be that as it may, it did turn out to be worthwhile.  In fact, I've just placed an order for another of Hassett's books, which is surely a strong recommendation.

Sallypark tells of Jane Warmbath, a young widow, half Irish, half English, who comes to visit her cousins, the Hartes, in 1922, just in the midst of the Civil War.  She has just come from a year in India and an abortive visit to her husband's relatives:

All this time I had not given a thought to Sallypark, and yet when I look back, it was always there waiting for me, and everything that I did and had been doing for years past was in reality only a link in the chain of events that was finally to lead me there. For if I had not married Mr. Warmbath in the first place, and if Mr. Warmbath had not departed this life when he so regrettably did; and if, in the second place, I had not postponed that nice long visit to his family, and going out to India in the meantime had not, in a manner of speaking, grown up there; if finally, returning in the full glory of that consciousness and betaking myself at last into Cheshire, I had not discovered by my own unaided wits that the only thing to do with some nice long visits is to cut them short at all costs—if all these things had not happened, it is ten to one that I should never have set foot at all in Ireland. Whereas I did, and quite without intending it, in the year 1922.

The Hartes consist of the persnickety old Dr. Harte and his three unmarried daughter, Francesca (Francie), Pansy, and Vervaleen (Verve).  There is also a son, Felix (Feely), who is away at school until halfway through the novel but is set forth as the exemplar of all virtues by his sisters.  Dr. Harte has a strong, apparently almost pathological, aversion to the thought of his daughters' marrying—indeed, he seems to be averse to marriage under almost any circumstances, which makes one wonder about the little-mentioned Mrs. Harte!  If one were to psychoanalyze him (and give him the benefit of the doubt), one might conclude that he is too pained by her loss to tolerate the thought of anyone else experiencing such love (and potentially its loss), especially since his other absolute intolerance is to the thought of widows "brooding" over their losses.

The doctor's terse commiseration with Jane is humorous but typical:

"Dear me, dear me!" He made a clicking sound with his tongue to indicate his sense of the wanton cruelty of fate. "Quite a young man, in the prime of life—indeed, not yet entered into it, you might say … "Dear me, dear me! Forty-five is very young nowadays ... a rising solicitor too. … Martin thought the world of him, I know. … What caused it, Jane?"

"What? Oh, I see. He ... he got a prick from a rose bush."

Whether the doctor regarded this as too poetic a death for a rising solicitor, or whether he had private medical prejudices against rose bushes, I couldn't quite make out, but there was no doubt whatsoever of his being most profoundly shocked.

The doctor's intolerance of romance and matrimony forms the basis for a good deal of the novel's plot.  As a result of it, the daughters must carry on their various romances behind his back and with much subterfuge and duplicity, and Jane finds herself increasingly involved in the intrigue and, just perhaps, in danger of being snagged by romance all over again.  There's a hilarious setpiece about midway through the novel, in which all the characters, including Jane, are tiptoeing around the creaky old house in the middle of the night—variously hiding, investigating sounds, or attempting to prevent the discovery of a man in the kitchen.  It's too brilliant to quote in short soundbites—but if you take my advice and track down this novel, you'll be able to read it all for yourself!

The backdrop of the Irish Civil War is perhaps a savvy one for an author publishing a light, humorous, romantic novel in 1945.  The novel would have been written as World War II was starting to wind down, and would have been published just as the end finally arrived (making Sallypark, incidentally, only the second "War Economy Standard" book to grace my bookcase).  The events of the Civil War would have been far enough removed from the current war to provide a sense of escape, but nevertheless provide the occasional scene of unexpected peril to which readers in 1945 might have related, as when the young women's car is fired upon after a shopping excursion, or when Jane finds herself in the middle of a shootout at the village store.

By and large, though, the Civil War remains a convenient setting and little more, and if it occasionally felt like these historical events were a bit trivialized, it's certainly a practical enough strategy for Hassett to have used, and one which she herself seems to acknowledge and perhaps even make a part of her point:

I had been only a week at Sallypark when the redoubtable Rory O'Connor blew up the Four Courts, and the Civil War began in earnest.

Of that momentous happening I retain at this distance of time merely the vaguest recollection. Can it be true, I wonder, that the events of history have but slight influence on the tenor of our private lives, and that in the long run it is those seemingly impermanent trifles which make up the sum of everyday existence that matter finally and most of all? When I look back on my early days at Sallypark, I am inclined—for my own part at least—to think so. The white skirt I tore on our picnic to Greenane woods; the scent of the sweet brier hedge the evening Mrs. O'Mara told me what a nice mind Gusty had; the doctor, invincibly urbane and utterly out of tune, singing "Oft in the stilly night" right through to the end and remarking, with tears in his eyes, that you couldn't beat it; Vervaleen, the picture of sweetest innocence, pursuing a ball down the slope off Mr. Twomey's tennis court, and an amorous bank-clerk following hard behind—these are the scenes, the incidents that swim triumphantly back into my memory, while so much of serious importance, of real interest to the thoughtful mind, has foundered and sunk out of sight.

And now, as you clever readers will no doubt have already noted from the passages I've quoted, I'll point out that the novel is distinctly and self-consciously Austen-esque in style.  If you're not a fan of dear Jane, then it might not be your cup of tea, as the prose is a bit ornate at times and distinctly formal.  But I have to say that although I like Jane Austen well enough, I am hardly an avid fan, and I haven't read her in a good many years, but I nevertheless found Sallypark's style completely charming and readable, perhaps a bit more subversive in its humour than the good Miss Austen's prose, and featuring a charmingly complex (and perhaps rather unreliable) narrator in the figure of the certainly-uncoincidentally-named Jane.

There are other highly entertaining characters as well: Babe O'Mara, another widow—much more inclined to brooding than Jane—whose lost husband "Gusty" periodically visits her in dreams to give her advice on the management of her house; the obnoxious Miss Ring, who frequently warns the Harte daughters that men only want one thing and brags about her unwillingness to ever give it to them, even while obsessively trying to uncover any hint of romance or scandal in their household; Bridget McCarthy, a family cousin who keeps the shop in the nearby village of Templemary; Aunt Bona, a nun in the local convent and headmistress of the convent school, who periodically offers advice to the lovelorn; and Uncle Pius, the doctor's brother, who comes for a memorable stay with the family and gets swept into the intrigue.

I found it all completely irresistible, a worthy tribute to Jane Austen, and an entertaining romance with more depth than at first appears.  Not to mention that it is humorous throughout—sometimes quietly so, sometimes quite hilarious.  This quite Austen-esque passage, for example, while ringing completely true about those who thrive on gossip, may also reveal that Jane is a bit more subtle and conniving than she will tell us straight out:

Now, there is nothing I love more than being let into things; all the same, I carefully dissembled my delight. Those who perform the letting-in generally enjoy themselves as much as you do, but they prefer you to think that it is a disagreeable duty, and it would be indecent to outrage their susceptibilities. It is risky too; they may take fright and withdraw the spicy morsel altogether. That happened to me once when poor Mr. Warmbath had been on the verge of telling me something scandalous about an actress I passionately admired. Remembering all these things, I gazed at Mrs. O'Mara with a solemnity equal to her own and gave a slow ponderous nod. It apparently satisfied her.

And then, as Mrs. O'Mara proceeds in releasing her gossip, Jane notes in hilarious detail the course of her fellow widow's sighs:

"Have one of these little cakes, Mrs. O'Mara," I suggested softly.

She refused, shaking her head most dolefully and heaving sigh after sigh. It is not often that sighs are really heaved, but Mrs. O'Mara's were. One could see them being levered up from the depths of her interior and stiffly propelled towards the outer air between walls of stays. It was a painful business. She put her cup down presently so that she might place a fomenting hand somewhere in the region of the diaphragm in order to assist the operation. I was in despair.

I have recently begun keeping track of references to novel characters' reading material, and there are some interesting sightings of other authors in Sallypark.  First, the doctor frequently reads aloud for the, er, enjoyment of the family and their guests:

[I]t was a favourite practice of the doctor's—a practice followed by many Irish pères de famille, to the unspeakable boredom of their households—to read aloud in the evenings to his daughters. Not wishing to burden their minds with anything heavy, since, being an eminently reasonable person and a medical man to boot, he took into account the fact that they were females, he usually chose for this purpose some light but edifying work of fiction, such as My New Curate, by Canon Sheehan, or Callista, a Tale of the Third Century, by Cardinal Newman.

But when Francie bursts into Jane's bedroom one night with the news that Michael Collins has become Commander-in-Chief, it is Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone Jane is perusing, and later on it is an even more modern text, the pleasure of which Jane describes in some depth (and which will surely be known already to many readers of this blog):

Feeling quite disinclined for sleep, I got into bed, trimmed the wick of my candle, settled myself comfortably on my pillows and opened The Enchanted April.

How well I remember the very page! Even the crackle of the new binding comes back to me, for the book had just been published. Indeed, it had arrived only the day before from London, and I was already half-way through it—quite a feat, I may add; as life always came before literature at Sallypark, and there existed besides in the doctor's mind a suspicion that solitary reading was only another name for brooding.

And Hassett could hardly have ended such a self-conscious tribute without at least a quick mention of Austen herself, as when Jane notes, near the end of the novel: "How true it is, as Elinor observes in Sense and Sensibility, that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety!"

If I can't absolutely attest to the "propriety" of reading Sallypark, I can certainly assert the pleasantness of the employment, and I can't urge you enough to be generous in your imaginary purchases of the Furrowed Middlebrow Books edition of the book.  While you're at it, why not imagine buying copies for all of your friends as well?!