'Frightful' women: ELIZABETH COXHEAD, The Figure in the Mist (1955)

It was a pale blue and golden rampart, a wall of peaks springing cleanly out of the satiny blue-grey water. Or, if you liked, a blue silhouette in tissue paper, transparent towards the top and filtered with patches of gold. Great cliffs must hem it in. Grappling-irons would be needed to gain a foothold. For the first time in her nineteen years the child of the Essex flats looked at beauty, and in the screaming of the gulls heard the music of the west.

A young girl discovers the beauties of Scotland and the complexities of grownup social life while serving as a live-in help for a London University professor, his wife, and their young son on summer holiday in Arran. Along the way, she develops an affinity for rock climbing and meets a chatty young man.

Surely this is a Mabel Esther Allan novel? Or a charming, cozy romance?

Well, certainly The Figure in the Mist has all the elements of a cozy family holiday story, complete with armchair travel and likeable locals. But it's ultimately a bit more complex, and these familiar plot devices are quite nicely interwoven with issues of class, gender, education, selfishness and vulnerability in young and old alike, and helicopter parenting vs freedom and challenge. Not quite the simple resolutions one might expect either.

Coxhead's heroine here is the appropriately named Agnes Flint, who during this Scotch summer must begin to learn to be a bit less hard and to forgive her fellow beings' shortcomings. She has grown up in a rather dreary middle class suburb, a tough, smart, no-nonsense kind of girl. Her first sight of Arran from the boat, quoted above, makes clear that Scotland will have an impact on Agnes, but she'll learn even more from her interactions with charming Matthew Ogilvy and his insecure wife Margaret, their overprotected, neurotic, but lovable toddler son Adam, Mrs Gillies the manager of the local hotel and an old school friend of Margaret's, and Patrick Hadley, a student of Matthew's who visits for a week. She even gains a bit of self-knowledge from the rock-climbing Matthew teaches her (Coxhead was herself a climbing aficionado and made it central to another of her novels, 1951's One Green Bottle, now added to my TBR list) and the "figure in the mist" she encounters during a climb…

Elizabeth Coxhead mid-climb

Professor Ogilvy is kind to Agnes and helps her with her difficulties, though he's also undoubtedly rather selfish and loves the attention he gets from her—as well as, apparently, many of his female students. Adam is a delight for Agnes (whom he calls "Angus") from day one. But Margaret is distinctly prickly, and the challenging relations between Agnes and Margaret are the real centerpiece of the novel—even when Margaret disappears for two pivotal weeks to visit her ailing father. And Coxhead handles Margaret with rather wonderful compassion—even if we don't quite come to love her, we certainly come to understand her foibles. Soon after Agnes's arrival, she is confused by how kindly Mrs Gillies responds to her initial complaints about Margaret—"She wanted a reassurance that Margaret would be kind to her, while Mrs. Gillies—was it possible?—was asking her to be kind to Margaret."

After Margaret has urged Agnes to get a shorter haircut because it will be flattering to her face, and then been overheard gloating behind her back to Matthew ("Touching, isn't it? The sincerest form of flattery. Just about as close as she could come to a faithful imitation of mine."), Mrs Gillies is unsurprised:

"It's certainly no news to me," said Mrs. Gillies, tranquilly resuming her knitting, "that poor Margaret is a fool. She was aye a fool—that's why I'm sorry for her.

And of course, after Margaret leaves for two weeks and Adam blooms without her neurotic hovering, more serious tensions arise upon her return.

Although rock climbing isn't the main subject of the novel (those uninterested in climbing will be more than compensated by the scenery described in the main climbing scene), there is one climb that forms the centerpiece, and something of a turning point, in the novel. It made me want to be out there scaling some heights myself (particularly in Scotland), though I have an anxious suspicion that I'd be like the one inevitable girl in every school story who manages to twist her ankle and spoil everyone's fun. And although Agnes is a complicated character, it's hard not to love her—and Coxhead—for the scene in which the blunt Agnes firmly tells off the self-absorbed and talkative Patrick. It's long, but I can't resist quoting it:

" ... but you do agree, don't you, that it was pretty discouraging? I mean, you'd have done the same in my place?"

He had stopped in his tracks and was demanding an answer, demanding her interest, her precious attention, so that she was forced to bring it back from the sea and sky. "I'm sorry, Patrick," she said. "I'm afraid I wasn't really listening. Tell me again."

He stared at her, his mouth open; it took him quite five seconds to grasp that she had not been listening. "Well, I must say, I think you're damn' rude."

"Do you? " said Agnes, her control snapping. "Well, if we're going in for home truths, I'd better tell you that I think you're damn' boring."

"Look here—"

"Why, just tell me why, should I be interested in your essays? Why should I care what you do or don't say to your tutor? Why do I have to spend my free afternoon on a re-hash of your academic career? What would you say if I started reeling off my essays? Would you find them interesting? Or is there to be one standard of entertainment for you and another for me, just because you happen to be a man and I a girl?"

It was really funny, seeing him goggle there, his frank blue eyes cloudy with bewilderment, the colour coming up into his handsome face. At length he said:

"I think you're frightful."

"Oh, splendid."

"I never in my life met a woman as frightful as you are." He sought for words which should express it more clearly. "You're the most frightful woman I've ever met."

"All right, it's penetrated."

"And you can damn' well finish your precious afternoon by yourself." And round he turned, shuddering with outrage, and striding back by the way they had  come, was soon out of her sight.

Oh, the relief at being rid of him! She felt no more compunction than if she had brushed off a persistent fly.

Oh dear. Rather harsh, indeed, but how many times have we all wanted to say something similar to some clinging bore?! But Coxhead lends the scene greater depth when, a few pages later, Matthew teases out a bit more compassion from Agnes—compassion that will undoubtedly be needed in dealing with Margaret later—and I related even more to her:

"I didn't realise till I'd done it just how young he is. It was as if I'd hit Adam. He just stood there saying 'You are a frightful woman,' over and over. He hadn't even words to curse me with."

"Poor young ass. I like to think Adam would have stood up for himself more efficiently. Perhaps next time callow youth annoys you, you'll make the necessary allowances."

"I'll try." She sighed. "But you know, one's always being told to make the necessary allowances for children and the aged. It's a bit hard if one has to make them for one's contemporaries also. Is nobody ever to be treated as an equal?"

"You will be safe to make allowances for everybody always." He gave her a sideways grin. "Bit of a tough nut, aren't you, Agnes? I mean it as a compliment, I rather like tough nuts, in fact I'm a bit of one myself. But we ought to pay for our privilege by modifying our toughness for the weaker brethren."

The wrapping-up of the relationship between Agnes and Margaret, which is also the conclusion of the novel, is handled in a similar way. Agnes is young and rash, a bit impatient and intolerant, but she also grows as a character and returns to her home and school as a more mature, complex young woman.

I first read Elizabeth Coxhead way back in 2015, and reviewed her 1952 novel A Play Toward here. I was a bit ambivalent about that one, though in light of my enjoyment of The Figure in the Mist I'm wondering if a re-read could be in order? First, though, I think I'm going to need to get hold of One Green Bottle—first, because I want to figure out what the deal is with that title, and second, because the dustjacket for A Play Toward contains an enthusiastic blurb about Bottle from no lesser critic than Marghanita Laski.

ELIZABETH COXHEAD, A Play Toward (1952)

In the past couple of months, I've been—in my chaotic, excruciatingly slow fashion—gradually compiling yet another list, the idea of which I first mentioned here at least six months ago. This is a list of novels written for adults but set in schools, a genre that has been of interest to me ever since I read (and raved about) Mary Bell's only novel, Summer's Day, back in the early days of this blog. I've still not found another title to really compete with Bell's lovely little masterpiece, but I have accumulated a fairly significant list of similarly-themed novels, and lately it seems that I'm dead set on working my way through every title on it. Only recently, I reviewed Eileen Helen Clements' Cherry Harvest, set in an evacuated girls' school during World War II. And in the near future I have reviews of at least two more very, very different novels with similar settings. (Hopefully, at some point I'll actually finish and post the list too...)

When I added Elizabeth Coxhead to my Overwhelming List not long ago, and came across a blurb about A Play Toward describing it as the tale of a grammar school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, I knew I would need to check it out. It sounded distinctly odd, and you must know by now that odd is almost always a selling point for me.

Odd it certainly is, though it's also a rather puzzling novel to write about. It has some incredibly lovely moments, rather interesting (if not terribly sympathetic) characters, and intriguing situations. But unlike the production described in the novel, which takes advantage of a lovely setting and some lucky breaks and becomes quite magically successful, the tale of that production never fully came together for me.

It's certainly trying to say something, in its odd, charming way, and surely that something has to do with class and elitism. The focus is on Madeleine Littlejohn—the wife of the grammar school's headmaster and also a former teacher at the school, who was forced to retire when they married but who maintains an interest in the school including, currently, producing the school play—and on her daughter Sophia, who is a bit of a problem child, smart but rather delicate and rather emotionally needy.

Madeleine is hyper-aware of her own social position and those of others, who include the likeable Lady Bannister and her hideous children, who represent the "society" of the village; the hideous social-climbing Mrs. Goadby and her poor inept daughter; Helen Marvin, a schoolteacher with her own distinct brand of elitism; and Lancelot Dixon, another teacher and also a former student of Madeleine's husband, who has now gotten himself tangled in an unhealthy relationship with a distinctly low class unmarried mother. These relationships and their various tensions and entanglings play out against the backdrop of preparations for the school's play, but just what exactly they suggest about class relations overall remains a mystery.

But there are, as I mentioned, some beautiful moments, and these alone may be worth the price of admission. Indeed, the novel's opening made me feel certain I had found a new favorite, and I have to share it with you at some length:

When she lay down in the field, Sophia could only see the delicate fretwork of grasses and cow-parsley, cut out against the hot blue sky. When she raised herself on her elbows, her mother came into view, slender and shadowed in the big garden-hat, her face bent seriously over the copy of the play. And when she sat right up, she could see half the Midlands.

For the field was the brow of Dane's Hill, whence the invaders had looked out from their island fortress of Alney over leagues of swamp and fen. The fen was drained and fertile now, though it only needed a few weeks of winter rain to flood the land between Alney and Midchester and remind the cocky Midlanders how superficial were the changes they had imposed on it through the centuries. Immediately at the hill's foot spread the dark carpet of the Alney Woods, and they were a link with primeval forest; in their recesses lurked the fear and mystery of very ancient things.

All three attitudes gave Sophia an exquisite pleasure. Here she was in a hot summer field, hot suddenly, overnight, for it was early May and had been winter till yesterday. Here she was on a sort of picnic, with pale Shrewsbury biscuits in a little basket, while other children toiled in school. Here she was assisting in the laying of important plans. And she always experienced a sense of release, like the opening of a great window, at finding herself on the Danes' lookout, with that immense coloured pattern of fields and woods spread beneath her. Fourteen church spires there were, visible on a clear day; that was, if you had noble eyesight like her father, and if you hadn't, you pretended.

Endless -bys and -thorpes had the Danes left behind them. First, beyond the band of the woods, came Glooby, then Fenthorpe, with the pimple of a hill that made it easy to pick out; then Winterby; then in a great sweep, Thursby and Knarehampton and Ratburn, where the lunatic asylum was (unfailing source of local witticism) ; and beyond that again the spires that one could only guess at, Petton Parva, and Wentworth Waterless, and, delicious thought, Benenden-in-the-Beans .... Half the Midlands shimmered there, right away to Midchester and beyond. To Sophia all the world was Midland. Her brief outside journeyings were merely pages from a picture book. The true world was made up of stocking factories and high red-brick farmhouses, of curtsying elms and fields broadly pleated with ancient ploughings; and up here on Dane's Hill, it was hers.

Re-reading this passage now, I still find myself sighing at such evocative scene-setting mixed with such a compelling introduction to Sophia, and I wish the rest of the novel had fully lived up to it.

Sophia is on this sort of picnic outing with her mother "while other children toiled in school" because she her parents have been ordered to keep her out of school and away from her compulsive reading for the sake of her health. In lieu of intellectual stimulation, Sophia is ordered to "run wild," which indeed she tries to do at times, but ultimately she always winds up squarely back in the middle of her growing intellectual ferment, as when—shortly after the foregoing—she quotes a passage of poetry for Madeleine and shares what she has learned of it from her father:

"Daddy says that's the most musical line in English poetry," she suddenly announced aggressively.

"M'm," said Madeleine, abstracted.

"He was explaining to me. The way the a-sound in fades is echoed in the 'scape—"

"M'm," agreed Madeleine; and then, attending: "But you know, darling, I believe Gray said -skip." Sophia was disconcerted. That was the worst of belonging to a learned household. People were continually bringing out bits of information which upset your previously formed, and therefore sacred, opinions. Her mother and father ought to agree together beforehand, and not go putting on her the burden of decision between them. Her mother, having launched this phonetic thunderbolt, seemed again to have forgotten her.

I loved this portrayal of a youngster trying to shore up her knowledge. Later, Sophia is scolded by her father yet again for reading when she is supposed to be running wild, and she defends herself by noting that she is not reading trash but rather an article by Arthur Conan Doyle about the true existence of fairies (if you follow this link, be sure to check out the clip from Antiques Roadshow with the daughter of one of the young girls' who originally faked the photos). 

Fairies at the bottom of the garden indeed!

Although in retrospect there were earlier clues to which I was oblivious, this was the point at which I frowned and noted that, however subtly revealed, the novel was clearly not set in the 1950s but in the years immediately after World War I. The fact that Coxhead allows her novel to go on for quite some time with only subtle clues to the time period before finally—nearly halfway through her tale—spelling out its historical setting explicitly, is one of the things I found most interesting here, though again I can't quite explain the purpose of such subtlety to the larger themes she's tackling.

Ultimately, the novel did, for me, get a bit bogged down in the melodrama of Helen's tormented romantic urges and Lancelot's sordid past and relationship, especially since neither of those characters ever seemed to come fully alive in the way that Sophia did. For it was Sophia—even as much of a problem child as she is when being brutally ill-tempered toward her younger brother—who made the novel worthwhile for me, and surely, too, her willingness to eschew the class distinctions her mother takes so seriously plays into Coxhead's themes, as when she tells kind Lady Bannister exactly what she thinks of her daughter:

"Your daughter's in the play, isn't she, Mrs.Goadby?" Lady Bannister said. "I hear she has a lovely dress. I'd hoped to bring my Lorna, but I'm afraid she's at the stage when her pony means more to her than Shakespeare.''

"She's my age," observed Sophia bluntly, right across Mrs. Goadby. "It's nothing to do with her age that she doesn't like Shakespeare. It's because she's awful. I can't think how such a nice person as you comes to have such an awful child, Lady B." Really, there was no knowing what these Littlejohn children would say next! A nice advertisement for the School!

Lady Bannister, however, took it in good part, and merely expressed the hope that Sophia and her daughter would be better friends as they grew older.

"Much worse, I'm certain," said Sophia darkly. "I can imagine Lorna grown-up—" Mrs. Goadby fortunately remembered she had bought some chocolates at the sweet-stall, and produced them now in an effort to stem so unsuitable a conversation.

If A Play Toward, despite such memorable scenes, is unlikely to become a favorite, it was still interesting enough to make me rather intrigued by Elizabeth Coxhead. Coxhead's earlier novel, One Green Bottle, is discussed here, and it may just have to go onto my TBR list, if only out of curiosity as to what she might make of such a different kind of plot.

And of course, there are still quite a number of other school stories for adults left to explore. Perhaps there's still one out there to give Mary Bell a run for her money...