Here's the text of my piece on Elizabeth Jenkins in the current issue of 'the real reader's quarterly',
Slightly Foxed. Of course it looks better in the pages of that beautifully produced magazine – the perfect stocking filler for the book lover(s) in your life, or indeed yourself.
Bits of this might ring a bell with Nigeness readers with good memories...
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Whatever Happened to Elizabeth Jenkins?
When she died in 2010, at
the astonishing age of 104, the novelist and biographer Elizabeth Jenkins was
all but forgotten, her name known only to a few aficionados, her books mostly
long out of print. And yet, in her day, her reputation had been up there with
the other distinguished Elizabeths of mid-twentieth-century fiction, Bowen and
Taylor. What happened?
I had never heard of Elizabeth Jenkins
myself until a chance conversation with a bookseller friend. He told me he had
just sold one of her books and was pleasantly surprised to find that she was
still being read. Elizabeth who? I asked, and he gave me the basics. Since then
I have found out – and read – much more, and discovered for myself what a very
fine novelist she was.
A literary career that spanned eight
decades began soon after she left Cambridge. While still an unpublished author
working on her first novel, she was invited to dinner by Virginia and Leonard
Woolf, and duly received the usual Bloomsbury treatment – taken up and made
much of, then frozen out and humiliated. Though Virginia did praise that first
novel, in somewhat patronising terms (‘a sweet white grape of a book’),
Elizabeth was so embarrassed by it that she sought out and bought up all the
copies she could find. (It was called Virginia
Water and it does indeed seem to have disappeared without trace.) However,
Victor Gollancz was sufficiently impressed to offer her a three-novel contract.
Elizabeth Jenkins was on her way.
Over
the coming decades, a stream of well received novels and equally well received
biographies poured forth. Several of the biographies – of Jane Austen (Jenkins
was a founder of the Jane Austen Society), of Elizabeth I, Lady Caroline Lamb
and others – remain quite easily available to this day, but the novels, though
they often went into several printings, are mostly much harder to find. In part,
no doubt, this was a matter of changing fashions – Jenkins’s novels generally
inhabit an upper-middle-class milieu, and she strongly disapproved of the
social changes that came about in the Fifties and Sixties. Things might have
been different if she had been more of a self-publicist – or any kind of a
self-publicist – but she was not. Held back by her diffident nature, she did
little to further her career, shunning all publicity and self-promotion (in
today’s literary world she would have sunk like a stone). Happily, however,
those novels were not entirely forgotten. One of them – The Tortoise and the Hare – was rediscovered by Carmen Callil and
republished as a Virago Modern Classic, and another, Harriet, was later reissued by the excellent Persephone Books.
The
Tortoise and the Hare, originally published in 1954, was the first
Elizabeth Jenkins novel I got my hands on, and I was not disappointed. It chronicles
the break-up of a marriage – a familiar enough subject, but handled with rare
imaginative flair and originality. Imogen is the beautiful, sensitive young wife
of Evelyn Gresham, a handsome, brilliant and successful barrister with a very high
opinion of himself and a strong sense of entitlement, neither of which his
compliant wife has done anything to dent. The Greshams have plenty of money, a
big house in Berkshire and a place in town, and a standard of living that might
make today's readers blink in disbelief. But are they happy? Of course not.
As the story unfolds, Imogen begins to
realise just what is going on between her dazzling husband and the wildly
improbable, therefore easily dismissed, 'other woman', a tweedy, frumpy pillar
of village society, spinster, wearer of ludicrous hats, but wealthy, capable,
knowledgeable in practical affairs and strong-minded. It is in those last
attributes – all of which Imogen lacks – that Blanche's fatal attraction lies.
Imogen looks on in helpless agony – and, worse, in full awareness that she is
collaborating in her own suffering.
There is an element of autobiography
in The Tortoise and the Hare. Elizabeth Jenkins, a beautiful, sensitive
woman herself, wrote it after being dumped by the love of her life, a married
man every bit as distinguished as Evelyn Gresham. She was fatally attracted to
such men, and they recur in her novels – as do sympathetic but frail victim
figures. And victims don’t come any frailer than the helpless title character
of Harriet, Jenkins’s second novel,
which in 1935 beat Evelyn Waugh’s A
Handful of Dust to win the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse.
Harriet
is a chilling read – indeed one of the most harrowing novels I’ve ever come
across. Based on a real-life Victorian murder case, it tells of a young woman
being starved to death by members of her own family eager to get their hands on
her inheritance. The worst of it is that the young woman, Harriet, is a ‘natural’
(we would now say she had ‘learning difficulties’). Her mother has raised her
with care and affection, and all is well until a handsome and entirely ruthless
fortune hunter sets his sights on her, woos and marries her, and takes her away
from her protective home.
What follows is almost
too painful to read – painful not only in the details of Harriet’s ordeal but
in Jenkins’s horribly convincing depiction of the growth, in those supposed to
be looking after her, of an ability to regard her as something less than human,
something whose suffering and fate are a matter of complete indifference. A
contemporary review described this novel as ‘like a cold hand clutching at the
heart’ – and that is no overstatement.
There is nothing of the cold hand in the
novel that Elizabeth Jenkins always named as her own favourite of her works – Dr Gully’s Story (1972). This, too,
takes its inspiration from a real-life Victorian murder case – the sensational
and still unsolved Charles Bravo murder. However, there is no mention of Bravo
until more than three-quarters of the way through, and the murder itself and
the ensuing inquests don’t happen until the closing chapters. The focus is
firmly on the fashionably society physician James Gully (who finds himself a
suspect in the Bravo murder), on his feelings and experiences. Jenkins builds
up a rich and compelling portrait of a fascinating, successful man – yes, the
Evelyn Gresham type again, but additionally blessed with a peculiarly mesmeric
presence.
The real subject of the book is less
the murder than the passionate love affair that develops between Gully and his
beautiful, rich and very much younger patient, Florence Ricardo (later to be
Florence Bravo). The course of this superficially unlikely romance is traced
with such imaginative insight that it becomes entirely believable and
involving. Jenkins creates around Gully and Florence a world rich in intricate
and abundant detail, a densely Victorian, over-furnished, hyperabundant world of
stuff – and of servants, ever
present, ever vigilant, ever gossiping – in which the principals are obliged
to live their lives, while trying to keep their love affair secret. It is, of
course, a doomed romance, and when it ends much of the heat goes out of the
novel, though the subsequent account of the murder and the inquests is
fascinating enough in itself.
One of the most
striking features of Elizabeth Jenkins’s novels is their strong sense of place:
the riverside locations of The Tortoise
and the Hare, Victorian Cheltenham and suburban London in Dr Gully, the grim rural setting of
Harriet’s ordeal, all are potently evoked by a writer who really does set her
scenes. In Brightness (1963), the
setting is the tight-knit Home Counties community of New Broadlands, a pleasant
town set on a high ridge, its earliest houses ‘built in the Edwardian era by a
community of high-minded cranks’ (we all know places like that).
Brightness
is a curious novel, the first three quarters seeming to be a fictional study of
parenting, good and bad, of youthful rebellion and delinquency and the
‘generation gap’. The author’s loathing of ‘progressive’ thought – apparent in
the background of The Tortoise and the
Hare – comes to the fore here, in the portrayal of a frightful old humbug
with the splendid name of Mortimer Upjohn, and, more especially, in the
withering depiction of the nouveau riche
Sugden family. The Sugdens are bringing up their late-teenage son with a toxic
combination of unrestrained indulgence and non-existent discipline – with
predictably loathsome results.
By way of contrast, we are given Una
Lambert, a widow with a beloved son who is a credit to her firm but loving
upbringing. As the novel goes on, a strain of theological speculation enters
the picture, and the reader begins to wonder what kind of book this is –
anti-progressive satire, study of parent-child relations, reflection on the
nature of faith? – and where it is going. Then, suddenly, we find out exactly
where it has all been going – towards a shocking and tragic event that changes
everything, and puts all that came before in a wholly new perspective. This is
a very bold way to shape a novel – as bold as the long delay of the murder in Dr Gully – but Jenkins, I think, pulls
it off.
Her last novel was A Silent Joy. Though published in 1992 –
her 87th year – it is set in 1957, among a still prosperous and
servant-attended upper middle class. Once again, a strong-minded and
distinguished man – an elderly retired judge – is at the centre of things. The
novel is a rather schematic study of three kinds of love: the deep,
disinterested affection of the judge for the young daughter of a dead friend;
the naked lust of said friend’s widow for a dodgy wheeler-dealer; and the
sweetly conventional love of a young couple (older daughter of said friend and
cousin of another friend). It is also a portrayal of the terrible effects of
easy divorce – in 1957! The plot is a
little lumpy and the chracterisation uneven, but there’s always something there
that keeps you reading, some scenes and moments when things come fully alive
and remind you just how good Elizabeth Jenkins could be.
There are more of her novels out there
waiting to be rediscovered and read. I like to think they are the kind of books
that might turn up in jumble sales, or even elude the hawk-eyed valuers who
monitor charity-shop donations these days. I’m certainly keeping my eyes
peeled.
Elizabeth Jenkins
continued writing almost to the last, publishing a memoir, The View from Downshire Hill, in her hundredth year. Downshire Hill
in Hampstead was where she lived, in a Regency house that her father bought for
her in 1939. She furnished it with good Regency furniture, picked up for next
to nothing after the war, but could barely afford to heat a few rooms. Because
of the furniture, she recalled, ‘people assumed I was comfortably off, instead
of being very hard up’.
Her small, hunched
figure was a familiar sight on the streets of Hampstead for many years, but the
distinguished and gifted author that was Elizabeth Jenkins had all but
disappeared. When, in 1983, Virago issued a promotional booklet with pictures
of all the Modern Classics authors, she was the only one of whom no portrait
could be found. Instead, she appears in the leaflet as an outline head filled
with a blank space.
