Nancy Mitford and the myth of women’s literature
In Canto II of William Hayley’s 1781 hilarious mock-epic The Triumphs of Temper, Penelope – an “ancient maid” responsible for looking after the young “nymph” Serena – finds a romance novel hidden under the girl’s bed. Her response is typically measured for the late 18th century:
Beneath the pillow, not completely hid,
The Novel lay — She saw — she seiz’d — she chid:
With rage and glee her glaring eye-balls flash,
Ah wicked age! she cries, ah filthy trash!
The book in question could “taint [Serena’s] youth” with its “licentious work” but, nevertheless, Penelope seems anxious to test its corroding possibilities when she rushes out to “banquet” on the text itself. It is a scene awfully reminiscent of a mother finding her daughter reading Bridget Jones or, worse, Fifty Shades of Grey.
Women reading novels has a long history of being seen as subversive. For much of the 18th century it was thought that, in the words of the Scottish writer James Beattie, reading novels “breeds dislike to history, and all the substantial parts of knowledge.” This was particularly damaging for women, so the argument goes, because they were more likely to read romance novels, and more susceptible to their titillating, frivolous, amoral charms. One only has to look as far as Catherine Morland in Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1803) to see this type of impressionable, deluded narrative-obsessed woman. She has read so many Gothic novels she is convinced she is living in one. Frailty, thy name is the reading public.
Recently – and as a direct result of the fact I needed to be reading more 18th century multi-canto poems – I read three books that James Beattie might have severely frowned upon: Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate (1949), Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac (1984), and Sophie Kinsella’s Can You Keep a Secret? (2003).
Only one of these books is truly embarrassing – Kinsella’s prose is so painfully convoluted and faux-conversational as to make it impossible to understand what is going on. As for the plot, it reads like a jealous woman’s materialist fever-dream (“You swore on your Miu Miu ponyskin bag, remember?”/ “I haven’t got a Miu Miu ponyskin bag!.. I’ve got a Fendi ponkyskin bag!”) crossed with all the subtlety of high-Victorian melodrama: woman tells deepest darkest secret to man (“I weigh 9 stone 3. Not 8 stone 3”) who turns out to be in a position of power. In short, the old maid Penelope was right – the book was “filthy trash” of a “wicked age”.
Hotel du Lac should have been better, but it reads like a chemical, bitter response to Kineslla-type novels of all centuries. Brookner’s narrator – a romance novelist herself – rails against women whose life-purpose is to “have pretty things”. And in its acrid, stultifying opposition to this image of femininity, the novel fails to move beyond that which it criticised. Instead of an exploration of a femininity opposed to this age old depiction of pink fluff and sugar all the reader receives is one-dimensional opposition. We learn that there is more than one type of woman, but learn nothing about them other than how they dress themselves. It is telling that it is nearly impossible to place with certainty the novel’s events in any decade of the 19th or 20th century.
Am I sounding like a particularly cantankerous version of George Eliot’s essay “Silly novels by Lady Novelists”. Why read novels if all you’re going to do is endlessly pick them apart and criticise? But I am not unravelling them from a point of quasi-/anti-feminist anger – if authors want to write novels about women who proclaim not to know what NATO stands for and spend all their time daydreaming about poorly-described men, I suppose we have to let them be. But the failings of both Kinsella’s and Brookner’s texts reveal the brilliance of the third novel I want to mention.
Nancy Mitford is never anything other than outstanding. From The Pursuit of Love (1945) – the classic tale of interwar love, loss, and debutante balls – to Pigeon Pie (1940), a relentless satire of upper-class society and early-war fears, every sentence and book she writes is unfailingly funny. She even happily pokes fun at her own family: Wigs on the Green (1935) ruthlessly exposes the idiocy of 1930s British fascists, only two years after her sister had married Oswald Mosley. And alongside this humour is a touching sensitivity and an awareness of tragedy: Mitford’s brilliant women die, their loves fail, and the war ruins many things.
It would, of course, be ludicrous to pretend that what Mitford writes is relatable fiction, or hard-hitting social commentary – her women never work, have multiple houses in both town and country, and frequently watch their fathers and husbands speak in the House of Lords. But, her novels do not to pretend to be either of those things; they are brilliant stories, which happen to be about upper-class women in the 20th century.
But the sad fact is that Mitford’s novels have received too little critical attention; there are multiple biographies of her and her family, but barely any articles or monographs on her writing. And, when her writing is mentioned, it is often in the same breath as Evelyn Waugh. Her books have many similarities to Waugh’s both in subject and context – but her dedication to tragedy and sensitivity sits alongside comedy in her novels, not further down the shelf and under another dust-jacket.
Mitford’s fiction is left stranded among “Silly novels by Lady Novelists” when it deserves not just greater readership, but far greater academic attention. Even the existence of this article reinforces my point: I have been unable – despite my caveats – to refrain from placing Mitford in the nebulous, perhaps problematic,”woman’s fiction” genre, and have also made the same half-baked comparisons to Waugh. While we might have just moved on from 18th century moral panics over the existence of literate woman (whatever next!), it seems that three hundred years of literary culture has failed to pay proper attention to what it is the literate woman are reading. Perhaps reading more Sophie Kinsella is a worthwhile pursuit after all…