Although she would have considered herself a cultured woman, Cambridge-educated and the first of her family to go to university, she cared little for theatre, art or music. To her, the word was all. She claimed that Iris Murdoch’s 1975 novel A Word Child could have been written with her in mind. She often told us that as a child she would seize upon anything that was printed – advertisements, instructions on bottles and medicines, lists, timetables. This is not an uncommon trait, and many have written about it. I inherited it, and am unhappy and anxious if I find myself stranded even for five minutes at a bus stop without a book or a newspaper. The Kindle has been a great comfort to me and I nurture its battery as though it were a small bird. Like my mother, I was attracted as a child by long and not very meaningful words. I remember memorising the word “paradichlorobenzene”, an ingredient of mothballs, in our bathroom in Sheffield, and repeating it to myself as a mantra. As a charm against ignorance, perhaps. My mother despised ignorance.

I reread A Word Child in search of my mother. It is a darkly hilarious novel, and it’s the opening sections with which my mother must have identified. The protagonist, Hilary, escapes an abusive and orphaned working-class childhood in an unnamed northern town through the attention of a teacher, Mr Osmand, and by his own discovery of language and grammar. “Mr Osmand believed in competition. It was necessary to excel. He loved and cherished the examination system… Grammar books were my books of prayer. Looking up words in the dictionary was for me an image of goodness… I was not a philological prodigy… I was just a brilliant plodder with an aptitude for grammar and an adoration of words.”

This aptitude gets Hilary into Oxford, having come from a school from which no child had ever been further afield than a northern polytechnic. Similarly, aptitude got both my mother and my father to Cambridge, with the help not of a Mr Osmand but of a Miss Crowther, of whom both my parents spoke with deep respect. Hoggart’s phrase for the working-class child expected to do well is “trained like a circus-horse for scholarship winning” – not a racehorse, but a circus-horse. In his autobiography, The Boy Who Loved Books, the academic John Sutherland titled a chapter “The Family Racehorse” in allusion to the pressure put upon him by his mother to do well at the eleven-plus. While still the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer said on television that the only thing his father ever praised him for was passing the eleven-plus. The pressure on my mother came not from her parents, but from the school and from herself.

I don’t know what my mother made of the rest of the goings-on in Murdoch’s novel, which characteristically embrace sudden deaths, passions, adultery, fornication and infidelity, as well as some memorably horrible meals. My mother’s life was extremely proper in comparison with Murdoch’s: she married her childhood sweetheart and remained faithful, though not always friendly, to him for her entire life. But she would not have been shocked by Murdoch. She was a liberal reader, and in no way prudish: she had a matter-of-fact, 1930s, common-sense attitude to sexual matters. I gave her copies of Robert Nye’s Falstaff (1976) and DM Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), both sexually explicit novels that she read with interest. In fact, I think she might have liked to discuss them with me in more depth than I wanted. I wanted her to read them, but I didn’t really want to talk about them, or not to her.

Hilary’s nameless hometown might have been rather like my mother’s Mexborough, which was once described by the historian Nikolaus Pevsner as “a small colliery town”. It was working class then and is now suffering from post-industrial blight and the long fallout from the miners’ strike. My mother did not like Mexborough, and after her parents bravely moved in the 1930s to run a B&B on the Great North Road in rural Nottinghamshire, she never went back. I don’t think I ever visited it during her lifetime.

But she had good memories of Mexborough School, where she met my father, and both my parents owed a great deal to the enlightened West Riding County Council “whose schools and libraries”, according to a letter in May 2020 to the Times Literary Supplement, “were the envy of the land”. My parents were born the same year and in the same class, and my mother’s grades slightly outclassed his, though both achieved consistently good marks. They played Helena and Lysander in the school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. My father was from the neighbouring Conisbrough, a small town on the River Don. It had more aristocratic associations than Mexborough, thanks largely to its outstanding feature: its famous white castle that was built in the 11th century. It features romantically in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, set in the time of Richard the Lionheart, although South Yorkshire was still a pastoral landscape when Scott was writing the novel.

I did, I think, go to Conisbrough once, as a child during or just after the war. I have a dim memory of my grandfather’s small factory (in my recollection, little more than a large shed) where the locally famous Drabble’s Sweets were manufactured, but of the castle I remember nothing at all. The shed also had some connection with brightly coloured wooden spinning-tops – were these an advertising gimmick, a giveaway gift? And can I be right in remembering strips of white and brown sugary stuff being whipped around and twisted to make humbugs? My grandfather, Joseph Drabble, died in February 1945, and, according to the South Yorkshire Times, my parents, “squad leader and Mrs JF Drabble” (sic), attended the funeral at Conisbrough Baptist Chapel.

I feel a sentimental attachment now to these small towns and this abandoned and neglected landscape, an affection that was shared by my aunt, who, unlike my mother, never rejected them and never struggled to get away from her origins. I visited Mexborough with her after my mother’s death, and we had a nice lunch in a modest little café above a shoe shop, which she seemed to know well and where she was at home.

I was moved, a year or two later, when I was invited to speak at Mexborough Grammar School’s speech day, a school that had been attended, long after my parents, by Ted Hughes. It might have been on this occasion that I was presented with a fine heraldic biscuit-coloured jug bearing a coat of arms that read “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (“Evil to him who evil thinks”). I treasured this object then, and treasure it still, though somebody knocked its handle off. I don’t think it was me, but it might have been. It now stands in the kitchen and holds celery and spring onions.

This is an extract from “The Great Good Places” (Canongate), a new collection of fiction and memoir by Margaret Drabble. She will be speaking at the Cambridge Literary Festival on 23 April

[Further reading: What it’s like to be played by Claire Foy]

One of the most curious features of Stein’s career was her compulsion to keep, preserve and deposit every scrap of her own literary output, a habit which must have made the biographer’s task both more arduous and, one hopes, ultimately more rewarding. Wade has examined on our behalf the vast archive Stein left, and untangles for us the complicated posthumous story of her acolytes, admirers, editors and bibliographers and their relationships with Toklas, the survivor: nearly half of the volume is devoted to what occurred after Stein’s death at the age of 72 in July 1946. By the time we reach this point in the narrative, we have become familiar with and fond of Stein’s eccentricities: her generosity and stubbornness and courage and wit and relentless self-promotion. Her earlier years, less well known by most of us, are recounted with insight: her studies at Radcliffe and Harvard; her developing understanding of her own sexuality, which she addressed in her early fiction; and her relationships with philosopher and psychologist William James, and her brother, the art collector and critic Leo (with whom she lived in Paris until they fell out – Stein’s description of her estrangement from Leo is peculiarly and delightfully Steinian: “Little by little we never met again”). The growth of her extraordinary self-confidence, and the style with which she expressed it, are carefully traced, and remain astonishing. She entitled herself, and she succeeded in living up to her own expectations of fame.

However, all was not plain sailing in her drive for recognition. Although she was comfortably off financially, and lived a pleasantly independent rentier life, she longed to be a popular commercial success, and not surprisingly she found it very hard to find publishers to take her on. Her work was too difficult, too obscure, too provocative. She had many overtures but few offers. She found a home in little magazines such as Paris’s surrealist journal transition, which welcomed experimental work, but she had to pay the costs of some of her publications. For example, in 1922 she forked out $2,500 to the Four Seas Company of Boston to take on her collection of 52 short pieces, Geography and Plays, for which she wrote her own autobiographical note praising her “brilliant work” on the brain as a medical student and the “profound influence of Cézanne” on her writing. This volume was greeted by what Wade describes as “some of the most hostile reviews Stein ever received”: the Baltimore Sun announced that “Miss Stein applies cubism to defenceless prose”, one critic described her work as “419 pages of drivel”, and the New York Herald Tribune compared her to the emperor with no clothes. It was hard going, but she persevered unapologetically with her unique agenda, seeming to believe, as she bravely declared in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, that bad attention was better than no attention at all.

She soldiered on, and her reputation grew, for both good and ill, and by 1926 she was sufficiently esteemed by academe to received dual invitations to lecture at both Oxford and Cambridge. She describes herself as having been intensely anxious and nervous before these performances, but she spoke to packed houses and received many questions and rapturous applause. She fielded the questions with wit, according to herself and others, and the events made her feel “like a prima donna”. She was backed up, in Cambridge, by Harold Acton and the Sitwells. It is worth noting that her Cambridge lecture was two years ahead of Virginia Woolf’s seminal “A Room of One’s Own”, first delivered in 1928. At this period, the Woolfs were considering taking some of her work for the Hogarth Press: she had tried to persuade them to publish her immensely long and unwieldy novel The Making of Americans, but Virginia could not “brisk [herself] up to deal with it”. But they did publish her lecture, “Composition as Explanation”, and the Sitwells gave a dinner for her in London where she met EM Forster. Stein conquered both Paris and London on her own terms.

Nearly ten years later, in 1934, she conquered America. Returning to her native land for a lecture tour after an absence of decades, she was able to celebrate the success of what many consider her most readable work, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, published in 1933. She and Toklas were on the road (and in the air, as they took their first aeroplane) for seven months and took in 37 states. “Gertrude Stein has arrived,” announced the ticker tape in New York to greet them. And arrived she had. They met many celebrities, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who invited her to tea in the White House. Stein enjoyed explaining her idiosyncratic prosody to her audiences, her love of long sentences and her antipathy to the “servile comma”, about which she is very funny. Her glory was compounded in the same year by the production of her opera Four Saints in Three Acts,with music by Virgil Thomson (with whom she had a characteristically turbulent friendship) and choreography by Frederick Ashton. It was “a knockout and a wow”, according to her most devoted admirer (and eventually her executor) Carl Van Vechten, and it transferred to Broadway, where “it played for six weeks to sell-out houses, the longest run for an opera in the city’s history”. It was quoted in the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie Top Hat and in the Charlie Brown comic strip. The chronology of her American triumphs is a little confusing – but that is probably because so much was going on. She had at last achieved the fame for which she had always longed.

The stories of Stein’s professional success and the intimate details of her domestic and sexual life are equally interesting, and both are well told. But they do leave one with an important question: do they make her work any more readable, any more accessible? The oeuvre which she strove with such determination to see in print is certainly accessible now, in that you can buy (as I did) the Delphi edition of her Collected Works on Kindle for £2.99. Stein would surely have been delighted to have reached the mainstream via a new technology (even if the text of the Kindle edition raises its own problems, as one is often unable to decide whether certain eccentricities, such as the persistent spelling of words like “roumanian” with a lower case “r”, are hers or the device’s, which gives an added piquancy to the pursuit of Stein’s genius). I failed to tackle The Making of Americans but reread the Autobiography and enjoyed some of her early and more conventional shorter pieces. Wade alerts us to the fact that Wars I Have Seen, including its portrayal of village life during wartime near the French-Swiss border, was in its day “hugely successful”, and it is indeed a relatively straightforward read, raising interesting questions about why Stein and Toklas were left unmolested by Pétain’s anti-Semitic regime. Stein’s politics were inconsistent, and she was on good terms with both collaborators and Resistance fighters: the story of the Vichy government official Bernard Faÿ and his putative protection of Stein and Toklas is particularly intriguing.

Wade’s biography is a fine introduction to the riches of Stein’s formidable output, and an encouragement to those unfamiliar with this terrain to travel further. Much has been written about Stein from many critical and ideological viewpoints, and specialists will surely find statements here to correct or dispute, but for the general reader this is an incentive to read on and explore her world. Richard Ellman’s masterly biography of James Joyce (of whose success Stein was jealous) has persuaded many readers to tackle Finnegans Wake, while Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971) re-established the poet Ezra Pound as one of the great modernists. Leon Edel’s The Life of Henry James is another notable marker. Biography can be the gateway to understanding and, more than that, to enjoyment. The Delphi modernists list now includes Carson McCullers, Dos Passos, Camus and Katherine Mansfield. Gertrude Stein is one of its boldest choices and, with Francesca Wade’s guidance, should tempt more of us to get beyond a rose is a rose is a rose.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
Francesca Wade
Faber & Faber, 480pp, £20

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[See more: Edward St Aubyn’s comedy of horrors]

Sylvia seems to have been the most committed countrywoman of the three. Virginia and Leonard Woolf were keen gardeners and Virginia was an acute observer of plant, animal and insect life, but she was a Londoner born and bred. Like Sylvia Plath’s narrator in The Bell Jar, she urgently needed both town and country. (Plath labels this divided allegiance as “neurotic”.) Rosamond had a fine eye for landscapes, flowers, trees and cloudscapes, and wrote of them lyrically; she was brought up in a large household in a much-loved family house in an idyllic stretch of the Thames Valley, where she was accustomed to others doing the hard work while she wrote girlish poetry and picked primroses. (Picking primroses is a recurrent motif in her work.) It is hard to picture Virginia or Rosamond shooting and skinning a rabbit, as Sylvia and her partner Valentine Ackland were wont to do.

Harriet Baker chooses episodes in the lives of Woolf and Lehmann which have not been over-explored, seeking to rescue Woolf’s time in Sussex from comparative neglect. “It would be easy to skip over the years between 1912 and 1919 – the years covering the lease of Asheham… to see them as years diminished by illness and war. Looking to her small notebook, I would like to reclaim this period.” Woolf’s editors and biographers have tended to consign the Asheham notebooks to the category of “nature notes”, and they differ greatly from the much more personal diaries that Woolf kept in later years. Baker makes a virtue of their sparseness and reads them as a means to recovery from the severe bouts of mental illness that had beset Woolf from adolescence and early adulthood, as well as early steps in Woolf’s literary journey. Baker tracks Woolf’s fragile mental state through her records of caterpillars and moths and fungi (“Darwin was her inheritance”) and moves on to examine her loving rivalry with her sister Vanessa, who for a time shared Asheham before setting up her own life (with rabbits) at Charleston, and her less than loving jealousy of Katherine Mansfield, whom she admired, resented, and published at the Hogarth Press.

Baker’s narrative of Woolf’s rural hours moves from one world war to the next, from her first novel The Voyage Out (1915) to Between the Acts, with its pageant of village life, which was published in 1941 after her death. Some haunting images from the Asheham notebooks record the German prisoners of war at work in the fields and the lanes, as the guns boomed over the Channel: “When alone, I smile at the tall German.” And the deprivations of war, when Virginia and Leonard learned to forage for firewood, are summed up in some comments on semolina: “We often eat nothing else for weeks. Try it with a spoonful of lard for supper.”

Rosamond Lehmann, with her sweet tooth and her love of cream, wouldn’t have liked that at all: she is triumphant when she manages to get 2lbs of icing sugar out of the village baker for her daughter Sally’s birthday cake. That’s a lot of icing sugar when there’s a war on, but Rosamond had winning ways. She was accustomed as a child to a grand style of country life, and the house at Ipsden in Oxfordshire where she lived with her second husband Wogan Phillipps was “an elegant red-brick Queen Anne manor house” looking towards the Berkshire Downs: Rosamond was annoyed when Wogan’s ill-bred communist friends put their feet up on the sofas.

Diamond Cottage, which she had bought in 1939 as a bolt hole from marriage and a possible refuge with a lover, was in the Berkshire village of Aldworth. Lehmann’s first novel Dusty Answer (1927) had been a sensational critical and popular success, and in the 1940s her career was still riding high. It was at Diamond Cottage that she spent her happiest hours with Cecil Day Lewis, who divided his time between her, the Ministry of Information in London, and his wife Mary in Devon, whom he refused at this stage to desert. Rosamond was on the whole content with this arrangement, enjoyed his passionate visits, and negotiated herself a secure place in village life, despite her notoriety and ambiguous marital status. She coped valiantly with the vegetable patch and the “persisting cold, the catastrophes of British plumbing”, and produced some of her best stories. She knew that she was loved and desired, and that was of supreme importance to her. She rubbed along well enough with her aged gardener and with her cook, Mrs Wickens. She made much fun of the farm folk, of the dirty evacuees, of the “adenoidal” village infants (that word “adenoidal” in this period always carries a huge weight of class prejudice), but she made the best of rural living and had a good war.

Sylvia Townsend Warner engaged more deeply with country life, making it the centre of her existence. She was a walker, an explorer, an eccentric, and the account of her purchase and renovation of a not particularly attractive labourer’s cottage in East Chaldon in Dorset in 1930, which she whimsically dubbed “Miss Green”, is well told. By this time she was already an acclaimed novelist and poet, well known for the very English Lolly Willowes (1926) and its exotic successor, Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927). The detailed description of how she and Valentine learned how to bathe in the copper in the back-kitchen is particularly enjoyable. She was “disdainful of middle-class luxuries”, such as bathrooms.

She had been introduced to the neighbourhood by TF Powys, whose fiction she championed; he was a writer who liked to dwell on unattractive aspects of village life: its meanness, incest, dishonesty, cruelty and violence. Warner’s own work veers between realism, intensely poetic and powerful descriptions of the English landscape, and a kind of jarring folklorist fantasy which makes some readers uneasy. But her positive and active commitment to the community of village life, particularly during the war years, is impressive, and Baker has made a good story out of not very promising records documenting her firefighting, her work with the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) in Dorchester, the “Blitzed Libraries Scheme”, and her advice to about how to make soap flakes by grating bars of soap with a cheese grater. She was a useful go-between, linking the evacuees and the WVS volunteers.

It is curious to note how intensely snobbish these writers could be about their neighbours, despite their left-of-centre politics. Woolf’s inability to write well about her social inferiors has been well documented, and Lehmann had a horrible habit of lapsing into fake cockney in the mouths of her fictional characters. Baker comments on Warner’s “unsparing …depictions of her working-class neighbours”, odd in “a communist who had spent a decade writing in their defence”. Country life was not wholly redemptive.

This volume brings sections of three overlapping lives together, perhaps a little arbitrarily. They all needed the countryside for different reasons, but their experiences of war provide a common theme, and create a strong sense of period, a Virago Modern Classic atmosphere. (Both Lehmann and Townsend Warner were successfully relaunched by the Virago founder Carmen Callil in the Seventies and Eighties.) This sense of time and place is occasionally disrupted by an anachronistic usage: I really don’t think autumn days can be “bookended by mist” (though Virginia’s story “Kew Gardens” could more plausibly have been “bookended” by Vanessa’s woodcuts, as Baker writes elsewhere). And the notes and index, although copious, are not as exhaustive as they seem. It would have been good to have been told who wrote the line that Baker quotes from one of Woolf’s last letters, to Rosamond’s brother John Lehmann, in January 1941, two months before she walked into the River Ouse: “What is the phrase I always remember – or forget. Look your last on all things lovely”. Walter de la Mare deserves an acknowledgement: in this strange and moving line, from his poem “Fare Well”, he gave Woolf one of her last moments of beauty.

Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann
Harriet Baker
Allen Lane, 384pp, £25

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[See also: The women that books built]

Hanging over both these compelling narratives is our proleptic knowledge that on 10 January 1957 the poet married his much younger secretary, that “peach of a girl”, Valerie Fletcher, having allowed both women to think that were his first wife, Vivienne, to release him by death, he might consider marrying one of them. Despite or because of our knowledge of this (to them) devastating marital denouement, both narratives have the suspense of works of fiction, and prove compulsive page-turners. They fit uncannily well together, with their cross references and interwoven incidents.

[See also: 1922: the year that made modernism – John Mullan]

The relationship of Mary and Tom takes one into the world of Barbara Pym, a world of saints’ days and church wardens and evensong, a world of London fogs and air raids and endless card games. Eliot loved playing patience, and we learn that one of his acts of self-denial during Lent was to give up “smoking before breakfast and patience after lunch”. Trevelyan was from a well-connected Anglican background; the biographer Humphrey Carpenter, her nephew, recorded that she was a true “daughter of a Victorian vicarage”, belonging to “a sublimely self-confident caste”. She was also a formidably courageous administrator and well-travelled internationalist, applying herself to the welfare of foreign students in London and to the war-wounded in Europe: her imposing title in 1947 was “Head of the Field Survey Bureau in the Unesco Department of Reconstruction in Paris”.

Despite this demanding public life, she managed to create with Eliot a cosy domestic refuge where a characteristic supper at her flat might consist of “soup, eggs and bacon, an excellent Brie, Cox’s apples and coffee”, accompanied by classical music on the gramophone. They also drank a lot of gin. He came to depend on her ministrations, and on her driving skills – he even paid for a new car for her, in recognition of how much time she had spent ferrying him about London and occasionally further afield.

He certainly led her to believe that he valued their friendship, and she was full of supportive admiration for his work and sympathy for what she knew of his unhappy marriage. Socially and intellectually she could hold her own with Bloomsbury and the Huxleys and Bertrand Russell (who may have had an affair with Vivienne, and whom Eliot wittily characterised in “Mr Apollinax” as an “irresponsible foetus”). She had a caustic eye for what she saw as his weaknesses, particularly his valetudinarianism, and thought that he spent far too much time retreating to the London Clinic whenever he thought he was slightly ill.

She had good grounds for thinking that she and Eliot had formed an unusually close relationship, for he frequently turned to her for help, requested her company, and showered her with gifts ranging from rosaries to “lovely nylons”. He introduced her to members of his family when they visited England and seemed to encourage her friendship with his sister. She records his snobbish and racist remarks, telling us in a neutral tone that he told her that what we need is “tighter immigration laws”. They discussed euthanasia and Ezra Pound, dentistry and Bernard Shaw.

Wagner points out that Trevelyan’s diary entries are designed to emphasise the intimacy between her and Eliot, which made the news of his announcement that he had secretly married Valerie all the more shocking. He had disparaged Valerie to Mary, and it is somehow disquieting to learn that in the Faber office Valerie wore her large engagement ring concealed by a fingerstall. Wagner comments that Eliot seemed startled that Trevelyan had taken the marriage amiss, and concludes that it is clear “that throughout their friendship his focus was always on himself, and on his own needs and requirements”. Indeed so.

[See also: The vision of Ralph Vaughan Williams – Rowan Williams]

If Tom and Mary tried to create a cosy refuge for themselves in the manner of the not-always-cosy Barbara Pym, the longer and more intense relationship of Eliot and Emily Hale has more tragic dimensions. In some aspects it recalls the preoccupations of Henry James in The Aspern Papers and his short story “The Altar of the Dead”: sealed boxes, posthumous revelations, treacheries, the beloved as muse, the duties of the guardian of the flame.

The down-to-earth, self-sufficient Mary Trevelyan never claimed to be a muse, although she may appear in Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party as a “guardian”, but Emily, who features in The Waste Land as the “Hyacinth Girl”, was deliberately cast by Eliot as his inspiration, and then as deliberately rejected by him. It is a tale of betrayal on a grand scale, and it is very well told. The surviving correspondence from Eliot to Hale proves, as Eliot and his wife Valerie correctly feared it might, a bombshell for his reputation, not as a poet, but as someone who presumably aspired to be a good man, but who was obsessed by a sense of ancestral guilt. He had Hale’s side of the years-long correspondence destroyed, and Gordon’s account of the fate of these two caches is as exciting as a detective story. She catches the drama of the sealed boxes brilliantly. But it is the story behind – or rather within – the boxes that makes these revelations so important.

Eliot, who was three years older than Hale, first met her in 1905 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she was 14. In December 1913, as their friendship developed, they attended a performance of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in Boston, an experience that leaves a recognisable mark in The Waste Land.

Before Eliot left for Europe in 1914 he had fallen in love with Hale and declared himself, though without offering any proposal for the future or asking her to wait for his return. She had already entered his poetry in “La Figlia che Piange”, which is dated to late 1911 or 1912. At this point there was nothing to prevent their eventually entering into a fulfilling love affair and a happy marriage. Instead, they embarked on a medieval romance, a Roman de la Rose, a spiritual journey in which she was transformed in Eliot’s eyes into the “Lady”, into Dante’s Beatrice, unattainable and unattained. One might almost describe it as a folie à deux, had its participants not been so high-minded. This romance persisted long after Eliot’s ultimately disastrous and destructive marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, and Gordon establishes the profound influence it had upon the substance and in particular upon the imagery of his work, lasting from The Waste Land through to Four Quartets.

Eliot acknowledged the immensity of the poetic debt he owed her, and one of the most curious features of this tragedy is the way in which in earlier years he urged her to record her emotions in hundreds of letters, and to preserve his side of the correspondence as testimony to their love and her powerful influence on his work. She was hesitant, he insistent that he wished the true story of their love to be told. (He had his eye on posterity from a very early age.)

There can be no doubt of the nature of his feelings for her in these years. It was not entirely a long-distance affair: in 1930 Hale spent the summer in England, attending the Shaw festival at Great Malvern and speaking on American poetry at the Lyceum Club in London (she was a much admired teacher of diction and drama, renowned for her beautiful voice), and Eliot invited her to a tea party with Vivienne at their home in Clarence Gate Gardens. Then aged 39, Hale was “smartly turned out” in a hat and “very pretty” dress. He told her later he had to struggle to maintain the polite detachment of his public face. From the moment Hale came into the room, “Eliot felt ‘something very strong and deep’ between them… Overwhelmed by emotion, he nearly spilt his tea.” Nearly, but not quite: a Prufrock moment.

They drew even closer together, physically and spiritually, on a subsequent visit, when she was staying with friends in Chipping Camden: the imagery of this period belongs unmistakably to his poem “Burnt Norton”. The brutality of his rejection of both Hale and Trevelyan (who gamely referred to herself as “jilted”) is startling: Gordon claims he thought he was protecting Valerie, but at what a cost! Valerie guarded his memory after his death but did not stand in the way of the truth, some of which, because of the length of the embargo on the sealed boxes, she was never to know. But Eliot’s claim on Hale condemned her to a solitary life: Gordon refers several times to her “loneliness”. One could say that Emily Hale has had the last laugh, but she was too good a woman to laugh at the ironies of fate.  

Mary & Mr Eliot: A Sort of Love Story
By Mary Trevelyan and Erica Wagner
Faber, 320pp, £20

The Hyacinth Girl: TS Eliot’s Hidden Muse
By Lyndall Gordon
Virago, 432pp, £25

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[See also: First review: The Waste Land by TS Eliot]

 I read Larkin’s poetry as it was published, with admiration and at times (for he can be very witty) amusement (see “Sunny Prestatyn” and “Annus Mirabilis”). But increasingly, as I aged and death approached, his corpse lantern flickered with less immediate menace, and I began to rally my spirits. Larkin argues that those who don’t fear death are deluding themselves, but he really misses the point. He writes in “Aubade”:

Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

With respect to the rest of the poem, that’s just not true. Of course it’s better not to scare others. Whining in itself is not a good approach to anything. Although he worried about other people (principally his mother) Larkin never had to look after anybody but himself. He sent his laundry home to his mother when he was a grown man. If he had had to care more for others, he might have felt differently.

It’s true that courage doesn’t let you off the grave, but why should it? And what would you want instead of death? More of life as an old fool? What on earth was he so frightened of? As Shakespeare has Caesar say: “Cowards die many times before their deaths,/The valiant never taste of death but once…”

Some of Larkin’s poetry is more optimistic, more conventionally consoling: “Church Going” and “An Arundel Tomb” speak more confidently of the eternal, although they have their inbuilt ironies. His evocations of the natural world are, almost despite himself, magnificent (and he did mock himself for these Wordsworthian moments). I particularly love “The Trees”, which I say to myself every springtime:

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

This does demonstrate how much Larkin loved the world he feared to lose. But so did Seamus Heaney, whose last message, a text from hospital to his wife, makes for me a better mantra: “noli timere”. Do not fear. We need that message too.

This article is part of a series in which writers reflect on Larkin’s life, work and legacy to mark the centenary of his birth. Read the other contributions here.

Her subtitle includes the word “pleasures”, but the first lecture is entitled “Pain and Pen” and her reflections contain at least as much suffering as delight. Writing, for Ferrante, was a struggle. She was a good student and a quick learner, and she was well taught, but her novels convey a sense of peril and risk. Part of this was due to her perception of herself as a woman writer, and her thoughts on women’s writing, as on feminism, are embattled. For a long time, she tells us, she tried to follow male models, and failed to free herself from the cage of male precedent, and the dictating formula of the elementary-school notebook with its ruled lines and fixed margins (two pages of Ferrante’s childhood exercise book are reproduced here). Cages and margins become extended metaphors for her, and she includes a heart-stopping paragraph-long sentence from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable: “I’m in words, made of words, others’ words… born in a cage then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words…”

The tradition of women’s writing in Italy is very different from that of the Anglo-Saxon model, and did not seem to offer Ferrante a sense of openness. And yet it too had its possibilities. When still at high school, she caught sight of these upland vistas in the work of the celebrated Renaissance poet Gaspara Stampa, but Stampa at the same time provided her with the language of abjection. She quotes from Stampa’s Sonnet VIII: “If, a lowly, abject woman, I/can carry within so sublime a flame…” This sounds even more abject in the Italian (which this text does not give, though it does give us Dante in Italian). To be an “abietta e vile donna” is a hard fate, even if the voicing of that fate renders you immortal.

[See also: “True cinema trusts in images”: Elena Ferrante on Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter]

Maybe English women novelists did not feel this sense of degredation? Jane Austen strikes the reader with her supreme self-confidence, and George Eliot may have taken a man’s name but she showed no sense of any kind of innate inferiority. In her essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”, Eliot proclaimed “No educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of fiction,” and her oeuvre in itself proved nothing could stop women from claiming the heights of literary achievement. Ferrante does not mention Eliot, but she explores the splintered and multiple identities of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, and contrasts them with the conventional male sentimental narratives of Hemingway. Her praise of Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas makes one look again at this entertaining and provocative experiment, from which I had chiefly remembered the cook Hélène’s comment on Matisse as an unwelcome dinner guest. (“I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand.”) But, as Ferrante shows, there is more to the book than that.

Maybe Ferrante underestimates the value of entertainment. She is a very serious reader and a very serious writer, and one feels she may have been at times paralysed by her familiarity with literary theory. As a broad generalisation, one might posit that English writers tend to be paralysed by irony, continental writers by theory. But Ferrante makes her way out of that cage – and in one instance at least, was offered a surprising escape by a theoretical work. Rereading (she is strong on rereading and second thoughts) an “extremely important Italian feminist text”, Sexual Difference by Adriana Cavarero, published by the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, she rediscovers the account of the friendship of Amalia (“an excellent natural storyteller”) and Emilia, who carries the text of her own life as written by Amalia “forever in her purse”.

Here we see one of the germs of the long, intense and fluctuating relationship of Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo in the Neapolitan novels, their intertextuality, their interdependence, their necessity to one another – the first novel had originally been entitled “My Necessary Friend”, not My Brilliant Friend. In these lectures, Ferrante shows us behind the scenes of her finished compositions, confirming as some of us had surmised that she had toyed with the idea of trying to create Lila’s own writing. She clearly shares what I once somewhat pretentiously described as Elena’s “extreme ontological insecurity”, and yet she at the same time has found the confidence to reveal the muddled nature of the genesis of what she describes (in a word borrowed from Woolf) as her “scribbling”.

Ferrante vividly describes the liberation that sprang from deciding to write in the first person, in Elena’s voice, a discovery which came, somewhat bizarrely, from writing an extended proposal for the book to a hypothetical publisher. She shows us other epiphanies: sometimes a single word seemed to lead her onwards. She offers as illustration pulling the word “cyanotic” from the dictionary to describe the aquamarine ring on her mother’s finger. It’s not in English a very pretty word, with its connotations of illness and printing ink, and one might prefer her other rejected choices: “sky-blue light”, or “pale celestial aquamarine”. But “cyanotic” seemed to offer her a way of leaving “the dull story of a real family”. It was a false gleam, she eventually decided, leading towards a “dark, almost gothic tale” from which she retreated into a form of “slow realism”. (She writes with insight about the speed of prose compared with the speed of thought, a subject too complex to paraphrase here.)

[See also: Elena Ferrante’s world of interiors]

This passage about the ring reminded me of Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebook, when Anna Wulf is writing at the height of her breakdown: “Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.” And I remember the feeling of immense relief that overcame me when, in one of my novels, I thought of renaming Muswell Hill as Cantor Hill. The false name enables the writer to speak the truth.

It is also good to discover that in Ferrante’s earlier novel, The Days of Abandonment, she as author claims to have had no idea of the meaning of the role played by the meek-spirited German shepherd Otto, or why “the door of the apartment suddenly won’t open and suddenly opens”. Readers remember these details clearly, but they are things that just happened to the writer, who didn’t know what they meant either.

In the Neapolitan novels Ferrante transposes her mother’s ring into a silver bracelet, an image that she evokes insistently (perhaps too insistently). For instance: “I displayed my successes as though they were my mother’s silver bracelet.” I reacted very personally when I read her discussion of the ring in her second lecture, “Aquamarine”, for I have for two or three years been trying to write a memoir, of which the working title was for some time “Opal Ring”, named after my mother’s opal ring, which is now on my finger. I’ve abandoned this title now, but the ring maintains a powerful symbolic and biographical significance.

Now, reading about the cyanotic aquamarine, I wonder if I chose this opening image under the influence of Ferrante? The dates fit, but they don’t fit. In the novels, we read of a bracelet, not of a ring. Did I transpose the bracelet into the ring, or did I arrive at this image of the mother’s legacy independently? Does every woman make such connections? The memory has links that we can never trace.

In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing
Elena Ferrante, trs Ann Goldstein
Europa Editions, 172pp, £12.99

[See also: The misrepresenting of Monica Jones]

The Jones-Larkin narrative has many subplots, including that of the academic politics that transformed the provincial, extramural college of Leicester (“porridge-thick with inferiority complex”) into a successful university, with a pioneering new department of sociology and a flourishing department of English graced by stars such as the professional northerner Richard Hoggart and the “highly metropolitan” GS Fraser. This doesn’t sound a very promising topic, but Sutherland, well placed to understand events in what is now his professional world, deals with it very well and with a scrupulously even hand.

Monica, partisan and embattled, hated this expansion, agreeing with Kingsley Amis that “more will mean worse”. She remained stubbornly traditional in her faith in the role of lecturer, dedicated to the love of and the communication of great literature rather than to careerist publication and self-promotion. But, although somewhat old-fashioned and decidedly anti-modernist in her literary tastes (George Crabbe was one of her favourite poets) she was strikingly unconventional on the podium: “A touch of tartan when the topic was Macbeth: swinging pearls when it was Cleopatra.” These performances made an immense impression on the young Sutherland, as a fresher in 1960, who says that he would have “crawled over broken glass to hear them”.

Sutherland introduces himself fully as a participant about halfway through this memoir. He reveals that his original plan had been to tell more of his own story, but decided to leave the spotlight on her, “where it belongs”, leaving out most of the compliments she bestowed on one of her most promising students. This must have been the right choice. What he has given us has indeed salvaged her from the abusive caricatures of many who knew her, including Larkin himself, and many who knew her only at second hand. He has presented her in all the lively complexity of her prejudices and her fears, her courage and her wit.

***

The most damaging of those caricatures was created by Larkin’s friend Kingsley Amis, in Lucky Jim (1954). Larkin, Amis and Jones, three very clever, first class students, had all been at Oxford at the same time, during the war, and had all then been banished (in Amis’s grumbling view) to the dreary provinces. The version of Monica as Margaret Peel, a needy, dowdy academic spinster, was the version that first lodged in my consciousness, as a scarecrow alarming enough to warn any woman off the academic life. (I took it so personally that I was even upset by her name being Margaret.)

The portrait was inspired, as we know, by Amis’s visit to Leicester, and some details of Monica’s appearance and mannerisms were supplied by Larkin. The names Amis originally chose for her were close enough to invite libel action, and even when they were changed she and her milieu remained readily identifiable. What unforgiveable mixture of spite and insensitivity can have inspired Larkin to betray his friend, ally and lover in a way that would render her everlastingly ridiculous?

Larkin was at that stage an aspiring novelist himself, rather than a poet, and he was not to know that Lucky Jim would become a sensational and lasting success. The accounts of Monica’s bruising encounter with the novel, as she braced herself to confront it in bed, “beautifully arranged” in a nightdress, make painful reading. She poured out her response in hurt, indignant, erotic, impassioned but curiously stoic letters to Larkin.

 Her ever-loyal mother wrote to her some editions later: “Mark my words that book will die.” But of course it didn’t. Its version of her endured, convincing readers that she was a woman who fancied herself in “a green paisley frock” worn with “low-heeled quasi-velvet shoes”, who had improbably ensnared poor Jim Dixon because of his “politeness, friendly interest, ordinary concern, a good-natured willingness to be imposed upon”. (As Larkin himself could have commented, in his customary epistolary diction to Amis, “Ogh! Argh! Gob!”) Philip Hensher, reviewing Larkin’s collected Letters to Monica in 2010, refers to the “venomous accuracy” of Kingsley Amis’s portrait and asks, rhetorically, who “can do anything but give thanks that they never dined with Monica Jones”?

But it wasn’t even accurate about her shoes. She always wore high heels, stylish ones at that, and was well known in later years for tripping along in them from the station to her country cottage by the rushing Tyne. (She never learned to drive.) She may have dressed flamboyantly and eccentrically, but Larkin loved her red suspender belts and the holes in her silken underwear and her principal-boy legs, and encouraged her to describe what she was wearing when she was writing to him.

Monica, writing to Larkin in the first shock of the impact of Lucky Jim, says, “K. would love to make himself believe that I am the sort of character who pretends to do in herself with sleeping pills and uses the wrong lipstick and dresses with fatal wrongness.” But Sutherland convicts Larkin himself, as well as Amis, of “double-dyed” treachery, and robustly comments that this was the moment “when she could/should have broken with Philip, and sued the backside off [the publisher] Gollancz, rendering Amis an untouchable author”.

[see also: A life more ordinary: salvaging Philip Larkin’s reputation]

But she didn’t break with Philip. She wrote him one of her letters. By this time they were already too deeply embroiled, committed to a lifetime of interdependence and to a long dying fall of alcoholism and ill health, marked by his half-cocked infidelities and her tenacious loyalty. (In one letter, intriguingly, Larkin suggests that his relationship with Monica “is a kind of homosexual relationship, disguised”: what can he have meant by that?) They were engaged in a kind of folie à deux, egging one another on in extreme and often unattractive attitudes: well-read people posing as philistines, enjoying The Archers, claiming to fancy the little bunny rabbits of Beatrix Potter and Racey Helps, playing infantile games, railing at immigrants, and pornographically defacing a novel by Iris Murdoch.

***

This last aberration reminds one of the folie à deux of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, who amused themselves by defacing the jackets of books from Islington Public Library. Their folly ended with a bang, not a long-drawn-out whimper, but their embellishments of the Arden Shakespeare and Agatha Christie have been put on display for public admiration, a dignity not likely to be afforded to the scatological Larkin-Jones version of The Flight from the Enchanter. Indeed, as Sutherland suggests, the woke generation that posthumously applauds Orton is more likely to hurl into the Humber the statue of Larkin that now steps out at Hull station.

During the first half of this memoir the reader is sucked down into a vortex of guilty Schadenfreude, as we eavesdrop on this odd couple tormenting themselves and one another with jealousies, rages, and vituperative attacks on their friends and colleagues.

She was excessively afraid of birds and burglars; he was morbidly afraid of death. They were both, according to Sutherland, “world-class malades imaginaires”. As we know, Larkin spent his whole life fearing death, a fear that inspired some of his finest poems. He was deeply exploitative, and selfishly indecisive, and he knew it. She wasn’t as afraid of life as he was, but she was often loud about her misery: after ten years at Leicester (where she was to spend the rest of her teaching career) she writes that she has wasted “my best years and nothing to show… You talk as though you’re as badly off as me till I believe it, but of course you’re not: you may be as miserable as me, but in the world’s eye you are a successful man… I don’t deserve the dignity of being miserable, ridiculous is what I am… a reject, an incapable…” How glad we are not to be them, not to be there, not to be imprisoned in their lockdown of complaint and paralysis! Reading about their gloom eventually elevates the reader beyond Schadenfreude into a kind of blessed exhilaration.

***

Their letters were their escape, their bond, their bondage. Thousands and thousands of words they poured out to one another, over the years, a correspondence that Sutherland compares to that of Héloïse and Abelard, to that of Swift and Stella. Their obscenities he relates to what Virginia Woolf called, in the Swift-Stella context, the “little language” of love, a lovers’ code that is a deliberate defiance of civilised and academic society. And we do know that Larkin was indebted to Monica for some of his insights, even for some of the words in his poems. He dedicated The Less Deceived to her, unambiguously, and “An Arundel Tomb” stands as a more ambiguous memorial to their mutual deceit and devotion, to their strange habit of taking “churchy” and churchgoing vacations in cathedral cities. A confirmed atheist, we are told he wept sentimental tears over his favourite hymn, “Lead Kindly Light”, when Monica persuaded the village silver band in Northumberland to play it for him.

The narrative changes pace when John Sutherland himself enters it in 1960, and we are suddenly presented with the living, breathing, pub-going Monica, fond of and flirtatious with “her boys”. She is very different from any of the epistolary personae she adopts for Larkin, and much more fun. It is a relief to find her, surrounded by admiring students, sociably sinking a few pints at the Marquis of Granby or the Clarendon.

John and Monica became good friends, eating and drinking together, and she spotted early that her new protégé was a “great boozer”. Sutherland has written candidly about his own problems with alcohol, confronted with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous years later, and he believes Monica spotted his predilection early, warning him not to get so “sloshed”. He managed to stay on the wagon for the vital five months before his finals, then lapsed. This makes him less judgemental about and more sensitive to her alcoholism, which became more and more pronounced, as did Larkin’s. But to her “boys” at this period, she was accepted as “a studiously good-looking woman, sharp on repartee, who bought her rounds… a conversationalist… amusingly indiscreet, with the ever-present tang of malice”. This doesn’t sound very like Margaret Peel of Lucky Jim.

But not long after these happy golden years, as Sutherland was later to discover, she was to descend into heavy solitary drinking, and into serious ill health. She was at last allowed to appear with Larkin in public, as his official partner, and to live with him, because he couldn’t manage without her. They did love one another, after their fashion, but it clearly wasn’t the kind of elevating love that most take the last lines of “An Arundel Tomb” to describe.

Andrew Motion wrote and published his biography of Larkin while Monica was still alive, and had to tread cautiously. Her “boy” John has done her a great service by posthumously rescuing her from Larkin’s abuse and Amis’s misrepresentation. This isn’t a dutiful feminist remake of an undervalued woman. It is a tribute to a real woman, who lived a real life. And who else could or would have told us that she “could play the kitchen range like Yehudi Menuhin”? 

[see also: Philip Roth and the repellent]

Margaret Drabble’s novels include “The Dark Flood Rises” (Canongate)

Monica Jones, Philip Larkin and Me: Her Life and Long Loves 
John Sutherland
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 288pp, £20

 The central square of this literary map is Mecklenburgh Square, where all five women had lived, in overlapping periods. As Wade reminds us, Dorothy L Sayers’s “greatest” novel, Gaudy Night, begins with the sentences “Harriet Vane sat at her writing table and stared out into Mecklenburg Square. The late tulips made a brave show in the Square garden…” Many women of my generation were captivated by Gaudy Night and the questions it posed about the conflict between academe and marriage, scholarship and sex. And it still has a following, for these conflicts have not gone away. Academe, in Sayers’s thriller, is Oxford, the cloister, celibacy and servants; the Square represents sexual and intellectual freedom, independence and, for some of its female inhabitants, a fair amount of self-catering.

Sayers was proud of being wooed by the undeserving but desired writer and translator John Cournos over a dinner in the Square of “five courses, and they were all thoroughly successful, and none of them came out of tins – except the jelly mixture, of course”. We also learn that Sayers had “delightful underclothing, all over little purple parrots”, and a futurist bedcover in orange, black and violet. This was freedom indeed, and an income as well as a room of her own.

The freedom involved disastrous love affairs and an illegitimate and largely unacknowledged child, but it also brought her wealth, fame and lasting success – and these were what she wanted most. Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey live on in Sayers’s fiction, although they represent a vanished world of class and privilege. Sayers never achieved the kind of evenly balanced and free relationship she posited, but at least she imagined it. As Doris Lessing might have said, she sketched out “a beautiful, impossible blueprint”.

There is quite a lot in this book about cooking and the problems of domesticity in a small space, some of them reminiscent of Katharine Whitehorn’s 1961 classic, Cooking in a Bedsitter. “The kitchens of history” were the chosen study of another and less well known of Wade’s subjects, the stylishly dressed and well-connected historian and LSE political activist Eileen Power, who lived in the Square from 1922 until her death in 1940. Her “surprise bestseller”, Medieval People (1924), was advertised as a “classic of social history”, and focused on the lives of those women whom history usually overlooked, as had her Medieval English Nunneries (1922), both titles familiar to Woolf.

Wade claims that there was a conscious tradition of “Mecklenburgh Square women resetting the boundaries of history”, and she makes a good case for a sense of female solidarity shared by these five women, whose personal lives were often chaotic and unorthodox. None of them had what the dons and scouts in Gaudy Night would have classified as regular marriages, and all had unconventional views of sexuality.

The private life of the American-born poet Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), who published as HD, was a flamboyant roller-coaster, the outlines of which are obscured by her many fictionalised versions of it and by Freudian interpretations from the master himself. She was extremely tall and in her prime very famous. She was involved for years with Ezra Pound, and married Richard Aldington, to whom she was not physically attracted, and with whom she co-edited the imagist periodical the Egoist. (Aldington was also a friend of Cournos, the unsuccessful but prolific writer for whom Sayers cooked and with whom she had an affair: these literary lives had many linkages.)

HD had a child called Perdita by another dubious literary character called Cecil Gray, and was the long-term associate of the philanthropic and gender-ambivalent poet Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), who at times overbearingly and insistently protected her and Perdita. (HD and Bryher described themselves as cousins, to pre-empt speculation about their relationship, and Bryher also masked it by two marriages, one to a man who was also HD’s lover.) Freud apparently had told HD that she was the “perfect bisexual”, thus illustrating Woolf’s vision of the androgynous writer. In HD’s own view, her life was a success; she had a long career, many relationships, many friends and four grandchildren. An experimental life, but not an unhappy one.

Perdita was to remember playing under the table while Bryher tried to write: her mother was the more important partner, and not to be disturbed. Wade concludes, “For HD, Bryher enabled a way of life where motherhood and creative work could be combined, if precariously: a life she had not felt possible.”

The oldest of Wade’s principal subjects is the classical scholar Jane Harrison, born in 1850, who lived in Mecklenburgh Street for the last two years of her life, dying there in 1928. Although her scholarship is dated, some of her pioneering concepts about matriarchy live on, and she is remembered for Woolf’s evocation of her in A Room of One’s Own, “formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress”, and for Augustus John’s portrait of her, which hangs in Newnham College, Cambridge, of which she was a fellow.

Shabby she may have been in old age, but in her youth she had been (like most of Wade’s five) showily dressed, as she travelled the country delivering histrionic lectures “in spangled satin gowns, strings of Egyptian beads and a glittering shawl”: there is a photograph of her leaning dramatically against a pillar, robed as Alcestis, dated 1887. She was not a dowdy don.

Her career was undoubtedly hampered by her gender, a fact which she resented, and she is said to have had various “romantic disappointments”. Nevertheless she strikes the reader as a scholar of exceptional gifts. Some of the most interesting pages in this book describe her passion for languages: she took up Russian during the First World War and told Gilbert Murray that learning the language made her “weep for joy”. “Specifically, Harrison was fascinated by Russian grammar, especially the far-famed much-dreaded imperfective aspect – a tense which captures a sense of ongoing action and expresses a collective memory of a past beyond that of the individual…”

Harrison attended Henri Bergson’s lectures, and was much taken with his formulation of la durée, which considered time as an ongoing concept and a series of changes that permeate one another. Wade’s application of this concept to modernism and to the works of Woolf, Joyce and Proust is useful and revealing. We see how the lives in the Square were in flux, ebbing and flowing into one another and creating something larger and more lasting than themselves.

Like HD, Harrison became involved in later life with an adoring and controlling writer, Hope Mirrlees, a woman considerably younger than herself, and more unambiguously committed to what Woolf referred to as “sapphism”. They travelled together, lived abroad together, worked at home together and shared fantasies about bears. Mirrlees, whose work has recently received more attention, was blamed for the bonfire that Harrison made of her papers on leaving Cambridge in 1922, which left much of her life undocumented.

Woolf’s life, in contrast, has been perhaps over-recorded and it continues to attract the intense scrutiny of scholars. Number 37 Mecklenburgh Square was the last London home of the Woolfs and the Hogarth Press: they moved there from Tavistock Square in August 1939, amid sandbags and the construction of air-raid shelters. They found the kitchen very small, the stairs bad, and no carpets. This was not a good time. They travelled backwards and forwards to Sussex until the Square was bombed and extensively damaged in September 1940. The section on the last two years of Woolf’s life shows her struggling to adapt to the constant movement, to her village neighbours, to war and loss and the very real threat of invasion. She needed to keep working and she needed to resurrect the past.

To these years belong her life of Roger Fry (1940), her last novel, Between the Acts (1941), and an attempt at memoir, in which she tries to recall the lives of the maids and servants who had waited on the Stephen family when she was a child.

Wade repeatedly stresses the constant pressure of living with servants. A writer needs a room of her own, and a couple, married or unmarried, may well need a house of their own, without domestic spies. The women of the Square were leading privileged if precarious lives, some supported by family money, and they were dependent on the labour of other women – of maids, servants, cooks and cleaners. The only way for a professional woman to avoid domesticity altogether was to live in a woman’s college, a point made again and again in Gaudy Night, and a point that certainly occurred to me and my contemporaries at Cambridge. If we stayed on and took the gown, we would never have to lay our own fires, change our own beds, cook our own dinners. I still think about this from time to time, and wonder if I made the right choice.

The Woolfs went to some lengths to square their socialist consciences with regard to their servants, but it could not be done. Virginia could fantasise about a life without cooking, but she couldn’t face the cleaning. I once had an unpleasant exchange of letters with Rebecca West on this topic – I think I had taken exception to her grandly moaning about “the servant problem”.

Alison Light explored this perilous territory in her ground-breaking Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2007), and Wade is acutely aware of the ongoing problems that confront women when they employ other less advantaged women to do their dirty work. Feminist though she was, Woolf in 1940 could contemplate, albeit playfully, a biography of her servant Mabel, expressed in the shocking phrase “how profoundly succulent it [would] be… her subterranean London life”. No reason why one shouldn’t write the life of a servant, or of a dog, but the word “succulent” is deeply offensive.

I confess that this collection of life stories has a particular charm for me, because for many years I rented a room of my own in Bloomsbury, just off Queen Square, and would go there three days a week when the children were at school to write my novels. I liked the idea of “going to work” on the 24 bus, and leaving domesticity behind me. There is something about that neighbourhood of London, so vividly evoked by Wade, which encourages high thoughts and hard work. The statues and blue plaques, the British Museum, Russell Square, Gower Street, Brunswick Square, even Great Ormond Street – they were all a part of my literary map, all a part of my writing life. It is good to revisit them and their eloquent ghosts. 

Margaret Drabble’s most recent novel is “The Dark Flood Rises” (Canongate)

Square Haunting
Francesca Wade
Faber & Faber, 432pp, £20

For as long as I can remember, I have been enraptured by the underwater world. Tadpoles and newts and water boatmen in ponds and ditches enchanted me, and my first visit to the seaside, after the war, was full of discovery. Shells, mermaids’ purses, cuttlefish bones, transparent shrimps in rock pools, sea urchins, little dabs almost invisible on the sand in the shallow – all were a wonder to me. Shore and sea life were much richer then than they are now. One of my favourite books was The Water Babies, with its wealth of marine lore and arcane information. I devoured books about the monsters of the deep and read Jules Verne more times that I can remember.

An underwater life would have been thrilling. But I couldn’t do the science to take my studies beyond O-level biology, and although I enjoyed swimming I didn’t like keeping my eyes open underwater, so I was deeply unqualified for any kind of marine career. There was one glorious summer when I learned to use a snorkel, in Yugoslavia, and entered the Technicolor realm of the fishes, but back home I lost the knack. I made the best of my disappointment by writing a novel called The Sea Lady with a marine biologist as protagonist. The research for this was almost as good as the real thing. I visited aquaria, I talked to shark experts, I read books about the Woods Hole Institute and the Antarctic and famous oceanographers. I made a vicarious journey along the road not taken, which is one of the things that novelists are lucky enough to be able to do.

This article is from our “Road not taken” series

The standout performance was by Mary Morris, in the star role of the Stepdaughter. She was mesmerising. Her gamine and savagely teasing features, her intensity, the intelligence of her delivery were unforgettable. I don’t know how well I understood the play, which was written very much for the theatre rather than the screen, but it worked brilliantly, in the starkness of its black and white imagery. I felt I was entering the adult world as I watched.

Morris had a distinguished career, but mainly in the kind of plays and films that I didn’t go to see, and I didn’t rediscover her until recently, as I replayed DVDs of the BBC TV Shakespeare productions, some of which are outstanding. She was the Duchess of Gloucester in Richard 11 (1978) and Queen Elinor in King John (1984). Her power was undiminished.

In 1954 I fell in love with drama, an aspiring tragedy queen, and at Cambridge five or six years later I played the Stepdaughter in a production at the ADC. Ian McKellen played the Son, and John Fortune the Producer. We all thought we were wonderful. Then, in 1981, I saw my son playing the Son in an Oxford University Dramatic Society production. The Son refuses to associate himself with the antics of the other characters, and at the end he walked off the stage, away from the curtain call, through the audience, and out the back of the building, never to be seen again – a great coup de théâtre, which my son says he has forgotten. What a play, what a playwright, what long memories.

The night that changed my life: read more from our series in which writers share the cultural encounters that shaped them

It is less intimately personal than earlier works, which are striking essays in self-revelation. Happening (2000) is a detailed account of an illegal abortion procured in 1963 while she was still a student in Rouen, and contains graphic material which simultaneously shocks and informs: she takes the reader day by day through the anxious waiting for the stain in the knickers, the growing certainty, the visits to cautious and unhelpful doctors, to the rendezvous with the abortionist, Madame PR, in her well-remembered apartment. She walks around for days with a probe inside her, and eventually aborts in the hostel bathroom, the foetus breaking out “like a bomb or a grenade erupting, the bung of a cask popping”. Neither she nor her possibly disapproving student accomplice have any idea whether or not to cut the cord (they do, and blood rushes out in spurts) or how to dispose of the “Indian doll”, with its tiny body and its huge head.

Understandably she never forgot a moment of this trauma, and in revisiting it (through diary, memory and location) and recreating it she rightly believes she is rendering us all a service. “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people”. At one point she perhaps ironically suggests she should have dedicated the volume to the unsympathetic and avaricious Mme PR, who did not seem to be doing very well at her profession (her apartment was poorly furnished) but who did the job when no one else would.

The Possession (2002) is an account of the overwhelming jealousy that seized Ernaux when her younger lover left her (albeit at her request) and then finds another woman who turns out, infuriatingly, to be more or less the same age as herself. (“I realised that I was an interchangeable part of a series.”) Her attempts to discover the identity of her rival are described in paranoid, tragi-comic detail – a shaming frenzy of anonymous phone calls, lurking in corridors, searches on the internet. She writes about sex with Gallic frankness, but “the image of his cock on the other woman’s belly” does not torment her as much as the thought of their underwear mingled together in the laundry basket.

In this short work’s only footnote, Ernaux raises an interesting point: if she is telling the whole truth, are the characters in her story likely to be identified by those who may have “decoded the system of substitutions I have used – for the sake of discretion, or some basically conscientious reason”? She uses initials (presumably false) for names, and alters precise locations. The ethics of memoir clearly concern her, but they do not inhibit her, as far as we can read.

In The Years she moves outwards towards a broader canvas, a longer and more collective viewpoint. It covers her entire life-span, from her birth at the beginning of the Second World War, through the growing affluence and confidence of the 1960s and 1970s, to 2008 with its urban riots and immigration scandals. She adopts a third-person narrative voice, using photographs of herself through the decades to provide visual anchors of chronology, as she evolves from “a little girl in a dark swimsuit on a pebble beach” in 1949 to a 66-year-old with reddish-blonde hair and a lined face, and her olive-skinned granddaughter sprawling on her lap, at Christmas 2006. But this is not that woman’s story: she is the objective, largely unseen reporter of her times.

For those of my age, whose lives occupy the same time-span as hers, this is a book with myriad resonances. At times historical memories diverge sharply: we were in battling Britain, she was in occupied France. Her family never tired of “talking about the winter of  ’42” when the Germans arrived, of the inconsiderate Americans, of “the always courteous English”. But many other memories converge: of food shortages, of rag dolls and dirt floors, of poor hygiene, of dogs roaming free and mating in the middle of the street. (I’d forgotten the dogs: you don’t see that now, but you certainly did then.) Then the stampedes for bananas, fireworks and, in France, the return of National Lottery tickets.

Ernaux was born into a family of weavers and carters in rural Normandy, and her mother, after working in the margarine factory and the rope factory, became a shopkeeper, running a general store. I recognise the world: my grandparents ran a B&B, in a village which had no electricity and very few flush toilets. Her evocation of this vanished age and her use of the collective “we” remind one of the opening sequences of Madame Bovary, set in the same region, where a strong communal consciousness surveyed change and innovation with a mixture of scepticism, stubborn superstition, and hope. From this, we have all moved on.

She charts societal development by invoking cultural moments and technological innovations. We had Elvis Presley, LPs and record players, Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer (already old, but new to her), the 2CV, Formica; then the Caravelle jetliner, flavoured yoghurt, transistor radios, The Cranes are Flying and Last Year at Marienbad, twin sets and Mary Quant. Some of these touchstones signify across national barriers: others, specific to French popular culture, are footnoted by the translator, Alison L Strayer, who also copes ably with rendering outdated expressions such as “old geezer” and “nincompoop”. There is no footnote, alas, for Charlie Hebdo, which appears frequently in these pre-massacre days, and now needs no gloss.

The public backdrop is sketched in; in the far distance Dien Bien Phu falls, while the war in Algeria comes to Paris. But part of Ernaux’s genius lies in noticing the insignificant and saying the unsavoury. She is acute on the subject of sanitary towels and condoms, birth control methods, sexual fear and shame, female lust, and irrational fear of Aids (she goes to Aids tests for purification as though “to confession”). She contrasts private and public moments in a passage in which her narrator describes her memory of the 1954 All Saints’ Day ambush in Algeria as the day on which she saw “a young woman squatting over the grass, as if to lay an egg, and standing again, pushing her skirts down. To this storehouse of illegitimate memory she consigns things too unthinkable, shameful or crazy to put into words.” The shameful and the crazy are her domain.

But Ernaux is also a sharp observer of what we now call “consumer society”. Some of her observations are a little troubling: can anyone really have thought the scart plug a “soothing” sign of material progress? But she is surely right that our ever-increasing craving for new gadgets, new technologies, for upgrading, is unstoppable. She takes the story on from the point at which Georges Perec, in his 1965 novel Les Choses, left off. Perec (whom she salutes in passing) died in 1982, and had been fascinated by brand names and by advertising, having worked in that field himself: how enthralled he would have been by Ernaux’s example of marketing excess, which claims that “L’Evian fruité, c’est plus musclé”. What can that mean, in any language?

Some of us will not own or recognise some of the objects she names, and I for one wish I’d never even heard of the toilet macerator. There is no stopping progress, and as she says, we don’t know where we are going. But at least we are all in it together. “To think of oneself in collective terms brought a certain exaltation,” she writes. Towards the end of a long life, Ernaux has gained a long and communal perspective. She reminds us that we are material beings, and that we remember in and with the body. And our communal memory makes us part of one body. That is, in its way, comforting.

Margaret Drabble’s novels include “The Dark Flood Rises” (Canongate)

The Years
Annie Ernaux. Translated by Alison L Strayer
Fitzcarraldo, 240pp, £12.99

 Fleur Jaeggy is multi-lingual and has also worked as a translator. Swiss by birth, born in Zurich in 1940 into an upper-class family, she writes in Italian, but she has also translated into Italian Thomas De Quincey’s The Last Days of Immanuel Kant and Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives.

In These Possible Lives (2017, translated by Minna Zallman Proctor) she offers three very short biographical sketches of Keats, De Quincey, and the fin-de-siècle symbolist orientalist Jewish Parisian Schwob. Schwob is a character best known to me, bizarrely, as a kind friend to Arnold Bennett in his lonely Paris days; more pertinently, he was a friend of Stéphane Mallarmé and Alfred Jarry, and is said to have influenced Borges. Her three subjects are loosely linked by opium, by malady, by a delectatio morosa or morbid delight, and her essays are prose poems rather than factual narrations. She does not give facts or dates, but tells us of Wordsworth’s habit of cutting the pages of books with a butter knife, of De Quincey’s nightmares, of Schwob’s love for a tubercular working-class girl and her dolls, of Keats begging “in a lucid delirium” for more laudanum. Their hallucinatory intensity and heightened language recall the prose poems of Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, with their invocations of wine and hashish, their pose of le poète maudit.

Jaeggy invokes Baudelaire in Sweet Days of Discipline – recently republished by the independent imprint And Other Stories – along with the Brontës and Novalis, and on the very first page, Robert Walser. Walser was a German-speaking Swiss writer who died in the Appenzell snow in 1956, after decades spent in various sanatoria and institutions; the novella is set in a boarding school in the same region and in the same mountainous but prettified and half-tamed landscape, described as “an Arcadia of sickness”. Thus we are confronted from the start with premonitions of doom and decline and ill-health – the mountains inevitably suggest tuberculosis and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

The frame of literary reference is wide and multicultural, reminding us that Switzerland is the linguistic crossroads of western Europe, and the text is sprinkled with German and French phrases – the heavy German Zwang, the softer French faisandé and carnet de bal. The narrator speaks in German to her father, Herr Doktor, but in French to Frédérique, the slightly older fellow pupil with whom she becomes (for life, as emerges in later short stories) obsessed.

The story is deceptively simple. It opens: “At 14 I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell”, and we discover that the narrator is a lonely and isolated girl who has spent her life in institutions, rarely hearing from her mother in Brazil, spending uncomfortable vacations with her father and dancing in hotel ballrooms with his elderly acquaintances. She is uneasy in her relationships with her fellow boarders, and mildly repelled by her room-mate, a German girl from Nuremberg who wears bright white underwear and files her nails and combs her curls and dreams of lovers. She describes her own condition with a chilly understated dignity. “I hardly got any letters. They were handed out at mealtime. It wasn’t nice not to get much post.”

The atmosphere of an all-female community of adolescent girls is powerfully conveyed; it is a stagnant hothouse world of spying and of “crushes” (passione in Italian), of teachers who have favourites, of girls waiting for Daddy to come to dance with them at the school ball, or to whisk them away at the end of term in a black Mercedes. There are echoes of other novels in the boarding-school genre: the references to the Brontës are not accidental, though the food at the Bausler Institut is much better than the burnt porridge of Jane Eyre’s Lowood, and the narrator is reprimanded for dunking her bread in her coffee “out of sheer greed”.

Villette also hovers behind the text, and Mme Beck shares characteristics with the solid head of the Institut, Frau Hofstetter, “broad as a cupboard in a blue tailleur”, who takes a fancy to the only black girl in the school, daughter of the president of an African state, a child who is clearly tubercular. It is suggested that the standard of teaching is high, though our heroine is interested only in French literature.

Those who have attended a girls’ boarding school will recognise the rituals – the obligatory pairing off for walks, the pigeon holes too often empty, the keeping of locked diaries, the emphasis on the neat folding of clothes in cupboards, the packing of trunks at the end of term. (I am embarrassed to be reminded of how pleased I was when the maths teacher, a severe woman whom I with reason feared, told me I was learning to be “a good little packer” as she supervised the row of trunks laid out in the school gym – laid out, Jaeggy would have written, like coffins. (School lockers, Jaeggy says, are “the dear little mortuary of our thoughts”.)

Jaeggy insists that convents and girls’ schools are inevitably full of spies. “A boarding school is a strong institution, since in a sense it is founded on blackmail.” The question of whether Catholic or Protestant schools are more prone to blackmail is raised but not answered; the narrator had been to a Catholic convent before the Bausler, and her father is Protestant, but her sensibility is caught in the baroque swirls and eddies of Swiss theology and practice. In Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a study of the intensity of relationships in a girls’ day school in Edinburgh, we remember that the pupil who betrays Miss Brodie, Sandy, converts to Catholicism (like Spark) and at the end of the novel is seen clutching at the bars of her grille, as if to escape. It is a disturbing image, and one that Jaeggy would have recognised.

The narrator is mesmerised by her bold and free-thinking friend Frédérique, and their complex relationship – not physical, but une amitié amoureuse – lives on after their schooldays into a bleak, dreamlike aftermath as Frédérique becomes mentally ill, tries to burn down her mother’s house in Geneva, and is institutionalised, this time forever.

This short work is packed with violent premonitions, sudden deaths, stabbings, hangings and the language of insanity. There are metaphors drawn from shrouds, altar cloths, coffins, corpses, funeral marches, gallows, guillotines, nooses, cults of the dead and, most affecting of all, stone tablets set in churchyard walls. We are all dying, even as children: as Rilke believed, we carry our deaths within us. Frédérique tells the narrator she has an old woman’s hands; the schoolgirls inhabit “a sort of senile childhood” and they have “a mortuary look”. 

Frédérique reappears in a volume of short stories, I Am the Brother of XX (translated by Gini Alhadeff), suggesting there was or is a real-life source, along with other sketches which are overtly autobiographical and introduce us to Oliver Sacks, Italo Calvino, Jaeggy’s husband the writer and publisher Roberto Calasso, and, most significantly, the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann.

The fictional stories deal with by now familiar motifs of arson, ill health, insomnia, suicide, isolation, hauntings, vendettas and murder: some are Gothic tales of the supernatural, featuring ghosts and saints and mandrakes. We learn in “An Encounter in the Bronx” that Jaeggy herself, morbidly sensitive to cold, types in fingerless gloves, indoors, swaddled in layers of clothing. The prose here has grown even more staccato and poetic: here are the orchids from a sinister tale of jealousy, “Agnes”: “Growing in the damp. White, with purple eyelets. Rosy, pale, an evil expression. Acidulous. Yellow. They last a long time. Not much earth. Not much nourishment. They reawaken in the dark, at night. Avid for company. When they wilt, they become small skulls in tuxedos.” These are flowers from the world of Sylvia Plath: death blooms, fleurs du mal. And death haunts: the death of Sissi, Empress of Austria, assassinated on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1898; the suicide of the Austrian poet and painter Adalbert Stifter, who cut his throat in Linz in 1868 (English-language readers have to look these events up: there are no notes).

There is no note to tell you the background to the shortest piece of all, a single paragraph called “The Aseptic Room”. It begins: “Once with Ingeborg we talked about old age, she smiled at that word, but that word was accompanied neither by the heart nor by a real smile.” The aseptic room is in the burns unit of the hospital of Sant’Eugenio in Rome, and it is clear that we are reading of the death of Ingeborg Bachmann in 1973, who, like Barbara Hepworth, appears to have set her bedroom on fire with a lighted cigarette. Bachmann was a very well-known poet and dramatist, whose long correspondence with Paul Celan, master of the elliptical short poem, was recently turned into a film, The Dreamed Ones.

She also appears, more happily, in the last recollection in the volume, “The Saltwater House”, an episode that brings her back to life in the summer of 1971, as she and Jaeggy set off together for a summer month in Poveromo on the Tuscan coast in an Alfa Romeo 2600. The house was vast, the water salt, the tea disgusting and the garden sickly, but they seem to have a good time, with visits from writers and publishers and Jaeggy’s husband-to-be, Calasso. The second sentence of this episode must be one of the most everyday sentences that Jaeggy ever wrote: “Ingeborg Bachmann manned the road maps.” They did not know then how near the end of the journey was. But Jaeggy writes, simply, “I would have liked it to go on a long time. And always.”

Margaret Drabble’s most recent book is “The Dark Flood Rises” (Canongate). She is an honorary patron of Cambridge Literary Festival (13-15 April)

Sweet Days of Discipline
Fleur Jaeggy. Translated by Tim Parks
And Other Stories, 102pp, £8.99

I Am the Brother of XX
Fleur Jaeggy. Translated by Gini Alhadeff
And Other Stories, 144pp, £8.99

These Possible Lives
Fleur Jaeggy. Translated by Minna Proctor
W W Norton, 64pp, £9.99

I was beginning to write fiction and the experimentalism of the new French novelists seemed to me arid and uninteresting. All I knew of Perec was that he had written a whole novel without using the letter E, an exercise that seemed to me, before I read it, to be deeply pointless: indeed, offensively frivolous. I’m afraid I sometimes made this point in public, when talking about the state of fiction. One should never speak of books one has not read.

I had never heard of Oulipo, a group of writers who believed in formal constraints and self-imposed problems, of which he was a member.

How wrong I was about Perec. I might never have read him had I not decided to write a book about the history of jigsaw puzzles, and a friend tipped me off about the greatest puzzle book ever written, La Vie mode d’emploi (1978), translated by David Bellos as Life: a User’s Manual (1987). I was enraptured by this masterpiece, which seemed to combine the virtues of two of my favourite French writers, Émile Zola and Jules Verne, and to add an extraordinary imaginative complexity of its own.

It is a vast mosaic, an enormous tapestry, a gigantic manual of jigsaw-making and solving, and an immensely satisfying narrative about Paris. It is bustling with life and interlocking stories: it is the reverse of arid. It is written to a plan, based on a chess problem known as the “Knight’s Tour”. I don’t understand chess but this did not matter at all.

I immersed myself in this novel, the unifying vitality of which soars above its formidable but playful intertextuality. I went on to read Bellos’s engrossing 1993 biography, which has what is surely one of the best descriptions of a successful psychoanalysis ever written, and his translation of Perec’s moody, atmospheric first novel, Les Choses, set partly in a morbidly quiescent Tunisia. Les Choses is as memorable as Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes is, to me, forgettable.

Perec’s passion for classi­fication, for enumeration, for lists, for patterns, for the thinginess of things, is strangely captivating and, despite an underlying melancholy, exhilarating. In this, he resembles Zola, who was also obsessed by detail, by “le saut dans les étoiles sur le tremplin de l’observation exacte”, which I take to mean “a leap to the stars from the springboard of precise observation”. The fact takes flight towards the symbol – I’m sure Zola said this somewhere, too, but I can’t find the reference. Anyway, I took this position to justify my love of a hyperrealism that reaches experimentalism and I found in Perec the most extreme manifestation of this tendency.

Eventually I got to grips with the novel without an E, La Disparition (1969), translated into English in 1994 by Gilbert Adair in a witty and inventive version under the title A Void; and with W ou le Souvenir d’enfance (1975), which descends into the world of the concentration camp and the Holocaust, to which Perec lost his mother. Nothing playful here at all, but a heroic attempt to salvage and reconstruct his past from a few fragments of memory, a few photographs, a few place names.

Georges Perec died of lung cancer in 1982 after many years of heavy smoking. His prose is punctuated by cigarettes. He often said that his life would be better if he could quit smoking, or organise his library better. He never managed to do either, but he left us some idiosyncratic and incomparable works.

Margaret Drabble is the author of “The Millstone”, “The Pure Gold Baby” and other works

Dickson’s project was in part inspired by the multilingual performances from nearly 50 countries that made up the World Shakespeare Festival in London in 2012, which ran parallel with the Olympics. Watching The Comedy of Errors played by Afghans, he wondered why the troupe had chosen this play, found good reasons (connected with exile, loss and separation) and in due course set out to travel in search of the multiple meanings of the world’s greatest playwright. It is a romantic, joyous, if at times (for him) exhausting exploration, and our hero (the picaresque vocabulary seems to come naturally) is an emotional witness, on a sentimental journey, easily moved to tears, particularly by the late plays.

He engages with all those he meets, from divas and directors to students and scholars, and has a light but expert hand with the travelogue aspect of his task, evoking landscapes and skyscapes as well as theatres and performances and libraries. The sprawling townships of the American Midwest, Cape Town’s Table Mountain and Robben Island, and the cultural citadel of Weimar (so sinisterly close to Buchenwald) are drawn with a painterly eye and much sociological curiosity. He’s very good on the topography and the place names of the desolate: Lady Bug Lane, Stagecoach Way, Nugget Lane, Black Bear Lane, Slave Girl Lane . . .

There is a fine pen portrait of snowy Gdansk, in Poland, with its skies the blue of raw silk, its bruisingly cold air, its teetering spires and towers and busy cranes, and its roofs, “toffee-coloured [with] a gleam of verdigris”. Here Dickson encounters another romantic, my old friend Jerzy Limon, whom I met long ago in the heady days of Solidarnosc. At that time, as a young scholar, he was dreaming of building a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe in honour of travelling players from England, forced from their native land by Puritanism and censorship. It seemed for decades a cloud-capped fantasy but the theatre is now built, not quite as originally planned, but prospering. The power of dreams has turned it into a magnificent edifice of menacing black brick, with a retractable roof, and galleries “finished in gleaming honey-coloured birch and beech”.

In his search for the reasons why so many countries have fallen under Shakespeare’s spell and made him their own – by a sometimes dangerous process that the Germans call “nostrification” – Dickson points out that the playwright, who as far as we know never left England, set a remarkable proportion of his dramas abroad. The Forest of Arden and Bosworth Field are represented, but so are Italy, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, ancient Rome and the newly discovered islands of the Indies: his world is much wider than that of the city-based Dekker and Middleton. Dickson notes that adaptations of The Merchant of Venice have been hugely popular in India and China despite the unfamiliarity of the religious and cultural backdrop – is this in some way connected, he wonders, with the racially mixed populations of the great trading ports of Kolkata and Shanghai? Do they see Venice as an image of their own cities? The Germans, of course, admired Hamlet, and thought they had ­written it themselves. The adoption of Othello by South Africa needs little explanation, although the play has caused endless difficulties there: there is a good account of Janet Suzman’s explosive 1987 production with Joanna Weinberg and the black star John Kani. But my favourite example of national favouritism is in the US chapter, “Buried Richards”, which takes us from the stifling atmosphere of the Folger Library and out on to the road. The Americans loved Richard III. Why? Because Dick Crookback was “the villainous victor, the ultimate go-getting, self-reliant, self-made man”. The booze-addicted actor Junius Brutus Booth, greatly admired by Walt Whitman, was often so carried away by this role on tour that he would refuse to die at Bosworth: Booth would, it is alleged, pursue his enemies off the stage and on to the street.

The ceaseless and often startling process of reinterpretation and reinvention, the “liquid modernity” of the Bard as a trans-national brand, the “rhizomatic” spread of “Shakespeare” as a living organism (or, less flatteringly, as the “Japanese knotweed” of culture), are contemporary critical concepts explored with panache. But the theories are illustrated by and interwoven with many human stories: particularly touching is the account of the dedicated life of Solomon Plaatje, journalist, linguist and political activist (1876-1932), who translated Shakespeare’s works into Setswana. He travelled widely in Europe and the US speaking about human rights, published an important account of the cruelty of the Natives Land Act 1913 and wrote a novel in English, but his deepest passion was for Shakespeare.

Dickson pursues Plaatje and his translations down many a dusty road and through acres of scrub-grass and gravel, visiting his museum and his grave, and empathising with his lonely position, stranded between two cultures, not wholly accepted by black or white. It dawns on Dickson “that perhaps another reason he had translated Shakespeare, often at sea, was as a way of evading loneliness. Shakespeare was . . . a companion on all those ocean voyages, when his wife and children were thousands of miles away and the cause of the black South Africans looked as impossibly remote as ever.”

It is hard to characterise this discursive, rambling, global volume: it has elements of David Lodge’s Small World, with a German professor casually pinpointed by his Alfa Romeo and his black leather jacket, and a cameo of an aged Indian scholar of film lying on his daybed with his steel crutches and his straggling white hair. It’s a tragicomedy of obsessions.

I share the obsession. Like Dickson, I see and hear Shakespeare everywhere. Dickson will undoubtedly have spotted the convicted (currently appealing) Marine Sergeant ­Alexander Blackman’s reference to “shuffling off this mortal coil” in Afghanistan. And I hope he, too, saw the interview on 24 June on Channel 4 News in which a refugee, a Syrian English teacher stranded on the Calais motorway, said that his favourite English writer was Shakespeare. Which play did he like best, his interrogator asked, perhaps expecting to trip him up. Antony and Cleopatra, replied the young man instantly. And I like to think that I remember a smile of fleeting happiness upon his face.

Margaret Drabble’s most recent novel is The Pure Gold Baby (Canongate)

Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe by Andrew Dickson is published by The Bodley Head (483pp, £20)

It is hard to find a critical vocabulary to contain what has been going on in Ferrante’s work. The first volume, My Brilliant Friend, appears on one level to be a Bildungsroman, taking us through the impoverished but aspiring childhood and schooldays of the narrator/novelist Elena Greco and her alter ego, her frighteningly fierce and unpredictable friend Lina Cerullo. They are surrounded by a large cast of children and adults from the working-class district of “the neighbourhood” and its thoroughfare, the stradone, whose love affairs, careers and entanglements are played out in the fourth book. But the sweep of the narrative is prefaced at the opening of book one by the disappearance of the now old and adult Lina, an event that provides a kind of closure to the final volume. So the entire sequence, published over a period of less than five years, must, one must suppose, have been carefully planned in advance. Motifs and images are followed through, at times perhaps too insistently: Elena’s mother’s silver bracelet makes several portentous appearances and the dolls Nu and Tina, which the two six-year-old girls lose at the beginning of the narrative, are carefully re-created in Elena’s and Lina’s youngest children, their daughters Imma and Tina. The foreshadowed theme of the bambina perduta is melodramatically enacted in real life. But, as Ferrante convinces us, real Naples is full of real melodrama.

The conventionally careful plotting, however, belies and is weirdly undermined by the powerful emotional flux of the writing, the immediacy of the turmoil of sexual passions and ideological attitudes, the chronological jumps and strange reprises that make up the uneven texture of the work. Elena oscillates throughout between confidence and despair and her story, as she frequently acknowledges, is not only interwoven with but also parasitical upon her friend’s life.

Elena leaves the neighbourhood to become an intermittently successful feminist writer. Lina stays, having disastrously married at 16, never pursuing (as far as we are told) her early literary promise, never travelling, never finding a wider world. Elena believes in the “phantom text” that is Lina’s life, the life she believes herself to be writing on behalf of her friend. (This trope is pursued, sometimes confusingly, through descriptions of preserved notebooks and boxes of manuscript and destroyed texts.) Elena/Ferrante is deeply exercised by accusations of appropriation, of theft, of exploitation, which appear periodically and damagingly in press reviews of her literary output and are levelled at her, even more painfully, by family, friends and neighbours and by Lina herself.

Elena escapes from the neighbourhood but she cannot help returning, sometimes to live there for long periods. She needs her dark material, emotionally and commercially, however uneasy her connections with it may be, however strongly Florence, Milan, Turin and the international circuit may call her. She needs Naples.

One of this volume’s strongest episodes recounts the death of her mother, with whom she has had a difficult, sometimes violent relationship. In her final illness, made comfortable in a private clinic, enjoying the little touches of privilege paid for by the ill-gotten gains of her younger daughter’s criminal partner, Elena’s mother is at last reconciled to the clever daughter who went away and married (then left) the professor and is happy to hold in her arms her new granddaughter and namesake, Immacolata, illegitimate though she is. Here we have a rare example of a form
of restitution.

Elena Greco’s extreme ontological insecurity as a writer is strikingly and convincingly portrayed. Each rejection, each attack, each implied or spoken criticism, be it from her mother-in-law, from Lina, from a scholar at an academic presentation, or in the pages of L’Unità or La Repubblica or Corriere della Sera, plunges her into a morass of self-doubt, from which a word of praise from an editor (even an editor she does not much respect) will as readily rescue her. Even when she is looking back over her long career (The Story of the Lost Child spans, with various loops and reprises, a period from 1976 to 2005) from the standpoint of an old woman in her seventies, the anxieties persist. This leads one to the inevitable question: how much of a feminist and what kind of a feminist is the writer who goes by the name of Elena Ferrante? Does her work suggest that women are more insecure than men, both as writers and as lovers? Are they by nature more needy, more dependent on praise and goodwill?

It is well known that Ferrante’s identity remains a mystery but the career of her protagonist documents a well-defined time span, from the 1960s through to the beginning of the 21st century, a period in which there was first a spontaneous new wave of feminist fiction, then the rise of feminist literary theory, then a period that interrogated the construction of gender. The evolution of all these themes is intelligently addressed.

At times – and at a first reading – Ferrante’s work seems curiously old-fashioned and somewhat out of sync, as though it were approaching with hindsight questions long since resolved or bypassed: basic questions of sexual equality, of jealousy and infidelity, of the discriminatory ageing process of women, of paternity and maternity. Yet, as one reads on, one realises that these ­questions are still unresolved, still urgent, and that maybe we resist her explorations only because they are so painful and so embarrassing. She spares the reader nothing of the agonies of indecision and self-torment that afflict women as they try to lead remodelled lives.

The title of her earlier novel The Days of Abandonment speaks volumes. This is also about a woman struggling to write but, more frontally, it is about a woman whose husband has left her, abandoning her and their two small children. The narrator here says, “I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife.” But
the book she produces is an exploration of jealousy, ugly substitute sex, ugly thoughts, ugly struggles over custody, and of the sense of the near-total annihilation of being a woman-without-a-man.

In contrast, The Story of the Lost Child has moved on. It gives us Elena at last coming to terms, after a long personal and professional power struggle, with the irredeemable nature of her most passionate lover and one-time schoolmate, Nino: a liar, a charmer, a politician and, like his father, a faithless yet loyal serial seducer. Everyone but Elena knows that Nino is a shit and tells her so, many times, in the brutal dialect of the neighbourhood. But she has to find this out for herself and to make the best of it, which, inventively, she does. (And Pietro the professor, her ex, has a surprisingly good outcome, we are relieved to note.)

Ferrante takes on many of the issues raised in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962). You have to do it by yourself, for yourself: with others, you have to go on pushing the boulder up the hill. Lessing’s novel was a heady mix of feminism (a label that she disclaimed), Marxism and madness. Ferrante takes us into similar territory, as she, too, endeavours to combine the personal with the political. (Her descriptions of Lina’s crazy moments of “dissolving boundaries” recall the passages evoking Anna Wulf’s madness.) The political backdrop is of communism, neo-fascism and the Camorra. In old age, Elena sardonically states: “Anarchist, Marxist, Gramscian, communist, Leninist, Trotskyite, Maoist, worker were quickly becoming obsolete labels or, worse, a mark of brutality. The exploitation of man by man and the logic of maximum profit, which before had been considered an abomination, had returned to become the linchpins of freedom and democracy everywhere.” Some of the neighbourhood end up in prison, where Pasquale, an activist communist bricklayer, finds peace: at last, he has time to study. I am told that not many Italian novelists, male or female, have tackled the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s: the anni di piombo, the “years of lead”. Ferrante’s account rings fearfully true. Lessing was safer in London.

An English reader has a specific disadvantage with these Italian texts. The style is easy, readable, realist, at times elevated by unobtrusive classical allusion, and the translation is fluent. But the author incessantly and importantly reminds us that many of her characters (although some of them studied Latin and Greek at school) speak another language: like Elena’s mother, they speak “dialect”, they speak Neapolitan and they speak it at crucial moments of the plot. Language marks them as members of a different community, leading parallel lives. The significance of this gulf cannot be adequately conveyed in English prose. The sense of a missing dimension – together with the slight disjuncture of a story told in the present but with many years of hindsight – makes at times for a disturbing sense of distance, for a sense of reading through more than one filter. Ferrante does not use dialect herself, except on one or two extreme occasions, but its presence/absence is insistently registered.

The translation has one or two disconcerting time warps. I don’t think the babies Tina and Imma could have been wearing “onesies” in 1981 (I wonder what the Italian for this garment could have been?) and, more annoyingly, it is unlikely that a newspaper headline would have dismissed Elena Greco’s “debut novel” as the “Salacious memoirs of an ambitious girl” in the 1970s, as the publishing word “debut” in this context only became widely used in a later era of marketing fiction. (The Italian has: “Memorie piccanti di una ragazza ambiziosa: il romanzo d’esordio di Elena Greco”.)

But I do have to wonder, as a novelist may, whether the “real” Elena Ferrante may have published some piquant memories, not long after the (cited) publication of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1954), and then suppressed them? Has she, like Elena Greco, reached into her bottom drawer? If the seven novels she has published late in life are indeed all the fiction she has written, this has been an astonishing period of late flowering.

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein, is published by Europa Editions (473pp, £11.99)

Margaret Drabble’s most recent book is “The Pure Gold Baby” (Canongate)

Verne was impassioned by travel, by exploration, by motion, by all means of transportation and locomotion. The first of what came to be grouped together as his Voyages extraordinaires was Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), which, after some years of struggle, launched his career as a commercially successful writer. These novels explored the outer realms of scientific possibility, and were backed up with extensive research and erudite displays of not always wholly trustworthy statistics. The plausible appearance of scientific verisimilitude enabled his enterprising and well-connected publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, to market Verne’s works not only as romantic adventures but also as educational and instructive works.

Travel by balloon, a theme to which Verne returned several times, was swiftly followed by journeys to the centre of the earth, to the moon, to underground cities, to mysterious volcanic islands, to the Arctic and to the Antarctic, and even to complicated and competitive wager-driven journeys round the United States by train, bicycle, motor car, schooner and horse. Movement itself entranced him, and so did both natural and man-made wonders. He anticipated the restless mass tourism and relentless appetite for sightseeing of the 20th century, and his name appears on the title page of one of the earliest satires of package holiday travel, the posthumously published L’Agence Thompson et Cie (1907), though this was in fact largely written by his son, Michel.

But his greatest and most profound love was, arguably, for the sea, and all that was on it, in it and under it. He was born in the French town of Nantes, on the Loire, some 30 miles inland from the Atlantic coast, and he is said to have tried to run away to sea as a boy. He kept a succession of yachts, all named Saint-Michel, and he greatly enjoyed sailing and long sea voyages. He first described an underwater boat in the 1850s and we know that he was extremely excited when he hit upon the concept of his submarine novel, the subject matter of which was commended to him by an admirer, the novelist George Sand. Verne boasted to Hetzel that it would be unlike anything anyone had ever written before – it would be “superb, yes superb!” – and composed some of Twenty Thousand Leagues (1870) while sailing in his Saint-Michel, where everything he saw prompted new ideas and images.

The starting point of the adventure is stunningly simple: we embark, with our scholarly narrator Dr Aronnax and his two carefully selected comrades, on a chase after a vast and dangerous beast that is causing havoc to the world’s shipping. This monster may or may not be a narwhal, a legendary and quasi-mythological sea creature with a single horn like a unicorn’s. At once we are in the realm of the epic, and are reminded of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick. The voyagers discover not a narwhal, but the even more extraordinary Nautilus.

The characterisation of the main players – the narrator Pierre Aronnax, a lecturer at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, explorer and author of “a two-volume in-quarto work entitled The Mysteries of the Ocean Deeps”; his valet, the ever-faithful, classification-obsessed Conseil; and the hawk-eyed French Canadian harpooner Ned Land (a name of awesome monosyllabic resonance in a novel of the sea) – is of a stark but effective simplicity. These three representative mortals, cooped up together in the midst of almost limitless space, live out their personal dramas in tense and close confinement: as Richard Holmes, in his history of balloon travel Falling Upwards (2013), points out, in Verne’s work the balloon basket, the moon rocket or the submarine provide the “ideal enclosed space in which to stage a drama, and draw out contrasting characters under pressure”.

Yet, despite their enclosure, they have a magnificent view of the spectacle of the underwater world. Verne’s pleasure in describing the forests of kelp, the shoals of fish, the nesting turtles and the tentacles, beak and triple heart of the giant squid is infectious. Who could resist “blue dolphinfish picked out in gold and silver; parrot fish, true oceanic rainbows competing in colour with the most beautiful birds of the Tropics”, or “golden Pomacanthus . . . decked out in emerald strips and clothed in velvet and silk, like lords out of Veronese’s paintings”?

Captain Nemo, the commander of the Nautilus and its mysterious polyglot crew, is a more complex figure than his three hostages; a Romantic, Byronic exile of perplexing nationality and (in this novel) obscure motivation. Cultured, tragic, ruthless, wealthy, he is at war with humanity, yet compassionate to the oppressed and the poor. He is anti-imperial, anti-colonial and republican at heart. We know that Hetzel steered Verne away from his politically sensitive conception of Nemo as a Polish nobleman seeking revenge against Russian tyranny, a character who might have prefigured some of Joseph Conrad’s later protagonists. Hetzel, by this censoring pressure, may thus have introduced some contradictions into Verne’s conception of his lonely ruler of the oceans, but Nemo nevertheless emerges as one of the great heroes, or anti-heroes, of fiction. When I first read Twenty Thousand Leagues as a child I had no idea that he would reappear a few years later as an agent of providence in Verne’s 1874 novel of shipwreck (or balloon-wreck) The Mysterious Island. I was astonished to meet him again, and to learn the explanations of his tragic past and ultimate fate.

On the surface, Twenty Thousand Leagues is an action-packed tale of adventure and exploration, precursor to and inspiration for Boy’s Own classics by British writers such as Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle and John Buchan. In England Verne has been considered mainly a supreme storyteller. The very word “league” (both in English and in its French version) has a ring of the yarn or the tall story. Verne’s inventiveness of plot and boldness of characterisation are matched by a pleasure in daily details that bring his fantasies to life; he is particularly good, as perhaps a French writer should be, on food. Nemo is a gourmet, and Aronnax’s pleasure in the ingeniously contrived delicacies with which he is presented is delightfully portrayed: so is Ned Land’s hunger to get his teeth into a chop. The giraffe steaks and eland barbecues of Rider Haggard and the ham rolls, hard-boiled eggs and ginger beer of Enid Blyton pale in comparison to Captain Nemo’s fillets of emperor fish, soup of turtle, livers of dolphin and anemone jam. Ashore, Ned Land creates a feast of wood pigeons, wild boar, “rabbit kangaroos”, breadfruit and mangoes, a point at which Aronnax confesses that he has “become exactly like the Canadian. Here am I, in ecstasy at freshly grilled pork!”

Verne does, however, show that he recognises the dangers of hunting, and of growing threats to species and to the planet. Although great numbers of creatures are slaughtered and devoured in the course of the book, Verne and Aronnax tend to deplore needless killing. We now reread 19th-century classics for early signs of awareness of ecology and environment and entropy, and we can find them in the criticisms of the bloodthirstiness of Ned, and in the information that the poor dugong and the great emerald bird of paradise have been hunted almost to extinction. Conseil speaks for the future when he reflects that, if the dugong is the last of its line, it should be spared in the interests of science.

The French have taken Verne’s work in general more seriously than the Anglo-Saxon literary establishment, seeing beyond the storyteller. Although it has been argued that he was never truly admitted to the canon, he was much admired by writers as different and as eminent as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire. The symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud was directly inspired by Twenty Thousand Leagues. “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”, 1871), his best-known poem, owes some of its tumultuous, exotic imagery to Verne, and perhaps also a little of its world-weary melodramatic melancholy. As human beings, Verne and Rimbaud inhabited different universes; as writers, they meet, reminding us that, although Verne never overstresses the significance of the great subconscious pull of the oceans, he is aware of their chaotic depths and currents.

A new generation of avant-garde Continental writers rediscovered Jules Verne in the 1960s and he became one of the cult heroes of the experimental group known as Oulipo, which included Raymond Queneau (1903-76), Italo Calvino (1923-85) and Georges Perec (1936-82). They investigated the connections between mathematics and language, enjoyed verbal conundrums and constraints, and stressed the playful, formal, puzzle-engendering aspects of literature, enlisting Verne as a writer who had explored in fiction the deployment of bets, wagers, challenges, inventions and statistics. Perhaps the most successful product of this movement is in a sense a direct homage to Twenty Thousand Leagues: Perec’s remarkable novel Life: a User’s Manual (1978). It is based on the conceit of an immensely wealthy and immensely bored man called Bartlebooth, who is obsessed both by harbours and by jigsaws, and who has devised an elaborate plan of occupying the first half of his life by sailing the world with his faithful valet to paint harbours. These paintings will be returned to Paris, where they will be made into wooden jigsaws, which he will spend the second half of his life constructing, and then destroying. This is a parody of Nemo’s restless circumnavigation of the globe; the novel is full of references to Verne, and to Verne’s predecessor in the creation of the myth of the obsessed oceanic pursuit, Herman Melville. Perec, like Verne, was fascinated by lists, by the multiplication and classification of phenomena, and he wrote to one of his readers that Verne liberated his imagination “to rediscover the archetypes of the adventure story – multiple and mysterious births, filiations, inheritances, aquatic monsters, curses”.

Jules Verne was buried in Amiens in March 1905, and his grave is marked by an extraordinarily dramatic sculpture, showing him bursting forth from his tomb and pointing upwards towards the heavens. The sculpture is called Vers l’immortalité et l’éternelle jeunesse (“towards immortality and eternal youth”). Verne is the saint of travel agents and the master of the travelogue, as well as the unwitting prophet of the surreal cruise liners of the 21st century. Despite parody and plagiarism and commercial exploitation, the haunting spirit of Nemo and his Nautilus sails on. 

A version of this essay appears in a new edition of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas” (translation by William Butcher, illustrations by Jillian Tamaki) published by the Folio Society (£36.95)