Lydia Fellgett the Writing of Betty Miller
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of East Anglia digital repository Lydia Fellgett The Writing of Betty Miller: 1933-49 Submitted for the degree of PhD in English Literature University of East Anglia School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing September 2014 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. Abstract This thesis is the first comprehensive study of the writing of the author, journalist, reviewer and scholar Betty Miller (1910-65). As such it seeks to develop a language with which readers might think about her work. Analysing the ways in which commentators have redrawn the critical maps of the 1930s and 40s provides a crucial context for an understanding of Miller’s work as a product of its cultural inception. Exploring the dynamics of the various socio-historic and institutional forces that have come to bear on the availability and readability of women’s writing from this period, The Writing of Betty Miller looks at the recuperative practices of feminist publishing houses as well as the near annihilation of Miller’s work in the Second World War. Betty Miller’s bestselling biography of Robert Browning and her non-fiction writing for journals such as Twentieth Century and Horizon in the 1950s, begin to suggest a literary context that draws out the allusions in and influences on her fiction. The seven novels that she wrote between 1933-49, read chronologically, situate her amongst contemporaneous debates on the gendered dynamics of marriage, the politics of the Anglo-Jewish experience and the familial impact of war. They also confront literary experiments of writing timeliness, boredom and violence. Close reading interrogates her texts’ most prevalent imagery and aesthetics, asking what makes her writing particularly Millerian, whilst positioning a readership that pays attention to the thoughtful examination of the morality of everyday decision-making that underlies Miller’s work. 2 Contents Introduction 4 One: Robert Browning and the ‘Peeping Tom of Prosperity’. 16 Or How to Read Betty Miller? Two: Re-writing the Circadian Novel: 42 The Mere Living (1933) Three: In Search of an Interlude: 69 Sunday (1934) Four: Reading Practices and the Dynamics of Marriage: 94 Portrait of the Bride (1935) Five: The Careless Tolerance of English Liberalism: 127 Farewell Leicester Square (1941) Six: Plotting and Planting: Millerian Imagery: 157 A Room in Regent’s Park (1942) Seven: Paper and Cloth: Unmasking the Second World War: 188 On the Side of the Angels (1945) Eight: A Question of Legacy: 211 The Death of the Nightingale (1949) Conclusion: Reading the Unread 238 Betty Miller’s Publications Bibliography 3 Introduction On the dust jacket of Betty Miller’s fourth novel Farewell Leicester Square (1941) is a long list of quotes praising her previous work. There is, for example, a recommendation by Dorothy Richardson: ‘Rarely’, she writes, ‘has a young writer set out with such a formidable array of gifts’. An anonymous reviewer from New York Herald and Tribune agrees: ‘Given this amazing reach of imagination, a style, which, at its best, reaches a distinctive beauty and a sound sense of narrative, one cannot doubt that this author has started on a brilliant career.’1 The emphasis on Miller’s precocious talent and output is not misplaced. By the time she was twenty-four, Victor Gollancz had published three of her novels and considered himself something of a mentor. In 1936 he rejected Farewell Leicester Square, a novel that dealt with the Anglo-Jewish experience in 1930s London, for being too controversial. It took a realignment of the perspective of British society, brought about by the outbreak of war, before Robert Hale printed it in 1941. Three other novels followed, as well as a career as a biographer and editor of Victorian poetry and letters. I first encountered Betty Miller’s work when I read Robert Browning: A Portrait and was taken with her account of his domestic life. In the biographical note on the back pages of my Penguin Classic, I learnt that the author had published seven novels between 1933 and 1949. So, over the course of a few months, read them all. Doing so was more of an administrative problem than I had anticipated. None of my local libraries had them in their collections and there was, it transpired, just one copy of each in the British Library so I had to remember to order them days in advance. I soon learnt that it is 1 Betty Miller, Farewell Leicester Square (London: Robert Hale, 1941) 4 difficult to read Betty Miller’s work, let alone to read it spontaneously. Nonetheless, I persevered because I found her fiction strangely compelling. It seemed so recognisably one thing and then it was another; I could see the relatedness between the novels but also felt how singular each one was from its predecessor. How should I articulate what Betty Miller’s writing is doing on the page? And what of the ‘brilliant career’ that was promised of this peculiar writer? The Writing of Betty Miller is the first comprehensive study of the author, journalist, reviewer and scholar Betty Miller (1910-65). As such, it seeks to develop a language for the ways that we might read her work. Politically interested, often explicitly so, Miller’s work is a product of the cultural moments of the 1930s and 1940s. Thankfully, the perceived failure of this period of writing is no longer the starting point for an assessment of its critical reception. Rather we turn to the overlapping, but often adjacent, literary scholarship of readers and writers who are still continuing to find new ways to think about its fiction. It is significant to note that Betty Miller’s work does not appear in what is generally accepted to be the first ‘comprehensive’ study of the writing of this period, Valentine Cunningham’s enormous, epoch-shifting survey British Writers of the Thirties.2 Often using Cunningham as a starting point for revisionist readings of the 1930s, critics have looked beyond the limits of its boundaries. Keith Williams and Steven Matthews’ collected edition is focused on writing that highlighted the ‘broad and contested cultural context’ of literature that often goes against the outdated map of the period.3 Others have continued the critical work of troubling the notion of the 2 Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 3 Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After, ed., Keith Williams and Steven Matthews (London: Longman, 1997) 5 1930s as a ‘discrete historical decade with unique identifying features manifested in its literature.’4 Tyrus Miller’s analysis of what he terms Late Modernism, places the paradox of literary innovation in relation to its necessary historical catalysts and therefore amongst its anticipated aftermath.5 Meanwhile Kristin Bluemel’s Intermodernism draws together the connections between the literature of the Second World War and 1930s life. She makes it clear that her term is a postmodern invention; the latest attempt to reclaim 1930s writing that is often Middlebrow, Jewish, Feminist and Leftist. Betty Miller’s work has so far never experienced a serious attempt of reclamation. Largely unread, it has silently refused to be classified. The unusual position in which it rests is therefore somewhat of a hindrance to a reader beginning to try to express its significance. But it also means that it remains un-tethered by the normal cultural constructs that can be used as formal categorisations of problematic work. Andy Croft’s study of working-class writers was an important part of the inclusive revisionist work on the 1930s.6 But the most fundamental development in the criticism of this period is the recognition of its many professional women writers. Nicola Beauman’s A Very Great Profession contextualised the historical conditions that she saw as bringing about the plenitude of fiction by women between the wars. Moreover, she named them: drawing more academic attention to the work of, amongst many others, Enid Bagnold, E.M. Delafield, Margaret Kennedy and G.B. 4 Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History ed., Maroula Joannou (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p.2 5 Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkley: University of California Press, 1999) 6 Andy Croft, Red Letter Days: British Literature in the 1930s (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990) 6 Stern.7 Alison Light drew on this study, marking out the political implications of the domestic fiction of the 1930s and claiming a shift in the national self-image that took place between the wars. The dominant mood of the period, she wrote, ‘could be conservative in effect and yet was often modern in form.’8 In Light’s understanding, the First World War rhetorically belonged to the heroes of the trenches, but ordinary people on the Home Front fought the Second World War. Whilst ‘potentially democratising’, this mythology, she argues, has resulted in the sense of the period as being both politically, and socially, inward-looking. Other critics, such as Rita Felski, Janet Montefiore, and Lisa Rado, have explored the political imperatives of women writers who did engage with broader, international debates.9 Sourcing radio programmes and newspaper articles as well as fiction, Diana Wallace has shown how women writers responded to the discussions about marriage that were taking place in the 1930s.10 Ranging from female adultery to the difficulty of obtaining a divorce before the 1937 Matrimonial Causes Act, writers such as E.H.