SAILING ALL ALONE

A Study of Spinsters in the Novels of Barbara Pym and Emily Hilda Young.

Valerie Pitty

A Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts ( English ) at Honours level, by combined Coursework and Research.

University of New South Wales

June 1995 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Louise Miller, and Professor Mary Chan, of the School of English, University of New South Wales, for the help and encouragement they have given me in writing this thesis. \ Valerie Pitty June 1995 2 Contents Page

Table of Abbreviations 3

Introduction 4

Chapter 1 'Excellent Women': Hannah Mole and Mildred Lathbury 22

Chapter 2 Friendships between Women: Barbara Pym's Comical Couples 33

Chapter 3 Sisters, Companons, and Conspirators in the Novels of E.H. Young 42

Chapter 4 Spinsters in Pursuit 55

Chapter 5 .. Lone Voyagers 64

Chapter 6 Drifting into Love 74

Chapter 7 First Love and Fair Prospects: Barbara Pym's Young Girls 85

Chapter 8 Looking for a Lightship: Girls in the Novels of E.H. Young 95

Chapter 9 The Prizes: Bachelors and Widowers 104

Conclusion 118

Novels of Barbara Pym and E. H. Young 122

Bibliography 124 3 Table of Abbreviations

Novels ofE.H. Young: TMM ...... The Misses Mallett MM...... Miss Mole JW Jenny Wren TCW The Curate's Wife TVD ...... The Vicar's Daughter C ...... Celia CS ...... Chatterton Square

Novels of Barbara Pym: STG ...... Some Tame Gazelle CH ...... Crampton Hodnet LTA ...... Less Than Angels J &P ...... Jane and Prudence AGOB ...... A Glass of Blessings NFRL ...... No Fond Return of Love AUA ...... An Unsuitable Attachment TSDD ...... The Sweet Dove Died QIA ...... Quartet in Autumn AFGL...... A Few Green Leaves 4 INTRODUCTION

She liked to see it sailing all alone, never getting any farther and never losing its gallantness. (Miss Mole)

Barbara Pym ( 1913-1918) and Emily Hilda Young ( 1880- 1949) are novelists whose work documented an almost exclusively female consciousness. Their novels were admired, reviewed and criticised by men but were clearly directed towards a female audience. The settings are largely domestic and the subject matter is the emotional experience of their female protagonists. Young wrote about women in a family setting, and the conflicts of love and loyalty this involved. Her characters are mainly married women or young women seeking marriage, but her most highly acclaimed creation is a spinster. Pym wrote for the most part about spinsters, and their struggle to maintain their autonomy and self-respect in a society that devalued them because of their single status. The work of these two novelists demonstrates the constancy of the spinster's position as a marginalised woman, despite changes in her economic position and in social attitudes towards her, throughout the present century up to the 1970's.

Feminist critics have noted that the position of the spinster became anomalous rather late in the 19th century .(l) Although "women who did not marry were a class of unfortunates" (Calder, 58), the half a million unmarried women who existed in Victorian times, fitted into the domestic lives of their married relatives as housekeepers or carers for children, partly owing to the high mortality rate of women in childbirth. Little chance of employment outside the home existed for middle-class women; in fact, " in the mid-nineteenth century, the genteel poor woman had a choice of three underpaid occupations - governess, companion or sempstress"(Vicinus, 3). As a consequence of the financial instability of the 1840's, many middle-class women were forced to leave home and take 5 positions as teachers and governesses, and as the century advanced, new and different types of work became available. Nursing, typing, work in the Post Office,and eventually the professions opened up for women (Stubbs, 124).

As clerical occupations and teaching became established as respectable employment, the "popularity of fiction concerning the self­ sufficient, autonomous woman" grew, and the "business-woman's novel" appeared frequently in the early twentieth century. It appeared that women might achieve real freedom of choice in both occupation and hetero-sexual relationships, with "those who chose celibacy less "unsexed" than might be expected".(Pratt, 112-116). The First World War, after temporarily opening unprecedented employment opportunities for women, ultimately set the cause of single women back by devaluing their status. Phyllis Bentley's autobiography mentions a headline "which announced stridently: A :MILLION SURPLUS WOMEN". The writer comments,"Surplus! rather a bitter word" as she records how women were exhorted to " clear out. .. and leave jobs open for returning men", and how she resented the implication that women were useful "only as mates" (106). Moreover, with the granting of the vote to women over 30 in 1918, "the final blow against single women was the demise of a large feminist movement that had given many a support group and had validated their single lives" (Vicious, 209). Young was writing her novels against this background, and Pym, a generation later, faced an equally determined, if more subtle, post-War campaign to convince women that their natural sphere was domesticity. In the 1950's, popularised Freudian psychology was used as an added persuasion to induce women to believe that matrimony, motherhood and consumerism were women's only natural destinations ..

The literary antecedents of the spinster characters in Young and Pym are clear. Miss Bates, the garrulous, ingratiating spinster in 6 Emma, living in genteel poverty, has some counterparts. The economic dependency and emotional isolation of the Victorian governess, documented fictionally by the Brontes in Agnes Grey and Villette, and by Harriet Martineau in Deerbrook, is recognizable in the lonely, if less harrowing, situations of some of Pym's and Young's characters. Trollope's Lily Dale, (The Small House at Allingham), often cited as a woman who chooses spinsterhood, following a disappointment in love, and achieves a contented autonomy, has no distinct parallel. However, the importance of financial security, an established social status, and settled accommodation, in successfully making such an adjustment, is as obvious in the works of Young and Pym as it is in those of Trollope. The gentle life of the elderly spinster in a small community, which loves and respects her, is represented by Mrs Gaskell's Cranford, and some of the early novels of Young and Pym are reminiscent of this work. Nevertheless, even in the 1880's, "[s]pinsters could not be heroines. They were at best...good but limited, or worthy but unpleasant" (Calder, 165).

The woman who chose not to marry was often denigrated by Victorian novelists. George Moore wrote with sympathy of the lot of the single mother in Esther Waters; in A Drama in Muslin, he pitied the fate of the "muslin martyrs", girls destined for lifelong spinsterhood, and doubly doomed if they were plain and intlellectual. Yet he characterised the woman who elected spinsterhood as a vain, frigid coquette in the person of Mildred Lawson in Celibates. Young and Pym both describe such women, although in less condemnatory terms. In The Odd Women, George Gissing gives a sympathetic portrait of middle-aged spinsters, struggling with uncertain employment and poverty, but the New Woman, in the person of Rhoda Nunn, is "obsessive and dominating ... a prig and a puritan" (Calder, 201). The "emancipated woman" of the late nineteenth century was caricatured by anti-feminist novelists as "harsh, sexless, aggressive ... ugly, 7 unattractive ... badly dressed, neurotic or lesbian" (Stubbs, 142). Although some of these characteristics distinguish many of Pym's middle-aged or elderly spinsters, her portraits are more affectionate than otherwise, and always humorous. Young presents two unpleasantly stereotypical elderly spinsters, but these are balanced by her portrait of Agnes Spanner in Chatterton Square, who, despite exhibiting many of the same features, is a wholly admirable character. One constant in the depiction of spinsters is the fact that "a woman who worked was very rarely the centre of interest in the novel, and even where the heroine did work the emphasis was still on her emotional life" (Stubbs, 124). This remains as true for the novels of Young and Pym as it was for nineteenth century fiction, and the search for emotional fulfilment is the dominant theme in the lives of their characters.

A World War intervened to change the course of life and work for both writers. Emily Hilda Young married a solicitor, J.A.H. Daniell, in 1902. Prior to the first World War, she published A Com of Wheat (1910) and Yonder (1912). Her third novel Moor Fires appeared in 1916. Contemporary reviews of the last two two detected promise, but reproached the writer for "signs of crudity and immaturity" (Nation 6/1/13). Moor Fires introduced the theme of a young woman, betrothed to one man, who marries and achieves sexual fulfilment, and thence love, with another, "an incomprehensible juxtaposition" as the Times reviewer declared (TLS 7/12/16). The theme however bore some relation to her own life, for, following the death of her husband at Ypres in 1917, Young left Bristol, the site of all her future novels, and went to London to live with Ralph Henderson and his wife. The menage a trois was maintained until Mrs Henderson's death during World War 2. As Ralph Henderson was the Head Master of the Alleyne School, Dulwich, the relationship, agreeable to all three, was, of necessity, conducted with great discretion (Bayley, Intro. to William xv). 8

Young published seven more novels, which were favourably reviewed in England and the United States: The Bridge Dividing (1922), later retitled The Misses Mallett ( The Malletts in the U.S.A.); William (192); The Vicar's Daughter ( 1928). In 1930 Miss Mole won the James Black Tait Memorial Prize. It was followed by Jenny Wren (1932) and its sequel The Curate's Wife (1934). Celia appeared in 1937. Her last novel, Chatterton Square, although set in Bristol on the eve of World War 2, was not published until 1947. Two children's novels were published during the War. In Young's novels, War is important only in its effect on the emotional life of her protagonists. A recurring theme is that of the man who is a hero in wartime, returns wounded or mutilated, and proves unworthy of the love and service of the woman who waits for him. On the other hand, the spinster whose fiance is killed in action, seems vindicated in her attachment to a single life.

Barbara Pym's life was also redirected by War, although less dramatically. Her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, written as a kind of serial joke for her friends at Oxford in the 1930's, was submitted to Jonathan Cape in 1935, but not published until 1950. Pym submitted the manuscript of Crampton Hodnet to her friend, Robert Liddell, in 1940. It was laid aside, however, owing to Pym's involvement with war work, and not published until after her death. After the War Pym went to work in London at the Africa Institute, which provided many characters and settings for later novels. Following Some Tame Gazelle, Pym published five novels which were very well received: Excellent Women (1952); Jane and Prudence (1953); Less Than Angels (1955); A Glass of Blessings (1958) and No Fond Return of Love (1961). In 1963 Jonathan Cape refused An Unsuitable Attachment . This was a grave disappointment to Pym, and began a fourteen year period 9 during which she failed to get any novels published, although she continued to write.

In 1977 the Times Literary Supplement celebrated 75 years of publication by asking a number of distinguished writers and critics to nominate the most over-rated and most under-rated writers of that period. Pym was named, by Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin, as the most under­ rated (Long, 22). Following her rediscovery, Pym saw two more novels published by Macmillan: Quartet in Autumn and The Sweet Dove Died (the novels had been written in the reverse order). Unfortunately she was already suffering from cancer and, after a brief period as a minor celebrity, died in January 1980. Her last novel, A Few Green Leaves, was published posthumously in 1981. Her friend and literary executor, Hazel Holt, edited the typescript of An Academic Question, which was published in the 1980's, along with An Unsuitable Attachment, the novel which was the cause of Pym's temporary obscurity. In 1987 Macmillan presented a collection of previously unpublished novels and short stories, under the title Civil to Strangers. These included her Home Front Novel and So Very Secret which involved Pym's familiar spinster characters in a wartime setting and counter­ espionage activities.

Personal experience undoubtedly played an important part in the genesis of the novels of both writers, but will not be emphasized in this study. No biography of E.H. Young has been written and details of her life are scant. Barbara Pym's long-standing friend and colleague, Hazel Holt, wrote a biography of the novelist under the title A Lot to Ask in 1990, and a selection of Pym's notebooks and diaries was published as A Very Private Eye in 1984. Her notebooks are available to researchers in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Pym's lifelong spinsterhood, and her series of unhappy love affairs, are reflected in her humorous, ironic view of the single life and 10 the search for love. Y oung's early widowhood, and her thirty year relationship with a married man, are no doubt equally influential in her portraits of sensible, kindly married women, somewhat dissatisfied with marriage and tempted by fantasies of adulterous love, which usually end in disillusionment.

My reason for choosing these two novelists to illustrate the position of spinsters in English society, throughout the first 75 years of the twentieth century, is twofold. Barbara Pym writes as a spinster with a personal understanding of the marginalised position of single women in pre­ and post-World War 2 society, and of the stratagems such women used to compensate for the lack of status, and sense of personal inadequacy, that failure to marry imposed on them in a patriarchal social structure. E.H. Young, writing a generation earlier, from the position of a woman who experienced enduring love relationships, was concerned principally with the analysis of such relationships and their problems for women; yet her fiction also examines the whole spectrum of spinsterhood, showing a profound understanding of the deprivations and compensations of the single woman. As Young's later novels overlapped Pym's first fiction, a continuity exists in their treatment of the subject. An examination of the place of women, in the society they depict, reveals how little the position of the spinster changed during the sixty odd years spanned by their work.

Critical Reception of Pym 's and Young's fiction

During the 1980's a minor critical industry developed around Pym's novels, beginning with some short pieces in the form of journal articles and essays, and culminating in the production of full length books and collections of critical studies. I shall deal with articles first, in chronological order, as, in general, they preceded the full-length studies. This is not intended to be an exhaustive review, but will concentrate on those 11 articles relevant to the subject of this thesis. In 1982 Barbara Brothers published "Women Victimised by Fiction". This article paid tribute to Pym's representation of an area that novelists had not previously dramatised: the lives of single women. She entered the debate over whether or not Pym could be considered a feminist writer by expressing the view that, in her novels, "women are still the psychic victims of a self-serving male myth; although women are neither more or less heroic, original, petty, nor self­ serving than men" (63). On the other hand, Isa Kapp, whose article " Out of the Swim with Barbara Pym" was published in 1982/3, denied that Pym was a feminist, but conceded that she was a great morale-booster for women. He praised her characters because " they know, unlike most liberated women, how to wrest a lot out of a little, [and] are masters (or mistresses) at making do" (238). Kapp's statement neatly begs the question of why Pym's women have to make do with little, and so entirely overlooks the ironic subtext of the novels.

Charles Burkhart in " Barbara Pym and the Africans" (1983) gives an excellent analysis of the symbolic significance of Africa and the anthropological element in Pym's fiction. Burkhart later contributed an essay on homosexual men in the novels under the title "Glamorous Acolytes" to Janice Rossen's book Independent Women, an enlightening analysis of its subject. The infantilising of men is analysed by Sanford Radner in " Barbara Pym's People" (1985). This is of great interest as a similar phenomenon is observable in the novels of E.H. Young. Jill Rubenstein published an analysis of the function of language as a means of distancing, defence, and the transformation of reality, in her article " For the Ovaltine had Loosened Her Tongue" in 1986.

The difference between American and English reactions to Pym is very marked. While male writers in both countries resist the 12 suggestion that Pym had a feminist consciousness, American feminist critics emphatically attribute such perceptions to her, while showing impatience with the class-consciousness of many of her characters. This unfamiliarly with the English class system sometimes blinds them to humorous or ironic implications in Pym's writing. Again, an inability to appreciate English self­ restraint and understatement leads to an underestimation of the emotional responses described by Pym. This is illustrated by Margaret Bradham's article "Barbara Pym's Women" (1987), and is most evident in her comments on Catherine Oliphant and her feelings for Tom Mallow in Less than Angels.

In 1985 Jane Nardin published her book Barbara Pym,_a perceptive study of Pym's attention to the minutiae of experience, and of the social changes documented in her novels. Nardin presents a balanced view of the way in which men are also victims of the social structure Pym describes. However the use of the "dual voice", which is Pym's chief instrument of subversive irony, is considered by Nardin to be a fault. Again, her interpretation of Quartet in Autumn is difficult to accept: Marcia's life hardly has "a hidden order and fullness of its own" (17). Moreover, Nardin's wish for a more explicit account of the relationship between Marcia and Norman ignores the fact that Quartet in Autumn is Pym's darkest novel, understatement and implied meaning are her tools, and the failure of human relationships her subject.

On the other hand, Diana Benet in Something to Love (1986), gives an excellent critique of that novel and also demonstrates a fine understanding of the comic potential of Pym's work. She succeeds in showing that, for Pym's women, romantic love is not the only, or even the principal, source of emotional sustenance. Benet treats male characters sympathetically, asserting that they develop into full emotional beings as the novels succeed one another. Janice Rossen in The World of Barbara Pym 13 ( 1987) shows how Pym's years at Oxford and her literary education are reflected in the novels, supplying biographical details which illuminate them. Rossen rightly credits Pym with a feminist awareness of " the devotion of women and the indifference of men"(46).

Robert Emmett Long's Barbara Pym (1986), explores the similarities between Pym and Jane Austen. AL.Rowse in " Miss Pym and Miss Austen" in The Life and Work of Barbara Pym, edited by Dale Salwak (1987), deals with these similarities, finding them less pervasive. Rowse's essay is valuable to readers born outside Britain because it throws light on English class-consciousness. Rowse finds in Pym " none of the boring exaggerations of Women's Lib." (68), a pronouncement which reveals the readiness of many male critics, particularly English ones, to dismiss her feminist consciousness. Robert Smith in " How Pleasant to Know Miss Pym" uses the patronising tone often adopted towards women's writing, when, missing the whole point of her work, he declares that Pym is out of her depth with references to foreign literature, philosophy and other esoteric matters, and "quickly returns to the shallow, placid waters of which she is mistress" (61). John Halperin in "Barbara Pym and the War of the Sexes" provides a perceptive analysis of the images of hunting and capture used in some novels, notably Jane and Prudence and The Sweet Dove Died. However, Halperin exaggerates Pym's high opinion of the married state ,and seems to project feelings of his own onto the writer: "It may be true that women are stronger ... but it is tactless and self-destructive to operate openly on this basis, which so many do" (92). Apart from Leonora Eyre, it is difficult to think of a character in the novels who does operate in this manner, unless it is comic characters like Miss Doggett, Esther Clovis or Sister Dew, self-sufficient, elderly spinsters who won the battle of the sexes years before. Penelope Lively, in her essay, "The World of Barbara Pym", sums up Pym's 14 oeuvre succinctly as "a devastating, sublimely unfair, wonderfully funny and ultimately fatalistic analysis of the relations between men and women" (48).

Janice Rossen edited a collection of critical essays, Independent Women, in 1988. Rossen's own essay, "On Not Being Jane Eyre", describes Pym's women as "defining their own narrow lives by negation", which is a rather pessimistic view. She sees Pym's characters as making a moral effort of will to renounce passion and romance. In support of her view that Pym's "moral...is a tacit admonition not to care any more", Rossen misreads An Unsuitable Attachment, finding "Ianthe plain and John basically false and inferior". Rossen's interpretation of The Sweet Dove Died, is also a distortion of the novel, giving Leonora Eyre totally undeserved credit for self-sacrifice. Rossen also appears to overlook completely the humorous and ironic aspect of Pym's fiction, which reposes in her characters' sly subversion of the values of their male-dominated society.

Other writers in Rossen's anthology present an equally strong feminist view.which gives a central place to these elements. Anne Wyatt-Brown, in her essay "Ellipsis, Eccentricity and Evasion in the Diaries of Barbara Pym", defines the writer's technique of "finding a comic, literary receptacle for negative experience" (29). Laura L. Doan in "Text and the Single Man", gives an exposition of the importance of the "dual voice" as an instrument of subversion, and the effect Pym achieves by exempting male characters from this characteristic. Barbara Bowman, in "Barbara Pym's Subversive Subtext", analyses Mildred Lathbury in Excellent Women and her power of constructing "an alternative system of linguistic codes marked by a keen sense of the ridiculous" (84).

Michael Cotsell m Barbara Pym 1989 analyses perceptively the fine shades of relationship that exist in the later novels, and mentions the antagonism of English critics to those who draw parallels 15 between Pym and Austen The resemblance is certainly minimised by Robert Liddell, whose book A Mind at Ease 1989 has the inestimable advantage of having been written by a lifelong friend of Pym's, who was actually the original of a character in Some Tame Gazelle. Liddell, a convert to Roman Catholicism himself, puts excessive emphasis on the importance of religious observance in the novels. Liddell's criticism is also underpinned by class­ consciousness., but this makes his book a valuable resource for readers not acquainted with the English class-system, as it alerts them to ironic implications which would otherwise be missed. It is disconcerting, however, to find Liddell disapproving of Jane Cleveland's "extraordinary malapropisms, odd quotations, non-sequiturs" and Catherine Oliphant's "mental kaleidoscope" (100-101). Their verbal flights of fancy are explained and justified by Jill Rubenstein, in the article previously mentioned.

Finally, Mason Cooley, in The Comic Art of Barbara

~ 1990, analyses the novels in chronological order, showing a grasp of the complexities of the later novels. He discusses the narcissism of The Sweet Dove Died, drawing a brilliant parallel with Restoration Comedy, and makes a perceptive analysis of the character of Marcia in Quartet in Autumn .. Cooley gives the most balanced assessment of the place of religion in Pym's fiction: "Religious faith is not a matter of profound thought or transcendental emotion, but of a settled and active piety in daily life" (254).

E.H. Young's novels were well-reviewed in England and America when first published. Her obituary, in the Times ( 10/8/49) described her as a " novelist of rare quality .... [who] brought a shining truthfulness to her observation of ordinary or seemingly ordinary personal relationships" and praised her "gaiety and ... rich fund of subtle and delicately astringent humour and ... [the] fastidious care" with which she crafted her novels. The same writer however, while commenting on the "illuminated 16 veracity" of Chatterton Sguare, considered that the writer was "not quite at home in the disrupted world of contemporary thought and feeling that she tried to evoke".

The Times Literary Supplement of 9 August 1947 had rebuked Young for expressing in her last novel "flaming resentment against the whole German race ... [a] particular kind of patriotism which has not been characteristic of the English for a very long time." The novel is far from xenophobic, but does express the heightened anxiety and polarised allegiances of a nation on the brink of War. It seems Young was already being regarded as outmoded by some of her contemporaries.

Some forty years later, several of her novels were republished by Virago Press. They appear to have received no critical attention, apart from somewhat lukewarm book reviews. Despite her beautiful and detailed descriptions .of Bristol, in the early years of this century, enquiries at several libraries in Bristol have revealed no local interest in her work. Young's biography, apart from a short sketch in Living Authors (1935) (454-5) remains to be written.

No systematic study of spinsters in the novels of Barbara Pym and E.H. Young has been made, but this has proved a fruitful area of research. Spinsters predominate in the novels of Barbara Pym as almost all of her protagonists are single women in their thirties, and the unifying theme of her work is their search for love or for a love-object, and the strategies, compromises and setbacks entailed in this search. The objects of affection vary: "Archdeacon or gazelle, sister or dove, curate or Bishop or poodle: the particular object of affection is immaterial, so long as there is an object" (Benet, 28). Most commonly,however, the woman is in pursuit of a particular man as potential lover or husband. Pym's ironic view of the relationship between the sexes and their incompatible needs is the source of high comedy. 17

Pym's spinsters are generally plain, dowdy, and aware of their inferior position in society, due to their unmarried state and passing youth. From this seemingly unpromising vantage point, they are able to take a very practical view of society. Speaking of Mildred Lath bury, the heroine of Excellent Women, one critic has said that she has "[the] cool detached accuracy of an outsider... [her] leisure for observation and self-irony characterizes Pym's women. Her life is justified by what she sees ... [and] by woman's heightened consciousness" (Nardin, 40). Whereas Mildred is characteristic of Pym's protagonists, Hannah Mole stands alone in Young's work for her independence and subversive skills. Y oung's other memorable spinsters are Miss Riggs, the house-keeper confidante of Celia Marston in Celia, and Miss Spanner, the boon companion of Rosamond Fraser in Chatterton Square. These are middle-aged spinsters completely content with their lot in a way that few of Pym's characters seem to be.

Each writer deals with the beautiful, sometimes wealthy, single woman who appears deliberately to avoid close reiationships with men. E.H. Y oung's Rose Mallett, an enigmatic figure, accepts marriage with her long-suffering lover, Francis Sales only as a form of sacrifice. Prudence Bates, the 29 year old spinster in Pym's Jane and Prudence, appears to enjoy courtship but avoids marriage. The exquisite and predatory Leonora Eyre, in The Sweet Dove Died, chooses a much younger homosexual man in a relationship destined for failure.

Older, somewhat eccentric spinsters are minor characters m the novels of both writers. In Jenny Wren Young introduces the stereotypical nosy and viciously judgemental old maid, in the portrayal of Miss Jewel. Her alliance with the formidable Sarah Lorimer has elements of grim humour. In the sequel however, the role of virago is given to Mrs Doubleday, wife of the genial and incompetent vicar: it is the odd spinster 18 Miss Fairweather who speaks up for kindness and common sense. Pym has a gallery of comic spinsters, starting with Belinda and Harriet Bede in Some Tame Gazelle. Miss Doggett, the "dragon" of North Oxford bullies Jessie Morrow in Crampton Hodnet, but cannot stop her getting her man in Jane and Prudence. Miss Lydgate and Miss Clovis are middle-aged anthropologists in Less Than Angels, who demonstrate that devotion to a professional interest can outweigh any sentimental concerns. Their dispassionate professional gaze marches well with their position in society, although neither would consider herself a marginalised woman. Daisy Pettigrew and Sister Dew are preoccupied by cats and food respectively in An Unsuitable Attachment; Daphne Dagnan, Miss Lee and Miss Grundy form a chorus in A Few Green Leaves, while Miss Lickerish and Miss Vereker, from different ends of the social spectrum, point out the passing of a whole social order. Only in Quartet in Autumn does Pym allow the real pathos of old age to be evident in the decline of Marcia Ivory from eccentricity to madness, and the struggle of Letty to preserve her dignity and independence in the face of encroaching loneliness. A study of these older women, most of whom have long abandoned the search for love, will reveal the accommodations they have made and the compensations lifelong spinsterhood has brought to some of them.

Both novelists people their fiction with numbers of young, marriageable women. Nubile girls of nineteen or twenty, in Pym's novels, are full of romantic hopes and the possiblities of love. Anthea Cleveland and Barbara Bird in Crampton Hodnet, Deirdre Swan in Less Than Angels, and Flora Cleveland in Jane and Prudence, lack that consciousness of their inferior status which is necessary to "transform subordination into acutely-felt sensiblity". (Bowman, 91). On the borderline between girlhood and spinsterhood is Penelope Grandison, in An Unsuitable Attachment, who is 19 "at twenty-five ... still young enough to suffer disappointments in love as commonly as colds or headaches" (AUA 14).

Young, like Pym, was childless, but her portraits of young women in their teens and twenties are compassionate and strongly individual. Henrietta Mallett is a naive though wilful romantic who just fails to be seduced by a married man. Ethel Corder is plain and nervous, over­ eager for marriage, and much pitied by Miss Mole. Jenny and Dahlia Rendall suffer unrequited love, and an initially loveless marriage, respectively in Jenny Wren and The Curate's Wife. The Vicar's Daughter presents excellent studies of two very different young girls, 19 year old Hilary Stack and 21 year old Caroline Mather - the first of whom is, and the second of whom may be, the daughter of the Reverend Edward Stack.

As Hannah Mole, Mildred Latham and other heroines do eventually marry, the fictional represenration of the bachelors (and in some cases widowers), who are their objects of affection, is examined in the final chapter. Men like Everard Bone (Excellent Women), Aylwin Forbes (No Fond Return of Love). and Fabian Driver (Jane and Prudence). marry for reasons of expediency, rather than passion, although Fabian does fall prey to the sexual advances of Jessie Morrow. The circumstances which produce these matches are rich in comedy, but the inadequacies of the reluctant suitor are always made plain by Pym.

E.H. Young too created some memorable bachelors: Charles Batty, who wins Henrietta Mallett, and Samuel Blenkinsop, who marries Hannah Mole, are splendid anti-romantic heroes. Gauche and unattractive initially, they prove capable of a disinterested friendship, which grows into love and awakens a similar response in the woman they admire. On the other hand, the Reverend Maurice Roper, the bachelor cousin of The Vicar's Daughter, is a superb study of a pitiable but destructively meddlesome 20 clergyman, bitterly aware of being unloved. Roper will be given special treatment as he in many ways resembles the stereotypical disappointed spinster, indicating that, for Young, life experience, rather than gender or social status, produced unpleasant characteristics.

Clergymen indeed are singularly important in the lives of Pym's and Y oung's spinsters. For Pym, a devotee of the Anglo-Catholic Church, the clergy are among the more gentlemanly exploiters of "excellent women", battening on their loyalty and serviceableness no less than the laymen, and often the object of unrequited affection. For Young, clergymen assume a more seriously antagonistic role, usually as guardians of a repressive code of sexual morality. The Reverend Maurice Roper is outdone in sinister intent by the Reverend Robert Corder, and his fellow minister, the Reverend Mr Pilgrim, when they set out together to undermine Hannah Mole's integrity. The Reverend Cecil Sproat who makes Dahlia Rendall a curate's wife, is a more sympathetic character, and Mr Doubleday, the Vicar, comes closer to the traditionally humorous clergyman of English fiction, and to those depicted by Barbara Pym. On the whole, though, Young's clergy are threatening figures.

E.H. Young presents a more optimistic picture of the life of spinster, balanced with a more sympathetic view of men and married life, than does Barbara Pym. In dealing with the novels of E.H. Young, I omit analysis of the first three novels, and of William and The Curate's Wife, as these deal with the problems of marriage, and spinsters play only an incidental part, or are completely absent. In writing of Pym, I exclude the early fragments and unpublished novels included in Civil to Strangers, and make only passing reference to A Glass of Blessings and none to An Academic Question, as both have married protagonists. 21 In my discussion of these writers, I have taken a critical approach broadly described as "authentic realism" by Sara Mills in Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading. This approach is founded on the belief that "women's writing can be usefully discussed in terms of how the texts relate to women's experience". The representation of women characters in women's writing is the chief concern, and "if the representation seems to accord with our notions of what women are like, then the characters and the writing are deemed authentic or true to life" (52; 58-9). Without discussing the relation between the texts and the personal lives of the authors, I have treated them as genuine reflections of women's experience, which may serve as "powerful vehicles for changing women's self-image" (62).

NOTES

( 1) Sheila Jeffreys notes that almost one in three women in the late Victorian period were single, and one in four would never marry. This was, in some cases, for example, Florence Nightingale, a personal choice. Although many of the early feminists were married women, spinsters formed the "backbone of the feminist movement" in the late 19th and early 20th century (86-88). 22 Chapter I 'Excellent Women': Hannah Mole and Mildred Lathbury

In his introduction to the Virago edition of William, John Bayley points out some of the similarities between E.H. Young's and Barbara Pym's protagonists. He draws a comparison between Hannah Mole and Mildred Lathbury, both "excellent women": "[b]oth writers have a gently sardonic and not at all sentimental view of what that role entails. Both reveal that the 'excellence' of women is a far more complex and more humorous affair that might be supposed"(vii-viii). As Hannah and Mildred are the characters who most clearly resemble each other, and also the ones that have brought their respective writers the most favourable critical attention, a comparative study of these two is an obvious starting-point.

Hannah Mole, the protagonist of E.H. Young's Miss Mole, and Mildred Lathbury, the narrator of Barbara Pym's Excellent Women, are superficially quite alike. Both are relatively poor, plain and dowdy, and still single in their thirties. Mildred declares emphatically that she is "not like Jane Eyre" (EW 9), but at least one critic insists on a resemblance: Mildred resembles Jane in " her plainness and marginality and even - though on a diminished scale - in the romantic impulses that beat within her" (Long, 57-8). Mildred is uncomfortably aware of the disadvantage of not being married in the 1950's, when "I haven't married" was an admission that laid a woman open to patronizing treatment by women who had (Strauss-Woll, 82). As Mildred reflects, returning from an Old Girls' Reunion at her former school, "it was the ring on the left hand that people .. .looked for". Although the ring might be merely "the smallest and dimmest of diamonds ... [and the] husbands of this variety" (EW 100), the wearer was marked as an achiever. Much of the novel concerns Mildred's involvement with Rocky and Helena Napier, a rather flamboyant couple who have a flat in the same building. Her first meeting with Helena underlines the deference which the spinster accords the greater 23 worldly experience of the married woman (Bowman, 83;91). Helena shows her disdain by serving Mildred tea in a mug, with slices of bread and butter cut very thick. Moreover, Helena converses with Mildred with "the blunt frankness that might be used with a confidential servant expected to listen without criticism or inner reservation" (Cooley, 81).

Hannah Mole is far less troubled by her single status. She sometimes imagines "what a real love might have been, but such loves do not come in the way of the Miss Moles of this world, and now she was nearly forty" (MM 236). Hannah's experience differs from Mildred's in one essential detail - she is not a virgin. Hannah's brief, unhappy love affair with a soldier, returning wounded from World War 1, is central to the novel. When she becomes housekeeper to the family of the Reverend Robert Corder, and joins battle with him, her past must be concealed so that Corder, and his fellow persecutor, Pilgrim, cannot use it as a weapon against her. Hannah is quite aware of the double standard of morality that prevails: "he was a man, and to men a past could be forgiven .... while Hannah was a woman for whom repentance had no practical results" (MM 126). Hannah's experience appears to give her an assurance in dealing with men of all ages, and even a certain complacency in the face of the rather desperate virginity of Ethel, Corder's elder daughter, and Miss Patsy Withers who aspires to be Corder's second wife.

In a review of Miss Mole in Punch (13/8/30) Hannah Mole is described as "the traditional spinster with a past and no future, but she is glad of her past and she feasts on the simple incidents of the present with a cynicism which is so healthy that no hypocrisy can exist with it", a view that accords well with patriarchal values. Hannah is quite conscious of her plainness, dowdiness, poverty and economic dependence on unpleasant employers. Yet none of these depress her because a healthy self-esteem and 24 cheerful independence of outlook keep her in good spirits. From her parents' farmhouse Hannah has salvaged a model of a sailing-ship in a bottle, and this becomes a symbol of her own journey through life: "[s]he liked to see it sailing all alone, never getting any further and never losing its gallantness" (MM 54). It could be thought that the enclosed environment of the glass bottle represents a limitation on the scope of the gallant ship, but Hannah Mole seems content, as do nearly all Y oung's women, with the world of Radstowe (Bristol) and its surrounds.

Hannah's position reveals how important the question of accommodation is to spinsters. In a moment of desperation she exclaims, " 'All I want is a little hole to crawl into ... Everything always belongs to someone else ... A home of my own, even if it's only an attic, and no questions asked'" (MM 255). Hannah depends on her employers for the roof over her head. However, she does own a tiny cottage, where her erstwhile lover lives rent-free. She had "offered him a home when he had none. He had taken her as part of the house, like the furniture and the fowls... a temporary and amusing convenience" (MM 257). The possession of a house improves the spinster's status considerably, and the realization that Hannah is so endowed comes as a shock to her employer Corder. His reaction reflects the conventional attitude to unmarried working women in the 1920's: "he had seen her as a poor, homeless woman who must be glad of the shelter of his house, and now he learnt that she had a property of her own", and the displeasure of a misogynist cheated of one form of power: "he had been seeking a way of getting rid of her and found she could go when she chose, and he felt he had been duped" (MM 191).

Mildred Lathbury too has a country background, but that of a rural rectory. She is therefore further up the social scale than Hannah and somewhat better off for, "when [her] parents died, within two years of 25 each other, [she] was left with a small income of [her] own, and an assortment of furniture but no home" (EW 13). Mildred's part-time work, for an association for impoverished gentlewomen, is more desirable than the positions available to Hannah - companion to an elderly and demanding widow, or housekeeper to a widowed clergyman. Again the question of accommodation is important: Mildred can afford a small flat, but in postwar London, is obliged to share a bathroom with the Napiers.

Young and Pym both accurately observe how the economic dependency of spin.sters determined their lowly status, and the threatened dispossession of a dwelling is signficant in both these novels. The unscrupulous attempts of Hannah's lover to let the house over her head precipitates the climax of Miss Mole. In Excellent Women, when the susceptible priest Julian Mallory is ensnared by his lodger Allegra Gray, his spinster sister Winifred is under threat of eviction for some time. Her wretchedness at the prospect emphasises how secure Mildred is in her own domicile. Less dramatically, when the separation of the Napiers brings about the vacation of their flat, Mildred is heart-broken to see Rocky go. It is, of course, her heart rather than her house that is being dispossessed, but the effect is for Mildred, as for Hannah, to free her of an old, impractical love, and leave her open to a genuine one.

Spinsters in the novels of both Young and Pym are shown as being inclined to undermine the prevailing male-dominated social order, even if only in their thoughts. Hannah and Mildred are particularly good examples of the use of such strategies. Doan points out that Mildred is Pym's first exponent of the "dual voice" - "a mechanism to subvert the social order while continuing to function in it "(77), and that the juxtaposition of the dutiful and the subversive voice at the beginning of Excellent Women is the source of Pym's irony. An early example of the "dual voice" reveals Mildred's 26 innate dislike of the over-confident Helena Napier. As Helena calls out her intention to provide some toilet paper for their shared bathroom, Mildred reflects: "I come from a circle that does not shout aloud about such things, but I nevertheless hoped that she would remember. The burden of keeping three people in toilet paper seemed to me rather a heavy one" (EW 12). The combination of well-bred reticence and practical common-sense is characteristic of most of Mildred's musings. Pym's use of first-person narrative makes such a technique more effective.

Miss Mole is written in the third person, so Hannah is deprived of a similar dual voice. Nevertheless her subversion is equally strong and of a more direct type. It takes the form of outspoken comments, and, later, of active participation in her social scene. In general Pym's heroines are "socially perfect but with an alluring hint of subversive feelings and thoughts which never quite constitute a threat" (Cotsell, 30). In spite of falling in love with Rocky Napier, Mildred is a detached and almost passive observer of the erotic and professional involvements of her acquaintances. Mildred never puts a foot wrong or says a word out of place; the wry humour of the novel depends entirely on her unspoken observations.

Mildred lacks Hannah Mole's gift of repartee, nor does she display a 'capacity for imaginatively enlivening mundane subjects of conversation, by expressing various affinities and allusions. This ability is most notable in Jane Cleveland (J&P). In Pym's novels " the most engaging characters metamorphose reality ... the least sympathetic [are] bound to the limitations of actuality" (Rubenstein, 574).(1) Hannah Mole is much less concerned than Mildred to preserve the conventional niceties, and illustrates the comment by Annis Pratt: "[t]he greater the personal development of a hero, the more tt;ue she is to herself and the more eccentric her relationship to 27 the patriarchy. A quality of consciousness that is essentially antisocial characterizes most admirable heroes" (169).

When Miss Mole was republished by Virago Press in 1984, a reviewer described the novel as the story of a "tart spinster/governess/companion's secret rebellion asgainst decorum" (British Book News May 84 ). Hannah initiates the course of events that sweep her along. By pretending to need a reel of thread, she escapes her employer Mrs Widdows for an hour, during which she prevents an attempted suicide by breaking a window with her shoe; the additional delay costs her her job. Entering the household of the Reverend Robert Corder as housekeeper, Hannah is determined to set right all that she observes to be wrong, but to use strategy to do so: "[s]he had to persuade Robert Corder that she was useful before she let him suspect her of a mind that was quicker than his own ... and though she would have laughed at the idea, she had the zeal of a reformer under her thin crust of cynicism"(MM 67).

Her exchanges with Corder are nicely calculated to let the pompous, blundering minister fall into a trap of his own making. On her first night in the manse, Hannah allows him to expatiate on the physical features of Radstowe before lightly informing him that she had known the city all her life. Some time later, invited to stir the Christmas pudding for luck, Corder notices a "pleasant but forbidden smell": 'I hope there is no brandy in it,' he said seriously. Miss Mole looked disappointed. 'I know some people prefer beer,' she said, 'but I think brandy's better. I ought to have asked you.'

And the mincemeat?' he inquired. 'I'm afraid that is contaminated too,'Miss Mole replied.(MM 163-4) This exchange reveals to Corder the true extent of Hannah's guile; planning how to pass off the incident of the pudding, "he felt very bitter towards a 28 woman who put him towards these shifts "(MM 164). Such exchanges justify the comment by an early reviewer of Miss Mole that "[t]he scenes between Miss Mole and the minister are rich in humour, inferred rather than expressed" (Nation & Athenaeum 30/1/30). At the same time, they convey a sharp sense of the minister's underlying misogyny, baulked by Hannah's keener wits.

Where Mildred's subversive commentary is largely unspoken, Hannah's resistance to Corder's authority is explicit, if delicate. She disregards his social superiority in her recognition of his moral inferiority, and this is not mitigated by respect for his clerical status. Young's novels are informed by a latent anti-clericalism whereas Pym's reflect her lifelong adherence to the Anglican Church. Mildred feels and displays a certain deference towards Julian Malory, the handsome, if somewhat naive, Anglican priest, and towards Everard Bone, a distinguished anthropologist, and devout churchgoer. Yet she recognizes their selfishness and their willingness to exploit the "excellent women" who serve them, and her mental comments reveal that she has few illusions about those who are her superiors by reason of gender or vocation.

A lack of physical beauty marks both Hannah and Mildred. Mildred describes herself as mousy and plain, and, before her decisive dinner with Everard, she attempts to alter her appearance for the better by pulling her hair back and dressing in black (EW 26). However, Everard is impressed less by her looks than by her skill with a casserole, and her ability to index and proof-read apparently wins his heart. Mildred's lack of looks arouses no hostility but, rather, acts as a protection against being the object of jealousy in her involvement with the Napiers. Helena never sees Mildred as a rival, and Rocky finds her eminently reliable but never desirable. 29 Hannah's 's plainness is also a distinct advantage to her in her war of wits with Corder. He is irritated by her appearance, and his unconscious prejudices hamper him in his attempts to deal with her: "he could not judge a clever or a plain woman fairly .. .In failing to please him,a woman virtually denied her sex and became offensive to those instincts which he did his best to ignore" (MM 160). Clearly, to Corder a dependent woman should fill the role of both menial and sex object. As Hannah gradually gains the confidence and affection of the younger members of the household, and manages to establish a degree of equilibrium, Corder's antagonism increases. He finds her alertness and competence "unsuitable in a housekeeper, and arrogant in a woman who had no pretensions to good looks. If she had to be plain and thin, she should also have been meek" (MM 160). Being plain, Hannah evidently has no right to normal sexuality, and Corder's resentment is heightened when he suspects that she has attracted the interest of Samuel Blenkinsop, a lapsed member of his own congregation.

In neither novel is the lack of beauty an obstacle to finding love ultimately, but the course of Mildred's amorous attachments reflects Pym's wry view of the relationships between the sexes. Mildred becomes infatuated with the handsome and flamboyant Rocky Napier, but, for Rocky, Mildred is merely an "excellent woman" who can be trusted to despatch his furniture safely to the country. Following the Napiers' reconciliation, Mil_dred is left feeling "flat and disappointed, as if he had failed to come up to [her] expectations .... And yet, what had [she] really hoped for?"(EW 210). The complacent plans of the newly reunited couple include a humorous suggestion that Mildred should marry Everard Bone,on whom Helena had once set her sights. When Mildred realizes that she herself is the "suitable person" whom Everard intends to marry, her reaction is a mild pleasure at the prospect of living a "full life", as his wife-cum-research 30 assistant. It is not at all apparent that "a deep affection blossoms and leads to marriage" (Benet, 77); on the contrary, it appears that the marriage is based rather on Everard's exploitation of Mildred's usefulness (Nardin, 77-80). As Esther Clovis remembers "Everard had married a rather dull woman who was nevertheless a great help to him in his work" (LTA 61 ).

Y oung's attitude to the love between men and women is at once less obsessive and more positive. Hannah Mole does not feel incomplete or inferior because she is unmarried, and her relationships with the numerous men in the novel are not couched in terms of seeing them as prospective partners. She maintains easy friendships while joking that her only hope of salvation is a rich, elderly gentleman. This joke is kept up with Mr Samson, the Corders' eccentric neighbour, whom Hannah befriends. Samson, with his parrot, canaries, cats and rabid anti-clericalism, and his fond memories of a sexually active past, "was in fact, in many ways what Hannah would have been if she had been a man" and he understands her basic androgyny, that "she was a human being more abundantly than she was a woman" (MM 137-8). Hannah is living proof that "androgyny results from the negation of gender stereotypes, the absorption of positive qualities of masculinity and femininity into the total personality" (Pratt, 57-8).

While she recognizes and deplores the effects of sexual frustration in Ethel Corder, Hannah seems to have been completely satisfied with her one brief relationship ten years earlier. Young certainly expresses the depth of Hannah's attachment and of her disillusionment when she realizes that her former lover is attempting to defraud her of the cottage: "she knew she had been befooling herself for years, making excuses for him"(MM 253). The ability to idealize a lost love was no doubt the consolation of millions of unmarrried women in the decade following World War 1, as another of Y oung's spinsters Miss Riggs in Celia demonstrates. 31 On the other hand, Hannah's affection for Mr Blenkinsop develops so slowly that it takes her unawares. Despite his dour and slightly priggish presentation, she comes to love him, because "Mr Blenkinsop had always made her laugh", being well aware that "the laughter [was] born of love and the love of a conviction that [she] could trust him to the end of time"(MM 265). In both Excellent Women and Miss Mole, the man who wins the heart of the heroine seems at first to be self-centred and unyielding, and is initially contrasted with an attractive and charming rival. Wilfrid, Corder's nephew, is never a prospective lover for Hannah, but they share a flirtatious joking relationship; however, Wilfrid recedes from the plot as Blenkinsop achieves prominence. In both novels, only when the attractive man of easy charm retreats, does the spinster realize the true value of the serious suitor.

The great difference between Mildred and Hannah is that the former shows no interest in children. Hannah Mole, however, idealizes family life, for "like most childless women she exaggerated the joys and privileges of possessing offspring" (MM 67). Hannah explicitly regrets her own childlessness, even though she accepts her spinsterhood (MM 139). Hannah's relationship with the Corder girls, Ethel and Ruth, is beautifully depicted, and justifies a contemporary reviewer's opinion that "no one at present writing more subtly understands the mind of the immature and is so sympathetic and so unsentimental towards growing pains" (Spectator 2/12/32).

Hannah understands the night terrors of the recently bereaved Ruth, and her need for the nightlight, of which Corder disapproves. Her talent for inventive fantasy puts her on Ruth's level without diminishing the security she offers. Ruth's trust is signalled by her use of the nickname "Moley": Corder's resentment of this name reflects his realization that 32 Hannah has won Ruth's affection in a way he never could. When threatened with ultimate exposure at the hands of Mr Pilgrim, Hannah's concern is chiefly for the effect of his revelations on Ruth. After Blenkinsop resolves her dilemma by declaring his love, Hannah rejoices that Ruth need never know about her earlier illicit love affair (MM 286-7). Hannah's attitude to Ethel Corder, by contrast, is a blend of pity, slight contempt and some wariness, for Ethel is very much the tool of her father and Pilgrim.

Both Hannah Mole and Mildred Lathbury are isolated in the sense of having no close woman friend in whom they can confide. Neither Mildred's old school friend Dora Caldicote, nor the rather pitiful Winifred Mallory, offer much emotional support, and Hannah is definitely ostracized by her one living relative, Lillah Spenser-Jones. Both Pym and Young do however describe close friendships between women who share accommodation, social activities, and sometimes work. The advantages and drawbacks of such relationships are revealed in detail by both novelists and will be discussed in the two following chapters.

NOTES

(1) Mildred's attempts to parry the self-centred demands of men sometimes result in an apparently dithering comment, which the priggish and complacent male fails to understand. Discussing Helena Napier's declaration of love to an unwilling Everard Bone, Mildred remarks," 'You must have been rather startled .. .it must have been something like having a large white rabbit thrust into your arms and not knowing what to do with it' "(EW 135). The remark is incomprehensible to Everard who fails to see how a white rabbit and an unwanted lover are both inconvenient, hard to get rid of, but above all vulnerable. Incidentally, Robert Liddell is equally puzzled by the remark. 33 Chapter 2 Friendships between Women: Barbara Pym's Comical Couples

In novels which have a predominantly domestic setting and feminine orientation, the relationships between women are of great importance. In two novels by E.H. Young, Celia and Chatterton Sguare, the married protagonist has a close and longlasting friendship with a spinster. Celia Marston, and her daily help, Miss Riggs, maintain a relationship of perfect equality, and their conversational exchanges have the intuitive understanding that comes from long familiarity with each other. Annis Pratt says that, from 1920 on, a large number of novels dealt with friendship between women, although the authors implied such friendships resulted from extreme circumstances, such as isolation (Pratt, 97). This does not apply to Celia, but is to some extent true of Chatterton Square, where Rosamond's husband has seemingly deserted her, and she invites Agnes Spanner, a girlhood friend, to share her house. The relationship between this tart,confirmed celibate and the mother of a growing brood, is beautifully delineated. In each case, the support and understanding of the single woman act as a touchstone of normality in the difficulties that beset the married one.

The reverse is the case, as Charles Burkhart observes, in Barbara Pym's novels, where all the female pairings are funny ("Glamorous Acolytes", 97). The earliest, and happiest, pair are Belinda and Harriet Bede in Some Tame Gazelle. The widowed Mabel Swan and her sister Rhoda Wellcome live together very happily in Less Than Angels, just as Pym and her own sister Hilary did for 35 years. The comical dominance-submission relationship between Edith Liversedge and Connie Aspinall, depicted in Some Tame Gazelle, is found again in Pym's last novel, A Few Green Leaves. In Less Than Angels, the most fully developed and amusing pair, Esther Clovis and Gertrude Lydgate, make their appearance as middle-aged anthropologists. 34 Younger women may team up with another spinster, as Dulcie Mainwaring does with Viola Dace, in their pursuit of Aylwin Forbes, in No Fond Return of Love. More often, an incipient rivalry develops, as between Jessie Morrow and Prudence Bates for the attentions of Fabian Driver, in Jane and Prudence. It must be admitted that Pym rarely described warm relations between women friends of marriageable age. Jessie Morrow "cannot be another woman's friend [being] preoccupied by a private determination to get a man at any cost" (Cotsell, 65). In one of her later novels, Quartet in Autumn, Pym describes two elderly women and two men, who experience only a rather frozen sense of shared isolation. Pym states explicitly that women may feel " a certain unsentimental tenderness towards each other", but appears to regard such feeling as merely an outlet for frustrated maternal affection (QIA 12). This is a bleak view of the relationships between women, but Quartet in Autumn is truly a novel about the failure of friendship.

Harriet and Belinda Bede are affectionately satirical portraits of the young writer's sister and self. They are secure in their possession of a cottage, a competency, respectable social status, and a University education. Harriet's perpetual infatuation with the latest curate is contrasted with her antagonism to Archdeacon Hoccleve, the first of Pym's self-centred and prosy clergymen, whom Belinda has adored for 30 years. Harriet, and the other characters, have the spontaneity of youth; Belinda is quite convincingly middle-aged, and, with her mixture of prudery and innocent snobbery, embodies many of the characteristics of Pym's later spinster protagonists.

"Belinda is easily embarrassed by the remotest sexual or scatalogical overtones" (Nardin, 69). However, she is more often offended by Harriet's robust common-sense: - to Belinda, whisky is a medicine, rather 35 than a drink fit for clergymen, but Harriet declares that the Archdeacon likes his drop and must be watched (STG 15). It is the librarian Mr Mold's fondness for visiting the Crown and Pinion that first alerts Belinda to his low origin, unredeemed by a life in cultured surroundings. Mold's unsuccessful proposal to Harriet balances the ludicrous Bishop Grote's rejection by Belinda, and his almost immediate acceptance by Connie Aspinall, in a delightful parody of the Elizabeth-Collins-Charlotte Lucas triangle in Pride and Prejudice. Both sisters are represented as emotionally satisified with their obsessions, and only concerned lest the other should marry.

Edith Liversedge and Connie Aspinall in the same novel are forerunners of Pym's most successful pair of spinsters, Esther Clovis and Gertrude Lydgate. Edith's rough, mannish voice, dogs, cigarettes, slap-dash cookery, and obsession with sanitation, are matched by a completely unsentimental attitude to romance. She is in sharp contrast with Belinda's fluttering doubts and refinements, and Harriet's perpetual girlishness. Edith's possession of a house gives her a marked ascendancy over her companion, the gushing and ingratiating Connie. Connie's marriage frees her from an unappealing form of female friendship, one which Belinda holds to be of little account and "cold comfort" (STG 160).

Esther Clovis appears alone in Excellent Women and with her friend Gertrude Lydgate in Less Than Angels, and they are the most fully developed of Pym's spinster couples. It has been observed that "although graceless and generally ridiculous ... nevertheless they achieve a mutual understanding more complete than most Pym characters ever manage" (Rubenstein, 577). The pair are linguists, engaged in research which may be totally meaningless, but united by a common devotion to their profession of anthropology. Like Edith, they are somewhat masculinized, displaying no interest in their appearance or in traditional feminine pursuits. Gertrude 36 speaks in a "penetrating voice" and dismisses one of Father Gemini's generalizations about women "as if she would hardly count herself as being a woman" (LTA 166-7). The only quarrel between the two occurs when Esther suspects Gertrude of having connived at Father Gemini's misappropriation of the Foresight grant money. Only a breach of professional faith could divide them, because personal motives have been entirely sublimated to their devotion to their science.

The hilarious luncheon scene in Chapter 8, where Mark and Digby agonize over the women's hearty appetites, and their own shortage of cash, is resolved when Gertrude "snatches" the bill, declaring "young men shouldn't be expected to take middle-aged women out to lunch" (LTG 99). Her atttitude underlines the total lack of sexual self-consciousness in the two women. Esther's only interest in Gertrude's brother Alaric, a bachelor, is her desire to get her hands on his jealouly-guarded notes, accumulated during years of service in Africa. The pair's detachment from the emotional context of the novel is revealed by their horror when Alaric and Catherine make a bonfire of his notes, achieving his liberation from the past, and deliverance into a new relationship.

It may be that Pym, in Less Than Angels, is satirising anthropology by "derid[ing] the insignificance of the work and the lack of nobility of the characters", while demonstrating that, in this area, as in others, it was still a man's world (Brothers, 76). The bachelor Professor Mainwaring, with his privileged social and educational background, can charm possible donors; it is Esther who does all the spade work - organising the weekend for grant candidates at Mainwaring's country house, and having the unpleasant task of breaking the news of Gemini's defection to their colleagues. Plainly, "excellent women" serve Science, as they serve the 37 Church, by doing the unglamorous but necessary jobs that keep the organisation functional.

The other close female/female relationship in the novel is that of another pair of sisters: Mabel Swan, Deirdre's widowed mother and Rhoda Wellcome,her maiden aunt, the most conventional spinster in the novel. Rhoda's curiosity about the doings of her neighbour, Alaric Lydgate, serves a literary function by informing the reader, through the eyes of a comically uncomprehending observer, of the progress of the friendship between Catherine and Alaric. Rhoda's acceptance of convention extends to maintaining "the only sustainable fiction that the Pym woman can create ... the belief that she has loved and lost, thereby justifying her existence as a spinster" (Bradham, 35). The sisters' only falling-out occurs when Rhoda becomes upset at Mabel's assertion that she has never lost anyone, as Deirdre and Catherine have lost their lover, Tom Mallow. The total incongruity between the two pairs of female friends is expressed in their reactions to Alaric's bonfire. What is a shocking destruction of valuable records to Esther and Gertrude, is to Rhoda (and presumably Mabel) merely an activity that is rather unsuitable for a respectable suburb. Rhoda and Mabel, Esther and Gertrude, are quite absorbed in their own lives, on the periphery of the real interest of the novel, observing, but rarely understanding, the main characters.

Esther Clovis' funeral is mentioned in Pym's last novel, marking the disappearance of links between the past and present. A Few Green Leaves has its own spinster couple, Olive Lee and Flavia Grundy, with their litany of memories, centred on the past grandeur of the de Tankerville family and their legendary governess, Miss Vereker. Miss Lee, who owns the house, comically dominates Miss Grundy, who is gentle and unassertive. Yet both have grown old in the service of the church, and Miss Lee, who 38 prefers to polish an old wooden lectern, rather than a more showy brass one, strikes Tom Dagnall as a woman firm in her faith. Miss Grundy, whose one skill is arranging the flowers in the church, supplies the title for the novel with her remark " ' these [roses] will do another week with a few green leaves. A few green leaves can make such a difference' "(AFGL 180) If, as has been suggested, the Church as the Rose of Sharon is intended (Benet, 157), Miss Grundy's assertion is an exquisite expression of confidence in her faith, and a final tribute, on Pym's part, to the "excellent women" who do most to ensure its survival.

The situation of the ageing spinster without a home is poignantly illustrated by Miss Vereker and Daphne Dagnall. Miss Vereker depends on a nephew in Kensington for accommodation, but Daphne, house­ keeper to her brother, has long dreamed of sharing a cottage in Greece with her lifelong friend, Heather Blenkinsop. Daphne and Heather are the only two spinsters in Pym's fiction to be suspected of a lesbian relationship, but solely by the bumptious young doctor, Martin Shrubsole, who likes to stereotype his patients. However, Daphne does prefer the company of women, because "there was a comfortable feeling about it that the company of men did not provide" (AFGL 47). Her rush of confidences to Emma, the protagonist, reveals her real loneliness.

Heather's cottage in Birmingham replaces the dwelling in Greece that Daphne dreamed of, and Heather's bossiness makes life a misery for her. On her New Year visit to Tom, Daphne encounters Beatrix and Isobel, determined to clear the path for a possible love affair between Tom and Emma. Daphne's secret hope of being asked to return is not likely to be fulfilled; well may she reflect on the life of the witch-like Miss Lickerish, living alone in her cottage, unfriended except by "her cats and hedgehogs, and once even a toad... animals did not disappoint or deceive, 39 perhaps because one expected less of them" (AFGL 206). When the novel closes, Daphne's position is uncertain and pathetic. Always seeking restlessly for something better than what she has, "at the end Daphne lives nowhere" (Cotsell, 136).

Despite this, Pym's last novel represented a return to a more light-hearted treatment of the spinster's lot, after the sombre tone of ..A Quartet in Autumn. The lives of Letty Crowe and Marcia Ivory, who have worked together for several years, are not enhanced by friendship. Neither they nor their colleagues, Edwin and Norman can "acknowledge their status as a small community created by proximity, familiarity and shared human needs" (Benet, 138). Letty, an admirable woman, allows her well-bred reserve and respect for the privacy of others to betray her into neglect of Marcia, a victim of increasing anorexia and paranoia. The distancing is not all the fault of Letty. Marcia resists any impulse to ask Letty to share her house, and it is willed to Norman, for whom she once had a passing fondness. Even Norman believes the house would have been more suitably left to Letty, but such acts of generosity do not occur between women in Pym's novels. By a sad irony, although Letty realizes they were never close friends, it is she who must sort through Marcia's personal effects after her death. The stocks of tinned food, plastic bags and clean milk bottles that overflow the house tell their own sad tale of Marcia's psychosis.

Letty regards herself as a modern anomaly, "the unattached working woman, the single 'business lady' of the advertisements who was most likely to survive in the house of strangers" (QIA 65). However she recognizes the similarity between her own position and that of the nineteenth century governess, when she comes to live in Mrs Pope's house. A lack of respect for the single woman's privacy and dignity is reflected in Mrs Pope's close inspection of her clothes and toiletries, which is 40 indeed reminiscent of Madame Beck's examination of Lucy Snowe's effects in Villette. The catalogue of Letty's possessions is Pym's way of conveying the good taste of a well-bred elderly woman, and the indignities she must suffer, because she is dependent on others for a roof over her head.

Like Daphne Dagnan, Letty has had a long-standing plan to share a cottage with Marjorie, a girlhood friend. The plans are upset when Marjorie becomes engaged to the Reverend David Lydell, one of Pym's more demanding clergymen. The exploitative quality of Marjorie's friendship is underlined by her anxiety to have Letty live near by. Her offer to arrange for her friend's admission to a retirement home in the village rebounds when the Matron of that home seduces the vicar away with food and wine. Marjorie's immediate assumption, that Letty will resume their former plans, reflects the lack of choice and personal rights that spinsters are granted in arranging their own lives. Ironically Marjorie sees the behaviour of Matron Beth Doughty as evidence of women's unpredictability, without reflecting on her own quick change of intentions, or her fiance's fickleness. Letty regards Marcia's unexpected bequest of her house to Norman as similar proof of feminine mutability: Pym suggests again that female friendships prove unreliable when a man appears on the scene.

The final pair of spinsters are not really friends, merely fellow-parishioners. Sister Dew and Daisy Pettigrew are minor, and mainly comic, characters in An Unsuitable Attachment. They demonstrate convincingly that, Pym's fiction, some women, " like cats, are self-contained and can manage competently and even satisfactorily by themselves" (Nardin, 37). Daisy Pettigrew, incensed that Mark Ainger refuses to have an Animals' Sunday, enjoys peering into the Vicarage garden, keeping an eye open for any suspicously High tendencies; she mistakes a blue cloth, drying on a tree­ stump, for a statue of the Virgin Mary, until Sophia comes to take in the 41 washing. Pym makes Daisy comically consistent in her devotion to animals, yet Daisy is the first person to meet Ianthe and John, and hear of their engagement, and perhaps the only one to appreciate John's genuine devotion. Daisy's heartfelt expressions of delight are the only sincere congratulations the couple receive. Neither Penelope nor Ianthe, the protagonists of the novel, employ the subversive "dual voice", and, in a way, it is Sister Dew and Daisy Pettigrew who make a critical comment on the other characters, particularly the Aingers. Sophia's snobbery, and lack of genuine compassion for her neighbours, is underlined by Sister Dew's vulgar good nature and generosity, and Daisy's kindliness. Moreover, the apparent emptiness of the Aingers' marriage (in which Faustina the cat takes precedence) contrasts markedly with the self-sufficiency and evident contentedness of the two middle-aged spinsters.

To sum up, the happiest female couples in Pym's fiction are sisters. Spinsters who own a house gain a marked ascendancy over unmarried friends whom they invite to share their home. Longstanding plans to live together in retirement can be disrupted by the emergence of such "bossiness", but, even more, by the advent of a man who offers marriage to one of them. Emotional ties between spinster friends are tentative, if not cool; self-sufficiency seems to be the ideal goal. In the next chapter, the close relationships between single women in the novels of E.H. Young will be discussed. These are more distinct than those described by Pym, and humour, although present, is subordinated to the sympathetic analysis of the support women offer one another. 42 Chapter 3 Sisters, Companions, and Conspirators in the Novels of E. H. Young

E.H. Young represents friendships between spinsters and between spinsters and married women in four of her novels. In many ways, Caroline and Sophia, in The Misses Mallett, resemble Pym's spinster couples, and their role is humorous. A certain grim comedy is evident too in the wary conspiracy between Miss Jewel and Miss Lorimer, in Jenny Wren. The genuine friendships that are described in Celia and Chatterton Square, between the married woman and her spinster friend, despite their gentle humour, resemble nothing in the work of Barbara Pym.

The Misses Mallett is quite explicitly a retelling of the Cinderella story. In their late middle-age, Caroline and Sophia are still proud of the fine ankles and small feet, which earned them both the nickname "Cinderella" in youth. When their niece Henrietta comes to live with them, they metamorphose into the Ugly Sisters, although kindly ones; Rose, their younger half-sister, plays Fairy Godmother, and, reluctantly, rescues Henrietta from a quite inappropriate Prince Charming, in the person of Francis Sales. Dominance and submission is the pattern of Caroline and Sophia's relationship, but it is defined by affection. Caroline, like Harriet Bede, is stout, and like Edith Liversedge or Esther Clovis, rather masculinised. Her "deep voice and deep laugh" (MM 27) bear out her claim that she should have been a man, yet she loves clothes, jewels, and the attentions of gentlemen as much as Sophia. The younger sister is gentle, conventional, and sensitive to the feelings of others, much like Belinda Bede. Emotionally Sophia has remained a mid-Victorian maiden, who constantly excuses or explains her outspoken sister.

There is no sense of failure or inferiority in Caroline's frequent assertion, "We Malletts don't marry!" Yet it is no less important for 43 Caroline to preserve the fiction of having been once loved than it is for Rhoda Wellcome. Because of her wealth and assured social position, Caroline can lay claim to a promiscuous past, without fear of ostracism, and rely on her sister to reassure her audience. Sophia is unperturbed by the "legions of disappointed and fictitious lovers" which Caroline claims to have refused (MM 179), for it is Sophia who secretly preserves the photograph of a real love, who died forty years earlier.

It has been remarked, by an American critic, that English novelists assume the reader "has a sense of class distinctions and their importance, even a sense of their being a little absurd" (Brownstein, 6). This is quite true of Pym, but in Y oung's work, class prejudice can be cruel. Caroline, on first learning of Henrietta's predicted arrival, fears her "dreadful accent" (TMM 80), for her niece is the progeny of her black sheep brother and his working-class wife. The aunts' dismay at Henrietta's habit of whistling, and at her unchaperoned trip to a cricket match, reveal how fixed they are within archaic conventions, and how far removed in experience from a girl who kept her mother and herself, by cooking meals in a seedy London boarding-house.

The aunts' love of clothes and fashion marks a kind of embalmed girlishness and, in Rose's eyes, they resemble "fashion plates of twenty years ago" (MM 44). By constantly praising Sophia for her slenderness and girlish appearance, Caroline denies her own advancing age. When the two are dressed for the ball, they truly resemble pantomime dames, in keeping with their role of Ugly Sisters. Yet the ball is a triumph for both, for they are "respected and playfully loved" in their community (MM 208). Following the ball, Caroline contracts pneumonia. Although she was "a funny, vain old woman without much sensibility, immune from much that others suffered" (MM 257), after her death, Henrietta finds Nelson Lodge 44 silent and sad, for" it was Caroline ... who had made the place a home" (MM 268). Sophia, collapsing at the garden-party, dies of the heart disease which she has long concealed from her family.

The ball and the garden-party are central to the plot of the novel for other reasons, but, by indirectly precipitating the deaths of Caroline and Sophia, they are also the means of setting Rose and Henrietta free. Raised in a traditional patriarchal culture by the General, the elder Malletts were secure, but also imprisoned, in an anachronistic way of life. "We Malletts don't marry!" seems an assertion of self-sufficiency and independence, but can also be seen as a prison sentence, when no other opportunity of self-fulfilment was permitted to a woman. Significantly, following the deaths of the sisters, the two younger Misses Mallett are released, or cut adrift, from their comfortable past, and allowed, or obliged, to marry their respective suitors. The spinster sisters could be seen as custodians of a selfish privilege, which was really a form of captivity, from which the younger women have been delivered.

In Jenny Wren three spinsters of 40 or more play parts. All three suggest that " to dismiss the promptings of the heart, to toe the line of conventional morality is seen ... as a denial of life itself " (Beauman, Introduction to JW ix ). Young appears, in her view of the effects of sexual frustration on women, to be very much a writer of the 1920's. Annis Pratt explains that "[the] tum-of-the -century discovery that women indeed had sexuality of their own led to greater insistence that they make themselves sexually active or else risk neurosis, complexes ... and ... social ostracism.... By the 1920's women who did not participate in sexuality were warned that they might become riddled with complexes" (78). Hannah Mole's brief experience of sexual love seems to be the ground of her stability, kindliness and self­ esteem and, although the two great spinsters of Y oung's later novels, Miss 45 Riggs and Miss Spanner, have achieved full adult humanity without such experience, in Miss Jewel and Miss Morrison, sexual deprivation exacts a sad toll.

The girlishness displayed by Caroline and Sophia and at times by Hannah Mole, is replaced in Miss Jewel by a sour immaturity, which is explicitly ascribed to sexual frustraton: "Miss Jewel was not mature: she had grown old without ripening in mind and body, and she had an insane hatred of physical fulfilment or its promise" (JW 272). Young's portrait of the archetypal nosy and vicious old maid is quite savage. Yet she makes it clear that the sole reason for Miss Jewel's rejection in youth was her lack of beauty. Despite her "natural enmity for other women, as women" (JW 131 ), Miss Jewel develops feelings of partisanship for Miss Morrison, based purely on a perception of shared disadvantage: " if she engaged a man's attention, she must do it by means of virtues which Miss Jewel, too, possessed, and not by physical charms of which, lacking them herself, she had a passionate jealousy" (JW 73).

When the widowed Louisa Rendall and her daughters set up a boarding-house next door in Beulah Mount, they become fitting targets for Miss Jewel's suspicion and contempt. The weekly visits of Thomas Grimshaw, a former lover, from whom Louisa has borrowed money for her venture, afford Miss Jewel grounds for scandalous imaginings. Her assumption that the Randall girls are illegitimate is ironic, in view of the fact that their father's good breeding is the one consolation Jenny Rendall has in her reduced circumstances. Inadvertently, his landlady's venomous suggestions impel the Reverend Cecil Sproat to take an interest in the family next door, and so fall in love with Dahlia. Finally, Miss Jewel's interference precipitates the farcical denouement of the novel, where Jewel, Sproat and Lorimer burst in on Dahlia kissing Mr Allsop. Sproat is confirmed in his 46 love for Dahlia, Mr Allsop returns unharmed to his fiance, and Miss Jewel's "hopes of horrible wranglings and broken hearts were not fulfilled" (JW 307). She is left skulking in her basement lair, while her prize lodger moves out in full view of her neighbours.

Sarah Lorimer, Louisa's elder sister is "singularly unkind and deceitful...common ... and ugly to boot " as Beauman says (JW xii). Yet she is a powerful and threatening figure, and one whom Miss Jewel instantly realizes would be "a formidable enemy, if she were not a valuable ally"(JW 197). By occupation and personality, Sarah is a negative image of Miss Mole, for she demonstrates the same management skills, and the same verbal capacity for undercutting the pretensions, or defences, of others. Sarah has held the position of housekeeper in several rich families, but never for long. Being currently out of a situation, Sarah, is like many of the spinsters in fiction, in need of a home. At 50, she evidently feels it more urgent to make sure it will be a permanent one. Miss Jewel and Sarah discover a common aim - to get the Rendalls out, but Sarah plans to do it by marrying them off, and taking over the running of the house herself. Between the two middle-aged spinsters, there lies " the difference between the constructive and the destructive mind, between seeking material advantages for self and the feverish desire for disaster to others"(JW 257).

Where Miss Jewel relies on the crude verbal tool of scandal-mongering, Sarah is a mistress of innuendo, able to make "innocent underservants ... [fancy] themselves and their families guilty of unsuspected, crimes"(JW 217). She manipulates her sister, by making snide references to Louisa's marital failures, but a genuine family affection moves Sarah to undermine Miss Jewel's most desperate attempt to plant doubts about Dahlia's chastity. One advantage of her employment in rich families is that Sarah, having moved in more sophisticated circles, lacks Miss Jewel's 47 "abhorrence of sin". Moreover, in all her encounters with Miss Jewel, she secretly despises her neighbour as a provincial, and treats her with "the majesty proper to the housekeeper's room" (JW 204). Sarah's lack of erotic experience, however, probably contributes to her insensitivity. Blind to the offensiveness of her suggestive remarks, and of her attempts to arrange the lives of her sister and nieces, her final isolation in the Rendall household leaves her bewildered. At the close of the novel, all Sarah's heavy-handed match-making has apparently been successful, but the house is to be sold, and she will be once more without accommodation or employment.

It is interesting that, in The Curate's Wife, her sequel to Jenny Wren, Young combines the characteristics of Miss Jewel and Sarah Lorimer in the person of a married woman, Mrs Doubleday, the vicar's wife. Mrs Doubleday is a monster of self-righteousness and hunger for power, which her position as a clergy wife, and her husband's genial weakness, give her ample opportunity to satisfy. She seeks to disrupt the married life of Dahlia and Cecil Sproat as consistently as Miss Jewel interfered with their courtship. Mrs Doubleday's only redeeming feature is her love for her son - who is destined to marry Jenny Rendall. Clearly frustration, moralism and a lust for power were not, in Y oung's opinion, the prerogative of unmarried women.

Miss Riggs, Celia Marston's household help, represents the many thousands of women who lost their real or potential lovers in the First World War. Miss Riggs is considered fortunate by her employer to have her fiance, Fred, "dead and safely her own" (C 148). Her contented celibacy is a telling contrast to the marital disharmony that disturbs Celia and her siblings. Celia has long cherished a secret passion for Richard Milligan, whom she met as a convalescent soldier. Peace brought Miss Riggs honourable bereavement, and a sacred memory, but, to Celia, only the return 48 of a husband she pitied, but did not love. The novel charts Celia's slow disillusionment, as she comes to realize that Richard has completely forgotten their romance. Celia's dissatisfaction with marriage is thrown into relief by Miss Riggs' reaction to a proposal from a widower, her dead fiance's best friend. Miss Riggs herself asks, " What do I want with marrying?' "(C 103), and seems motivated mainly by a sense of loyalty to Fred. As often occurs in Young's novels, a dead hero remains enshrined in memory, but a living one, like Richard Milligan, or Hannah Mole's lover, proves inadequate in everyday civilian life.

Despite the genuine affection that exists between them, Celia and Miss Riggs are divided by differences of class and education - symbolized perhaps by the fact that we never learn the houskeeper's Christian name. Miss Riggs's takes a severely practical approach to life; she visualizes a future with Jo where there will be little need for conversation. Celia is also aware that "if Miss Riggs made a mistake no one else would suffer for it" (C 104). Clearly an invisible barrier prevents Celia from ever finding in Miss Riggs the confidante she needs for her own secret yearnings and disappointments.

Twenty years of self-sufficiency have made Miss Riggs determined to preserve her independence, even as a wife. Yet, marriage will give her a home: she currently lives in a single room, " with a photograph of Fred on the chest of drawers and all his virtues intact" (C 346). She will gain her long-desired "little bit of green and somewhere to hang the washing" (C 343), and will count completely on Jo to support her in future. In fact, she regards his proposal as proof of the wisdom of the Biblical injunction to take no thought for the morrow. Her attitude to marriage is completely unromantic, and she admits freely that no other opportunity had presented itself until Jo proposed. It is evident that, in a generation where millions of 49 young men had been eliminated by war, to have loved and lost was sufficient guarantee of a woman's worth to make her contented for life. On the other hand, all the married women in Young's novel suffer dissatisfaction: Celia's merely takes the form that is least evident.

Miss Riggs is a portrait of contented maturity, resembling II a wise and competent mother" (C 104), as opposed to the illusory girlishness of the Mallett sisters, and the pathological immaturity of Miss Jewel. Agnes Spanner, the admirable spinster of Chatterton Square, Young's last novel, seems ageless, certainly much older than her 43 years. Described by a contemporary reviewer (Wyatt E.V.R.) as "scrawny, tart and Victorian ", Miss Spanner denies that she ever had any youth, being "born a plain spinster, somewhere about thirty years of age' 11 (CS 259). In many ways Miss Spanner is made to seem a contemporary of the elder Misses Mallett; sixteen-year-old Rhoda Blacket loves her room furnished with

11knick-knacks ... photographs of bearded men in frock coats and ladies wearing jet ornaments" (CS 95). This indefinite age, or agelessness, serves a literary purpose: Miss Spanner is the voice of the conscience of England, speaking up against the forces of appeasement. The novel ends as the family listens to Chamberlain's notorious announcement on his return from Munich. Much of the patriotic denunciation of the German nation, which so offended the reviewer (1LS) when the novel appeared in 1947, flows from the lips of Miss Spanner.

In Agnes Spanner, Young has combined the percipience of Hannah Mole with the curiosity of Miss Jewel, and something of Sarah Lorimer's love of interference. Miss Spanner suffers the chief anxieties of the spinster: loneliness and homelessness are the conditions that threaten her. Much of her activity in the novel is motivated by her fear of losing the home which Rosamund Fraser offered her when her husband Fergus abandoned the 50 family. Agnes' disapproval of Rosamond's growing love of Piers Lindsay arises not so much from moral scruples, as from the fear of being replaced in Rosamond's affections, and displaced from her home.

The friendship between the two women is beautifully delineated. Rosamond describes it as "the best relationship in the world. We haven't to be careful. We haven't to think before we speak" (CS 42). However, Rosamond's determination to keep her visits to Lindsay's farm a secret from her friend, show that there are serious matters on which they do not think alike. Yet when she pledges herself to give Agnes a permanent home, at the end of the novel, she chooses the words of Ruth to Naomi: " 'Don't cry any more, my poor dear,' she said. 'Whither I go thou shalt go ... And my people shall be thy people, and all the rest of it.' .. She realized the rashness of this promise but she was not sorry she had made it"(CS 318). Miss Spanner has a higher social status than any of Y oung's other spinsters, except the Malletts. Her father and Rosamond's were partners in a firm of solicitors. Rosamond resents the pious and repressive upbringing her friend endured; Miss Spanner regards the past with equanimity. To the young Agnes, Rosamond represented beauty, freedom and happiness; in middle age she is the complete converse of Agnes, being still beautiful, sexually desirable and desirous, and surrounding by evidence of her fruitfulness in the persons of her sons and daughters.

Annis Pratt notes that " early in the century, it was still possible to write about deeply passionate feelings between women because actual physical sexuality was so unheard of that its presence went unsuspected. [But] ... after 1920 .... [it was] far less acceptable for women authors to exhibit strong feelings between their heroes ... because an acknowledgement of lesbian sexuality had become prevalent" (96). Young makes a point of advising the reader that "[t]here was nothing abnormal or 51 even jealous in her love for Rosamund" (CS 143) but she shows Agnes experiencing, if not a physical attraction, at least a strong admiration for Rosamond's body: "[n]obody knew how much Miss Spanner, casting disapproving eyes on Rosamund's bare neck and arms enjoyed the sight of her". The "deep, concealed affection", that she has nourished for Rosamund since girlhood, has all the quality of romantic friendship (CS 36-37). The two meet every night in Rosamund's bedroom for a chat before retiring, and Agnes is aggrieved if any of the young Frasers make her wait by demanding their mother's attention. Yet it is Rosamund's young daughter Chloe, accidentally running into Miss Spanner in a dark corridor, who gives her "the nearest thing to an an embrace she had ever experienced", for Rosamund's hugs were "lovingly matter-of-fact" (CS 130). The fact that the author felt it necessary to make the disclaimer mentioned above suggests that she was well aware of the implications of this relationship.

Like Miss Jewel, but lacking her capacity for malice, Miss Spanner is a voyeur of life, describing herself as "only a spectator" (CS 260). Indeed, as much as Rhoda Wellcome or Daisy Pettigrew, Miss Spanner takes a lively interest in the activities of her neighbours. During the absence of Mr Blackett and Flora in Europe, she monitors the visits of Piers to his cousin, Mrs Blackett, hoping for evidence that his affections are already engaged. Agnes also undertakes a degree of moral guardianship which is responsible for the most serious differences between the friends. Rosamond is quite shocked by Agnes' horrified reaction to her contemplated divorce procedures. Once more the approach of a male lover threatens the durability of a friendship between women, but Agnes is prepared to fight by informing Piers that Rosamund is married, and greatly exaggerating the warmth of feeling between the couple. 52 In her resentment of Agnes' strictures on divorce, Rosamond thinks contemptuously of her "sacred virginity", and Miss Spanner is unconsoled by the memory, or even by the fantasy, of having been loved. Yet she remains unembittered, considering herself as "bare as a monument and as invulnerable" (CS 128). Again, Miss Spanner's love for young people divides her from spinsters like Miss Jewel and Sarah Lorimer. The relationship that develops between Miss Spanner and Rhoda Blackett resembles that between Hannah Mole and Ruth Corder, and Miss Spanner's affection for Rosamond's sons is very marked. A certain feminist consciousness is apparent in her resentment of the fact that topics of conversation that interest men, like cricket, are regarded as sacred, while the the topics that interest women, like cooking, are treated with scorn. Yet Miss Spanner continues to believe that men deserve the best because they make the sacrifice in wartime - a conventional view, but a timely one in 1938.

The "high-minded dowdiness" (AFGL 92) that typifies Pym's admirable women, is also characteristic of Miss Spanner, and her complete lack of physical beauty or dress sense is stressed in the novel. Miss Spanner's flat-chestedness is mentioned several times, and her embarrassment, at being seen by Rosamond's children in her dressing-gown, with her plaits down, is motivated less by modesty than by the consciousness of her appearance. Y oung's most daring touch is to give Miss Spanner a formidable squint, and a habit of suddenly tapping her nose. This unattractive feature, however, attracted the young Rosamond to the young Agnes, for her squint is Miss Spanner's way of underlining the irony of her observations or her silences. The tap on her nose is an equally clear sign that she has been confirmed in her judgement of personalities and situations.

Appreciation of Miss Spanner's quality is a touchstone of male worth in the novel. The absent Fergus, one of Y oung's inadequate 53 war heroes, is redeemed for Rosamond, and the reader, by the fact that he "had always liked her curious friend. It was one of the nice things about him, that capacity for recognizing her quality under an exterior which troubled his eye and a manner which suspiciously resisted his friendliness" (CS 318). In sharp contrast, Mr Blackett is as deeply offended by Miss Spanner's looks as was Robert Corder by Hannah's. Both judge a woman by her capacity to please men. To Mr Blackett, Agnes neglects "the obvious mission of a woman" and "offend[s] by her unattractiveness"(CS 53). Rosamond disturbs him by her "over-much femininity" as much as " the plain spinster who offend[s] him by her complete lack of it" (CS 215). Of course, Rosamond's position, in a household not headed by a man, permits Mr Blackett to indulge in licentious imaginings of his own. By contrast, Miss Spanner is desexualised, even depersonalised, simply because she does not arouse such appetites: " 'I should hardly call Miss Spanner a woman ... but ... as a chaperon ... she may justify her existence'" (CS 294).

Miss Spanner herself regards her childlessness as a failure; in a melancholy moment she speaks of "the fruitlessness of her life" (CS 223). The Frasers are her surrogate family, yet,even in Rosamond's household, her emotional security is tenuous. The half-humorous scene, where the returning Fergus blunders into Miss Spanner's room, in mistake for the marital bedroom, signifies that the intrusion of men is a constant threat to a spinster's hold on domestic happiness. Despite her acknowledgement that men make the sacrifice in wartime, Miss Spanner is stringent in her criticism of Fergus for deserting his family, overlooking the possible effects of his head wound. Again, Piers Lindsay's limp and damaged face are clear signs of his past suffering and heroism, yet Agnes resents his advent, as a threat to her moral principles and to her domestic tenure. Part of her resentment, however, derives from her awareness that the disfigurement that makes Piers Lindsay interesting and even attractive, would, in a woman, merely aggravate 54 the distaste with which she was regarded by the opposite sex. Rhoda Blackett's naive wish, that Cousin Piers and Miss Spanner might marry, reveals her innocence of the standards by which men and women are judged in the world. The two are indeed rivals for Rosamond's affection, and Piers has the decided advantage.

Yet the very forces which soured Miss Jewel and turned her into a vicious gossip, and made a nonenity of Miss Morrison, have developed self-sufficiency and a capacity for loyal friendship in Miss Spanner. Her fear of loneliness and her rather blundering manoeuvres to guard against it are treated with humour, and great sympathy. Much could be read into her name, which connotes a tough androgyny and a capacity for endurance and service. As a kind of gaunt Britannia, her oracular pronouncements and denunciations are plainly those of the author herself. As "an ancestral voice prophesying war" Miss Spanner achieves a dignity undiminished by her status as a marginalised woman.

The spinsters discussed in this chapter have made various accommodations to their fate, all of which involve some form of alliance, if not friendship, with another woman. However, both Young and Pym describe spinsters whose determination to find a husband leads them to play an active role in securing the attentions of a man. In the following chapter, these women, and the strategies they employ to secure a mate, will be considered, together with the attitude of their society and their authors to such blatant husband-hunting. 55 Chapter 4 Spinsters in Pursuit

The spinster faces a painful dilemma in patriarchal society: she is devalued by her society if she remains unmarried, yet any evident anxiety, or obvious effort, to acquire a husband, earns her disapproval and rebuke, even ridicule. Both E.H. Young and Barbara Pym present this paradoxical situation. Miss Morrison's feeling for the Reverend Cecil Sproat is too muted to be called pursuit (JW). However, Ethel Corder (MM), although only 23, is as desperate as the determined husband-hunters, Jessie Morrow (J&P) and Dulcie Mainwaring (NFRL) whom Pym portrays, but these two are more aggressive, and much funnier, than Young's characters.

Miss Morrison is a character "gently drawn, [who] drifts sadly through life on an ocean of unfulfilled gentility" (Beauman, ix-x). Young shows sympathy with her plight, yet, in her emotional sterility, Miss Morrison is ultimately condemned. Aged 40, plain and dowdy, Miss Morrison is an "excellent woman" in the parish of Mr Doubleday: she could indeed be one of Pym's spinsters, but that she lacks their detached, ironic awareness. Young describes Miss Morrison as something of an anachronism, for "by character and upbringing her period was that of women who were old and ashamed to be unmarried before they had reached her forty years" (JW 136). This authorial comment is, in itself, slightly anachronistic, for, as Pratt points out, there had developed, by the 1920's, "an ironic discrepancy between the high hopes of the tum of the century and the economic realities of life in the modem patriarchy"(l 18). Pym's novels would reveal that the spinster in her mid-thirties still felt ashamed of her single status in the 1950's and 60's. Validation of the single life for women did not really arrive until the second-wave feminism of the l 970's. 56 Miss Morrison's unwillingness to see evil, makes her the complete opposite of Miss Jewel, but also suspect to the Rendall girls, who understand the seamy side of life. Miss Morrison has retained "girlishness in excess", which contrasts markedly with Dahlia's real youthful liveliness, and suggests a basic immaturity (JW 112). Before she leaves Beulah Mount, Miss Morrison bestows a beautiful scarf on each of the girls. Dahlia's declaration that she will try hers on when she is naked, strikes Miss Morrison as "frank paganism" (JW 261). Her sexless puritanism clearly earns the author's disapproval, and a marriage with Miss Morrison would plainly have led to a hardening of Sproat's austere attitudes, and a still further narrowing of his moral, and social, perspectives.

The difference between Miss Morrison and Dahlia is succinctly illustrated in Chapter 26 where the pair are dressing dolls for the church bazaar. Dahlia's wicked caricature of Mr Doubleday and Cecil Sproat, "the one rubicund and paunchy, the other sallow and cadaverous" produces only a priggish reprimand from Miss Morrison (JW 210). Her one act of mild spite, showing Sproat the two dolls, merely confirms him in his perception that Dahlia is the wife he wants. Miss Morrison's bloodless gentility is clearly a product of her repressive upbringing, yet Young makes no concessions on that score. Miss Morrison is generous, kindly, and well­ intentioned, but she is only half-alive.

Young clearly ascribes Ethel Corder's behaviour to sexual frustration, in accord with the popular Freudianism of her time. Observing Ethel's nervousness, and rather hysterical reactions to family disagreements, Hannah wonders "what was happening to the minds of countless virgins who would never be anything else if they wished to be thought respectable?" (MM 69) This reductionist view of Ethel's problems overlooks her lack of economic independence and freedom, in the household 57 of the Reverend Robert Corder. Corder is content to have a daughter whose failure to attract young men makes her constantly available to devote her time to parish duties, while he secretly resents "her protective plainness"(MM 160).

Ethel is so overwhelmed by "the primitive pain of being undesired by any man" (MM 110), that she bestows her affections on the repulsive Mr Pilgrim. Their courtship, seen through Ruth's eyes, is unappealing: " 'I think he's a horrid man. He smiles too much and his teeth don't fit. They click too. And Ethel [is] so grinny and giggly' "(MM 239). Ethel, prudish and completely without a sense of humour, becomes a willing ally of Pilgrim in his attempts to expose Hannah's past and deprive her of employment. When Hannah finally makes a full confession, Ethel's basic moralism leaves her quite unable to understand "this new species ... a woman who seemed good, who never failed to give help when it was wanted, and yet confessed to wickedness without apology or excuse"(MM 281). The reader gets no real insight into Ethel's emotional being; she is observed only through Hannah's shrewd, and not too sympathetic, eyes. Hannah appears to regard the mutually declared love between Ethel and Pilgrim as a sufficient guarantee that Ethel has a chance of happiness. To the modem reader, marriage to Pilglrim - middle-aged, self-important and repressive - seems less a liberation than a prison sentence. Ethel has been freed from her father to submit to a husband who is almost a mirror image.

Barbara Pym also describes two spinsters who set out to attract a man, and both of them finish up with vain, self-centred husbands, who have, in addition, a reputation for infidelity in their former marriages. Jessie Morrow, in Jane and Prudence, seduces Fabian Driver, and Dulcie Mainwaring, in No Fond Return of Love, succeeds in winning Aylwin Forbes, when all the other women with whom he has trifled finally desert 58 him. However, as Pym had an apparently unflattering view of men and marriage in general, this cannot be regarded as an adverse comment on the methods employed by either Jessie or Dulcie.

Jessie Morrow apears first m Crampton Hodnet as companion, like Hannah Mole, to an older, very authoritative woman, Miss Doggett. The Reverend Stephen Latimer, who comes to board with Miss Doggett, discovering that there are some disadvantages in being surrounded by a sea of adoring female parishioners, decides "that he might do worse than marry Miss Morrow"(CH 64). Latimer's proposal scene is another delightful parody of that between Collins and Elizabeth, in Pride and Prejudice: Piqued by Jessie's refusal, Latimer, like Collins, finds another bride on the rebound. (1)

Miss Doggett, warning Jessie belatedly "not to get silly ideas about Mr Latimer " declares that " a plain woman, no longer young is often the most likely to lose her head"(CH 119). When Jessie Morrow re­ appears in Jane and Prudence, her lack of looks is a distinct advantage in her rivalry with Prudence Bates for the attentions of Fabian Driver. Fabian is "Prudence's male counterpart... desire for admiration is [their] ruling passion". Unlike Prudence, Jessie is "aesthetically no competition to Fabian" (Nardin, 85-86). What is more, Jessie, at 37, is eight years older than Prudence, and much more ruthless in her determination to get her man.

Much of the irony, in Crampton Hodnet and Jane and Prudence, is derived from Miss Doggett's belief that Jessie is sexually ignorant. In the later novel, the problem of obtaining meat in post-war England gives Pym great scope for sly innuendo. If we accept that "meat...is a part of the mysterious and even sexual nature of men" (Cotsell, 57), then the oft-repeated cry of "A man needs meat" takes on added significance. It also prepares us for the strategy Jessie will use to catch Fabian. Fabian's 59 infidelities are well-known, and a specific indication of his prowess is the outsize vegetable marrow which he presents for the Harvest Thanksgiving. The admiration it elicits from the church workers, and the rather ambiguous reaction of Jessie Morrow are wickedly suggestive: " What a fine marrow, Mr Driver .. Jt is the biggest one we have had so far, isn't it, Miss Morrow?' Miss Morrow, who was scrabbling on the floor among the vegetables, mumbled something inaudible. " 'It is magnificent,' said Mrs Mayhew reverently" (J&P 31). Unconsciously, each of these ladies like,"the reader[,] is sure that man needs meat to grow such a marrow" (Cotsell, 59).

During his wife's lifetime, Fabian had always regarded her friend Jessie as a nonentity,'' as neutral as her clothes" (J&P 61 ). It is typical of Fabian to equate a woman's personal worth with the smartness or otherwise of her garments. Jessie, however, takes advantage of his attitude when she opportunistically appropriates one of Constance's velvet dresses, and remodels it. A lonely evening, the vaguely familiar dress, skilful make­ up, and a couple of shots of whisky seal Fabian's fate. Along with Mrs Glaze, the reader can well believe that "[Jessie] may have stooped to ways that Miss Bates wouldn't have dreamed of' (J&P 238). It is obvious that Jessie is better suited than Prudence to be Fabian's life companion, for "what Fabian fails to get from Prudence and gets from Jessie .. .is evident, plentiful admiration and a tolerant, undemanding acceptance" (Benet, 57). However, she has no illusions about his vanity and self-centredness, and, plainly, she will not tolerate infidelity: the broken, headless dwarf, which Fabian inadvertently picks up in Jane's conservatory, may well be the symbol of his diminishment and powerlessness, as Benet remarks.(3)

Jessie's campaign is a straighforward seduction of Fabian, but Dulcie Mainwaring's pursuit of Aylwin Forbes in No Fond Return of Love is partly a game and partly a quest. Hazel Holt's biography 60 and Pym's own manuscript notebooks reveal that Dulcie's sleuthing was an autobiographical element in the novel. It may be true that Dulcie, in her quest for information about Aylwin, avoids complete knowledge for as long as possible: "[s]he can possess the tokens, the bits of information, without having to face the altogether more threatening possiblity of coming into possession of Alylwin himself' (Cooley, 177). This piecemeal collection of data, however, provides the plot of the novel, and gives the author scope to introduce a rich array of eccentric characters and amusing incidents, that bear the stamp of her silent observations.

Dulcie is in a better position than the majority of spinsters so far dealt with, inasmuch as she has a house, paid employment, and has actually been briefly engaged. In an attempt to mend her broken heart, she attends a learned conference where she meets both Viola Dace and Aylwin Forbes. Dulcie does not consider her work, making indexes and bibliographies for academic authors, very important. By contrast, Viola romanticizes and exaggerates the work she has done for Aylwin Forbes, just as she romanticizes her name, originally Violet. Aylwin's fainting-fit on the lecture podium introduces the elements of Victorian melodrama, while neatly reversing the traditional gender roles, for it is Dulcie who proffers the smelling-salts (Cooley, 174). The incident prepares the reader for the decorative Aylwin's self-dramatizing personality, the whole mock-Gothic grandeur of his family history, and perhaps for Dulcie's pursuit.

Leaming by chance that Aylwin's brother is a vicar, Dulcie rejoices in the motive this gives her for "the kind of research [she] enjoyed most of all .. .investigation into the lives of other people" (NFRL 43). Her visit to his church introduces two important sub-plots - Neville Forbes's flight from an amorous spinster, Miss Spicer, and Bill Sedge's courtship of Viola. The telephone directory leads Dulcie to the house of Aylwin's 61 estranged wife; her reluctance to encounter Aylwin face-to-face, after this shameless prying, produces, in its tum, the meeting between Aylwin and Laurel, Dulcie's 18 year old niece.

At Taviscombe, Dulcie encounters Wilmet Forsyth at Forbes Castle, and learns the secret of the unsuitable marriage, to the daughter of the Eagle Hotel's landlord, which led to the disinheritance of Forbes senior. Class distinction, which has tragic ramifications in Young's work, is for Pym a source of comedy, and the Widow Forbes is a glorious eccentric. Pym also makes a neat comment on the contrast between romantic imagination and reality, when she shows Dulcie to be envious of Wilmet, "cherished and secure with her three men" (NFRL 217). Readers of A Glass of B Iessings will recognize Piers and Keith as the true lovers, and Rodney as merely a rather dull husband.

It has been remarked that "Pym parodies the scholarly penchant for collecting and organising facts" in No Fond Return of Love (Rossen, World of Barbara Pym, 37). Certainly, Dulcie derives more satisfaction from her researches into Aylwin's life than is promised by the man himself. Aylwin is always shown as self-important and absurd, and ludicrous in his belief that young Laurel will marry him. Rejected by Laurel, Aylwin dignifies his panic-stricken recourse to Dulcie by seeing it in literary terms: he is playing Edmund Bertram to her Fanny Price, or living out the design of a Victorian novel, where "a pure and beautiful woman helps the hero to become his noblest self' (Rossen, 38). However, Dulcie is acquiescent, and Pym shows a reasonably attractive and intelligent spinster, with her own home, and worthwhile employment, being so anxious to marry, that she accepts a vain, self-deluded, and pretentious divorced man.

In all cases, rivalry in love precludes friendship between women: Miss Morrison disliked Dahlia, Jessie Morrow ruined Prudence's 62 dress, and Viola Dace uses Dulcie shamelessly. At the conference, Viola stakes her claim to Aylwin, by making Dulcie her confidante, and confessing her largely imaginary affair with him. When Viola later asks to be given a room in Dulcie's house, Dulcie thinks,"it was flattering to feel that she had been chosen, even to be made use of " (NFRL 59). Her unflattering surprise to learn that Dulcie was once engaged is equalled by a lively curiosity about what Dulcie did with her engagement ring, and a lack of any sympathy whatsoever with Dulcie's feelings about being jilted.

It is significant that Bill Sedge's elaborate courtesies make Viola feel more womanly, but cause Dulcie to feel like a "woman manquee" (NFRL 172), uneasy at obvious compliments. Viola needs the flattering attention of man to feel whole, and Bill's proposal extinguishes her interest in pursuing Aylwin. Billl Sedge has been described as "symbolically ... an ersatz husband"(Rossen, 37), yet his liveliness, vulgar kindliness, and masterful manner, make it difficult to resist the conclusion that Viola has got the best deal. Viola casts off the old love just as readily as she dumps Aylwin's off-prints in the waste-paper basket. The value she places on friendship is shown by the heat-rings she leaves on Dulcie's furniture; Dulcie is not surprised to receive no invitation to the wedding. Viola is incapable of true friendship with another woman because she is as self-centred and exploitative as the man she fails, and Dulcie succeeds, in marrying.

Both E.H. Young and Pym show that, paradoxically, a spinster who accepts her lot may achieve a worthwhile lover, while a spinster who takes the initiative in seeking a husband is likely to suffer unfortunate consequences. As Viola Dace's experience demonstrates, the best match is the one that comes unexpectedly, and where the man plays the traditional role of assertive suitor. In marked contrast to the spinster who pursues her man is 63 the woman who appears reluctant to marry any of the several men who show a strong interest in her. The next chapter will discuss three such women, and the motives that impel them to avoid the commitments others so long to undertake.

NOTES ( 1) Cooley describes Latimer's engagement to the 19 year old Pamela as "the only heart-felt attachment in the whole book" and declares "his rhapsodies about his engagement" as the "only genuine tribute to the Spirit of Love"( 41). This fails to make allowance for the smug satisfaction of the unsuccessful suitor who can parade a younger and more beautiful prize in front of the woman who first wounded his self-esteem by refusing him.

(2) It is a mistake to interpret this triangular relationship as "the competition of two women for one man based on their ability to serve him" (Radner, 173). This is based on a false reading of the climactic incident in their rivalry: to say that Prudence, at Fabian's tea-party, "instead of serving tea properly to her suitor ... spills it on her expensive dress and ends up alone", is to overlook the fact that it is Jessie who deliberately knocks a cup of tea over Prudence's "lilac cotton dress of deceptive simplicity"(J&P 192). This is Jessie's unkindest and most effective move, for Prudence is forced to go back to the Vicarage to change, breaking up the party, and leaving Jessie a clear field.

(3) In fact, it is tempting to see Jessie's capture of Fabian as a kind of revenge on behalf of her friend Constance. Pym whimsically suggests this when Tom Dagnall, reading Fabian's death notice, which describes him as "Devoted husband of Constance and Jessie", wonders "[h]ad the man had two wives still living? ... And had they got together after the man's death?' (AFGL 190). 64 Chapter 5 Lone Voyagers

Both Barbara Pym and E. H. Young describe spinsters who seem reluctant to marry. The most striking of these, Leonora Eyre, in The Sweet Dove Died, is not a character designed to arouse sympathy, although the story is based on Pym's own experience of loving a young, homosexual man. On the other hand, Prudence Bates in Jane and Prudence is rather comical in her everlasting series of love affairs, which she regards as her life's work, much as her contemporaries regard their marriages or their careers. In The Misses Mallett Rose, adopts an ambiguous, even enigmatic, attitude to marriage. She refuses Francis Sales's proposal, falls in love with him following his marriage, but marries him, after his wife's death, purely as a sacrifice for the sake of her niece Henrietta.

What Rose, Prudence and Leonora have in common is a degree of narcissism. All are strikingly beautiful, and have the means to indulge their perfect taste in dress and decor. Each, however, is limited in the scope offered by her life and environment. Rose, the most circumscribed, having refused Francis, rides home from the Sales farm, along a path bordered by a "tall, smooth wall, unscaleable" around a private estate. (TMM 15). Rose resents the way this wall restricts her freedom of movement, and the same sense of restriction is apparent when she contemplates the limitations on her future life in Radstowe, as a single woman: "[w]hat was she to do? ... Marriage opened the only door" (TMM 23).

Rose actually determines the course of the novel by negation. In not interfering to prevent Francis from letting Christabel ride a dangerous mare, she becomes indirectly responsible for the hunting accident that paralyses the young bride. Rose experiences "anger, jealous rage and disgust" when she learns of Francis' flirtation with Henrietta, yet she reveals nothing. Towards Francis she believes she must accept an "inactive 65 responsiblity ... a stoical endurance of possibilities" (TMM 177). Rose takes direct action once only - when she confronts Henrietta and Francis together, and tells the girl of her own involvement with him so many years previously. Neither Rose nor her ally Charles prevents their elopement, but Christabel's death of a heart attack on the same night. Finally, in order to leave Charles a clear field, Rose accepts Francis. Afterwards, when Henrietta comes on her, "[h]er body, so upright and strong, seemed limp and broken and her face, which was calm, yet had the look of having composed itself after pain"(TMM 311); Rose's whole stance is that of a martyr. Set beside the energy, strong emotions, and impulsiveness of Henrietta, one of Y oung's most realistic and appealing young women, Rose is a strangely restrained and inactive protagonist. She engineers Henrietta's transformation, from obscurity and poverty to true love and riches, almost without stirring a finger.

Prudence Bates has had an Oxford education, to which Rose could never have aspired. Yet she hardly regards her employment in a vague cultural organization, as a satisfying career.(1) In fact, the pettiness of office politics and the boring nature of her work are merely a very amusing background for Prudence's fantasies about her employer, Arthur Grampian. Jane Cleveland, her former tutor at Oxford, and current close friend, considers Prudence's love affairs "surely as much an occupation as anything else" (J&P 9). Prudence too adopts a somewhat passive stance towards events in her own life: her initiative is limited to making herself as beautiful as possible, and allowing herself to be admired.

Prudence is adept at dressing to suit the occasion, and dress is critical in the rivalry between Prudence and Jessie Morrow. (2) When she seeks comfort for Fabian's defection in an expensive lunch, she discovers that "[t]here was a certain consolation in the crowds of fashionably dressed women, especially as Prudence felt that she could equal and even 66 excel some of them" (J&P 225). In all of Pym's novels, dress is an indication of the character's moral worth: "dowdiness ... [is] a mark of spirituality or an agreable nature" (Kapp, 239). Jane, always sharply aware of Prudence's appearance, is herself incurably dowdy, in her hanging petticoat or borrrowed clerical mackintosh. As Prudence contrasts with Jane, so is Leonora Byre's careful elegance thrown into relief by the scruffy clothes of her friends Meg and Liz, and her young rival Phoebe Sharp. The correlation between dowdiness and the ability to love is clear: Leonora, Prudence and Rose are free to lavish time, money and attention on their clothes and appearance because, ultimately, they do not love passionately at all.

Prudence and Rose never need to take the initiative in seeking love, but sometimes feel that life has slipped away without bringing them the real prizes that are their due, as beautiful women. Leonora Eyre, the "invincible and incorrigible" protagonist of The Sweet Dove Died (Stovel, 59) is by no means a passive agent. Leonora does not need to work, having inherited ample money and a house of her own, complete with an upstairs flat. Her time is spent in the agreable search for beautiful objects, browsing in antique shops, and the salerooms at Christie's. Once she has met James, her talent for manipulation and her lust for possession become very evident.

James's uncle Humphrey, an elderly antique dealer, is a contender for Leonora's affections, but Humphrey would be neither as aesthetically pleasing nor as flattering a consort as his 24 year old nephew. Leonora decides to instal James in her flat which, as a former nursery, is fitted with bars on the windows. On his return from Spain, Leonora presents him with a pair of very expensive vases. Looking at them, James feels "like somebody - a child of course - who has eaten too many cream cakes" (TSDD 122). Leonora has symbolically reduced James to the status of spoilt child, 67 or pampered, neutered cat. She does not yet realize that, in Ned, she has a rival whose ruthless possessiveness will outstrip her own.

The ownership of a beautiful fruitwood mirror, surrounded by cupids, becomes a matter for fierce, though wordless, contention in the novel. The mirror is a potent symbol of vanity and love, for both Leonora and Ned, James's homosexual lover. Leonora takes possession of the mirror when James goes to Spain: "[t]he glass had a slight flaw in it, and if she placed it in a certain light she saw looking back at her the face of a woman from another century, fascinating and ageless"(TSDD 79). This is the only flawed object that Leonora ever admits into her house, because she has a neurotic need for perfection: in this case, the flaw in the glass conceals imperfections in herself. When Ned first meets Leonora, his instinctive glance into the fruitwood mirror alerts the reader to his vanity; his apt quotation from the Keats poem, that gives the novel its title, subtly accuses her of holding James prisoner. The visit the three make to Keats's house demonstrates Ned's tactics at their most polished and effective. His solicitude for Leonora's comfort barely conceals the implication that her age makes her unfit for even minor exertion. The smooth way in which Ned calls a taxi to take her home, leaving James ensconced in his flat, is the coup de grace.

When James finally leaves Leonora's flat, taking the fruitwood mirror with him, her only recourse is to spend "hours looking after her possessions, washing china and cleaning the silver obsessively and rearranging them in her rooms" (TSDD 164). She must console herself with lesser treasures because she has been cheated of her prize possession Leonora wins only a Pyrrhic victory by refusing to take James back, when Ned tires of him, for the magical effect of having a youthful admirer has gone forever. When she looks at herself, in the replacement mirror Humphrey has given her, she is no longer "ageless and fascinating her face seemed shrunken and 68 almost old" (TSDD 165). The gift of a 60 year old admirer has no power of flattery. However Humphrey seems content to dance attendance indefinitely, and so Leonora's narcissism prevails, rendering her invulnerable to further assault.

Of Leonora and Prudence it may well be said that their "great beauty and chann destroy [the] ability to commit themselves to anything else". As a consequence, their lives are filled by the "excitement of transient love-affairs [and the] manifestation of exaggerated self-love" (Nardin 39) .. However, only Leonora is explicitly described as sexually frigid (TSDD 16). Benet suggests that James's homosexuality, which Leonora has intuitively perceived, is a positive attraction. "This physically and emotionally frigid person ... cherishes James as proof of her womanly attractiveness and desirability", knowing he will make no demands (123).(3)

Leonora thinks nostalgically of the many wartime romances she enjoyed, yet she does not regret the brilliant marriages she might have made. Humphrey's comment that "[b ]eing unmarried has its own status"(TSDD 174) is more surely applicable to Leonora than to any other of Pym's characters. It is difficult not to see an inherent coldness in all her relationships. She thinks of herself as "utterly alone" following James's desertion because "[s]he would not have counted the friends she still had, like Humphrey, nor yet her women friends and acquaintances. One would almost rather not have had them at all"(TSDD 167). Pym makes it quite apparent, in several situations, how lacking in basic human wannth her protagonist really is. When buying the expensive vases for James, Leonora vies with the saleswoman to preserve an icy distance.(4) Only when the cheque is written, and the saleswoman is fawning on her in an obsequious manner, does Leonora feel a glow of self-satisfaction. Clearly, the act of 69 possession, even if the cost is high, is the one experience that can warm her heart.

Leonora's insistence in perfection, in all her possessions and all her relationships, is a denial of life. Her two middle-aged friends, Meg and Liz, on the other hand, accept the muddle that comes with living. Liz, disillusioned with men, and addicted to cat-breeding, wears garments "so much plucked by cats that the pulled threads gave an almost boucle effect to everything she wore" (TSDD 53). Meg, continually loving, and losing her homosexual friend Colin, sits in Leonora's kitchen in "that same old sheepskin coat which seemed to be her only winter garment" (TSDD 150). Meg's acknowledgement of her need to love, and confessions of menopausal symptoms, are repulsive and embarrassing to Leonora. She recoils from this intimation of shared fermininity, finding it "intolerable that she and Meg could have this in common" (TSDD 149).

Leonora cannot accept any parallel between her situation with James and Meg's with Colin. She sees Meg's "unappealing and pitiable" love for her friend as "the diminishment of self'. She is moved not by self­ respect but by the shabby notion that it is shameful and degrading to show emotional need and to accept what is less than perfect"(Benet, 132). Leonora completely lacks a capacity for friendship with other women - they are either rivals, or foils for her own perfection. Yet she remains a spinster, reluctant to marry, or to undertake any normal human relationship where she cannot exercise complete control. If Leonora should accept human warmth, she might be forced to accept human imperfection.

Prudence Bates does not "stoop" to the same means as Jessie in order to capture Fabian Driver, because she is one of Pym's characters for whom "imaginary pleasures not only fill the emotional gaps in actuality but also seem superior to real events". Prudence willingly accepts 70 the role of romantic heroine that Jane seems anxious to impose on her, and never more dramatically than in her own fantasies (Benet, 59;46). In comparison to Prudence's highly-coloured daydreams about Grampian, Fabian Driver seems commonplace (she is right, of course). Dining with Fabian,and exchanging conventional endearments, as she gazes into his eyes, she thinks only of the delicious meal to come. Yet Prudence is by no means frigid, and, warmed by wine and coffee, proves susceptible to Fabian's good looks; had she not been the friend of his vicar's wife, Fabian might have spent the night in her flat. This climactic opportunity is missed; Prudence's hopes are thwarted by Jessie's seduction, and Fabian's belated anxiety for respectability as an intending member of the Parish Council.

Prudence certainly has a capacity for friendship with other women. All the same, the advent of Geoffrey Manifold offers a much surer remedy for a broken heart, although Jane finds Geoffrey just as "ordinary and colourless" as Grampian, whom he supplants in Prudence's fantasies. Prudence looks forward with pleasure to heartbreak and disappointment, for "everything would be spoilt if anything came of it"(J&P 246-7). In a subsequent novel, A Glass of Blessings, Pym suggests that Rodney Forsyth, Wilmet's husband, has had a passing interest in Prudence. The Pym reader's last impression of her life is an endless series of such short­ term romances.

Rose Mallett may also be seen as the victim of a romantic imagination; in her girlhood she longs to offer homage to "the colossal figure of her imagination ... rough and great and the scandal of her stepsisters!"(TMM 24). Not surprisingly, Francis Sales, known since childhood, appears dull, monotonous, and somewhat stupid by comparison (TMM 13). Many references are made to her nun-like qualities in the novel, and, significantly, Rose uses the threat of entering the convent to counter her 71 sisters' insistence that she should marry Francis. Young's constant references to her creamy skin, and preference for wearing black, underline this image of a religious, and Francis, at a point of crisis, thinks she is "like a church ... a dim church with tall pillars losing themselves in the loftiness of the roof... she was cold, but there was no one like her"(TMM 228).

However, Rose is by no means frigid as Leonora Eyre is frigid. When Francis returns with his bride from Canada, Rose begins to feel the first stirrings of sexual attraction, and the desire "to taste forbidden fruit simply because it was forbidden" (MM 47-9). Yet when Christabel's accident presumably cheats Francis of his marital rights, Rose adopts a rigid attitude. She thinks of him "scornfully" as "a man who needed women" (TMM 168). Herself denying him even a kiss; she keeps in contact with Francis only to restrain him from seeking consolation elsewhere. Rose has apparently appointed herself his moral guardian, even though she finds the relationship wearying.

Eventually, Rose comes to regret the chastity which has made Henrietta the object of Francis' pursuit. Yet, undoubtedly, this very chastity gives Rose a kind of magical presence in the lives of Henrietta, Charles, Francis and others. As in many legends, there is a deliberate confusion of the sources of good and bad magic. Christabel, witchlike in her deformity (and her name), her malicious insinuations, and her love for a particularly malevolent cat, is, in her tum, embraced by Francis "as the sinner kisses the saint who has wrought a miracle of salvation for him" (TMM 231). The miracle is to save him from further involvement with the Mallett women, whom he hysterically declares to be "all witches". Christabel will, in other words, save him from his own illicit sexual desires, traditionally projected onto the witch. Following Christabel's death, Rose marries Francis for the 72 same purpose: "he needed her... She had to protect him against himself " (TMM 319).

Rose's reluctance to marry cannot be ascribed to intrinsic coldness, nor even to an over-romantic imagination, but to the lack of real opportunity in an environment circumscribed by class, locality and social attitudes. The great possiblities which Rose, as a young girl, considered to be her due, were denied to her because of her sex and situation. All three of these spinsters are, to some extent, sheltered from social opprobrium because, as beautiful and elegant women, their single life is axiomatically a matter of choice. All three are well able to afford a degree of luxurious living which provides an apt setting for their personal charm; yet none has an occupation which affords her any great satisfaction. It is Rose who finds this most limiting, Prudence finds it mildly irritating, Leonora does not seem to feel the lack at all, for her own beauty is her life's work.

What is most striking is that each, whether aged 30 or 50, feels entitled to set high standards to which hopeful lovers must conform. Leonora requires a dance of chivalrous attendance which will entail constant flattery but no sexual demands. Prudence needs a succession of men onto whom she can project, temporarily, her own romantic daydreams, but of whom she will inevitably tire. Rose is sought by a lover who fits the role of romantic hero, but whose human needs and shortcomings try her patience. In each case the very qualities that make the woman desirable and sought after, come close to ensuring lifelong spinsterhood. There are, however, others, apparently confirmed spinsters, whose very lack of expectation produces a capacity for disinterested friendship, which blossoms in time into love Hannah Mole is one of these characters, and Pym describes several others, and all will be discussed in the following chapter. 73

NOTES (1) Prudence's employment owes much to Pym's experience at the Africa Institute for Hazel Holt records that Jane and Prudence "contains a lot of the Institute's daily routine, for example the typists made the tea but one made one's own coffee" (The Novelist in the Field, 29).

(2) The lilac cotton dress, which Jessie deliberately ruins is only one element. Prudence's red velvet housecoat deceives Jane into imagining illicit relations between her friend and Fabian. In her darkest hour, Prudence even contemplates turning to religion - "in a black mantilla, draped over her head, hurrying into some dark cathedral". In a delightfully ironic scene, Pym depicts Prudence in bed, nursing her broken heart: "she could see her reflection in a looking-glass on the wall opposite ... not quite at her best at this hour, but rather appealing in her plainness, sipping her favourite Lapsang Souchong, at ten and sixpence a pound, out of a fragile white and gold cup" (J&P 228-229). Remembering Fabian's pleasure, when the distinguished looking man at the end of the restaurant proved to be his own reflection in a mirror (J&P 200), the reader can appreciate the essential similarity between the two.

(3) Janice Rossen remarks that "Leonora does not renounce passion but seeks to control it or suppress it, or both"("On Not Being Jane Eyre" in Salwak, Independent Women, 149). It is true, as she says, that both Phoebe and Ned in tum seduce James in settings that are much wilder than Leonora's flat: Phoebe's almost squalid, vine-covered cottage, and Ned's borrowed flat, with its jungle decor, and furnishings of synthetic fur. However, more than the setting for seduction is lacking in Leonora's environment; she plainly experiences no sexual desire.

( 4) There is a subtle humour in the scene: the saleswoman speaks "coldly", Leonora is "equally cold"' her voice becomes "a degree colder" when she asks the price, the woman remains very "clear and cool" as she states it. The price is exorbitant - the temperature falls "to zero" establishing "an icy silence". At last Leonora yields, and experiences the "glow" of self­ satisfaction (TSDD 109-110). 74 Chapter 6 Drifting into Love

Young and Pym both describe spinsters who are actually surprised by love. Hannah Mole is overtaken by a passion that springs up from what at first seems merely a friendly alliance; Barbara Pym has three protagonists who drift into a love relationship, after having broken off an earlier affair, or having given up any hope of marriage. The first of the three, Catherine Oliphant in Less Than Angels was, for her time (1955), quite a daring young woman who lived openly with her lover, and turned him out when his affections strayed. The last, Emma Howick, heroine of Pym's elegiac novel, A Few Green Leaves, also has an unsatisfactory love affair, but moves, or is moved by others, into what promises to be a happy relationship. Ianthe Broome, the only sexually inexperienced woman of the four, falls passionately in love with a young man considered by all of her friends to be entirely unfitted to be her life's partner - the "unsuitable attachment" of the book's title.

In all four cases, the spinster has accepted society's verdict that love has passed her by. This is especially true of Hannah Mole. In Miss Mole, the final pairing of Hannah with Mr Blenldnsop is unexpected; both Hannah, and the reader, are deceived about the true object of his affections. Initially Blenkinsop appears as a bumptious and self-centred lodger, who regards Hannah's dramatic rescue of his fellow-tenant, Ridding, with a hostility which suggests overweening concern for his own comfort and dignity. Blenkinsop shares her antagonism to Corder, but his is based on Corder's attitude to marriage. The reader is left to assume that a belief in the indissolubility of marriage may prove a barrier to Blenkinsop's interest in Mrs Ridding, and Hannah readily accepts that likelihood. Hannah takes a derisive pleasure in her own shortcomings: believing that Mrs Ridding appeals to Blenkinsop through pathos, she reflects, with decided common sense, that she could never do so, for "pathos without prettiness can never be appealing" 75 (MM 139). Because she entertains no further expectation of love, Hannah remains long unaware of Blenkinsop's growing interest in her.

It is Robert Corder, alert to a possible alliance between his opponents, who first detects Blenkinsop's attachment, which Hannah quite sincerely denies. Indeed Hannah seems determined not to realize his attraction to her, even when she decides that "Mr Blenkinsop was the one to whom to tell a secret or go for help". Hannah needs an ally against Mr Pilgrim, and her rather comical vision of the "solid, bulky form of Mr Blenkinsop overshadowing the narrow-shouldered somewhat slinking figure of the other" is none the less a reassuring prospect (MM 169). A close analysis of the novel reveals that Blenkinsop's sympathetic attitude to the Riddings develops only after Hannah takes him to task for his former intolerance. Under her teasing, whimsical approach, her own unconscious attraction is discernible, yet Hannah's low estimation of her own attractiveness blinds her to the extent of her influence over him. When Blenkinsop invites her to go into the country and inspect the cottage he has chosen, she accepts, more convinced than ever that he intends to share Mrs Ridding's life.

Discovering that her former lover intends to sublet her cottage, without her knowledge, drives Hannah into a state of utter misery. As she wanders distraught, Blenkinsop, despite his complete lack of comprehension, watches over her and gently guides her back home. Annis Pratt speaks of "the ideal, non-patriarchal lover ... [who] often aids [the hero] at difficult points in [her] quest" for self-realization, and "sometimes takes the form of an owl"(140).(1) It is tempting to see Blenkinsop in this role, for Young frequently mentions the spectacles and solemn expression which give him an owlish look. Despite Mr Blenkinsop's obvious concern for her, and the fact that he holds her hand so firmly that she must "free .. .it with some 76 difficulty" (MM 261), Hannah is at her lowest ebb, believing "[s]he had lost Mr Blenkinsop"and his hoped-for support against Pilgrim (MM 249).

During the ten days that intervene between this and their ultimate meeting, Hannah interprets Blenkinsop's absence as proof of such loss. Yet it is clear that, as an autonomous and self-sufficient woman, Hannah must, during this period, face Ethel and Corder, and admit the truth of Pilgrim's allegations, and do it alone. In fact, when Blenkinsop finally steps in, and turns Hannah's treacherous lover out of the cottage, her first reaction is indignation at his masterful handling of the whole matter. However, when he declares his love, wondering gratitude replaces her irritation at his assumption of authority. Hannah is surprised by love because she has schooled herself no longer to expect it: her very self-sufficiency, essential for her survival as a spinster, has been an obstacle in the course of love's progress.

For Catherine Oliphant, perhaps Pym's most attractive spinster, keeping love proves difficult, largely because she is an autonomous, self-sufficient woman. Catherine earns her living writing short articles and romantic fiction for women's magazines. Returning to London to complete his Ph.D., after two years in Africa, Tom Mallow, her former lover, naturally moves back in with Catherine: as Mark remarks at his welcome home party," 'Trust Tom to get himself well looked after... [by] a woman who can cook and type' "(LTA 72). Catherine, like Rose Mallett, had dreamed of a strong, masterful lover, but her attitude to Tom is that of an indulgent mother, or older sister, "[he] was two years younger than she was and it was always she who made the decisions and even mended the fuses" (LTA 24). Deirdre may be excused for her shock on discovering the nature of the relationship between Catherine and Tom, not only as an affront to her suburban ideas of 77 morality, but because the casual way they treat each other at the party seems more appropriate to siblings than to lovers.(2)

However, it is a mistake to underestimate Catherine's affection for him.(3) Catherine's shock is palpable when she sees Tom and Deirdre tete-a-tete in the Greek restaurant that used to be a special haunt of Tom and herself. Catherine's good-humoured discussion with Tom, about their future living arrangements, sounds like a mother remonstrating with a teenage son about his wish to have a live-in girlfriend, but it conceals real grief. Tom's tears on the morning of their parting distress Catherine very much, but again, her grief and even his pretence of feeling ill resemble a parental situation: "She could no more prevent his going than a mother could hold her child back from school" (LTA 124). Later, Catherine has the difficult errand of breaking the news of Tom's death to Deirdre's mother and aunt; she must watch Deirdre being consoled as the bereaved lover, while concealing her own feelings, which are movingly depicted by Pym.

Like Pym herself, "Catherine ... employs a fictionalizing habit of mind as a distancing device and a defense ... [which] enhances her imagination and capacity for sympathy"(Rubenstein, 578). She turns the meeting she observes between Deirdre and Tom into a short story, Sunday Evening (AGOB 149). However, Catherine herself casts some doubts on the benefits of this process: " 'Writing is such a comfort isn't it, that's what people always say - it really does take you out of yourself. I sometimes feel it lets you more into yourself, though, and really the very worst part.' "(LTA 231) Writing certainly takes Alaric Lydgate into the worst part of himself. After eleven years in Africa, Alaric has been invalided home. He lives alone, jealously guarding his crates of accumulated notes, and writing corrosive reviews of publications by scholars he considers to be his rivals. Alaric is an ungainly and eccentric figure, who alarms his neighbours by working at his 78 desk with his face concealed under " a mask of red beans and palm fibre" (LTA 54). His isolation and vulnerability are instantly perceived by Catherine, when Deirdre's family describe this habit, and, on meeting him, she deems him rather attractive, if somewhat forbidding.

Like Hannah Mole, her experience of love has given Catherine's self-confidence in dealing with men. She takes the initiative in furthering her acquaintance with Alaric by "the bold step ... of inviting him round for Sunday evening supper" (LTA 220). Characteristically, she imposes a literary patina on the occasion by likening Alaric to Mr Rochester, then embarks on a venture to make life imitate art. In a joyful role reversal of Jane Eyre, Catherine encourages him to set himself free of the monster in his attic by burning his whole mouldering collection of notes in a huge bonfire. Some time after Tom's death, Rhoda Wellcome observes Alaric and Catherine clearing out the remaining souvenirs of his years in Africa: "[a]ll the masks out on the lawn ... a great big shield and two spears and some moth­ eaten old feather thing ... " (LTA 253). The reader infers that the process of liberating Alaric from his prison of outdated commitments, and past disappointments, will continue. As for Hannah Mole, a friendship has developed from unpromising beginnings and may, in the event, lead to love.

An earlier generation would have described Catherine as "bohemian", for her appearance is always slightly raffish. Like Jane Cleveland, and other Pym characters, her untidiness in dress is a sign of a generous, loving nature. Ianthe Broome, the elegant protagonist of An Unsuitable Attachment, could not be a greater contrast to Catherine. From the beginning of the novel, she is marked as an anachronism, and dominated by the memory of her formidable mother, a Canon's widow. Ironically, her mother chose librarianship to make sure that Ianthe would meet only refined people of an intellectual cast of mind. She meets John Challow, destined to 79 outrage all her own inherited prejudices, and those of her friends. Initially John's candour causes lanthe to recoil, yet his poverty touches her, while his good looks attract her. When John rebuts Mervyn's description of Ianthe as "a respectable, unmarried lady", and gives her a bunch of violets at Christmas, it is plain that he will awaken her into life.

Rupert Stonebird seems to be a potential suitor for lanthe, but he has merely a kind of aesthetic appreciation of her breeding and elegance. This lack of strong feeling is mutual, and contrasts with Ianthe's anxiety when John is sick with flu. Ianthe visits him, in the run-down area where he lives, disregarding the remembered voice of her mother protesting against the unsuitability of such a proceeding. The sheltered Ianthe braves the disillusioned vicar, the landlady's daughter with hair in curlers,and the turbaned Indian tenant, to reach John's squalid room, and finishes up cleaning it, and lending John money to cover his unpaid rent. She "wanted to do things for him - it seemed to give some purpose to her life to have somebody depending even a little on her" (AUA 116).

John's first kiss leaves Ianthe pleased but confused, and mindful of her' mother's strictures on such a salute from " a young man, suitable or otherwise, and John was so very much otherwise"(AUA 136).(4) Yet, during the trip to Italy, Ianthe finds love working its way insidiously into her consciousness; "[f]or one whose thoughts were normally disciplined it was disconcerting and humiliating to find how much he was creeping into them" (AUA 153). Love makes Ianthe bloom, and Rupert feels a new interest in her. On her return to London, Ianthe is sure enough of her own feelings to resist Mervyn's proposal that they "join forces" - a suggestion motivated merely by lust for her Hepplewhite and Pembroke furniture. When John visits her to repay the loan, a final understanding is reached. 80 lanthe's elegant appearance and evident good-breeding are stressed throughout the novel, whereas John's brashness, and somewhat slangy speech, may be regarded as either vulgar or engaging. Initially, his shortcomings of dress indicate his lack of social status, but Ianthe's consciousness of his class is mitigated by compassion for the thinness of his overcoat. Following her visit to his sickbed, Ianthe no longer worries about the good taste or otherwise of his clothes. On her return from Rome, she is only aware, with a shock, of how good-looking he is, and how different from all the other men she has known,"stretching back into the past like pale imitations of men" (AUA 197). Plainly John's sexual attractiveness, significantly enhanced by absence, outweighs any sense of his social inferiority.

lanthe's friends all seem to be disappointed that he has not turned out to be an impostor, and Sophia Ainger remains inexorably opposed to the marriage. It may be that "Sophia's insensitivity is obnoxious and hateful" (Benet, 110), yet her impulsive comment to Rupert," 'I never thought of her as getting married .. .I wanted her to stay as she was, almost as if I'd created her' " (AUA 246) is suggestive. Perhaps, as Jane Cleveland romanticized her friend Prudence, Sophia has seen in Ianthe an ideal of what she herself may have been, had she not married "a little beneath her". Benet finds Ianthe inhibited and very class-conscious: "[she] attaches tremendous importance to propriety .. .lacks humour, imagination and openness ... of all Pym's women ... [she] is the least likely to desire or find romance" (107). On the contrary, Ianthe is the only Pym spinster who is swept off her feet. Marriage to John will liberate Ianthe from her outdated and restrictive attitudes, just as the relationship with Catherine liberated Alaric from the burden of his past failures and responsibilities.(5) 81 Emma Howick, the spinster protagonist of Pym's last novel A Few Green Leaves, is less inhibited than Ianthe, but also less adaptable than Catherine Oliphant. Emma represents a reversion to earlier spinsters, like Mildred Lathbury, and the village setting of the novel is a conscious return to Some Tame Gazelle, with sharp observations of the changes wrought by the intervening 40 years. Emma, in common with most of Pym's spinsters, feels vaguely that she is a failure, and she certainly has not come up to the expectations of her mother, Beatrix, a tutor in English literature. Beatrix believes that either marriage or a distinguished career, preferably with a literary bent, must justify a woman's existence. She has named her daugher after Emma Woodhouse, but to Emma her name suggests "Thomas Hardy's first wife - a person with something unsatisfactory about her"(AFGL 13). Her former lover, Graham Pettifer, is happy to resume the relationship during a temporary separation from his wife. He rents Keeper's Lodge for a few months, in order to finish a book, and Emma is expected to keep him supplied with groceries and cooked dinners.

Beatrix Howick is that most fortunately placed woman in the Pym world - a widow, with an absorbing career and adequate financial provision. However, she yet feels anxiety about her daughter's continued spinsterhood; expressed in private disapproval of Emma's lack of dress sense: "[i]t wasn't as if Emma had ever produced anything that could justify such high-minded dowdiness"(AFGL 92). Beatrice is quite aware of the shortage of eligible men in the village: her initial verdict on Tom Dagnall, the widowed rector, is that he is "ineffectual" (AFGL 93). Emma too considers Tom rather negative,"good-looking ... also 'nice', agreable, sympathetic ... Not, of course, a dynamic personality ... "(AFGL 114). On the other hand, she is quite aware that Graham himself is a very boring character. Keeper's Lodge has a reputation in the village as a love-nest; Miss Lickerish has memories of "goings-on" there during the war. Yet only once is Graham stimulated to 82 anything resembling passion: - he is inspired to "kiss and fondle [Emma] in a rather abstracted way", because he needs a break from his work (AFGL 134). Following her lunch with his estranged wife in town, Emma takes Claudia's umbrella by mistake, and notes "it was an umbrella of inferior quality. She wondered what the possible significance of that could be"(AFGL 139). Neither Pym nor the reader is in any doubt.

A chance encounter with Tom Dagnall saves Emma from having to make her own way home through the forest, on the night of Graham's farewell party. After Graham's departure, Emma invites Tom to supper, and, like two old friends, they discuss their respective single status. The conversation is entirely free of coquetry for "Tom, being the rector of the parish, hardly seemed in her eyes to count as an eligible man" (AFGL 210). Pym's church-going spinsters weave romantic dreams around the clergy; Emma, an anthropologist, automatically accords them celibate status. So neutral indeed is Emma's attitude to Tom, that her mother must engineer their rapprochement, by "gently discourag[ing]" Tom's sister Daphne from coming back to live at the rectory. Like the Three Fates contemplating their playthings, "[t]he three women - Beatrice, Isobel and Daphne - stood in silence, looking to where Tom was standing with Emma ... Beatrix wondered how Emma was going to react to the plans that were about to be made for her. And, of course .... Tom ... But he was less important and more easily manipulated"(AFGL 219).

Of the four spinsters dealt with in this chapter, Emma is the least passionately drawn to the man whom she may eventually marry. Tom, Graham, and Emma all seem untroubled by strong feelings, nor does Emma romanticize her situation. This is left to her mother, who sees, somewhat ironically, all the vagaries of her daughter's love-life in the melodramatic terms of a Victorian novel. If Emma fulfils her dream of 83 writing a novel, and embarking on " a love affair which need not necessarily be an unhappy one" Beatrix will enjoy great vicarious satisfaction (AFGL 220). It could almost be said that she regards her daughter's life as a literary work of which she is the author, and which she must draw to a happy conclusion.

Hannah Mole and Catherine Oliphant create stories about themselves that serve to distance them from disappointment. Hannah's whimsical fantasies are often made up to entertain Ruth, or deceive Ethel, but also have a more serious purpose. They parry any inference that her own situation is pitiful, or that she is not in complete command of her own destiny. As Hannah protects herself from the possibility of future disappointment, Catherine distances herself from present and past misery by turning it into fiction. Ianthe Broome and Emma Howick are each the subject of another person's narrative: they are the only two spinsters in Pym's novels who are strongly influenced by their mothers. In her mind Ianthe hears continually the story her mother would have liked her to live, and she can only truly live by contradicting it more and more radically. Beatrix Howick is a more benign influence; her effect on Emma's life is at once more concrete and more literary. In Pym's last novel, Beatrix is an image of the author herself, weaving a final plot with a pleasant outcome for her last fictional daughter.

All the women discussed so far, with the exception of Ethel Corder, have made the indefinable but irrevocable transition from nubile girl to spinster. Both Pym and Young show how dramatically the experiences of the girl of 18 or 20 differ from those of the thirtyish unmarried woman. In the next two chapters, the young girls in the novels of both writers will be discussed, and their attitudes and expectations compared with 84 those of the older spinsters with whom they come into contact as family members, friends, and sometimes rivals.

NOTES (I) Pratt explores Jungian concepts, particularly that of the woman,s mid-life journey into the "green world", in search of self recognition. This is relevant to Y oung's work because, in most of her novels, the female protagonist crosses the Suspension Bridge, into the country of farms and forets, in search of love. However, the love that spings from the green world is nearly always inauthentic; the true non-patriarchal lover is an inhabitant of Radstowe who guides the heroine on her journey, but returns her safely home to the city.

(2) One critic has described "Catherine's cardinal sin: she did not pretend to make [Tom's] interests her own (Benet, 69). Certainly when Tom, almost immediately after his return from Africa, and even before the party, picks up Deirdre in the Library, is because"[h]e had left Catherine busy finishing a story and seeming to have no time for him"(LTA 48). He finds the attentions of 19 year old Deirdre "soothing and satisfying".

(3) It has been observed that "[m]ore often than not, if a Pym woman has loved and lost, the love proves to have been so luke-warm and one-sided that she really had nothing to lose in the first place ... when Tom leaves Catherine there are no outbursts of emotion, but rather perfunctory acceptance of a lack of interest"(Bradham, 33-4). This fails to give Catherine credit for the well-bred Englishwoman's self-restraint and dislike of attracting attention. Moreover Pym tells us that Catherine wept so bitterly that she met her publisher for lunch with "eyes swollen with crying and imperfectly disguised with too much green eye-shadow"(LTA 127).

(4) As mentioned previously, Ianthe is completely inexperienced sexually, and her subsequent chance meeting with a former schoolfriend, now a nun, seems an omen of lifelong celibacy if she resists John. Both Rupert and the Aingers see this as an appropriate destiny for Ianthe. At her wedding, Rupert is reminded of "a line of poetry ... something about a garland of red roses on the habit of a nun" and thinks that "loving her might have been like that"(AUA 252). Sophia too rationalizes her wish for Ianthe to remain single: she would be "one of those splendid spinsters ... the pillars of the Church"(AUA 293), an "excellent woman" in Mark's congregation.

(5) Ianthe does not overcome all her prejudices. Hearing that her former colleague, the elderly Miss Grimes has married,"and to a Pole she had picked up in a pub", Ianthe feels quite depressed. As Pym explains, "Ianthe was perhaps too rigid in her views to reflect that a woman might have worse things to look forward to her than the prospect of marriage to a Polish widower and a life in Ealing"(AUA 243). 85 Chapter 7 First Love and Fair Prospects: Barbara Pym's Young Girls

The difference in age between the young girl and the old maid may be a mere ten years or so, but it represents a huge change in social attitudes towards her. In the novels of Barbara Pym and E.H. Young, only one girl under 25, Ethel Corder, is fearful of missing out on marriage. All the others either win true love, or are assured of boundless prospects of romance. In Young's novels, Henrietta Mallett, Dahlia and Jenny Rendall are worthy protagonists in their own right. In her later novels, The Vicar's Daughter, Celia, and Chatterton Square, the daughters of the family are largely peripheral to the middle-aged woman's preoccupations with her own conflicting desires.

In Pym's novels, the young girl is a reminder to the spinster of lost youth and wasted opportunities. In Less Than Angels, No Fond Return of Love, and The Sweet Dove Died, she is a rival for the attentions of the desired man. Just as children are notably absent from the novels, so young girls are rather two-dimensional figures. The exception is Penelope Grandison, in An Unsuitable Attachment. At 25 Penelope is thought by her sister, Sophia Ainger, to be on the verge of becoming "a rather eccentric spinster not even looking as if .she might once have been ennobled by some tragic love affair" (AUA 121). Penelope is appealing because of her vulnerability and because she is such a contrast to Ianthe Broome. Penelope, on the threshold of the sexual revolution of the 60's, is startlingly modern in appearance: Rupert's private nickname of " the Pre-Raphaelite beatnik" sums her up exactly, with her sack dress, silver medallion, and collapsing beehive hairdo. Yet, for all her anxiety to appear up to date, Penelope is utterly conventional in her expectations of men, and her feeling of inadequacy when deprived of a male escort. In a restaurant, Penelope feels "deeply the shame of being caught dining with a woman friend when Ianthe was with a 86 man"(AUA 203). Ironically, Ianthe's escort is the waspish, and probably homosexual, Mervyn Cantrell.

Liddell considers Penelope to be the character who comes closest to the tragic in Pym's "canon" (novels written before 1963) (93), and her anxious hopes and perceived failures are touchingly described. Having "reached the age when one starts looking for a husband rather more systematically" (AUA 31), Penelope is happy to meet Rupert at the Vicarage; in typical Pym fashion, at a later meeting, she finds him "less interesting than she had remembered - [and] unresponsive to her semi-flirtatious looks and remarks in a way that puzzled her" (AUA 82). Despite their mutual lack of interest, she persists in her attempts to charm, as if enticing the opposite sex were almost an obligatory performance.

Penelope, however, is self-defeating. Her very anxiety causes her to underestimate her own appeal, and to exaggerate minor f incidents in which she fails to behave in what she considers a sophisticated manner. Appearing at Rupert's dinner party, in a skin-tight silver lame cocktail dress, which gives way after the meal, she is so depressed by her inability to understand the conversation, and her anxiety to conceal her split seams, that she fails to realize that Rupert has found the "split at the back ... provocative and rather endearing" (AUA 130). Again, in Rome, her tears at a supposed slight leave Rupert "reflecting on the irony of the situation that now made him want to take Penelope to bed when he had intended to have a decorous flirtation with Ianthe" (AUA 181). Back in London, consistent misunderstandings, and further hurt feelings, make it not surprising that Rupert, as he stalks her across St Paul's churchyard, in the last pages of the novel, thinks that "he must go carefully and not say anything to annoy or upset her" (AUA 255). 87 As with many of Pym's women, Penelope's emotional isolation aggravates the uncertainties of her situation. Sophia's desperate and self-defeating attempts at match-making make her useless as a confidante for her sister. Sophia, with her high-handed manipulation of other people, fills the role so often played by mothers and aunts in Pym's novels, seeing marriage as the only conceivable goal for a woman. Penelope and Ianthe both desire "the comfort and advice of a woman friend" (AUA 157), but each is too inhibited to seek or share confidences.

Penelope feels herself to be on the borderline of spinsterhood, but the changes that turn the young girl into the spinster are shown more plainly with one of Pym's earlier characters. In Crampton Hodnet, two girls, Barbara Bird and Anthea Cleveland, share many of the experiences of the writer herself, as related in Holt's biography. However, Barbara Bird reappears in Jane and Prudence as a middle-aged, successful novelist, and comically demonstrates the differences between the nubile girl and the confirmed spinster.

Barbara's youthful passion for her English tutor, Francis Cleveland, is an early example of the tendency of Pym's women to idealize very ordinary men. The affair is farcical from the beginning, and a punting expedition ends up with both Francis and Barbara in the river. However, to a girl with Barbara's literary tum of mind, Francis' quite unnecessary act of jumping off the punt to "rescue" her can be viewed as heroic, and "a ridiculous mishap" becomes "a romantic episode"(CH 183), and she accepts his invitation of a trip to Paris. Even when she deserts him in Dover, and runs in panic to a girlfriend's house, she sees her conduct in terms of the noble renunciations celebrated in the verse of Christina Rossetti. Francis is left to answer questions concerning the whereabouts of his :"daughter" from the elderly denizens of the hotel lounge, and to hitch a ride home with Mr 88 Latimer. Barbara makes the discovery that "to imagine a romance is headier than to have one" (Rossen, The World of Barbara Pym. 22).

Barbara Bird, when she reappears in Jane and Prudence,is a chain-smoking, gruff-voiced spinster, who has successfully published 17 novels, and complacently accepts the admiration of aspiring writers. She barges ahead at the supper table, and ignores the beautiful young poet, who has addressed the literary society. Barbara Bird has shed her capacity for romanticizing men, along with her desire to attract them. Her dreams have been turned into money-making fiction; she is now contentedly self-sufficient, and can afford a degree of individuality which borders on eccentricity. The sketch is obviously a caricature but Barbara bears a strong resemblance to Esther Clovis.

Anthea Cleveland in Crampton Hodnet displays the solipsism of young love when she treats reports of her father's interest in Barbara as a great joke, and remains oblivious of her mother's anxiety. When Anthea's own love affair with Simon Beddoes ends, her suffering is theatrical; her mother and Miss Doggett are so preoccupied with consoling Anthea, that Francis' ignominious return goes almost unnoticed. Only the perceptive spinster, Jessie Morrow, noticed how dull and self-absorbed Simon really was: "Imagine being married to someone like that. But of course Simon would never marry Anthea, she realized with a sudden flash of worldly insight" (CH 115-6). Jessie perceives that for an ambitious young man like Simon, romantic love is merely a stop-gap: it was "women, poor things" who wanted more. Jessie is correct too in her prediction that "[t]here could be others, many others when one lived in Oxford and was as pretty as Anthea" (CH 201), for, by the beginning of the new term, Simon's friend Christopher has begun a courtship of Anthea. Plainly, the young girl, like the 89 older spinster, can be the victim of a self-centred man, but youthful resilience and the illusion of limitless time help her to make a quick recovery.

Flora Cleveland, in Jane and Prudence, is not related to Anthea, but she is also an undergraduate at Oxford, and at 18 has a keen eye for eligible men. Unlike Barbara Bird she has a practical attitude towards age differences. Meeting her father's colleague, Father Lomax, she dismisses him as "old, a contemporary of her father's, and therefore uninteresting and profitless" (J&P 23). Yet Flora too tends to idealize men, and is attracted by the appearance of Mr Oliver, the young bank clerk, as he reads the lesson in Church. Disappointment ensues when he comes to tea at the Vicarage, and not until she sees him again in Church, his appearance spiritualized by the "dim light", does she feel love "flooding back" once more. (J&P 72). Clearly Flora, like Prudence Bates, is adept at falling in love with love. When she meets Flora's fellow-student Paul, Prudence is overcome with envy and nostalgia for her own romances at Oxford. However, once more love is assumed to be the prerogative of youth, and Paul and Flora have an unflattering explanation for the failure of Prudence's current affair. They shrewdly assess both Prudence and Fabian as attractive people, but concede that she is "about thirty" and Fabian only good-looking in a "used-up, Byronic way ... but rather middle-aged" (J&P 217).

Laurel, the 18 year old niece of Dulcie Mainwaring in No Fond Return of Love, is also sceptical about the attractiveness of middle­ aged men. She is the first instance of the young woman as rival to the main protagonist of the novel, but also the least serious rival. Like Prudence, Dulcie is surprised by the sudden maturing of the young girl, and, when Dulcie meets Marian, whose flat in Quince Square is Laurel's Mecca, she is made sharply aware of the difference between 20 and 30: "she was an aunt, old, finished, fit only for the Scouts and their little jumble cart" (NFRL 120). 90 Laurel instantly classifies Viola as a "repressed spinster... with all the easy scorn of her eighteen years"(NFRL 74). Viola, in her turn, cannot help but be conscious of "the silent niece watching them with the critical eyes of youth" (NFRL 77). The spinster's sense of her own failure is reinforced by the judgemental attitude of the young girl, so confident of her superior attractions, and so determined that women over 30 have had their day.

In sharp contrast is Laurel's initial reaction to Aylwin, who, at 49, is considerably older than either Dulcie or Viola. Paul, a young lover, seems "younger and callower ", on closer acquaintance; Dulcie thinks "[p]erhaps she really like[s] older men better ... "(NFRL 75-76). Aylwin is instantly deemed "the perfect 'older man' with whom young girls fell in love" (NFRL 91). At Dulcie's dinner-party, the pretentious conversation makes "the culture of middle-aged people" seem "dreadfully depressing", yet Laurel's contempt is not directed at either Maurice or Aylwin, who are so obviously vying to display their learning (NFRL 137). Aylwin, while bitterly resenting Maurice's proprietorial attitude towards Dulcie, his erstwhile fiancee, is glad to note that he ignores Laurel "almost completely" - giving Aylwin freedom to adopt the role Laurel has assigned him.

When Aylwin finally succeeds in .kissing Laurel, she is not too innocent to recognize his "murmured romantic phrases and his hands moving with practised skill" as the signs of the experienced seducer (NFRL 181). However, Laurel herself is only playing a part, and when she tells Dulcie about Aylwin's proposal of marriage, it is related as merely a comical incident: " 'I'm sorry for him ... But the idea of me marrying him! Why, he's older than Daddy!" (NFRL 274). Evidently, Dulcie's indignant remonstrances did not deter Aylwin from thin.king of Laurel as a future wife; only her rejection, and his wife's absconding with another man, could dent Aylwin's vanity. When he turns to Dulcie as the last resort, Laurel has Paul, 91 a less practised but more authentic lover, and many other opportunities on her own horizon.

Plainly, Laurel is never a real rival to Dulcie or Viola in their pursuit of Aylwin, because he does not interest her in any serious way. Deirdre Swan, in Less Than Angels, believes her youth and good looks give her a natural right to expect love, and even to usurp it. Realizing that · Catherine and Tom are lovers proves no obstacle to her opportunism. While she benefits from Catherine's friendship, and admires her lifestyle, she considers her "neither particularly beautiful, nor even young", and convinces herself "that Tom was beginning to grow tired of her" (LTA 75). Deirdre is eager to justify Tom's leaving Catherine in similar terms: " 'Catherine isn't so very young, and she has lots of interests and her writing' " (LTA 119).

At 19, Deirdre is ripe for romance, and quickly won by Tom's aristocratic good looks. She is one girl who is not disappointed in her lover after successive encounters, and plainly many clandestine meetings have preceded the one that Catherine observes in the Greek restaurant. However, the love-affair is one-sided, as Catherine realizes when, clearing up after Tom has left the flat, she finds a discarded love letter from Deirdre. Deirdre suffers all the conventional jealous pangs of a fictional heroine and, for all her vaunted interest in Tom's research, shows a callow and conventional obsession with love as the chief goal of life. She has undoubtedly internalised the attitudes of her mother and aunt, who really cannot see any alternative for a young woman but love and marriage.

Like most of Pym's young women, Deirdre has another string to her bow, in the person of Digby Foxe. It is Digby who breaks the news of Tom's death to Deirdre, and supports her in her grief. It is ironic that, when excusing herself to Catherine for not being able feel Tom's death profoundly, she uses her youth as justification," 'I'm only twenty, after 92 all...and though I did love Tom terribly, of course, I just don't feel like a tragic figure'" (LTA 237-238). The very youth which gave her a prior right to love, now exonerates her from mourning her dead lover for long. By the time of the memorial luncheon for Tom, Deirdre has recovered sufficiently to refuse the custodianship of Tom's anthropological papers, "overcome with dismay at the picture of herself and Digby starting their life together with the burden of poor Tom's field notes upon them" (L TA 250). For Deirdre, as for Anthea, Flora and Laurel, lovers are almost interchangeable.

Though death ultimately defeats the two of them, Deirdre can certainly claim to have vanquished Catherine, her mentor, confidante, and rival. Not so Phoebe, the youthful rival of Leonora Eyre for the affections of James, in The Sweet Dove Died. Before Ned finally ousts them both, Leonora has already defeated Phoebe with ruthless strategy. Phoebe Sharpe differs from all Pym's other young girls in living away from her family and, judging from her swift seduction of James, in being sexually experienced. Engaged in editing the literary remains of one Anthea Wedge, she is vicariously involved in one story of unrequited love and destined to live out another.

Like Penelope (AUA), Phoebe has little confidence in her own attractions, but her lack of looks is an advantage in her affair with James, who is sexually ambivalent, because "prettier girls always made him feel ill at ease and inadequate" (TSDD 30). Because Phoebe takes the initiative in their relationship, he later experiences the disappointment more often felt by young girls, on successive meetings. Furthermore, the sloveliness of her housekeeping, and the disadvantage of having a mother living in Putney, deter James from any real emotional involvement. James displays the priggish fastidiousness often seen in Pym's "men not likely to marry": Phoebe's kitchen, where cats' hairs and pawmarks are evident, puts 93 her in the league of Meg and Liz, and provides a stark contrast to the perfection of Leonora's surroundings. James's tentative offer of the fruitwood mirror, made immediately after his first visit to Phoebe's bed, is regretted almost as soon as it is uttered. Leonora ensures that Phoebe never gets such an inappropriate gift.

Leonora is so determined on a complete rout of her rival, that she even toys with the idea of marrying James - an asexual union as "dear James wouldn't expect anything like that ... " (TSDD 108). Phoebe feels a similar recoil when she glimpses Leonora sitting in Humphrey's car. Phoebe's reaction however arises from the customary scorn a young girl feels for her older rival, in this case " a mother figure to replace the one he had lost" (TSDD 114), and disgust at the incongruity of youth and age. Leonora may regard Phoebe as her vanquished rival, Phoebe may regard Leonora as an unfitting mother substitute: both have been forestalled by Ned, who has probably confirmed James in his homosexual orientation ,for life.

In Pym's novels, the young girls, those up to the age of 25, differ from the older spinsters most obviously in having a supportive circle of mothers, aunts and friends to console them when lovers foresake them, and to encourage them to renew their efforts. The true spinsters are nearly always without parents, and friends are often an irritant rather than a comfort. Again, the young girl has the prospect of other lovers to look forward to, and sometimes a faithful suitor to fall back on. For the spinsters, maturity brings greater self-reliance, despite an increased chance of loneliness, after having survived the pleasures and disappointments of youth.

In the following chapter, the most important of the young women in E. H. Young's novels will be discussed. Two must learn the painful lesson that a lover who has all the attributes of a romantic hero proves unreliable in the end, while an unattractive suitor provides devoted support, 94 and a third is so disillusioned with what she sees of romantic love that she opts for marriage without love as a form of security. 95 Chapter 8 Looking for a Lightship: Girls in the Novels of E. H. Young

The young girls depicted by E.H. Young share the romantic longings felt by Pym's young women, and also their assumption that youth automatically confers prior right in the affairs of the heart, when rivalry with an older woman is in question. Rivalry in love is dealt with most fully in The Misses Mallett; Henrietta is a complex, vigorous personality with a strong desire for sexual love, and Francis Sales convinces her of her own desirability. Charles Batty, on the other hand, "might have persuaded her she was incapable of rousing men's desire and not to rouse it was not to be a woman" (TMM 197). The contrast between this explicit sexuality, and her Aunt Rose's aristocratic reserve, forms the core of the novel.

In The Misses Mallett and Jenny Wren, class origins are significant, as knowledge of her upper-class paternity attracts the girl initially to a handsome, but weak, gentleman. Henrietta, the Cinderella of the story, has worked as a cook in Mrs Banks's boarding-house. Following her mother's death, she comes to Nelson Lodge "in her cheap black clothes like some little servant seeking a situation "(TMM 88). Her elder aunts, apprehensive about her London accent, and liking for cheap company, are reassured by her resemblance to their scapegrace brother, but shocked by her brutal candour about his shortcomings. However, Henrietta's initial awed admiration of Francis Sales, mounted on his great horse, is instantly matched by the reassuring thought that her father was, by birth, his equal in rank. When Francis finally extricates himself from his involvement with Henrietta, he describes himself as "nearly old enough to be [her] father" (TMM 293). The admission is a belated, if unconscious, recognition of the basis of her attraction. 96 Henrietta has all the young girl's capacity for romantic infatuation, and for jealousy. The vindictive impulses, which arise when she discovers the relationship between Francis and her Aunt Rose, overwhelm the gratitude due to her aunt. She also displays the familiar tendency to write off her rival, on the grounds of age, while pining for a lover several years older than either: "she was filled with an indignation that almost brought her to tears ... Aunt Rose who was almost middle-aged!" (TMM 117). She gets a vicious satisfaction out of discovering Francis is married, and appoints herself his saviour, determined to rescue him from the wiles of her scheming aunt - the very woman who has just provided her with "three thousand pounds and six pairs of silk stockings" (TMM 112).

Unlike Pym's young girls, after successive meetings, Henrietta experiences no disillusionment regarding Francis' physical attractiveness. She thinks of her declaration of love at the New Year's Ball as a heroic surrender," she was prepared to suffer, she was anxious to suffer and be justified" (TMM 220). Such apparent masochism is tempered by her shrewd perceptions of Francis' failings: he uses forms of flattery that instantly remind her of the odious boarder who pestered her at Mrs Banks's house. She judges him to be actually "mentally inferior to Mr. Jenkins who had a quickness of wit, a vulgar sharpness of tongue which kept the mind on the alert"(TMM 174). Young makes it clear that the attraction to Francis is almost purely sexual, without diminishing or underestimating it because of this. Henrietta herself apprehends the difference between her two lovers. Francis with his "brown muscular hands and ... odour of wind and tobacco ... had never said anything worth remembering, but there had been danger and excitement in his presence. There was neither in the neighbourhood of Charles, yet she could not forget his words" (TMM 249). 97 Charles Batty, Young's most decidedly unromantic hero, must progress slowly to being Henrietta's best friend, long before he can claim to be her accepted lover. Henrietta misjudges the socially inept and isolated Charles for a long time, believing "he must be emasculate" and "the guilty passion of Francis by contrast, splendid" (TMM 197). She is thrilled and uplifted by Charles's eloquent declaration of love in the mysterious environs of the Monks' Pool; yet she wishes it were Francis speaking so passionately (TMM 156). When Francis seems to have deserted her, Henrietta is glad to fall back on the loyalty of Charles, acknowledging him as the only friend she has, but quite conscious that his value for her depends on her need: "[h]is part in her life was like that, to a sailor, of some lightship eagerly looked for in the darkness, of strangely diminished consequence in the clear day, still there, safely anchored, but with half its significance gone" (TMM 261).

Charles's equanimity in the face of all her slights at once irritates and flatters Henrietta as a tribute to her power over him: "[s]he could do what she liked and Charles would love her; he was a great possession and she did not know what she would do without him"(TMM 287). She must be set free of the spell cast by Francis, and threatened with the loss of Charles, before she realizes that she truly loves him. She must acknowledge her selfishness and ingratitude, to both Rose and Charles, and admit that she is hard and bright, like the ring that Charles drops umceremoniously in her lap. Young spares the reader none of Henrietta's unpleasant characteristics, but elicits sympathy by her delicate analysis of the girl's confused feelings.

Henrietta's intermittent outbursts of spite and ingratitude to Rose reflect an adolescent's customary ambivalence towards her parents. Jenny Rendall too must work through violently conflicting feelings towards her mother before she can accept her love and protection. The class conflict 98 that Henrietta can put behind her, thanks to her aunts, bedevils Jenny. A gentleman and a scholar, Sidney Rendall regretted his marriage the warm­ hearted country-woman, Louisa Lorimer, who compounded the solecism of her birth by a brief, adulterous affair. Jenny, however, feels that her father's death has deprived them of "peace and harmony", and her longing for this draws her to Merriman House. Ironically ,the Merrimans are but newly rich, Edwin Cummings describes them scornfully as "the third generation of packing-cases" (JW 93), but their way of life represents, to Jenny, her lost heritage. When she falls in love with Cyril, she passes as "Jenny Wren" to conceal the family disgrace associated with her notorious name. After Mrs Merriman recognizes, and publicly snubs, Louisa at an open-air performance of Twelfth Night, Cyril is able to use Jenny's deceit as an excuse to end the relationship. However, by this stage, she has realized his essential weakness, and his eagerness to blame her for his own inability to love.

At 18, Jenny is ripe for love, and confident that "gilded happiness" awaits her (JW 9). Youth bestows a right to love, and Jenny feels pity for the Dakin girls, "rather old and weather-beaten", because they range in age from 35 to 26 (JW 11 ). Love is to be the instantly recognizable,supreme experience, and the destined lover will combine "youth and strength with other graces" (JW 40-4). Edwin Cummings does not fit this pattern, but Jenny is happy to sharpen her skills on this, their first lodger, and to attract his admiration. She allows Cummings' faultless aesthetic taste to override her own wish to depict her father, on his headstone, as a recumbent knight, but this cherished notion predisposes Jenny to idealize Cyril Merriman when she first sees him: "[a] radiant figure, with the sun on his fair head and the gleaming coat of his mount", he passes them at the entrance to Merriman House, forcing Edwin to "skip back hastily", and emphasizing the social gulf that separates him from the young couple on foot (JW 93). 99

Jenny, like Pym's young women, romanticizes the encounter in literary terms: it is the story of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. Her first actual meeting with Cyril resembles a pre-Raphaelite painting, or even a tapestry - the young man, approaching on horseback, with "the sun ... on the gleaming coat and the youth's fair hair... across the brilliance of the grass and flowers". After some conversation, he departs "like a centaur emblazoned on a field of green and white" (JW 149). Clearly, no young man could live up to the heraldic dimensions that Jenny attributes to Cyril. Her disillusionment is not founded on any physical imperfection, but on the realization that he is rather a limited boy for whom "music and books and pictures" do not exist (JW 178). She realizes only too well that he is too immature to accept the truth about her family disgrace, and so she embarks on a saga of concealment which constitutes the body of the novel.

However, Jenny has a capacity for sexual fantasy that surpasses even Henrietta Mallett's, and, astonished by the strength of her own desire, Jenny momentarily believes that the "overwhelming power of love" will give her the courage to "confess all her dark secrets" (JW 83-4). Common-sense prevails, and her fairy tale becomes a kind of nightmare, of mingled hope and dread that Cyril will find his way to Beulah Mount and discover her situation. When Jenny finally says goodbye to Cyril, the meeting takes place in streaming rain, and he is sulky and reproachful. She realizes that her shining prince has "changed to an ordinary young man, standing in a wet field under an umbrella". She weeps "for her lost love", but, more significantly, for "her failure to feel the proper pain" (JW 350).

Edwin Cummings allows us to take the measure of Jenny's snobbery, which prefers the meretricious gentility of the Merrimans to the plain decency of Cummings, a son of the artisan class. Edwin's pride in his family contrasts sharply with Jenny's contempt for her mother's side: 100 she cherishes the memory of one fleeting visit from her father's sister Isabel, after his death. Her pleasure in teasing Cummings gains an extra piquancy from the thought that she is "dallying with a young man whose existence her father and Aunt Isabel would not have recognised" (JW 118). As her father is dead, and her aunt ignores her, Jenny's concept of cohorts of aristocratic relatives defending her status is as false as her fantasy about Cyril.

Like Henrietta Mallett, Jenny relies on her unromantic lover in times of distress, forgetting that Edwin is "a young man in a bookshop who must keep his distance" (JW 186). When Edwin finally declares his love, she feels her dilemma to be a cruel one: "[w]hy should she be so sure of the man she did not love? She knew she could trust him to the world's end, but she did not want to go there with him" (JW 248). Finally, Edwin rebels against being so blatantly used, and Jenny is horrified, feeling that she is parting from "one of her anchors,the stronger of the two, the one on which she might ride out the storm" (JW 297). Yet when Jenny flees the inevitable meeting between the Merrimans and her mother, it is Edwin who ·, follows her and brings her safely home.

Jenny's other anchor is her sister Dahlia, who is made sceptical of romantic love by observing her sister and her mother's expenences. She marries Cecil Sproat without being in love with him and the painful gestation of that love is described in the sequel to the novel. Dahlia has her mother's beauty and practical nature and little regard for her father's family. Even Jenny is forced to admire the "carelessness of opinion ... aristocratic indifference to criticism" (JW 26) which allows Dahlia to consort with the neighbours' maid-servant, and manipulate the curate in order to get respectable boarders.

While Jenny weaves her romances around the half­ glimpsed figure of Cyril, Dahlia drops a duster almost on Sproat's head to 101 give him an excuse to talk to her. Dahlia's does not share Jenny's disdain for anyone over the ageof 30; her objections to Miss Morrison are based solely on the spinster's moral pretensions. Miss Morrison's well-meaning efforts with the girls of the parish, her eyeglasses, her short skirts and bowed legs, all qualify her as a suitable bride for Sproat, in Dahlia's opinion. Her half­ humorous attempts to match them reflect her own indifference; the incident of the clergy dolls frees Dahlia of a rival she never recognized for a lover she hardly acknowledges. Dahlia's attitude to the older man who tries to take liberties is quite characteristic of all the young girls discussed so far. Mr Allsop repels her by his "fatuous belief that the company of a man, even a middle-aged man and slightly bald, must be welcome to a woman" (JW 267- 71). Against Sarah Lorimer, Dahlia displays a gift for innuendo that outdoes Sarah's own, without losing her aunt's affection. However, she keeps Sproat's courtship a secret from her aunt because she does not "want smudges on things" (JW 337).

Jenny depends almost entirely on Dahlia for emotional support, and an almost claustrophobic family atmosphere surrounds Hilary Stack, in The Vicar's Daughter. Although created before Jenny Rendall, she represents a transition in Young's work, from the young girl as protagonist, to the daughter of the house, who is peripheral to the affairs of middle-aged parents. Hilary becomes the touchstone of normality in a household filled with unspoken anxieties, and, at last, dissipates the miasma of doubt and guilt that has tormented her family. Hilary received high praise from one critic in 1928. Writing in the New Statesman, Elizabeth Bibesco described her as "a delicious creation ... the only young girl I have read about for a very long time who does not use nauseating slang and behave with that brazen bad taste which is, I believe, known as 'facing life' ". Hilary's innocence and candour are frequently stressed in the novel, and are essential to the psychological development of the plot. At 19, Hilary has a quality of "virginal innocence" 102 and a degree of self-possession which resembles "the frankness of a boy". Maurice Roper is wounded by the "gay, sexless sound of her laugh" when she presents him with a rose (TVD 15-17). Young gives Hilary the androgynous character of the typical heroine of a schoolgirl saga; the shadow side of her personality is embodied in Caroline Mather, whom Maurice believes to be the Vicar's illegitimate daughter.

Hilary's chief weapon against Maurice is a kind of exaggerated solicitude, spiced with malice. Many of her candid remarks scandalize him and provoke a desire to teach her her place. At one stage in the novel, Margaret reflects that the whole situation resembles a play, with Hilary "the necessary young girl" and Maurice "the comic man" (TVD 258). Hilary is certainly cast as the ingenue, for, despite her attractive vitality, and a sparkle like that of Hannah Mole, she is rendered almost two-dimensional by her utter goodness, and complete lack of erotic feeling. Where Hilary is explicitly asexual, Caroline is, by implication at least, a sexual threat, and is perceived by such by the misogynist James Blunt. Good-looking, tall, "very managing" (TVD 78), she is, at 20, evidently much more worldly-wise than Hilary.

These two young girls are converse images of early womanhood, but not really protagonists in their own right. The outstanding portrait in The Vicar's Daughter, is that of Maurice Roper, a middle-aged bachelor, at once obnoxious and pathetic,whose censorious attitudes, and capacity for meddlesome trouble-making, are shown to be rooted in a pitiful insecurity. In the final chapter, Maurice Roper will be dealt with as perhaps the most convincing, if the least attractive, of Young's memorable bachelors.

Young's young girls share with Pym's a lively expectation that love will be the overwhelming experience of their lives, and a capacity to romanticize rather ordinary men in their attempt to have that 103 experience. These girls tend to put their romantic experiences into a literary context, and are consequently subject to inevitable disillusionment. However, whereas Pym's young girls experience disappointment in the physical attractiveness of the men, Young's discover faults of personality. Young's girls are more frankly sexual in their attraction than Pym's, but, in both cases, the importunate middle-aged man is rebuffed as an inappropriate suitor. Yet, an older man may be attractive, while an older unmarried woman arouses somewhat arrogant contempt. Rivalry with such a woman, even when she has a well-established prior claim, brings out the worst characteristics in the young girl, confident in the superior attractions of youth and good looks. The young girl has internalised her society's attitude to spinsterhood, a status she never expects to achieve.

Whereas Pym's girls survive many disappointments in love and go on to repeat the same pattern indefinitely, Y oung's generally turn to a man who has been disregarded, or even exploited by the girl, in her pursuit of a false love. The romantic hero has all the conventional attributes of the hero of fiction or legend, and inevitably proves to be a shallow personality. The anti-romantic hero, always much more clearly depicted, proves himself by guiding and guarding the heroine through her time of trial, and establishing himself not only as her devoted suitor, but as her best friend. The following, and final chapter, will deal with the male characters in the novels of Pym and Young. 104 Chapter 9 The Prizes: Bachelors and Widowers

The greatest contrast between Barbara Pym and E.H. Young is found in their attitude to the male characters in their novels. Pym, in a letter to Philip Larkin about the B.B.C. film Tea with Miss Pym, writes, "a question about my treatment of men characters suggested that I had a low opinion of the sex. My instinctive reply sprang to my lips, Oh, but I love.men, but luckily I realized how ridiculous it would sound" (Holt, 257). Many critics of Pym's novels have received the same impression as that interviewer. Pym depicts both homosexual and heterosexual men, but even the latter exhibit a "strong indifference to women - to the point of homosexuality" (Rossen, The World of Barbara Pym, 44). With the exception of Ned (TSDD), the homosexual men are the more sympathetically portrayed. Y oung's men also fall into two -categories: the romantic hero, who proves inadequate, and the unromantic anti-hero, who remains true. Like Pym, Young depicts several clergymen, but, for her, a religious calling has a negative effect on a man's personality.

Writing about the novels of Young's contemporary, Dorothy Richardson, Elaine Showalter says "men had to remain emotionally childish, or women would lose their power" (257). Young and Pym depict a similar tendency in their female characters to perceive men as children. One critic in Pym's fiction, a repeated theme of "a self-denying mother [who] generously feeds her ungrateful baby son". A good example is the Reverend David Lydell, suitor of Letty's elderly friend (QIA), who manages, by complaining of his persistent diarrhoea, to combine the roles of "testy little boy ... [and] sophisticated traveller" (Radner, 172-175). On the whole, men, as portrayed by Pym, may be considered as "amusing creatures not to be taken seriously ... [they] cannot be held quite responsible ... [but] rather like large children ... time and again [are] put rather gently in their place" (Epstein, 14). 105 A contemporary of E.H. Young, writing in 1929, advised that "the girl of character" was "aware that men, even the cleverest, are rather like children, and generally open to management" (Lang, 170). Several of Young's women share this opinion: Henrietta Mallett, imagining her aunt Rose laying snares for Francis Sales, thinks "men were helpless, they were like babies in the hands of women" (TMM 130). Her attitude is confirmed by Mrs Batty's declaration that "[t]he very minute you marry, you've got a baby on your hands" (TMM 272). Francis addresses both Henrietta and Christabel as "poor little girl" and "poor little thing", but the epithet reflects a sense of his own superiority, not a wish to protect. Cyril Merriman too addresses Jenny Rendall as "poor little love", after one of their most idyllic meetings, but it is Edwin Cummings who comforts her in a moment of stress by speaking "quietly, as though she was a baby" (JW 186). Cyril's infantilism surfaces when he ends the relationship, repeating "the text of his mother's sermons" (JW 349). Dahlia, observing the sulkiness of Mr Allsop, decides that the balding, middle-aged man is "nothing but a baby, good-tempered when he wanted her ... and helplessly cross when things went wrong" (JW 269). Neither Charles Batty, Edwin Cummings nor Cecil Sproat appear in such infantile guise: it clearly a sign of basic masculine weakness.

However, Hannah Mole, from the vantage point of her 40 years, sees infantile characteristics in both the men she must manage. "Mr Blenkinsop was a solemn infant who asked for what he wanted and Robert Corder was a spoilt one who expected his needs to be divined" (MM 158). Comforting Corder after his son Howard's desertion, she speaks "quietly, as though she persuaded a child to its good" (MM 218). Yet, under Hannah's tutelage, which is half goading and half encouragement, Blenkinsop achieves, or reveals his real emotional maturity, and bestows maternally protective care on Hannah at her time of greatest distress. 106 The "basic and unfashionable Pym philosophy that women are intended to serve and solace men" (Kapp, 5) is always expounded with the writer's tongue firmly in her cheek. The nearest Everard Bone ever comes to a proposal of marriage, is to ask Mildred to assist him in the proof­ reading and indexing of his book. Fabian Driver (J&P) and Aylwin Forbes (NFRL) have been sufficiently described as vain, self-dramatizing men, proof that, in the early novels, men are "intensely and unreflectively selfish and spoilt by the women" (Liddell, 35). Diana Benet decries the "life-denying alienation" of Tom Mallow, beloved of Elaine, Catherine and Deirdre (LTA):"[h]is malaise makes him complacent, unfeeling, self-centred and manipulative" (13).(1) Benet believes that whereas the men are "emotional cyphers" in the early novels, they "change into ... thinking and feeling individuals not radically different from women in their problems and needs" in the later ones (9), and Rupert Stonebird might be deemed "an excellent man" because of his sensitivity to Penelope. However, John Challow, so reviled of critics, is engagingly unrestricted by class-conscious reserve, and has far more vitality than Mervyn, more self-assurance than Rupert, and more warmth than either Basil Branche or Mark Ainger.

One man who is himself used.by a woman, is Humphrey Boyce, uncle of James and admirer of Leonora Eyre (TSDD). Humphrey keeps Leonora well supplied with dinners, seats at the opera and theatre, and tickets to exhibitions, but his advances are ponderous and unwelcome. Only once, when she is desolated at the prospect of James's departure, does Leonora think that they "might have ended up in bed and it could have been cosy and comforting for her" (TSDD 152). Humphrey might, in fact, have substituted for the usual hot water bottle or cup of ovaltine that Pym's spinsters enjoy .on melancholy evenings. Humphrey, ever opportunistic, helps Leonora to appropriate James's furniture from Phoebe's cottage, in the forlorn hope that James will take offense at the high-handed action, and 107 Leonora will be forced to turn "from the nephew to the much more suitable uncle" (TSDD 113). Because he takes responsiblity for the ultimate failure of Leonora and James's friendship, his presents "becom[e] more expensive and the bunches of flowers more lavish" (TSDD 175). His last appearance, doggedly clutching a bunch of peonies, clearly shows his willingness to remain as the faithful old stand-by, mildly ridiculous, but dependable to the end.

Love does indeed play a diminished role in the last three novels: the affection of sisters and brothers, the close marriages of the earlier novels are replaced by "lovelessness, destructive narcissism, betrayal of love" (Nardin, 60). Love seems never to have existed in Quartet in Autumn, for Letty and Marcia have no intimate knowledge of their colleagues. Edwin's religous devotion marks a degree of complacency: he puts off a visit to Marcia because it will interfere with Corpus Christi. Calling belatedly, and finding her in a state of collapse, Edwin cannot reproach himself for failing to prevent her death, "because for a Christian, death is something to be desired" (QIA 148). Norman, an irascible little man, obsessed with shopping for food, fails Marcia by remaining wilfully blind to her progressive starvation and mental decline, but is quite happy to inherit her house.

In her last novel, Pym juxtaposes one of her most "clammily selfish" men (Halperin,91), Graham Pettifer, with one of her most likeable. Tom Dagnan is "the only clergyman in Pym's entire oeuvre to receive relatively charitable authorial treatment"(Liddell, 35). Many of Pym's clergymen have trouble relating to their parishioners: Julian Malory (EW) believes himself to be "consummately eligible"(Doan, 73) and cannot believe Mildred is not secretly devastated by his engagement to Allegra Gray. Stephen Latimer and David Lydell are equally persuaded of their personal irresistibility. Moreover, many a clergyman is "trapped in the jargon of his 108 profession" (Doan, 64 ), ranging from Archdeacon Hoccleve, who bores his congregation with lengthy quotations from obscure poets, to Tom Dagnall, who quotes from Anthony a Wood to the consternation of his housekeeper.

The celibacy of the clergy is a decisive element in determining whether a single clergyman is eligible or permanently out of bounds. The Vicar, of course, may remain unmarried for the Kingdom of God's sake, without arousing suspicion or ridicule; the confirmed bachelor, if a layman, is a slightly absurd figure. The urban bachelor in Victorian fiction has been characterized as one who "is selfish ... [who] bitches ... [and] is a hypochondriac". The man who refuses sexual choice, in a climate of compulsory heterosexuality, becomes "self-centred and at the same time self­ marginalizing" (Sedgwick, 248; 251). In Pym's fiction, the bachelor, whom women perceive as "not the kind of man to marry" (EW 64), fits this pattern, and is often further emasculated by the rather unmanly occupation he follows: indeterminate office worker, librarian,or peripatetic gourmet. Norman (QIA), William Caldicote (EW),and Edward Killigrew (CH) are men who are "diffident, submissive, retiring, fussy ... [or] spiteful and prying ... [and] utterly oblivious to the mood and opinion of others" (Doan, 67). Adam Prince, a former Anglican clergyman who has "gone over to Rome" and become a professional gastronome, reminds Emma Howick of "a well-living neutered cat" (AFGL 184). These latent, or suppressed homosexuals contrast srikingly with the wonderful gallery of overtly "gay" men who parade through all twelve novels. Of all Pym's homosexual men, only Ned is really disagreeable: "predatory, poisonous, fickle, capricious, malicious and false ... an embodiment of hostile homosexual cliches" (Burkhart, 104). However, in regard to the heterosexual men in Pym's novels, it is easy to agree that they seem to deny the importance of love altogether, while women feel "blank" without it. If a few, like Tom Dagnall and Rupert Stonebird, are excepted, men are represented as both selfish and 109 needy: " it is as if any difficulty found men uniquely weak and vulnerable; as if any hint of male thoughtfulness were as marvellous as an unexpected thankyou note from the family cat" (Benet, 51).

Y oung's male characters are also initially self-centred or self-absorbed. Her great accomplishment is the creation of anti-romantic heroes, unprepossessing at first, and wrapped in their own concerns, but gradually displaying an unselfish love for the female protagonist. Charles Batty, Samuel Blenkinsop and Edwin Cummings become progressively better looking, and of lower social status, as the novels follow one another. Whereas the Reverend Cecil Sproat abandons his puritannical moralism under the influence of love, the Reverend Robert Corder, on the other hand, never relents from his, and the Reverend Maurice Roper. remains forever fixed in his unhappy ,self-righteous isolation.

All three of Y oung's worthy bachelors are relatively socially isolated and, by implication, sexually inexperienced. Charles Batty is intolerant of anyone who does not share his musical interests, and so socially inept that he does not understand the use of dance-cards at his own mother's Ball. Blenkinsop, lives with a friend of his late mother, who exercises almost maternal care over him. He is extremely methodical, and particular about his clothes, to the extent of getting the maid-servant to tighten any buttons which seem loose. Such reported anxiety gives Hannah secret enjoyment, and slyly suggests his repressed sexuality. Cummings is completely devoted to his sisters, and preoccupied with his own plans to get ahead in the world.

Charles's masculine self-absorption is shown by his antagonism to Francis Sales, based on his habit of "stealing beauty" by talking at concerts, and shooting birds. Jealousy does not enter the equation until he sees Henrietta stealing away from Nelson Lodge and realizes she is 110 going to meet Sales. Blenkinsop is so self-absorbed that he resents Riddings' attempted suicide and Hannah's rescue as a major personal inconvenience. Initially he resembles Pym's characters in that "[i]ronically 'coming to the rescue' is an act of chivalry far more suited to women than to bachelors" (Doan, 78). It takes a great deal of teasing banter from Hannah to break through the armour of reserve that has shielded him for forty years. Like Blenkinsop, the Rendalls' first boarder, Cummings, is extraordinarily self­ contained and reserved at first. Jenny, piqued by his lack of curiosity about herself, concludes wrongly that he is dull and not interested in anything.

Jenny is so imbued with class prejudice that, at first, she cannot see past Cummings' cheap clothes, dusty shoes, and workman's hands. Finally, acknowledging his good looks, she becomes far more aware of his individual features than she ever is of Cyril's, usually observed in a golden haze. Henrietta's dreams of "a rich man, a handsome one, a gay life" do not predispose her to look favourably on "a plain young man with pale, vague eyes" already tending to baldness (TMM 101;106-7). Significantly, during his declaration of love at the Monks' Pool, Charles is invisible in the darkness. Only when she realizes that she loves him, does she long for "his vague gestures, his unseeing eyes" among the handsome, dull young men who form her social circle.. Nor is Hannah's first impression of her future lover favourable: he looks at her "severely through his spectacles ... grave, solid, and as monosyllabic as language and bare courtesy would allow" (MM 40). However, at her moment of crisis, the same "solemn face, anxious but chivalrously incurious" bears witness to his protective care. In each case, the woman must acknowledge the anti-romantic hero's qualities of character and intellect before she can appreciate his physical appeal. The romantic figure, on the other hand, wins the girl's attention by his bearing and good looks, and disappoints her by his commonplace mind. 111 When her false lover fails her, the unromantic hero takes the woman under his care, and guides her safely home. The younger protagonists rely on their faithful lovers for support in these emotional crises, but the lovers withdraw when they feel they are being grossly used. Charles is enraged by Henrietta's assertion that he would be satisfied with an asexual relationship, and avoids her for several weeks. Cummings suffers "the torture of knowing [Jenny] was a woman who acknowledged his manhood only as an amusement for herself or occasional practical use" (JW 138). He resembles Charles Batty in refusing to go beyond a certain point of exploitation. However, he gets no declaration of love at the close of the novel. The ambiguous ending prepares the reader for Cummings to be cheated of his happiness, as a fictional device that ensures emotional balance in the plot of The Curate's Wife. Only Hannah Mole never exploits the man she comes to love; it is Blenkinsop who seeks her help for the Riddings, as, under her tutelage, his concern for the couple overcomes his initial self-centredness.

The Reverend Cecil Sproat is never able to quite discount the social disadvantages represnted by Dahlia's "mother and her unspeakable aunt" (JW 305). Dahlia, in her turn, marries him while candidly admitting she is not in love. Sproat, as an ambitious curate in the Church of England, does not improve his chances of preferment by falling in love with Dahlia, as Mrs Doubleday, the Vicar's wife, makes quite clear in her comments on their proposed marriage. Sproat is austere, gloomy, and remote when Dahlia first encounters him, and seems wilfully oblivious of Miss Morrison's feelings for him, when he instals her next door. He falls in love with Dahlia almost immediately, but his masculine superiority prevents him from realizing "her indifference to a man at least ten years her senior and looking more: a man of severe appearance, proclaiming in his garb the service to which he was dedicated" (JW 132). That indifference is nowhere 112 more vividly illustrated than by the caricature she makes of him in the form of a doll. Sproat is crestfallen, but undeterred.

Sproat's class consciousness makes him vulnerable to Miss Jewel's insinuations about the Rendalls. Even while rebuking her sternly for her gossip, he admits that he himself is "predisposed to suspect them of bad behaviour because they [are] not of his own social order" (JW 290). Yet finally Sproat can think of nothing but "the blissful certainty of his own love" (JW 330). Sproat is humourless, but not insensitive, and he is wounded by Dahlia's confessed lack of passion when he proposes to her. Without loving Sproat, she recognizes in him a true friend who would never deceive her, and who promises unfailing, though not uncritical, devotion. To Sproat Dahlia offers the experience of a full-blooded passion which humanizes him, and saves him from the puritanism of a Robert Corder or Maurice Roper.

The Reverend Mr Pilgrim is so negatively depicted, as a • stereotype of the worst characteristics of the non-conformist clergy, that one suspects a personal hatred on the author's part. He personifies "outraged sanctimony and spite" to Hannah (MM 235), and she remembers, with contempt, the cowardly self-righteousness that "spared a little time from his exhortations to the troops encamped near Hannah's cottage, for reproaching a woman for her care of a man broken in doing what Mr Pilglrim had no intention of doing himself' (MM 257). Pilgrim remains a shadowy menace; Corder, on the other hand, is a well-rounded portrait.

Robert Corder is Hannah's antagonist from their first meeting, but Young gives a concise and quite sympathetic explanation of his situation - had he been born 40 years earlier, "the infallibility of his creed and his authority as its exponent" would have been beyond question (MM 80). Corder is a splendid example of the muscular Christian, and his vitality and 113 sociability earn him wide respect outside his own home (MM 162). He cannot understand why similar esteem is not accorded him by his own family, and rightly suspects Hannah of being a subversive influence. The charming incident of the Christmas pudding shows clearly how Hannah's very efficiency and gift for repartee leave him frequently feeling that he has been made a laughing-stock.

A self-centred father, Corder is inclined to use his daughers "as an audience for his sentiments and the record of his doings and to forget that these girls had characters unless they happened to annoy him" (MM 67). Corder is not without affection for his children, but he resents and belittles the emotional support Hannah supplies to the troubled adolescents. He is "always jealous of those who gave to someone who was not himself and to those who received" (MM 160). Her ability to manage the house, without once asking his advice, offends him as much as her gift for inspiring affection. Like most of Young's clergymen, Corder is burdened with a narrow, repressive sexual morality and, at the same time, he is a snob. Ignorant of their relationship, he deems Mrs Spenser-Smith's Christmas invitation to Hannah as "true Christian charity", while he fears that Hannah "might be too clever at the games or too lively in demeanour" (MM 194). He is taken aback at seeing her dressed for the party with old lace and a brooch, gifts from Mr Samson and Wilfrid, which she wickedly declares to be family heirlooms (MM 198).

Hannah realizes that she is fortunate that Corder learns her secret from Pilgrim, for it gives him a golden opportunity to lord it over his ri'7al "and read him a little lecture on ... the duty of Christians to accept sinners who had repented" (MM 270). His condescension, however, is more than she can bear and she longs to see him "floundering in the embarrassment of her confession" (MM 273). To spare Ethel's feelings, she makes a clean 114 breast of the matter, but Mr Blenkinsop's proposal saves Corder from the necessity of taking action. Hannah is sure that Corder will eventually marry Miss Patsy Withers, and "find her somewhat dull after the incalculableness of Miss Mole" (MM 287).

In the novel which portrays the most satisfactory marriage in Young's fiction, The Vicar's Daughter, the Reverend Maurice Roper, the ultimate outsider, elicits the greatest sympathy. Towards the end of the novel, Margaret Stack tells him," 'You're not a bad man. You're well­ meaning - and that's always dangerous, isn't it?'" (TVD 217). Maurice is not well-meaning, his actions are inspired by conflicting emotions that motivate a sequence of undertakings which, he convinces himself, are guided by the hand of God.

Maurice has "lived more than forty years in a state of mental barricade" (TVD 43). His deep insecurity is revealed by an extreme sensitivity to snubs, real or imagined, and his inability to ever strike the right note in social situations. Most obviously, he is unfamiliar with the dynamics of family life, and Hilary's self-confidence disconcerts him. He retaliates by treating _her like a schoolgirl, using French quotations, then checking on her understanding of them; Hilary soon detects the "acid flavour" under Maurice's conversation (TVD 228). James Blunt, with his hysterical misogyny, is a male equivalent of Miss Jewel, and Maurice parallels Miss Morrison as being an easy target for mockery. The irritating habits of extreme self-consciousness are almost photographically reproduced by I Young: his habit of paddlling round flat-footedly in rubber soles, peering through his eye-glasses, clearing his throat significantly, giving "little propitiating glances" when he enters a room (TVD 55). Sadly he alienates the very ones to whom he intends to do good, while being acutely aware of his own inadequacies. 115 Recourse to invalidism in times of stress has obviously been Maurice's standby all his life; he can be dissuaded only by "the callous accuracy of the thermometer" (TVD 150). Edward makes unfeeling jokes about throwing the sickly young orphan in the river, and does not spare the adult Maurice his own advanced views on theology, declaring that "the church doesn't want lies even for the sake of peace"(TVD 104). The reader can well understand Maurice's desire to put a crack in Edward's complacency, by informing him he has an illegitimate daughter. Margaret's weapon of defence is the love Maurice has cherished for her for twenty years, while suffering agonies of conscience over the sin of coveting his cousin's wife. Margaret is admirable in her determination to protect her husband and daughter, but her complacency prevents her from divining Maurice's "desire, which was for pain, for love, for friendship, for some relationship with some one, without the need for calculation or carefulness" (TVD 129). Denied such acceptance, Maurice longs to have power over Margaret, to make her suffer, to make her "learn that it was not safe to laugh at him" (TVD 130). Significantly, his denunciation of her husband is preceded by an almost hysterical litany of the cruelties Edward inflicted on Maurice as a child. I

Margaret is physically repelled by Maurice's asexual softness, and "the fat, tapering fingers which performed little exercises now and then, in a funny old-maidish way" (TVD 63). Maurice's prudish remonstrances, at the idea of love between John Blunt and Caroline Mather, suggest a degree of sexual repression more typical of a middle-aged spinster, and his very inexperience enables Margaret to mould him to her will. She uses the familiar tactic of infantilising the man; it is singularly appropriate in Maurice's case, because so much of his emotional conflict derives from childhood trauma that has never been acknowledged. After his first evening en Camille with the Stacks, Maurice is "excited and nervous, like a child who would have been broken-hearted if he had missed the party, but longed for 116 the moment when his nurse would come to take him home" (TVD 71). Margaret takes on the role of that nurse, or surrogate mother, as she coaxes, cajoles and finally persuades him that he must spare Edward his suspicions about Caroline's paternity. When she succeeds, she scolds him, " 'What a child you are! You've been mean and spiteful, like a nasty little boy, and now you're sorry but you won't admit it!' (TYp 219). Maurice's final blundering attempt to mend matters, by blackening the name of Caroline's mother, earns a rebuke which reduces him, like a chastised child, to tears (TVD 263).

In Maurice Roper Young has depicted a bachelor who has all the characteristics usually attributed to the spinster, and who suffers similar feelings of alienation. Despite his clerical status, which confers authority and some dignity, Maurice fails in human relationships. Like the spinster, he suffers unrequited love, largely, it would seem, owing to his physical unattractiveness. He may use different techniques to ingratiate himself with others, but they are no less absurd. Again, like the spinster, the celibacy demanded by his calling imposes a repressive attitude towards sexual relationships, and an ignorance of family dynamics. His very desire to be accepted as a member of the Stack household prompts him to comments and actions that deter such acceptance. The majority of the middle-aged spinsters portrayed by Young and Pym are far more content with their lot and far more self-sufficient that Maurice, who remains pitiful in his emotional isolation at the end of the novel.

NOTES

(1) Tom is alienated from his society and his family, and Pym makes his isolation pitiable when he can find no one to share a celebratory bottle of champagne at the completion of his thesis. Wandering to a party at his aunt's house, he is turned away by a policeman, suspicious of his scruffy appearance. Saddest of all is his visit to Mallow Park, where he finds his mother and uncle, and his former girlfriend Elaine, all locked into their traditional roles, and his dress clothes still hanging in a wardrobe; Tom feels 117 like a revenant. Ironically,his one attempt to integrate, by wearing native dress, leads to his death in Africa, when he is shot in error by police, during a political demonstration.

(2) Pym uses an evocative image to convey how far the three have distanced themselves from love and intimacy. Clearing out Marcia's house, they find a bottle of sherry, and consume it, sitting at a table surrounded by the stacks of hoarded food, and clean milk bottles, that bear witness to her derangement. It is Cyprus sherry, from vineyards reputed to have belonged to the Queen of Sheba. Wine from the birthplace of Venus, vinted for a legendary Queen of love, warms the hearts of three who have either forgotten or never known such passion. 118 Conclusion

E.H. Young and Barbara Pym share "a sense of humour... which can emerge in spontaneous and sometimes disconcerting ways. They are, as it were, secretly amused by their own sense of things, and the readers can share this or not, as they like" ( Bayley, Introduction to William, vii). This is nowhere more evident than in their treatment of the spinster characters in their novels.

Young and Pym were writing in a period when the position of the spinster had become anomalous. The achievement of the suffrage had defused the first wave of feminist enthusiasm without really empowering women. Even though employment for women was expanding, the assumption that marriage and domesticity were a woman's lot deprived many women of educational opportunities and working women of a fair wage. The task of caring for ailing or elderly parents, or younger siblings, was automatically assigned to the unmarried daughter, a situation which often resulted in her being left, unqualified and socially isolated, to face the world in early middle age.

Moreover, two world wars ensured that thousands of women would never have a chance to marry, a harsh fact which, however, did little to improve social attitudes towards the single woman. Indeed, the 1920's witnessed "a massive campaign by sexologists and sex advice writers to conscript women into marriage and ensure that once in it they would engage cheerfully and frequently in sexual intercourse"(Jeffreys, 166). The threat posed by independent women to male dominance was blamed on spinsters, who were consequently "scape-goated and sacrificed"(l 76).

Both writers acknowledge the marginalisation of the unmarried woman in their contemporary society, and the sense of personal 119 inadequacy which afflicts the spinster who has internalised this low estimation of her worth. Failure to marry carries a far greater stigma than the childlessness of a married woman - not sterility, but failure to be attractive to men is the source of her shame. Such failure is usually ascribed to the woman's lack of beauty, and the spinster accepts society's judgement of her unattractiveness. After the age of 30, she has often accommodated this view to the point of not being able to recognize a man's interest when it appears. Dowdiness is a function of the spinster's poor self-image, rather than a result of her relative poverty; however, both writers make a clear correlation between this lack of vanity and an ability to show love and compassion towards others. Conversely, a beautiful woman may set extremely high standards for prospective lovers, which no man can attain, and thus great beauty may also predestine a woman to a single life.

A plain woman is conveniently judged to be a non­ sexual being, by men whose appetites she has not aroused. Spinsterhood, during the first part of this century, however, usually entailed sexual repression, with assumed negative effects that Young, at least, clearly demonstrates. Pym uses the common assumption of a spinster's inexperience to humorous effect, especially when it conceals the intentiions of a determined seductress. The confirmed middle-aged or elderly spinster is shown, by both writers, to have acquired androgynous, if not masculine, characteristics and stereotypical peculiarities. Yet these often prove advantageous, and the spinster's individualism, bordering on eccentricity, is humorously, even affectionately, depicted.

The spinster's freedom from family ties has varymg consequences, as she is shown to live vicariously through the emotional involvements of those around her. This often results in inquisitiveness, and a propensity for making judgemental comments, and interfering in the concerns 120 of others. On the other hand, as Young demonstrates, the detachment of the unmarried woman allows her to show compassion and understanding, particularly towards the young. Pym depicts the readiness of the older spinster to undertake voluntary service to her community; this may entail a degree of exploitation, but affords her the benefits of a social network, and a degree of self-satisfaction. Above all, spinsters have a great advantage in that "the often disappointing reality of satisfied desire is something they rarely have to confront" (Nardin, 20).

Neither writer shows marriage to be an entirely satisfactory relationship, owing chiefly to the exploitive and insensitive nature of men, or to their inadequacy as husbands. Yet young girls are inexorably guided towards wedlock by their female relatives and friends. Widowhood, or honorary widowhood bestowed by war, is the ideal state; widows, however, are just as anxious as others to impel young women into matrimony - perhaps as a necessary intermediate condition. They are assisted by a literary tradition which encourages girls to romanticize their encounters with men, even at the cost of inevitable disillusionment. The spinster who has never been loved often feels impelled to create her own story of past romance, to validate her existence. On the other hand, both Pym and Young show society ready to romanticize the beautiful single woman, either by dreaming up chances for her to marry, or by assuming she has rejected many such chances in the past. Quite often such fantasies, projected onto a spinster friend, afford a married woman an outlet for her own frustrated longings. '

Competition for a man's attentions is the only form of rivalry described by either writer, and one which negates friendship between women. Certainly, close ties, and even deep affection, between women exist, but it is clear that both writers accept the prevailing male-centred attitude, because the possibility of lesbian relationships is either denied or derided, 121 while male homosexuality is sympathetically treated by Barbara Pym. Most frequently, the need to share a home brings women together; the ageing spinster without her own home is in an unenviable position. Spinsters are shown as unlikely to achieve economic independence in occupations which are either an extension of the domestic role, or ancillary to the work of men, affording but low status and remuneration. Economic dependency produces a submissive attitude towards a more prosperous friend, and imposes a degree of emotional insecurity. When the spinster's friend, or brother, contemplates marriage, this union takes priority over any other relationship, no matter how longstanding.

Nevertheless, both writers present a positive view of the spinster's life. Having accepted her place on the sidelines, she has time for solitary pleasures and small indulgences, untrammelled by the need to make any impression on those around her. Pym, writing from her own experience, creates the most appealing picture of such an existence, but both writers show how a rich imaginative life can be a compensation for the spinster's relative lack of involvement in close relationships Both writers show their understanding and admiration of the strong, self-reliant, unmarried woman who survives varied forms of oppression, and manages to live happily in spite of her disadvantages. The spinster's great compensation is her ability to take a detached, ironic view of patriarchal society and of her position in it. Accepting her marginalisation, she turns deprivation into "courage, stoicism, charity" and develops "a cutting edge that is clean as it is ruthless" (Lively, 48). Her insights into the functioning of a society which devalues her are sharp, often humorous, and always enlightening. 122 NOVELS OF BARBARA PYM:

Some Tame Gazelle London, Granada: 1981.

Crampton Hodnet London, Grafton Books: 1986.

Excellent Women. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books: 1980.

Jane and Prudence London, Grafton Books: 1981.

Less Than Angels London, Granada: 1980.

A Glass of Blessings Harmondsworth, Penguin Books: 1980.

No Fond Return of Love London, Panther Books: 1981.

An Unsuitable Attachment London, Grafton Books: 1983.

The Sweet Dove Died London, Grafton Books: 1980.

Quartet in Autumn London, Grafton Books: 1980.

A Few Green Leaves London, Grafton Books: 1981.

A Very Private Eye London, Panther Books: 1985.

NOVELS OF E. H. YOUNG:

The Misses Mallett London, Jonathan Cape: 1927.

William London, Virago Press: 1988.

The Vicar's Daughter London, Virago Press: 1992.

Miss Mole London, Jonathan Cape: 1934.

Jenny Wren London, Virago Press: 1985.

The Curate's Wife London, Virago Press: 1985.

Celia London, Virago Press: 1990.

Chatterton Square London, Virago Press: 1987. 123 Bibliography

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