The Lark | Thornfield Hall

I would love to live in an English novel. Not the novels of the UK in the 21st century, but the English novels of the 20th century. From Rumer Godden’s A Fugue in Time to Margaret Kennedy’s Lucy Carmichael to E. Nesbit’s The Lark, I am prepared to travel to unreality.

THE TWEE & ANTI-TWEE DILEMMA

I don’t know what twee is, but I suspect my psychelelic lit-trip is twee. Here I am, a woman from another time, dressed in old tatty jeans and a Take Back the Night t-shirt (how young I was!), reading while I sip tea out of a bone china mug from Fortnum and Mason. I had two bone china mugs, but one broke. Now the broken one is a receptacle for old political buttons. And I’m planning a surreal book trip in which I drink tea. Twee?

WHAT’S IN MY FICTIONAL LUGGAGE?

A twin set and sensible shoes, tea bags in case the security guards bust me for loose tea, because it might be mistaken for marijuana, and The Oxford Book of English Verse,so I can catch the allusions to poetry in English novels.

WHICH NOVELS SHALL I LIVE IN?

Rumer Godden’s A Fugue in Time (1945). Born in India and educated in England, Rumer Godden taught ballet in India, traveled widely in Asia, and eventually moved back to England. In this little-known novel, A Fugue in Time, Godden asks the question: what happens if you lose your home? Rollo Dane, a retired general, is about to lose the family house, because the owner will not renew the 99-year lease: he plans to sell the house to a developer.

And then Rollo’s grand-niece, Griselda, a service woman in the U.S. army, shows up looking for a place to live in London. He is reluctant to let her stay, but she brings vibrancy, energy, and hope into the house. Rollo spends his days dreaming about the past, remembering the different generations who inhabited it during the 99 years. As is common in Godden’s books (see China Court), time-lines are blurred with memories. This is partly a ghost story, with much repetition of poetry, a retelling of family history, and allusions to T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster.

Margaret Kennedy’s Lucy Carmichael (1951). Recently reissued in Penguin’s The Mermaid Collection, this is my favorite of Kennedy’s novels. Every image is so vivid you almost need sunglasses, and every sentence is exquisite. Kennedy tells the story of Lucy Carmichael, a jilted bride who struggles back from grief when she takes a job at an Arts Institute.

A charming Oxford graduate, Lucy fell in love with Patrick, a best-selling travel writer, and he jilts her at the church. She thinks she has missed a phone call, or a telegram has gone astray, or that he has been in a car accident, until it becomes obvious that he simply left. Lucy’s best friend, Melissa, another Oxford graduate, is also devastated: she had never trusted Partrick and feels she should have warned Lucy. But then, fortunately, Lucy gets a job at a provincial Arts Institute established by a philanthropic millionaire.

Although Lucy has no work experience, she is hired to be the assistant director of the drama department on the basis of her Oxford degree. Because the well-known drama department director is away lecturing in Europe, she must direct Hamlet, which is comical, because she discovers mistakes only at rehearsals. The students are fond of her: they gamely cooperate when she changes the blocking.

And Lucy befriends faculty members, most of whom are much older, many of them eccentric. But she can’t keep silent when she realizes the director of the institute is conspiring to fire the most talented and expensive employees, a famous Jewish painter, who is a refugee from Germany, and the well-known drama director, who is often on the road lecturing.

Lucy stands up for what she thinks is right and learns about the dangers of politics. What will her future be? What will the future of the other anxious Institute employees be? I loved the characters, and this beautifully-written book is just what I needed on a very cold day in April.

E. Nesbit’s The Lark. Best-known for her children’s fantasy novels and her Fabian socialist politics, Nesbit’s adult novel, The Lark (1922), is a masterpiece. Two young women, Jane and Lucilla, learn that their guardian Mr. Rochester has lost all their money. (Prepare for romance: the guardian is named Mr. Rochester and Jane is the name of one of the girls.)

And so Jane and Lucilla move into a charming cottage with a beautiful garden, and support themselves by selling the flowers. And when all the flowers are gone, they find a larger, somewhat run-down house, with a larger garden. Utterly charming from beginning to end, and by far the best of Nesbit’s adult books. it celebrates her love of gardens.

If you read my blog post of August 29, you gathered that E. Nesbit is my favorite writer of children’s books. One of the pleasures of the e-reader has been the discovery of Nesbit’s out-of-print adult novels in e-book form. The best of her adult novels is The Lark, a delightful comedy published in 1922. Since I read the e-book in 2015, it has been reissued in paperback by Penguin in the UK and by Furrowed Middlebrow in the U.S.

In The Lark, Nesbit establishes a magical atmosphere reminiscent of that of her charming children’s novels. The two heroines, Jane and her cousin Lucilla, are both orphans, and an epidemic of the mumps has gotten them out of school early, since they were lucky enough not to catch it. At their friend Emmeline’s house, they discover a spell book in the library, a “fat quarto volume with onyx-laid clasps and bosses.” And the willful Jane decides it will be “a lark” to try a spell that will reveal her true loves.

“You wouldn’t dare!”
“Wouldn’t I? That’s all you know!”
“You mustn’t dare her,” said a third voice anxiously from the top of the library steps; “if you dare her, she’ll do it as sure as fate!”

I love the lively dialogue, which depicts the three girls so believably. As you would expect from the lines “Wouldn’t I? That’s all you know!”, Jane is adamant. She speaks aloud the spell in the woods at the moment when Mr. Rochester, a handsome man who has missed his train, is passing by. Yes, the novel is a playful riff on Jane Eyre: Jane and Mr. Rochester fall in love. Sort of. But Jane has no idea if she will see him again.

, Jane and Lucilla are comfortably well-off. But a few years later, when they are 19, their guardian loses their money and flees to South Africa. Before he leaves, he arranges for a cab driver to pick them up at school and drive them to a charming small cottage he has bought with the last of their inheritance.

They are unprepared to support themselves–a flaw in girls’ education in the early 20th century, Nesbit obviously thought. At first they try selling the flowers from their garden. It is a difficult business.

Before I go on, let me fill you in on E. Nesbit’s background and the popularity of her children’s books. She has many writerly fans, including Antonia Fraser and J. K. Rowling. In 1963, Gore Vidal wrote an article, “The Writing of E. Nesbit,” for The New York Review of Books.

He wrote,

After Lewis Carroll, E. Nesbit is the best of the English fabulists who wrote about children (neither wrote for children) and like Carroll she was able to create a world of magic and inverted logic that was entirely her own. Yet Nesbit’s books are relatively unknown in the United States. Publishers attribute her failure in these parts to a witty and intelligent prose style (something of a demerit in the land of the free) and to the fact that a good many of her books deal with magic, a taboo subject nowadays.

Edith and her husband, Hubert Bland, were socialists and members of the Fabian Society. To support her husband and five children, Nesbit wrote children’s books. She also supported her best friend, Alice, who had an affair with Hubert, had two children by him, and became Edith’s housekeeper and secretary. A. S. Byatt’s wonderful novel, The Children’s Book, is based on the lives of E. Nesbit and her circle.

In The Lark, Jane and Lucilla have sold most of the flowers from their own garden, and wish they could expand by renting the deserted house with a huge garden down the road. When they find the door open one day and decide to explore, Jane falls and turns her ankle. Mr. Rochester, who is the landlord’s nephew, shows up and takes the two girls home in his carriage. He is smitten with Jane (but we knew that) and arranges for his cranky uncle to allow them to sell the flowers from his garden. They open a shop in a shed, hire a gardener, and eventually are given the use of his house, where they take in lodgers (which is very, very funny).

One of the things I most relate to is the young women’s struggle with math and accounts.

“It’s so different doing it with real money,” said Lucilla, fingering the little piles of coin on the table of the garden room, where, with two candles in brass candlesticks to light them, they were seeking to find some relation between the coins–so easily counted–and the figures referring to these same coins which all through the week they had laboriously pencilled in an exercise-book.

“I think it’s the garden distracts us,” said Jane, looking towards the open window, beyond which lay lawn and cedars bathed in moonlight and soft spring air.

The Lark is utterly charming, and I enjoy the rambling authorial asides and occasional slapstick scenes. I also admire novels about work, and though this isn’t super-realistic–could someone please give me a garden?–I love the characters, appreciate the descriptions of gardens, and the burglar episode reminds me of similar episodes in The Phoenix and the Carpet and the Bastable books.

A fabulous weekend read!