A Tedious and Irritating Read!

I must say I found Stella Gibbons’ The Matchmaker somewhat tedious: I struggled to finish it, and I wouldn’t read it again although, like the curate’s egg, it was good in parts. I knew her other writing didn’t follow the satirical style of ‘Cold Comfort Farm’, but this lacks the sparkle and wit of that first novel, as well as its charm and humour. ‘The Matchmaker’ was published in 1950, almost 20 years later than the earlier work, and in that period Gibbons seems to have lost her youthful disregard for literary and societal conventions.

Stella Gibbons, pictured in the late 1980s.

For me, one of the downsides is that you see life through the viewpoint of too many different people, and each time the narrative focuses on one person, the others step back into the shadow, so somehow there seems to be no central character to hold things together, and you are never with one person long enough to get to know them and find out what makes them tick, and no-one is really fleshed out, so it’s difficult to believe in them, and many of the characters are little more than stagey stereotypes.

To start with we meet Major Ronald Lucie-Browne (who is still on active service in Germany), his wife Alda and their three young daughters who have just moved to a cramped, isolated cottage in Sussex, having led a nomadic existence since their own home was bombed. Among the host of other characters are their grumpy chicken-farming neighbour Phil Waite; lazy Italian prisoners of war, and brash Landgirl Sylvia, who wants to be an actress.

Actually, I thought the most interesting person was Alda’s old school friend Jean, who comes to stay following the death of her parents. Wealthy, elegant and lonely, Jean is desperate to find a husband but, despite Alda’s efforts to help, she has been unsuccessful. However, her reactions to Alda’s interference (for that, after all, is what it is, however well intentioned) are not quite what you expect. And just as you start to think Jean has hidden depths and should have been developed to take a more central role, she is whisked away, and you’re almost at the end. But you do find out what happens to her, in a letter which is almost an afterthought, as if Gibbons suddenly realised she needed to tie up loose ends.

I guess the book is very much of its time, but the attitudes about women, foreigners and the working class felt much more redolent of an earlier period – the 1930s perhaps. But I suppose in 1950 the new, post-war world which embraced modernism and new ideas hadn’t really got under way. A lot of the most offensive comments are made by Gibbons as author, not by the characters, and I found her constant asides were an intrusion which, especially when combined with the shifts of emphasis, and the lack of a strong plot line, means there’s a lack of focus, with no clear sense of direction or overall theme.

There’s an obsession with marriage and catching a suitable man which rivals anything you find in Jane Austen, but is nowhere near as humorous, or as well written, and women are mainly portrayed as empty-headed with few, if any, interests outside the home and family. Alda, for example, is very dismissive of Sylvia the Landgirl, claiming she is vulgar and ignorant. But Alda herself is not that bright, and her reading (not that she ever seems to look at a book) has been shaped by 12 years of marriage to a ‘clever’ man. For some reason that throw-away line about Alda annoyed me more than anything else. Why doesn’t she make her own choices about books, and form her own opinions? I can’t equate her attitude to that of my mother and her friends, who would have been young married women in the period this novel portrays, and they were much more independent and intelligent. And, let me tell you, had my father ever tried to influence her reading matter then my mother, usually the most peaceable of women, would probably have thrown the entire bookcase at him!

I could go on at great length about the things in this novel that irritated me beyond measure (especially Alda). But I’ve gone on quite long enough, and before wrapping this up I should mention some of the good things – and there were quite a lot of them. For example, Gibbons is good at describing the small, everyday things of life that are so important to people, and she’s brilliant at providing telling details giving clues about status and social distinctions. But it wasn’t enough to make me want to keep the book.

Lolly Willowes

Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner's first novel, is a quite extraordinary story of a woman who sells her soul to the Devil and finds her true self by becoming a witch. Let me start by saying that Laura Willowes – the Lolly of the title – may confound your expectations of witchery. She wouldn't dream of riding a broomstick, and she has no intention of casting spells, for good or for bad. Laura doesn't want to help, or to be helped. She just wants to be herself, to think her own thoughts, make her own decisions, and live her own life.

When her father dies Laura moves in with passionless, duty-bound Henry (the younger of her two brothers), his wife Caroline and their two daughters. Laura has some reservations about her future: “But in London there would be no greenhouse with a glossy tank, and no apple room, and no potting-shed, earthy and warm, with bunches of poppy heads hanging from the ceiling, and sunflower seeds in a wooden box, and bulbs in their paper bags, and hanks of tarred string, and lavender drying on a tea-tray.”

However, she remains passive about the move, with no will of her own. “And Laura, feeling rather as if she were a piece of family property forgotten in the will, was ready to be disposed of as they should think best,” Townsend Warner tells us. Over the next 20 years Laura loses her name and her identity. She becomes Aunt Lolly, a dull, sensible, conventional woman, always ready to help when needed. But there are inklings that all is not quite as it seems, for each autumn she feels oddly uneasy and sometimes, while visiting old, forgotten corners of London she feels she is missing something important, and a secret is about to be revealed.

Then she walks into a small greengrocery shop and everything changes. “As Laura stood waiting she felt a great longing. It weighed upon her like a load of ripened fruit upon a tree. She forgot the shop, the other customers, her own errand. She forgot the winter air outside, the people going by on the wet pavements. She forgot that she was in London, she forgot the whole of her London life. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her gingers seeking the rounded ovals of fruit among the rounded ovals of leaves.”

The chrysanthemums she buys smell of the dark, rustling woods, like the wood which haunts her imagination each autumn, and on discovering they come from the Chilterns she buys a map and guide book and informs her horrified family that she is moving to the village of Great Mop.

Once there she feels at one with the landscape, with nature and the passing seasons. But she senses a hidden secret just beyond her grasp. However, her new-found freedom and her joy in life are threatened by the arrival of Titus (the son of her other brother). She wants rid of him at any cost, and her anguished plea for help is answered – by Satan.

The novel starts as something of a social satire, a comedy of manners. “The Willoweses were a conservative family and kept to old-fashioned ways,” writes Townsend Warner, adding: “Finding that well-chosen wood and well-chosen wine improved with keeping, they believed the same law applied to well-chosen ways.”

But beneath that humorous veneer lies something much sharper and darker. I found it utterly un-put-downable, but I wouldn't describe it as charming, delightful, or whimsical. There's a kind of wildness here, something untamed and uncontrollable, and it must have seemed very subversive when it was published in 1926, demanding a life of their own for women, and portraying the Devil almost as a force for good.

When he appears, Townsend Warner's Satan may look like a dishevelled gamekeeper, but he seems to have more in common with ancient pagan gods than he does with the conventional Christian view of the Devil. He is a hunter who collects souls not because he's evil, malicious, or even mischievous, , but because he can. He doesn't want to control people, or lead them into bad ways. Once he knows he has their soul he is happy to leave them alone, to let them do, say and think what they want. He confers a glorious kind of freedom on people, which enables Laura to finally be completely true to herself, and do exactly as she pleases.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

And when she meets Satan she is confident enough to launch into the most amazing, impassioned speech, in which she rails against the way women are treated. There is nothing for women, she says, except 'subjugation and plaiting their hair'. Men talk, while women listen and become dull. Women do. “If they could be passive and unnoticed it wouldn't matter. But they must be active, and still not noticed,” she explains. “And think, Satan, what a compliment you pay her, pursuing her soul, lying in wait for it, following it through all its windings, crafty and patient and secret like a gentleman out killing tigers. Her soul – when no one else would give a look at her body even.”

And, she says, a woman will take that chance to stretch her wings and be herself in a dangerous black night because 'it's to have a life of one's own, not an existence doled out to you by others'. There are no theological arguments here, no thoughts about the nature of good and evil, or life and death, or considerations about the future. What matters is the here and now, and a woman's right to be independent.