FORGOTTEN AUTHORS
Lucy Lethbridge on Dorothy Whipple
Some novels bring the period in which they were written so sharply into focus that they feel less like fiction than documentary journalism. The voice of an author heard through his or her protagonists is apparently unmediated by considerations of literary form but nonetheless creates an extraordinarily vivid portrait of something, somewhere, some people, some families who seem very particularly of their time and place.
The novels of Dorothy Whipple, bestsellers of the 1920s and 30s, do this to the inter-war period, when British middle-class families were often struggling economically, their place in the world uncertain and their futures made fragile by the damage inflicted by one world war and the looming threat of another. Whipple writes about people hanging on and eking out. She describes women (because women are her subject) making sad, sometimes angry, compromises to keep things together; about the loneliness of being alone and the even more painful loneliness of an unhappy marriage. The novels are set for the most part in northern towns and southern suburbs, and Whipple is the chronicler of family members torn apart by adultery, debt and the uselessness of men – ashes from which her women emerge, stronger, more independent, their eyes opened to ways of living that they had never allowed themselves to contemplate before.
Born Dorothy Stirrup in Blackburn in 1893, she worked as a secretary and married her boss, Henry Whipple, 24 years older, in 1917. They spent their married life in Nottingham where Dorothy published her first novel,
Young Anne, in 1927. What was Henry Whipple like? It’s an interesting question because the men in his wife’s novels are by and large strikingly awful. The best of them are weak and the worst are venal (in the case of the shadowy financial string-puller in They Knew Mr
Knight, quite literally diabolical). Of the three husbands in They Were
Sisters, only one has anything to recommend him: the other two are, respectively, a bore and a monstrous bully (the latter played in the 1945 film version with sadistic relish by James Mason). When Whipple’s male characters are successful, they are vain or boastful and when they are failures they are vain and boastful too. Born to rule in both the large world and the small, her men are incompetent and complacent, quite often spoilt by doting mothers. They get their education paid for, their wild oats forgiven, their follies indulged, while their cleverer sisters must sit at home and hope to be rescued by a husband who is slightly less of a dullard than the average.
Whipple’s fury at the waste of female talent breathes through these books. Though prone to let telling get in the way of showing, her astuteness is very satisfying, her characters almost always acutely drawn and fully coloured. She is particularly good on how the interior resilience of her women is often perceived of as threatening by men – how chasms of blank misunderstanding loom between them. But her females are not simply saintly foils to ghastly menfolk. They are complex, often angry, sometimes unpleasant – but when their survival skills are tested they find the challenge surprisingly exciting, exercising mental muscles atrophied through under-use. And the art of survival is not only reserved for the virtuous. In Someone at a
Distance, she slowly unravels the seduction of a contentedly married man, a worldly publisher, by a scheming French minx. Poor Avery, easily flattered because it’s never occurred to him to doubt himself, it’s all too embarrassingly easy for a hard-boiled seductress to scoop him up.
Whipple particularly has it in for the kind of handsome elder son who lets his privileges go to waste. Take Major Marwood in The Priory, who has inherited a beautiful house and through idleness and ineptitude lets it all go to ruin. Nurse Pye, the managerial midwife, the kind of person Whipple thinks should be running governments, is appalled by his incompetence. One wonders if Whipple was thinking of the first war and the opportunities that had opened for women’s work and then closed during an economic depression. Certainly she is in no doubt that work liberates. When her characters’ marriages break up or their fortunes fail, she sends her women out into the working world, to labour in beauty salons and secretarial agencies or running bed and breakfasts. Through their own paid labours they find satisfaction, a sense of self-worth and an experience of female camaraderie. Better, is the Whipple message, to be alone and financially independent than dependent on a man you despise – which is the sorry end for Freda Blake in They Knew Mr Knight, who wanted to be rescued and ended up trapped.
The Second World War changed society for good: managerial women like Nurse Pye would come into their own again, and with men out of the way, they would be running things their way. Things look different now, but not so different. Whipple’s novels are not quite period pieces. Most modern readers will have encountered a Whipple kind of man, a Whipple kind of marriage. In 1939, she turned her fictional dream house,
The Priory, into a (somewhat improbable) utopia of female cottage industry and productive management. But no possible plot contortion could make it happen without the intervention of a rich man. The Priory, They Were Sisters, They Knew Mr Knight, Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple are published by Persephone Books, £13