Forgotten authors
LUCY LETHBRIDGE on the fashion historian and novelist Doris Langley Moore
If you want a treat, visit the BBC iplayer archive: buried in there, there’s a period gem from 1957 – Men, Women and Clothes, the first colour series ever made by the Beeb. It takes place in Eridge Castle, the first home of the Costume Museum, and is written and presented by Doris Langley Moore wearing formidably well-cut dresses adorned with statement buttons. Around the lawns cavort various famous faces in period dress – including Vanessa Redgrave and, curiously, Benny Hill. Moore has a great voice – deep, flavoursome, bold and brooking no dissent: it’s worth tuning in just to hear her enunciate the word ‘accessories’. I had no idea you could roll Ss and Rs around each other so elaborately. When Doris Langley Moore says, ‘It’s every woman’s ambition to look slinky’, it is said with such authority that one wonders why one had ever been ambitious to be anything else.
Moore, who died in 1986, aged 84, is best remembered for being a fashion historian when the idea was completely new. It was her vast collection of antique dress that formed the first Museum of Costume (now in Bath). Brought up in South Africa and mostly self-educated, she was a prodigious reader who on moving to London in the 1920s published her first book at the age of 24 – a verse translation from Greek of odes by Anacreon. From then on, she never stopped turning them out – among them books on household management, a biography of E Nesbit and a ‘discourse on fashionable life’. Her 1928 book The Technique of the
Love Affair advised women on how to catch a husband. In the New Yorker, Dorothy Parker thought Moore’s tip that you could hook any man simply by making him realise his utter inferiority made ‘considerable sense’. If only, Parker thought, ‘it had been written and placed in my hands years ago, maybe I could have been successful rather than just successive.’
Moore was obsessed by fashion and pronounced hat-buying the best cure for her occasional bouts of low spirits. She was flapperish but literary, given to de haut on bas hauteur but at the same time not quite snobbish. ‘Harder-core bohemians’ were her chosen circle remembered her friend Barbara Ker-seymer. She was at all the parties but was entirely independent (her brutal seduction techniques didn’t work for herself as her marriage lasted only a year).
Moore started collecting costume in the 1930s, starting with an Edwardian wedding dress, and became obsessed. Her greatest coup was probably the discovery of the Albanian costume worn by Lord Byron for his 1814 portrait by Thomas Phillips; she unearthed it in the attic of Bowood House. This is turn led to a passion for Byron and the publication of several scholarly works on the poet, a biography of Ada Lovelace and the founding of the Byron Society of which she was the first vice-president. She wrote once: ‘I am perhaps the only woman to whom nothing but pleasure has come from loving that poet.’ She was a powerhouse of industry and enthusiasms. Her DNB entry includes the line ‘she was a difficult woman and some of her friendships ended in bitterness’ but alas doesn’t expand on it. But she certainly packed a lot in.
Now the enterprising Dean Street Press has re-issued four of Moore’s novels, written between 1938 and 1959. In them, that rich deep voice with its razor-sharp enunciations tells the reader what’s what – but the novels are also funny, somewhat self-mocking and full of often twisty and surprising social observations that often take the reader by surprise. Although clearly now period pieces, they are still extremely readable and Moore navigates her complicated plots with considerable skill. An added pleasure is the books’ introduction by Roy Strong who knew Moore in the 1960s; she once took him out to lunch at the Ivy and asked him to sign her passport photograph which looked not remotely like her having been taken through flattering gauze.
Moore clearly took seriously the exhortation to write of what you know. In all the novels we see the main character’s preoccupations dovetail beautifully with her own. She may have been difficult to like but Moore is perceptive about character and lays her own susceptibilities bare for her readers. In Not At Home (1948), for example, a middle-aged woman in a Chelsea house filled with lovingly accumulated beautiful things has to get a lodger to help pay the bills during rationing. This beautiful but stupid younger woman is a horror, who leaves a hot iron on an 18thcentury table and wine stains on lovely carpets. There’s a subplot involving a Pinewood starlet which doesn’t quite work but the main dynamic – between two women of different generations and types – is startlingly vividly and convincingly drawn.
In All Done by Kindness (1951), a doctor takes pity on a poor old lady and pays her bills in exchange for a chest of what looks like worthless old paintings. Thanks to the intervention of (guess who?) a remarkably stylish and informed librarian called Stephanie du Plessis, a complex plot of attribution, art world corruption and a bit of (half-hearted) romance unfold. In her last book, My
Caravaggio Years (1959), a young bookseller fakes Byron’s lost memoir to sell to a gullible American. He persuades his fashion model fiancée to do some research for him only to find that she begins to be too aware of his less-than-byronic attractions.
They’re fun. And with their tight plots, carefully sprung surprises and astute social and even emotional observations, every one of them I think would work as adaptations for television drama. It’s time for a Doris Langley Moore revival. Not At Home, All Done by Kindness, My Caravaggio Years and A Game of Snakes and Ladders are published by Dean Street Press at £11.99 each