'If she was a bloke, she’d still be in print': the lost novels of Gertrude Trevelyan
Great things were predicted for Gertrude Trevelyan in 1932, when she published her debut, Appius and Virginia, about a lonely woman who sets out to raise an orangutan as if he were a human child. The novel was heralded by the Spectator as “exciting both in promise and achievement”, while the eminent critic Gerald Gould wrote: “So original is it that I have scruples about writing the word ‘novel’ at all.”
Trevelyan, who has all but sunk into obscurity, had been the first female winner of Oxford University’s Newdigate prize for poetry while a student there – a win that garnered headlines from Wisconsin to Auckland, and prompted the Daily Mail to predict that her “future work will be watched with interest”. By 1940, she had published
seven more novels as GE Trevelyan, when her Notting Hill home was hit by a bomb during the London blitz. She died of her injuries in February 1941, at the age of 37; her death certificate described her as “Spinster – an Authoress”.
“She’s been completely forgotten. None of her books have been reprinted. They’re incredibly hard to get hold of,” says Scott Pack, the former Waterstones head buyer and publisher at Lightning Books, which is teaming up with Abandoned Bookshop to republish Appius and Virginia for the first time in more than 80 years.
Pack came across the novel when he read a review by Brad Bigelow at the Neglected Books site. Bigelow, who describes himself as “probably the only person alive who’s read all her books”, called Appius and Virginia “one of the most powerful stories about loneliness ever written”; Pack, intrigued, managed to find a copy.
“I read it and I thought, ‘ This is incredible,’” he says. “If she was a bloke, she’d still be in print today, without question. All of Aldous Huxley’s books are still in print – some of them are amazing, some aren’t that great. He was doing interesting social commentary, and also experimental stuff. She was doing the same sort of thing and no one’s heard of her.”
Bigelow agrees: “Every one of her novels took great stylistic and imaginative risks. I can’t think of another writer of her calibre who’s been so completely forgotten.”
The novel opens as Virginia, a 40year-old single woman, contemplates the orangutan Appius – a “tiny dark splash in the whiteness of the cot” – and begins to train him. The idea had come to her some time back that “if a young ape were taken at birth and brought up completely in human surroundings, exactly like a child, it would grow up like a child – would, in fact, become a child; except for its appearance, of course, and even there something might be done”.
As the years pass, Virginia starts to believe that Appius is learning to understand her, to speak, even read: “If it succeeded she would indeed have achieved something. She would have created a human being out of purely animal material, have forced evolution to cover in a few years stages which unaided it would have taken aeons to pass …” But if her experiment fails, she fears that “her existence would no longer be justified in her own sight. The newly awakened need of her being to create would be frustrated utterly. She would go back to Earl’s Court and her bed-sitting-room – gas fire and griller, separate meters; to her consumption of novels from the lending library; her bus rides to the confectioner’s; her nightly sipping of conversation and coffee in the lounge: to middle-age in a ladies’ residential club. Each year a little older, a little stouter, or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the bus.”
Trevelyan shows how different Appius’s experience of the experiment is; and as Virginia’s need for him grows – “Darling child, you can’t know how lonely mama was before she had you” – the chasm between their two perceptions of the world widens inexorably.
While the Spectator and Gould loved the novel, others acknowledged its challenging nature. “It must have required considerable courage to conceive Appius and Virginia and to carry out the conception so carefully … Miss GE Trevelyan demands equal courage from her readers,” said the Times Literary Supplement. Others were less convinced: it was “saved from being disgusting only by its frantic silliness”, according to the Mail. For Pack in 2020: “It is dark and grim, but that’s why I like it.”
A descendant of Sir Charles Trevelyan, founder of the modern civil service, the author was educated at Princess Helena College, Ealing, where she won the school essay prize two years in a row. She began at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1923, winning her Newdigate prize with a 250-line work titled Julia, Daughter of Claudius – something she told the press she wrote as a joke. As she would later write, she maintained “a position of total obscurity” at Oxford, because she “did not: play hockey, act, row, take part in debates, political or literary, contribute to the Isis or attend cocoa parties, herein failing to conform to the social standards commonly required of women students.”
After Oxford, Trevelyan’s father’s modest fortune gave her £500 a year, and a room at 107 Lansdowne Road in Notting Hill, where for nine years, from 1931, she would focus on nothing but writing. After Appius and Virginia, her books included As It Was in the Beginning, a stream-of-consciousness work told from the perspective of a woman dying in a nursing home; and her final work, Trance By Appointment, about a psychic who is exploited for commercial gain. Abandoned Bookshop’s reissue of Appius and Virginia is the first time any of her work has been reissued since her death in 1941.
“She had a small circle of friends, avoided the limelight, reviewed no books, neither taught nor edited, made no trips abroad or otherwise diverted her time and energy from the task of writing,” writes Bigelow in his introduction to the reissue. “This allowed her to take great risks in style, structure and approach, to create works of imaginative intensity unequalled by any novelist of her time aside from Woolf herself.”
Her death was marked with a news story in the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, which noted how she “had the misfortune to be buried beneath the wreckage of a London flat” the previous year, and “never fully recovered”. Appius and Virginia, the story noted, was “a first novel of really outstanding importance”.
If she had not died, says Bigelow: “Trevelyan might well have continued to write groundbreaking fiction and become recognised as one of the leading novelists of her generation.”
“She is a fascinating and important writer who has been unjustly forgotten by history,” says Pack. “It is time that her novels were back on bookshelves.”
Appius and Virginia by GE Trevelyan is published by Lightning Books.