Edwardian Lives
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing EDWARDIAN LIVES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL In literary circles the term "Edwardian" conjures up expectations of atart, amusingnovel, a sparkling memoir, or perhaps a volume of...
...the children travel back in time to ancient Egypt, Babylon, Roman Britain, and Tyre, and forward into a Wellsian Utopia...
...Yet her voice was utterly distinctive...
...She had not read as widely as a Victorian woman in her place would probably have done...
...Pretty, diminutive, bright, she preferred to behave like a petted child...
...From her own childhood Nesbit turned to that of her sons and daughters...
...Many literary figures of the time tried to take her under their wings, but she would always run back to her family...
...The Treasure Seekers(1899), and The Would-Be-Goods(1901)descnbed the mishaps of the Bastables in a realistic yet humorous manner...
...Perhaps this meant so much to them because they realized that the kind of existence it implied was passing from the world...
...Suppose you have just finished a Nancy Mitford or Angela Thirkell, and you're not quite ready to pick up that pretty chapbook of A Shropshire Lad again...
...In a Foreword, poet Brad Leithauser observes: "To have written, as Charlotte Mew did, a handful of poems of unique beauty and finish represents an inspiring beating of the odds...
...In 1928, at age 59, she swallowed Lysol and died after hours of agony...
...Their secret relationship infused The Story of the Amulet with a special warmth...
...These preoccupations gnawed at her until she became quite neurotic...
...Upon Hubert's death, Edith gratefully married a retired marine engineer...
...Like Brontë and Dickinson, Mew had a repressed life that seems to have heightened inner experience...
...The Mews did not have it easy financially: The income they received from taking on lodgers had to support a brother and a sister in an insane asylum, and Anne brought in only a little extra money by painting flowers on greeting cards...
...Charlotte grappled with a few potential scandals of her own...
...Edith Nesbit lived fully enough for three ordinary people...
...Today, these books sound coy, but at the time they seemed refreshingly natural...
...The longings in her poems remain passionately undiminished by time, as do her cries for a world more just and forthcoming...
...and her ideas are not a woman's ideas, but the ideas which men have foisted, in their own interests, upon women...
...No matter what their political convictions, Edwardian writers lived with an elegance that became impossible for the post-World War II generation...
...The two youngest Bland children were really his by his mistress / secretary, who ran Edith's house for her and gave her leisure to write...
...Hubert Bland was a tireless womanizer...
...Instead, she developed a psychosis...
...She was a lesbian...
...When she was 41, Nesbit undertook to write a series of stories for and about children...
...In short, E. Nesbit was ahack, although, like many of that tribe, she fancied herself a genius...
...The Mews felt trapped by secrets—the presence of lunacy in the family, the need to take in "paying guests" to keep up their once fashionable house...
...Briggs' biography is best read in conjunction with Doris Langley Moore's E. Nesbit (1933, revised 1966...
...and it is probable that if she ever writes a sincere poem, she will suppress it...
...Nesbit's tall figure, always draped in a flowery Liberty gown, stood out at political meetings...
...The Railway Children, published the same year, concerns a Russian anarchist based on Kropotkin, who was a friend of the Blands...
...After the lawsuit he could not hold up his head, Poor Father, and he does not care For people here, or to go anywhere...
...Mew's verse seemed radical to readers trained on the Victorians and their regular meters, old-fashioned to those harkening to Pound and Eliot...
...Even in her last days, she attracted a new young male admirer—Noël Coward...
...If things got dull, she livened them up by fainting histrionically or committing some similar distraction...
...But because the material was so private, her friends had to coax her to publish...
...Unfortunately, she had already contracted lung cancer and died a few years later...
...It is needless to add that she is never original...
...Thomas Hardy thought her "far and away the best living woman poet...
...She wasnot prolific...
...Nesbit's own life was less magical or idealistic than the one she portrayed in her books...
...The material for her time-travel stories was gleaned from another lover—the great Egyptologist, E. Wallis Budge...
...Moore was forced to conceal some of the scandal surrounding her subject during the lifetimes of Edith's friends and family, but her political observations are superior to Briggs' Both studies are fascinating, each in its own way...
...In The Story of the A mulet (1906), the young heroes learn that capitalism has actually worsened the lives of the working classes...
...Her syntax was often shaky...
...Writers & Writing EDWARDIAN LIVES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL In literary circles the term "Edwardian" conjures up expectations of atart, amusingnovel, a sparkling memoir, or perhaps a volume of mauve-tinted verse—ideal summer reading, particularly if you happen to be lolling in a hammock, soothed by the ripple of distant laughter from the croquet court...
...She had lost her religion...
...Some acquaintances thought this would give her a chance to become more normal...
...Her androgynous dress coupled with her passionate verse made her contemporaries think of Emily Bront...
...when I was young, they could only be ordered from England...
...At 42 Charlotte suddenly produced some remarkable poems...
...Wells was a close friend, until he tried to run away with her daughter...
...Members of the Stock Exchange were invariably depicted as arch villains...
...In Mew's case, the result was oblivion...
...George Bernard Shaw had a brief, unconsummated affair with her...
...They featured the Bastables, characters based on her own brothers and sisters...
...He was uneducated, but believed in marital fidelity, and they adored each other...
...Fantasy freed Nesbit from the limitations that plagued her Bastable stories, and made her tendency to preach more palatable...
...Poems were Mew's only outlet for telling her own story...
...Generally these were with young men, her secretaries or hangers-on (Richard le Gallienne was one...
...Of course, Fitzgerald and Briggs cannot recapture the insouciant tone that came so naturally to their fin de siècle subjects, but Mew and Nesbit are nonetheless engagingly drawn...
...With luck, these books will attract a fresh audience for their works...
...Such tragic endings have often catapulted poets into fame...
...Fitzgerald has appended 15 poems by Mew to the biography, and she discusses half a dozen others...
...She once asked Shaw to review her...
...At first glance one might wonder why the sad, uneventful life Mew led deserves book-length attention...
...With her husband, Hubert Bland, she was a charter member of the Fabian Society...
...Mew and Nesbit, like so many other literary figures of their era, describe a world that revolves around large houses in which there is always enough time to read, to write, and to dream...
...American readers may be reminded of Emily Dickinson...
...The enchanted childhoods Nesbit described so well were denied to her own neglected children: One died young, the rest grew into unhappy, unsuccessful adults...
...Fitzgerald's study is invaluable— I only wish she had included more poetry...
...Charlotte occasionally helped out by selling a short story about some "fallen woman" or sailor sweetheart lost at sea to the notorious Yellow Book, but as Fitzgerald tells us, "she never applied herself systematically to anything...
...Yet if one appreciates the poems of Thomas Hardy, John Crowe Ransom or early Yeats, her virtues will be readily apparent...
...It has been quiet as the countryside Since Ted and Janey and then Mother died And Tom crossed Father and was sent away...
...The Quiet House," like most of her work, paints a devastating picture of loneliness, rejection, frustrated love, and the fear of insanity: When we were children Old Nurse used to say The house was like an auction or a fair Until the lot of us were safe in bed...
...Nesbit compensated for her husband's infidelities by indulging in affairs of her own...
...Nesbit had finally found her theme: the trouble that results when imagination and reality collide...
...On the other hand, she is excessively conventional...
...This is the second major biography of her to appear, and she often figures as a supporting actress in books about her contemporaries...
...She suspected— correctly, according to Fitzgerald—that she had inherited more than a touch of the family schizophrenia...
...They ought to entitle her to a small share of enduring renown...
...Most of it was lived with her sister, Anne, their vain, selfish mother, and a parrot called Wek who bit any visitor rash enough to call...
...he obliged with a cruelly accurate assessment in a letter to her that Briggs quotes: "The author has a fair ear, writes with remarkable facility and with some grace, and occasionally betrays an incisive, but shrewish insight...
...By now she had stumbled on a perfect formula: A family of ordinary youngsters discover some magic implement that will grant them wishes or allow them to travel in time...
...Nesbit supported her husband, five children and a motley collection of hangers-on with the proceeds from her popular novels and magazine verse...
...Leithauser and Fitzgerald suggest that Edwardian literature itself fell out of fashion just then...
...Fabian Socialism plays a large role in all her works (though she also satirized certain of its adherents...
...Reading their books, we long for a not-so-remote Arcadia we never knew...
...I am glad to note that most of Nesbit's books for children can now be obtained in this country...
...One by one, the family members died...
...Then I would recommend two new biographies of lesser-known Edwardians: Penelope Fitzgerald's Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (Addison Wesley, 276 pp., $17.95) and Julia Briggs' A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, I858-1924 (New Amsterdam, 473 pp., $27.95...
...Though she affected the cropped hair, mannish felt jackets and cigarette-smoking of an "advanced" woman, she was still too genteel to enter bohemian circles...
...They also inspired her strongest poetry...
Vol. 71 • August 1988 • No. 14
