Father (British Library Women Writers Book 5), page 1
FATHER
ELIZABETH VON ARNIM
First published in 1931
This edition published in 2020 by
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London NW1 2DB
Preface copyright © 2020 Lucy Evans
Afterword copyright © 2020 Simon Thomas
Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780712353182
e-ISBN 9780712367905
Text design and typesetting by JCS Publishing Services Ltd
CONTENTS
The 1930s
Elizabeth von Arnim
Preface
FATHER
Afterword
THE 1930S
1928: Virginia Woolf gives a lecture that states women needed £500 a year and a room of their own; a version of the lecture was published as A Room of One’s Own the following year.
1929: the total fertility rate (the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime) falls below 2 for the first time. It remains below 2 until 1943.
1930: the average age at first marriage is 24.3 for men and 21.3 for women.
1931: Father is published.
1931: the census shows that there are approximately 1.7 million more women than men in the UK, about the same difference as 1921. The 1931 census was destroyed in an accidental fire in 1942.
1931: 34.2 per cent of women in the UK are considered ‘economically active’, a term used by the Labour Force Survey to include those in work and those looking for work. The number rises by only half a per cent by 1951.
1936: Elizabeth von Arnim publishes All the Dogs of My Life, the closest thing she wrote to an autobiography.
1937: the Matrimonial Causes Act extends the right of women to divorce their husbands, no longer requiring incest, sodomy, cruelty, etc., to be an additional offence to adultery. (Men could already divorce women for adultery, without additional offences.)
1939 (September): the outbreak of the Second World War.
ELIZABETH VON ARNIM (1866–1941)
The author known today as Elizabeth von Arnim was born Mary Annette Beauchamp in Australia in 1866 and moved with her family to England when she was three years old. Her cousin, born more than twenty years later, was the renowned New Zealand short-story writer Katherine Mansfield, whose real name was Kathleen Beauchamp.
The author name ‘Elizabeth von Arnim’ was never used during her lifetime. Her works appeared as ‘By the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden’, which was her first, very successful novel in 1898. Later, her books appeared as being by ‘Elizabeth’ (inverted commas included) and only when she was republished in the 1980s was she given the name by which she is best known now, Elizabeth von Arnim.
The surname came from her first husband, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin, making her a countess. They lived in Berlin, and it was here that she wrote her heavily autobiographical first novel, which led many of her readers to believe she was German. The couple had five children, but in 1908 Arnim left her husband, whom she referred to as the ‘Man of Wrath’. He died a couple of years later, and in 1916 she married Earl John Francis Russell, the brother of the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Her second marriage also entitled her to use the title Countess. This marriage was equally unhappy, and the couple separated in 1919. She would use the marriage as the basis for her 1921 novel Vera.
For more than four decades, Arnim wrote comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies with equal skill. She is perhaps best remembered now for the poignant and touching novel The Enchanted April, but deserves to be known for her wide range of work. In Father, she combines the comic and the poignant with wit and hidden depths.
PREFACE
Elizabeth von Arnim is perhaps best known for her 1898 work Elizabeth and Her German Garden and her 1922 novel The Enchanted April. Father, one of her later novels, is a deserving inclusion in the British Library Women Writers series. The novel revisits one of the most striking themes of von Armin’s works: the importance of a garden in a woman’s life. When Father was published in 1931, the theme of freedom through access to the natural world joined with the fate of the ‘surplus’ women who remained unmarried in the interwar years.
The eponymous father appears very little throughout the novel, and yet his presence is felt on almost every page. We begin with Jennifer, toiling away for her emotionally distant father, being given the news that he has unexpectedly remarried. This leaves Jennifer free at last to pursue her dreams of moving to the country. By casting off her restrictive London life and embracing nonconformity, her life begins to change dramatically. As might be expected from an Elizabeth von Arnim novel, the comedy is sophisticated and unexpected. A borrowed coat and a pile of sardine cans provide light relief. However, there is always a string of unintended consequences which leads to the dramatic conclusion of the novel.
On the surface, the detailed comedy, richly drawn characters and romantic interest lead the reader to expect a tale of a zany spinster with a neat and satisfying conclusion to her story. But at the heart of the novel is the escape from a heavy-handed father and suffocating urban existence. Her liberation from domestic constraint brings her to the happiness of the garden. It also brings her to towards new and fulfilling human connections. While the ending seems neat, there is a sting in the tail when we consider the reality of Jennifer’s new life and the consequences of our actions, both large and small.
Lucy Evans,
Curator, Printed Heritage Collections
CHAPTER I
Mother said, dying, “You’ll take care of father, won’t you—”
“Always,” sobbed her kneeling, heartbroken daughter.
“Don’t leave him, Jen.”
“Oh mother, I promise—I won’t ever. Not ever, ever—”
No; one will never leave father. But what if father, not left, meticulously attended to, taken care of, obeyed and cherished, after twelve solid, faithful years of it, without saying a word to a soul comes back to tea one afternoon with a new wife? Then, isn’t one released? Hasn’t one completed one’s job? Can’t one with a clear conscience, indeed must one not, hand him over, and at last, at last—oh, how glorious!—be free?
Father, however, didn’t seem to see it that way. He appeared to take it for granted that his daughter would continue about him as before, side by side with his new wife, on the ground that homes were the natural places for maiden daughters; and when she reminded him that she was thirty-three, he merely inquired with acerbity, for in his heart he was thinking she ought to have been married and out of the way long ago, whether being thirty-three altered the fact that she was a maiden daughter.
He was, that is, doing his duty by her; and, as sometimes happens with duty, the doing of it made him cross.
Now the last thing father had meant to be on his wedding day was cross, so naturally, when he found himself being it, he became much crosser, and at last, as will presently be told, there was quite a scene.
To begin with, though, all was blandness. There wasn’t a cloud at the tea-table. Father was very pleasant indeed, if faintly apologetic—not embarrassed, for he was never that, but there was a faint flavour of apology in his manner, which was perhaps not to be wondered at, since his new wife was ever so much younger, one could see at once, than his daughter, and he sixty-five.
“You mustn’t think, Jennifer,” he said after tea, which had been the oddest meal of her life, as he called her into the back diningroom where, protected by folding doors from anything that might be going on in the front one, they had worked together so long—she the obedient handmaid waiting on his thoughts, taking them down as they emerged from him, typing and re-typing them, over and over again with dogged patience typing a single paragraph, a single sentence, sometimes for days working on a single sentence till it was, in father’s eyes, as near perfect as it could humanly be got,—“you mustn’t think, Jennifer,” he said, “that I’ve sprung this on you unfairly.”
Pleasant, he thought, surveying this workroom of his, this back diningroom looking on to the backs of other diningrooms in the parallel street behind, with its cold neatness and sombre, rep-covered furniture, its type-writing table for his daughter between the maroon window-curtains, its big writing-table for himself, with the revolving chair from which he dictated,—pleasant to leave it for a while. He hadn’t had a holiday for years; not since, now he came to think of it, poor Marian’s death. There had been too much to do to think of holidays. Years slip by remarkably quickly when one is busy. And Jennifer, too—his eyes came back to the sturdy, heavy, shortlegged figure—pleasant to have a change from Jennifer. She was losing, he had noticed lately—since, that is, he had become acquainted with her who till that morning was Miss Baines—her freshness a good deal, and soon, if she didn’t take care, would be a regular old maid.
Father didn’t like old maids; not to be shut up alone with, most of every day, in the back diningroom as well as at meals, and he couldn’t help feeling relieved to think that this stretch of his life was over. Yet he admitted, making the best of things, that if his daughter weren’t an old maid, or weren’t that which would certainly presently become one, neither would she have been living at home, efficiently helping him in his work. She had been very useful. She would still be useful. It cut both ways, he thought, trying to console himself for
“You mustn’t think, Jennifer,” he therefore said, in case it should happen to be exactly what she was thinking, “that I’ve sprung this on you unfairly.”
“No, no,” she reassured him, looking at him without seeing him, so much dazzled was she by what she did see; but if ever a thing had been sprung on someone, was it not this on her? As to unfairly, what did she care about unfairly, when she was free?
She blinked. Through and beyond father she saw doors flying open, walls falling flat, and herself running unhindered down the steps, along Gower Street, away through London, across suburbs, out, out into great sunlit spaces where the wind, fresh and scented, rushed to meet her, and the birds, and the stars, and those glorious vague beings in the Bible called sons of the morning, sang together for joy. Father, provided for; she, with a clear conscience, free; the twelve years during which youth had been ebbing away, the years shut up in the back diningroom at a typewriter, with no hope that anything would ever be different and no thought of anything but sticking to her promise and taking care of the helpless, gifted man, finished and done with—what did they matter now? Not a jot, thought Jen, her wide-open eyes shining with the reflection of what she saw through and beyond father. She could feel the wind—she could feel it, the scented fresh wind, blowing up her hair as she ran and ran …
“Oh!” she exclaimed, taking a long breath, and clasping her hands; for really she couldn’t help it—she, so quiet always, so careful never to show the least excitement, nor any wish, couldn’t help just that one small cry.
Father naturally thought it was a reproach, or the beginning of reproaches. It might well be that it was. Many reproaches, also those in his own writings, began with precisely this exclamation, and he was aware that the occasion was one on which grown-up children are apt to make unpleasant comment.
But he hadn’t brought his daughter into the back diningroom, and left his young bride alone with empty teacups, in order to be reproached. Far from this, his motive in taking her aside had been to assure her, before proceeding on his honeymoon, that what he had done would in no way make a difference to her, and that her mind might be at rest. This was what decent fathers in the circumstances did. He was a decent father; his intentions towards her, whatever his private wishes might be, were good; and, aware of this, his eye, as he looked at her when she clasped her hands and so ominously exclaimed, grew cold.
Of course he knew his marriage was sudden, and also he knew it might be called secretive; but how much better if all marriages were sudden and secretive, and accordingly undiscussed beforehand. These things should be taken simply, considered father. They were not important, except to the two persons concerned, and should be accepted without fuss. Father hated fuss, and the flapping of feminine wings. Also, he long had needed more relaxation in his life of work than the astringent affection a daughter could provide, and latterly had been quietly making up his mind to get it. No one could say he hadn’t properly matured in widowerhood, with twelve years of it, austere and withdrawn, to his credit. Besides, was he not an artist? And should not every side of an artist have its proper outlet? If proper outlets were withheld too long, the need for them inevitably became apparent in the artist’s work, and unbalanced it.
Not that father was of those who think they ought to fall in order that they may rise, to wallow in order that they may emerge. He disliked anything violent; his nature was a quiet one; his habits solitary. But, quiet as he was, and solitarily as he preferred to live, from time to time, being human, he had yet a kind of itch, a kind of gnaw, a kind of—who shall describe exactly what father had? Anyhow it got into his work; especially in spring, in the nesting season, when even the sparrows in the sooty backyard seemed to have secured something denied to him. And lately he had been conscious that those parts of his books which had to do with love, from March onwards loomed out of all proportion to the rest, besides becoming steadily more lush, more full, and conspicuously, of, as it were, sap.
Father abhorred sap; he shuddered at written lushness. On no account must his work be permitted to sag away from the Greek serenity, the Elizabethan simplicity, which was what so deeply endeared it to his small, fastidious public. And when a reviewer said of his last book, obviously referring to the love scenes, “Mr. Richard Dodge’s style”—he was spoken of as Mr. Richard Dodge, because there are many Dodges—“is curiously broadening,” it was the last straw.
Broadening. Detestable word. Detestable symbol of a detestable thing. In the interests of his style, having accidentally found Miss Baines he woo’d her; in the interests of quiet and talk avoidance, he married her without telling anybody but herself. She was so young that she thought a secret marriage an immense joke, and also she easily did what she was told, for it saved, she thought, a lot of trouble, and also, again, her age was the age of hero-worship; so that when father, the great Richard Dodge, celebrated in two continents, the chief hero of her relations, who belonged to an eagerly literary set, suddenly loomed into her life and without loss of time began to woo, she was awestruck. It never would have occurred to her to refuse him. That very morning father had married her; and, as such a thing as getting married hadn’t happened to him for a long while, he had been feeling almost excited, very nearly buoyant, quite apart from, and in addition to, his satisfaction at knowing that his style would now cease to broaden, now that he would have a domestic outlet for breadth, and his love-scenes would once more become exquisite rather than lush.
What simple remedies life provided, he had been thinking, pleased, at tea, a meal during which his daughter had behaved quite well; what agreeable simple remedies. A young wife, four weeks on the continent—he was taking her to Norway—and a return, purged and detached, to that which was most important to him in the world; good work, without a word in it which wasn’t the exactly, the beautifully, right one.
And now here was his daughter going to do her best to spoil it; starting, he was afraid, a scene. Fuss, after all, was not going to be spared him.
“Surely,” he began, forestalling what she might, disagreeably, be about to let loose on him, “surely on my wedding day, of all days—”
“Oh, but I’m only trying to realise!” she interrupted, her hands pressed tightly together, her eyes bright and wide open.
“My dear Jennifer, there’s nothing for you to realise,” he said, a little stiffly because of having to be patient. “This will make no difference to you. Do you suppose I would allow a newcomer, however dear to me, to oust my daughter from her rightful home?”
Certainly his daughter should never be ousted. She had looked after him dutifully and well from the day her mother died; and of late years, once he had trained her to the needful unremitting application and accuracy, she had been most helpful in his work. Grateful was an odd word to use in regard to their relationship, thought father, but he was grateful to Jennifer; and being grateful, being a decent father, he had firmly made up his undoubtedly reluctant mind,—for every man prefers to have his young wife to himself,—that so long as she was unmarried, and he was alive, she should never want for a home. Could any parent say more? He doubted it. Would most parents in his position say as much? He doubted that too.
Yet here she was exclaiming, in answer to his kind and reassuring words, her eyes, he noticed, unusually bright, filled, he feared, with the light of imminent unseemly criticism, “No difference? No difference, father?”
“No difference at all. Don’t be foolish, Jennifer,” he said, trying not to speak too sharply, it being his wedding day; but indeed her words sounded exactly like the first words of fuss. “Except,” he continued, “that sometimes now in the evenings you will be able to talk to another woman, instead of playing chess with me, our daily life will go on just as regularly as before. Three people instead of two. Really, Jennifer, that’s all it amounts to—and of course the immediate fact that I shan’t be here to dinner tonight, nor in the house for the next few weeks. Make your arrangements. Give your instructions. I’m afraid,” he went on rather quickly, as she seemed to be about to open her mouth, “my absence for a time is inevitable, but it will leave you undisturbed in making the necessary alterations in regard to—well, rooms. And it’s not as if you won’t have plenty of work to keep you busy. I’m taking Netta to Norway, and during my absence there’s that fifth chapter to be gone through again—a most important chapter, as you know, with alterations which need great care. Set your mind at rest, my dear,” he finished, giving himself a pull in the direction of proper paternalness, and bending forward and lightly kissing her on the brow—that was what fathers kissed daughters on, and for years now he had been thoroughly tired of brows—“set your mind at rest, and while I’m away get on with that fifth chapter.”
