Trance by Appointment, by G. E. Trevelyan (1939)

I’m not sure what the point of this post is. There are seven copies of this book worldwide listed in WorldCat.org. There are none available for sale. If you want to read it, your best bet is to get a copy of amateurish scan I made of the British Library’s copy. There are few enough people who even read these posts in the first place. Given those odds, Lord knows whether anyone else will ever read Trance by Appointment.

I have begun research on the life and works of Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan for the MA program in Biography at the University of East Anglia (Go … um, I don’t actually know what the sports teams refer to themselves as … Anglers?). From what I have been able to discover so far, sometime in 1932 she rented a flat or a room in a flat on Lansdowne Road in Kensington that she shared with 3-4 other people and where she remained, steadily writing away, producing a total of eight novels, until a German bomb hit the place and she died of injuries a few months later. She appears to have had exactly what Virginia Woolf proposed as the prerequisites for an independent woman writer in “A Room of One’s Own”: a room of her own and five hundred a year. She didn’t write reviews. She didn’t go to country house weekends. She didn’t go to parties or join them. She sat and wrote what she wanted to write.

Publishers seemed interested in publishing what she wrote. Martin Secker published her first four books; Victor Gollancz her next three; George Harrap this last one. She got consistently favorable reviews, but perhaps it was more the cachet of the Trevelyan name (G. M., G. O., R. C., Sir Charles, et al.) that attracted them. In any case, none of them ever went to a second printing, let alone a reissue. I still have to get to the archives to track down the contractual correspondence, but the dearth of copies of any of her books today certainly suggests that no one was queuing up to reserve the latest G. E. Trevelyan novel at their local Boots Book Lover’s Library.

And so, Gertrude went out of her flat on Lansdowne Road on a stretcher in early October 1940 and disappeared. The Times and a few other papers published a few lines when she died of her injuries in early 1941 and that was it. She was buried in the cemetery up the road from her parents’ home in Bath, and from what I’ve seen in terms of coverage in English literary history and criticism, they might as well have buried all of her books with her. There is nothing. I’ve gone through all the surveys of the 20th century British novel they have here in the UEA library: nothing. I went through the biographies of her contemporaries (Bowen, Greene, Orwell, Waugh, Woolf, etc.) looking for mentions of her name: nothing. The one trace is in Barbara Pym’s A Very Private Eye: a single entry, dated 4 September 1933. “Reading Gertrude Trevelyan’s novel Hot-House. I desperately want to write an Oxford novel – but I must see first that my emotions are simmered down fairly well.” I’ve been checking with a number of academics specializing in British women novelists of the mid-20th century — which is something close to a minor industry — and get the email equivalent of blank stares. Not only is her work lost, but no one else appears to be looking for it.

This is not entirely true. Just last year, the academic publisher Routledge reissued the very novel Barbara Pym got all excited over: Hot-House. Not that you’d know by anything that Routledge’s website will tell you. What you have to look for is this gripping title: Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II. This is one of a series of novels and other narratives of university life — meaning Oxford and Cambridge — edited by Dr. Anna Bogen. The series includes Neapolitan Ice (1928) by Renée Haynes (a classmate of Gertrude’s at Lady Margaret Hall), Rosy-Fingered Dawn (1934) by Rose Marie Hodgson, and other hard-to-find titles — companion texts to Bogen’s 2015 study, Women’s University Fiction, 1880–1945 (which doesn’t actually mention Trevelyan, by the way). The way in which Routledge has packaged and marketed these books is execrable — and I’m being as polite as I can. There are only two things in Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II: Hot-House and a 10-page introduction by Bogen. And this is what the title page says:

To be fair, if you click on the “Contents” tab of the Routledge page for Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II, you will see the following: “Table of Contents: Volume 2. Hot-House (1933), Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan.” So, it’s not like Routledge is denying they’re reissued Hot-House: they just not particularly interested in telling anyone. If you’re dying to read it, by the way, be aware that the hardback edition will cost you £110.00, which may be why UEA doesn’t own a copy.

All of which is a tediously long preface to a discussion of Gertrude Trevelyan’s last and easiest rarest novel, Trance by Appointment. Trance tells a simple and sad story. Jean, the middle daughter of a working-class London family, is a psychic. As she grows, her family comes to recognize this talent and introduce her to Madame Eva, who runs a fortune-telling business from a basement flat in Bayswater. Eva, who encourages Jean to develop her skills, then introduces her to “the Professor,” Norman Mitch, an astrologer, who sees the commercial possibilities of a “trance by appointment” business run in a better part of town. In some ways, from this point forward the story will be familiar to anyone who’s read Tolstoy’s Kholstomer, usually translated as “Strider: The Story of a Horse” — or, if you’ve read Marx, the story of labor in the hands of capitalism. The resource is used up in a relentless quest for profit, then tossed aside in contempt.

In this case, the means of production are a little unusual. Trevelyan tells much of the story through Jean’s perspective, which means that though she has visions as early as when she’s strapped in a stroller and being wheeled along the street by her sister Joyce, it takes her a while to understand what’s happening.

“Where does it come from, Mum?”
“What, lovey?”
“The trees and things that come when it’s dark. When you lie and look hard, but you have to keep still as still or it goes. And the bubbles that’s all different colours and jumps about, where does it come from, Mum?”
“Stuff and nonsense. Is my water boiling yet?”

Gradually, the family comes to recognize that Jean has “the Sight,” but her mother caution, “It’s a precious gift to them that can keep their tongue still, but no good ever come to them that didn’t. You keep it quiet, my dearie, to yourself.” Jean tries at first to fit into the normal workday world, taking a job selling cigarettes from a little stand in the nearby Underground station. But the energy that bombards her from the thousands of souls that pass her every hour overwhelms her and she collapses. Mum takes Jean to Madame Eva, who’s happy to have “a nice, quiet, refined sort of girl to ‘elp her in the house and learn the business.”

And “Jean did love it, being at Madame Eva’s”: Eva takes the girl under her wing, shows her how to recognize the signs in a client’s expression, clothing, manners, and language that Eva relies on to produce the appearance of clairvoyance. “Remember this, though,” she advises, “everyone wants money, it doesn’t matter how much they’ve got. That’s always a safe one.” Fascinated by Eva’s use of the crystal ball, Jean reveals her ability to fall into a trance and see visions, and Eva begins to organize seances: rare occasions for which a much higher fee can be demanded.

This in turn attracts the attention of Eva’s friend, the astrologer. Trevelyan is a little too eager to let us know he’s not to be trusted: “Mr. Mitch was a bit fat, with a white face, and his hair was curly except that he oiled it down, and was starting to go bald on top, he brushed it across.” His manners are well-oiled, too — taking Jean’s hand, stroking it, murmuring, “My dear lady.” Soon, he’s talked Jean into marriage and sets her up in a West End studio — to “Get you further with the clee-an-tale.” He gives up reading the stars “to manage for Jean” and sets her on a schedule of frequent seances. He convinces Jean that the visions are communications from the dead — specifically his dear departed little sister, Daisy — and soon Jean imagines Daisy calling to her: “Jee-een, I want to talk to you, Jee-een.” Unfortunately for Norman’s plans, he also sleeps with his new wife, and with the predictable results. Two of them, in fact. And when Jean resists strapping on the seance harness again after the second child, Norman takes his anger out on her. “You can thank your Mum for that,” he snaps at his son after slapping Jean around. Although Jean continues to give readings — reluctantly, with ever greater hesitation, ever less appetite to fight or even care about her fee — Norman all but abandons her to strike out on his own again.

Most reviews of Trance by Appointment offered moderate praise. Edwin Muir, writing in The Listener, called the book “a sordid, pitiable little story, told with that cruel attention to detail which characterises Miss Trevelyan’s art.” Leonora Eyles, her most consistent advocate among critics, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, “Once again Miss Trevelyan gives us an insight into human minds that is quite uncanny, and her Jean, though such an unusual character, is completely convincing.” The New Statesman’s John Mair, on the other hand, thought Trevelyan had wasted her time — and his: “Apart from her mediumistic talents Jean is a complete nonentity, and no writer could present her otherwise. A good novelist would never have made the attempt.”

I truly did not enjoy Trance by Appointment. It is a grim story, a story of a soul being ground down by an abusive husband and the relentless pressure to pay the rent and put food on the table. I found myself, like Jean, taking pleasure from the littlest things — yellow flower petals floating in a blue bowl or the solid, if at times ineffectual, goodness of Madame Eva.

But my respect for Gertrude Trevelyan’s talent and courage as a writer grew as it has with every one of her books I’ve read. This was a woman who grew up in a family with a prestigious name and a modest but comfortable fortune. She went to university when a tiny fraction of women did. She didn’t go out of her way to establish herself with her contemporaries or to seek celebrity. And in Trance by Appointment, as she did in her two previous books, William’s Wife and Theme with Variations, she collected material by listening, by taking in talk and attitudes and expressions while walking through the city, while riding on the bus or Underground, while standing in queues or waiting in shops, and then returned to her room in Kensington and put herself deeply, intently into a mind, a situation, a life completely different from hers.

Trevelyan’s Jean is not a specimen pinned to a piece of cardboard for disinterested examination by an omniscient narrator. She tells Jean’s story as if Jean’s sister, or Madame Eva, or Jean’s neighbor were trying to tell it, aided occasionally by Jean’s own awkward, imprecise attempts to explain what she sees. Maybe John Mair was partly right, that Jean’s is “an aimless and random mind.” Evidence of Jean’s exercise of free will are rare (but not wholly absent). But managing to tell this woman’s story and keep it utterly convincing, utterly coherent for over 260 pages is no small accomplishment as a writer. Name one other contemporary of Trevelyan — male or female — who took this kind of risk, who undertook this level of experimentation.

This is a picture of Trevelyan taken in 1933 to celebrate the publication of Red Rags: Essays of Hate from Oxford, a collection to which she contributed an essay attacking the complacency of “Garden Cities,” the new suburbs around London. Who would guess that the smallest person in the group, the one woman in the photo, would be capable of leaps of imagination that would put all the men around her to shame?

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Trance by Appointment, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: George G. Harrap & Company, Ltd., 1939