Body swapping, where two characters end up in each other’s bodies is such a staple of comic and fantastic theater, fiction, and film that it’s got its own Wikipedia page, which links in turn to a list of over 100 examples of body swapping in media. Many of the modern interpretations can be traced back to F. Anstey’s 1882 novel, Vice Versa. Usually the exchange occurs between sharply contrasting individuals: a father and his son (Vice Versa); a mother and daughter (Freaky Friday); a boy and a girl (The Swap). In the case of Strange Journey, the opposites in question are a middle-class suburban English housewife (Polly) and a landed/titled member of the ruling class (Lady Elizabeth).
Polly and Tom live in one of the new garden cities ringing London that began popping up after the First World War. As much as she loves Tom and her two children, she does tire of the endless demands that other people make on her time and energy. One day, as she stands at her front gate watching a queue of traffic idling behind a bit of road work, she sees an elegant woman sitting inside a Rolls Royce and looking out idly:
Suddenly I felt a longing to change places with her, to get into that big, comfortable looking car, lean back in the soft cushions I felt sure that it contained, while the chauffeur made it glide away through the dusk to some pleasant house where there would be efficient servants and tea waiting, with a silver teapot, thin china, and perhaps hot scones, nice deep arm chairs to sit in, and magazines lying on the table.
The traffic moves, the Rolls passes, and Polly goes back into the house. A week or so later, a picture of a similar Rolls in a magazine brings back that daydream. But suddenly, Polly feels a moment of dizziness, after which her head clears and she looks down at her hands.
They are not hers. They are hands “of the sort that I should have loved to possess, white and slim, with long fingers and shining almond-shaped nails.” She finds herself in exactly the sort of place she’d dreamt of: fireplace roaring, walls lined with portraits, battle scenes, and books, and a butler bringing in the afternoon tea. She manages to mask her complete disorientation, but quickly finds herself unable to come up with the appropriate responses to the older woman sitting with her. Worse, two large dogs that wander in bristle and growl at her. “Good Lord, one would think they were seeing ghosts,” the woman remarks. After a few more moments of panic, Polly finds herself back home again.
Over the following months, she finds herself transported to the grand country house again and again, and she begins to suss out a little about the woman whose skin she’s in. Her name is Lady Elizabeth. She is married to Major Forrester — Gerald — who appears to enjoy flaunting his interest in several different beautiful and flirtatious women. She is an avid shooter and rides to the hounds, skills which Polly utterly lacks, leading to embarrassing and awkward moments with Lady Elizabeth’s acquaintances. The shooting in particular proves particularly disturbing:
All those people who seemed quite pleasant and ordinary had taken the massacre as a matter of course. Only I had never seen things killed, except on the films, when naturally one knows that it does not hurt…. Of course I had known that such things took place; that the meat people eat gets knocked on the head, and chickens have their necks wrung, but I had never visualised what slaughter was actually like. I simply had never thought about it.
Polly struggles to navigate her passages through Lady Elizabeth’s life — just which of the dozens of bedrooms in the house is hers, for example? She also realizes how little she actually knows about the simplest protocols and assumptions of the gentry. £1,000 a year, for example, seems a fortune to her; it is, however, considered one step from the poorhouse for any young man hoping to marry into a good family. On the other hand, she’s a whiz at bridge, which astonishes everyone who thought Lady Elizabeth looked on all forms of card play with distain.
She also soon realizes that her exchanges are mutual. When she’s transported into Lady Elizabeth’s skin, the Lady finds herself in Polly’s. She’s dismayed to learn that her children love the stories of castles and knights their mother has been telling them, stumped to come up with a good explanation of how she can suddenly play the piano with ease. Worse, while she feels certain the Lady Elizabeth views her own husband Gerald with a mixture of dislike and disinterest, she begins to suspect the Lady of having designs on Tom.
Eventually, Polly and Lady Elizabeth — as themselves — make contact and attempt to come to an understanding of how the mechanism linking them operates. Much of it seems to depend on a sort of synchronized wishful thinking, just the kind of idle daydreaming that led to their first experience. Simply arranging to meet, however, brings Polly to an understanding of just how constrained her lot is compared to Lady Elizabeth’s. “Gerald would never ask what she had been doing, and she could go to a picture gallery or a concert and nobody would think it at all queer.” Polly, on the other hand, sees that “I really had no private life at all”: “If I should feel inclined to do something quite ordinary like that, by myself, everybody in my neighbourhood would wonder why.”
The most interesting the twist in Strange Journey is not the details of how the two women are able to exchange lives — and they do, at least for a while, manage to use it at will — but the author’s attempt to pull off her own swap.
Maud Cairnes — as The Tatler and several other society-radar magazines revealed soon after the publication of Strange Journey — was a pseudonym. She was not a literarily-inclined middle class woman but the Lady Maud Kathleen Cairns Plantagenet Hastings Curzon-Herrick, eldest daughter of the 14th Earl of Huntingdon and wife of Mr. William Montagu Curzon-Herrick, whose own grand house, Beaumanor Hall, and its surrounding estate had been in his family for over 300 years. When William and Lady Kathleen were married in 1916, their wedding was called “The Event of the Week” and featured in a full-page spread in The Illustrated London News. Going by the story in The Times, I counted fourteen lords and ladies, at least eight counts and countesses, three viscountesses, one earl (Huntingdon, of course), and one each baroness, duchess, and marchioness.
Lady Elizabeth’s world was Lady Kathleen’s. Her father the Earl, and later she and Mr. Curzon-Herrick, regularly hosted great shooting slaughters at their estates. Lady Kathleen was as much at home in the saddle, if perhaps not cutting quite the same slim, elegant figure in her riding gear. She frequented the ballet, theater, and concert hall, saw her name in Court Circulars, set an example for housewives like Polly with her reputation for wit, grace … and heavy smoking.
She was also long an amateur at the writing game. Her sister Grace recalled Kathleen writing plays the three Hastings girls would perform while still being taught at home, and in the mid-1920s, the Lyceum’s Stage Club put on a production of Kathleen’s play, “It is Expedient.” Strange Journey was her first novel, but its reviews in both England and the U.S. would have pleased most seasoned writers. In The New Statesman, Cyril Connolly — after savaging the more established Kay Boyle’s novel The Next Bride (“a very annoying book”) — praised it as “an original and charming story; a very good idea is neatly worked out, and there is something fresh and delightful about this first novel.” The Illustrated London News repaid Lady Kathleen for her many appearances on its pages by calling her book “fresh and odd, and an unusually good first novel.”
The Spectator’s anonymous reviewer, after saying that Strange Journey was “a remarkable little book: a good novel on a theme that is pure housemaid’s delight,” identified its greatest strength:
It does verge on the romantic; but it is saved, and made, by being told in the practical words of Polly Wilkinson herself. Her gaffes on her various translations into the body of Lady Elizabeth, her suburbanisms, her anguish when she finds herself suddenly on horseback in the middle of the hunting field, are all related with extreme common sense. One likes Polly Wilkinson.
Considering that the voice of Polly Wilkinson is the voice of a Lady Elizabeth translating herself into the mind of someone she could only have experienced or imagined at some remove, Lady Kathleen’s success in her first attempt at fiction is even more remarkable. And the down-to-earth tone of Polly Wilkinson’s voice is what prevents Strange Journey from sinking into cringe-worthy farce and keeps it at the level of simple human comedy:
She then opened a big jewel case in which there were several tiers. I thought it looked like a real treasure chest, when I saw brooches and necklaces, bracelets, ear-rings and rings, all in velvet compartments. I just stared. Late for dinner or not I had no intention of hurrying over my choice. I took a sort of collar of emeralds and diamonds, and put it round my neck; it looked wonderful. Then I found some emerald and diamond ear-rings, long ones, and some bangles; I put two or three of these and a big diamond brooch like a spray, that cheered up the dress a lot.
Then I saw the pearls — three long ropes of them — and one shorter one. I put the ropes on and looked happily at my reflection in the mirror.
“I think I want something on my head now,” said I, wondering if it was a grand enough party for a tiara.
Foley, who had been looking rather stunned, smiled respectfully as though I had made a joke. I gathered that it was not a tiara occasion.
Lady Kathleen made just one other excursion into novel-writing. She followed up a few years later with The Disappearing Duchess (1939), which required less of an imaginative stretch. It told of how the Duchess of Darenth went missing from a French villa while on a visit in the summer of 1913 and how an ex-Secret Serviceman found her. Sold and reviewed as a conventional mystery, it earned brief, respectful reviews: “A neat and pleasantly readable story” (TLS); “cunningly compiled to sound plausible to our expectant ears” (The Daily Telegraph).
From this point forward, Lady Kathleen faded slowly from sight. Her husband died suddenly in 1945 and much of the land around Beaumanor Hall had to be sold off to pay his death duties. When the Curzon-Herrick name appeared in the press, it was more likely to be about her daughter. She died in Hove in February 1965 at the age of 71, earning no more than a one-line notice in The Times.