If Betty Swanwick is remembered today, it’s usually for her painting The Dream, which was used on the cover of the Genesis album Selling England by the Pound. And it’s as a painter she would probably prefer to be remembered, since she resigned from her long professorship at Goldsmith’s College School of Art in 1970 to pursue her unique style, a blend of traditional realism and somewhat exaggerated modernism.
But it would be an injustice not to celebrate her brief but distinctive career as a novelist. Whether she decided to write novels as a vehicle for her illustrations or as an outlet for her literary inclinations, between 1945 and 1958, Betty Swanwick wrote and illustrated three slim novels that gleefully subvert many of the tropes and conventions of the 19th century novels and more than deserve recognition themselves.
Born in 1915, the daughter of a professional draughtsman, Swanwick entered Goldsmith’s College at the young age of 15 and studied under two masters, Edward Bawden and Clive Gardiner. She fell into a long-term relationship with Gardiner, who helped get her a teaching position with Goldsmith’s after her graduation. It was a job she held for over thirty years, though she ultimately saw it as an obstacle to her own creative development.
She supplemented her teaching income by taking on occasional illustration jobs for clients ranging from London Transport to Strand magazine and, less frequently, illustrating children’s books such as Marjorie Seymour’s Camille Cat, “the story of a cat who liked green figs far too well.” Perhaps she felt she could do just as good a job with the words as the illustrations, for in 1945, she published her first novel — or, more properly, novelette, as specified in its subtitle, since it’s just 64 pages long.
The Cross Purposes opens in the manner of any good Victorian novel, with the Reverend Robert Randall and his sister Esmeralda traveling to take a vacant curacy in the prosperous town of Frogs Copping. The beautiful and eligible Esmeralda catches the eye of Frederick, son of Sir Edward Chalmers, the town’s most prominent nobleman, and everyone assumes that the Reverend Robert will pair up with Chalmers’ ward, the lovely Hermione Beauchampers.
Nothing in a Swanwick novel ever turns out quite as planned, though. Hermione is beautiful, cruel, and conniving and more than happy to lure the Reverend into matrimony, but she is no match for her governess, Miss Whistle:
Miss Whistle, mark you, was a woman of shrewd perception and quick ideas, and, being of an uneasy age, seized the possibility of being a respectable married woman with both hands. What more could a plain, intelligent woman require than a plain, egotistical husband with settled means? It was a very good and manageable catch, thought Miss Whistle to herself whilst saying her prayers at night.
Soon, two engagements are announced, and Hermione departs to the Continent in search of wealthier fish. Sir Edward plans a betrothal ball that sets his “noseholes quivering with lively anticipation.” Swanwick knows how to draw her story to an end according to the formula: “There now only remains the winding up of this story to universal satisfaction and cosmic gratification.” This doesn’t, however, mean that everyone lives happily ever after.
Swanwick is too much a realist to risk going into details about what happens after the dual wedding. She sides with Sir Edward, who would be just as happy to see the vision of the two couples at the altar in the lavishly decorated church prolonged indefinitely, “until the whole of them, the bridal party and all, were slowly consumed by death, standing up in a breathless trance in the Floral Chapel.”
Paddy Rossmore’s catalogue raisonné, Betty Swanwick: Artist and Visionary, lists few works between The Cross Purposes and her next novel, Hoodwinked (1957). Rossmore notes that this is more likely due to the fact that she concentrated on teaching and commercial work and the latter, held by the Society of Illustrators and Artists, was discarded in the course of moves and reorganizations. In any case, when she turned to fiction again, it was to revisit the theme of matrimonial mismatches — but this time brought up to current day and with even more subversive twists.
Cora Fox and Madeleine Mudie are old friends with a common problem: uncooperative children. Cora’s older daughters, Laurel, Flora, and Philippa are mad about jazz and are only interested in improvising and jitterbugging. Her youngest, Gemma, is the loveliest and most conventional in her attitudes … aside from her penchant for lying and cheating. Madeleine’s son, Castor, is handsome, of age, and an ideal candidate to be matched and married off … aside from his disinterest in everything except designing womens’ wear. The solution in obvious to both women.
And its urgency increases when Gemma arrives home, having been expelled from her boarding school for egregious cheating. The shadow it casts upon the family name leads Mr. Fox to take his life in front of Gemma (Swanwick illustrates the scene in case we have trouble picturing it). Gemma sighs with relief at the sight of her dead father. “Phew! Well, that is that,” she says, “very coolly fanning the smoke fumes from her eyes.” Castor and Gem are hastily brought together in hopes of kindling sparks.
Unfortunately, Castor prefers older women. Cora, to be specific. While he goes through the motions to please his mother, he insinuates himself into Cora’s companionship, and finds her love-starved and not entirely unwilling. At the same time, an enormously wealthy and utterly socially inappropriate Indian Rajah buys the estate next door to the Foxes. Gemma may have cheated on a fair number of her subjects, but arithmetic was not one of them. You can see where Swanwick is going. All it takes is the sudden death of the distraught Madeleine to remove the remaining obstacle.
A year later, Arthur Barker Ltd. published her third novel, Beauty and the Burglar, while kicked the Victorian matrimonial formula to the curb for good. Once again, an eligible pair — this time, the ward Palma Purre and the earnest reformer Bernard Follow — are brought together through the machinations of guardians and parents with the aim of achieving a quick and socially profitable match. Palma is not entirely unwilling, but Bernard’s feet are so rooted in the 19th century that it’s hard for her not to get a bit exasperated. “It is to be hoped that we shall see a good deal of each other in the future,” he tells her.
I would find it satisfying to develop you in other ways also: of course, it goes without saying that we refer to the higher ways. There will be much gratification from these services that I am more than willing to render you. Whenever I am free from tours and lectures, I shall endeavour to see you and train you for the proper purpose in life.
Luckily for Palma, one night a cat burglar named Rowland Swagger sneaks into her bedroom to steal her jewelry. Instead, he falls instantly for Palma — and she for him — and the two abscond to his hideout, which happens to be a school where he is teaching a new generation to carry on his dishonorable profession. Rowland proudly shows Palma around his Royal Academy of Crime, allowing her to observe classes ranging from safecracking to the art of proper coshing.
Rather than taking exception to Rowland’s criminal enterprise, Palma is inspired by its educational potential and proposes to deliver a lecture to the students on the “Art of the Golden Section,” aided by an attractive and scantily clad model. The lecture gets a tremendous response and before we know it, the R.A.C. begins transforming into the G.C.C. — the Golden College of Culture. All ends happily at the altar again, or rather the bridge, as Rowland and Palma and Bernard and the thoroughly inappropriate Melba find themselves before an old sea dog named Captain Blott.
John Betjeman found Swanwick’s novels “Strange, startling, funny, and with a weird beauty.” Other reviewers struggled to categorize her books, drawing on everyone from Jane Austen and Wilkie Collins to David Garnett and Damon Runyon in hopes of finding a familiar point of reference. Angela Milne probably described them best by writing that they were “small and funny in the way [Daisy Ashford’s juvenile comic novel] The Young Visiters was funny” — but “not unintentionally so.” In fact, she argued, everything Swanwick did “points roundly to its adulthood.” And it would be wrong to dismiss these three little novels as pastiches. If anything, I’d say they looked forward, not back, towards 1960s satires of long-standing British traditions such as Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War! and Lindsay Anderson’s If…. Swanwick was not just saying that those Victorian tropes were dead but standing in front of their grave and saying a derisive, “Good riddance.”
Betty Swanwick died in 1989 from complications due to cancer. None of her novels has ever been reissued, but several can be had for under $50 if you’re interested. They’re lovely little packages of subversive fun.
Three novels by Betty Swanwick:
The Cross Purposes (1945)
Published by Editions Poetry London
Hoodwinked (1957) and Beauty and the Burglar (1958)
Published by Arthur Barker Ltd.