“Your time’s your own, and don’t you forget it, my girl: for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you can do what you bloody well choose,” Eva Wotton reminds herself at the start of Argument with the East Wind (1986), the last of Joan O’Donovan’s three novels about older single women trying to find the place in the world that fits them. “So what was she going to do with today? It was hers and empty; and they could so easily slip through her fingers, those minutes, those hours, leaving nothing but a deposit of waste and regret.”
Sixty, just retired from a dreary office job, she wakes up unsettled from a dream and unsure how to approach this first day of the rest of her life. Back from a Mediterranean holiday with friends, she scans her surroundings, taking inventory of her situation: a postcard from her married lover Alec, its tone reminding her of his affectionate lack of commitment; a notice to pick up her first OAP (Old Age Pension) check; the roar of an airplane overhead reminding her that this house is both her property and no one’s idea of Nirvana; the scratched sofa reminding her of Pussy, the cat she still talks to, though dead and gone for years. And then a clatter outside reminds her she’s forgotten to ask the milkman to resume delivery.
Bob, the milkman, is a good-natured, loquacious sort who’s happy to supply a pint nonetheless. But he has a new young helper, Harry, and as Bob natters on, Eva sees Harry reach down and rip out two tulips from her next-door neighbor’s (a West Indian couple) garden — and worse, hears him mutter, “N——s,” as he spits and tosses the flowers away. Enraged, she switches into attack mode, only to end up a moment later flat on her back, her robe caught up in a briar bush, the pint shattered and spilled on the sidewalk.
This is just the first in a series of unexpected events that, over the course of a week, both throw Eva’s world into disarray and provide her with the means and motivation to set it right and to her satisfaction for perhaps the first time. She goes to visit Nora, her oldest friend, in a care home, only to be informed by the matron, a model bureaucrat, that Nora had died the week before:
“As you know,” Matron was saying, “our rules don’t normally allow…. But as we were unable to contact you and at that point didn’t know there was a…. So it happened in one way as she would have wished, and I’m sure that will be a comfort to you in time to come. That she died here, in her own little room, I mean. And very peacefully at the end, very peacefully indeed. She knew nothing,” Matron assured Eva earnestly, “ab-so-lutely nothing, my dear.”
The shock of this news, like Eva’s rush to the defense of her neighbors against a mean little racist and the end of her mean little affair with Alec, comes as an unexpected shock. Harry the young milkman turns out to be the nephew of the local councilman Eva argued with a year or two before when he came canvassing “to put a stop to this insidious invasion of our shores by foreigners.” She soon finds “N—— LOVER GO!” spray-painted across the front of her house. But these shocks also spur Eva to action, and in the end — without revealing any of several major plot twists — leave her a much different woman and in a much better place than she was at the start of this first week of retirement. And Joan O’Donovan helps carry us through the many bumps and swerves along the way by creating an astute and funny, if at times excessively self-critical, narrator in Eva.
Argument with the East Wind was preceded by two novels whose spinster protagonists ended up in less happy places. In She Alas! (1965), Jane Franckis is a Canadian woman living in a small town south of London who’s never moved on from being left by her dashing RAF pilot lover. She gave up the child from their affair and gave up trying to fit into her town’s insular culture. If anything, she goes out of her way to irritate the locals, exaggerating her Canadian accent and idioms, taking a superior tone, shutting herself up in her house with a bottle as company. Her slow rot is interrupted by the arrival of Ivy Gravy (yes, that really is the name O’Donovan chose), her NCO aide from her time serving in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.
She Alas! seems a bit like a dry-run for Argument. The two books have similar ingredients, but the resulting dish in the case of the first is less satisfying. While Jane, like Eva, is both narrator and protagonist, she lacks Eva’s resilience and tenacity. Where Eva’s humor is grounded in a belief in man’s fundamental goodness (despite the presence of a few bad apples), Jane’s is laced with wormwood. And where the comic figures in Argument are mostly recognizable characters from everyday life, the supporting cast in She Alas! was described by several reviewers as Dickensian — and not in a complimentary way. As one Australian critic wrote, “The pathos is not finely shaded enough to stand up strongly in the company of the book’s bludgeoning comedy.”
Joan O’Donovan’s exploration of spinsterhood began in 1959 with her first novel, The Visited. If there is any comic strain here, it’s black indeed. This time, the spinster is Edith Crannick, in her mid-thirties and “miserable as hell.” Hoping to be diverted by a holiday in Dublin, she’s only been reminded once again that in the eyes of society, she is undesirable, worthless, or invisible. And then Leopold Darkin, also English and also traveling solo, introduces himself in the lounge of their hotel.
It turns out they are neighbors — of a sort, a few blocks apart. Leopold is a bit coarse, separated (or divorced? It’s not clear, he mentions a daughter). But he’s company and amusing enough, nice enough, and, well, randy enough to put an effort into courting Edith. They spend some happy days together in Dublin, then head their separate ways home. Leopold promises to keep in touch. Edith promises herself to make sure he does.
And the rest of The Visited is the story of how Edith keeps that promise. What she hasn’t shared with Leopold is that she is not only sensing all hope of marriage, if not love, rapidly slipping away, but also still living with a mother who’s suspicious, controlling … and failing in health. Leopold is her Plan A. She has no Plan B. And so with an intensity that keeps ratcheting up the narrative tension, she sets to carrying out her plan. Woe be to anyone who gets in her way.
While hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, mid-century English fiction hadn’t seen many scorned women lately when The Visited hit the scene. A few reviewers found the whole subject distasteful. J. B. Priestley, on the other hand, wrote that O’Donovan “stands out, among so many messers-about and muddlers in story-telling as Pancho Gonzales would in a suburban tennis club,” and Penelope Mortimer reported that the book “frightened and moved me and I honestly couldn’t put it down.” I confess that my enthusiasm for The Visited was dampened a bit by the terrible quality of my Ace paperback edition (the few remaining copies of the Gollancz hardback sell for $75 and up). This is a story that deserves a printing equal to its quality.
Joan O’Donovan’s life had a few parallels of its own with that of her spinsters. She had a long affair with the Irish writer Frank O’Connor (while he was still married to his first wife) and bore him a son, Oliver, now a distinguished Anglican scholar. She took his real last name when she published her first book, the story collection Dangerous Worlds in 1958, though the two had parted ways well before that. She published several story collections, along with the three novels, and settled in France sometime in the 1970s. There, she became acquainted with the writer David Garnett and eventually became his caregiver until he died in 1981. I haven’t been able to determine when or where Joan O’Donovan (Joan Knape) died.
The Visited
London: Victor Gollancz, 1959
She Alas!
London: Victor Gollancz, 1965
Argument with the East Wind
London: Macmillan, 1986