In a biographical sketch, G. E. (Gertrude Eileen) Trevelyan wrote of her time at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford: “Did not: play hockey, act, row, take part in debates, political or literary, contribute to the Isis or attend cocoa parties, herein failing to conform to the social standards commonly required of women students.” If we go by Hot-House, her fictional account of one young woman’s three years at Oxford, it’s clear she didn’t think much of those standards. Trevelyan said her chief accomplishments at Oxford were developing “smoker’s throat and a taste for misanthrophic reflection.”
She didn’t omit mention of her winning the 1927 Newdigate Prize for English verse — the first ever by a woman. The novelty of the award led to the story being picked up by wire services and reprinted in newspapers worldwide — in everything from The Daily Mail to The St. Louis Daily Livestock Reporter to The Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser. Trevelyan was presented the prize at the Encaenia ceremony, following the award of degrees honoris causa to Field Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Supreme Allied Commander during the First World War, Field Marshal Viscount Edmund Allenby, who freed the Middle East from the Ottoman Turks, and Etienne Gilson, a French philosopher. The day before, there had been a total eclipse of the sun, the first visible in England since 1724, and most of the male students at Oxford had taken the event as an excuse to leave early. “This,” The Oxford Times asserted, “doubtless explained the presence in the gallery of many undergraduettes in their quaint hats.” Trevelyan herself chocked up the publicity surrounding her award to astonishment at “evident revolutionary tendencies at work in the University.” The fact that the University Council had decided, just two weeks prior, to limit the number of women students to 620 suggests it wasn’t much of a revolution.
Trevelyan made her analogy for Oxford’s women’s colleges clear on her title page, including a definition from Chamber’s Dictionary: “Hot-house: a house kept hot for the rearing of tender plants.” Anyone who’s ever been in a hot-house knows that in addition to providing an benign environments for growing plants, their warm, humid atmospheres can also be suffocating. This certainly seems to have been Trevelyan’s view of her own school. From reading Hot-House, one gets the impression that what Queen Anne’s College — Trevelyan’s fictional stand-in for Lady Margaret Hall — fostered was not learning or personal growth but gossip and relentless surveillance. Everyone seems to keep track of everyone else. When Mina, the impressionable young woman at the center of Trevelyan’s story, runs down the hall in her pajamas and collapses in a hysterical fit outside the door of a fellow student, it’s all anyone talks about the next day.
In the servant’s hall: “Lyin’ on the floor, she was, all rolled in an eiderdown. Cryin’ somethin’ cruel.”
In the kitchen: “Did you hear that? How one of the maids saw a stewdent rolling on the floor in New Building corridor and screamin’ fit to bring the house down?”
In the Common Room: “Yes, in the New Building corridor. On Sunday night.”
In the Senior Common Room: “What’s this story about Cook wandering round the passages at night?”
One thing I admire about Trevelyan’s work is that in every one of her books, she dives into the deep end and really submerges herself in her subject. In the case of Hot-House, this means she brings the reader into the walls of Queen Anne College and keeps us trapped inside its claustrophic atmosphere without a break for almost 400 pages. The book opens as Wilheminia Delacroix Cook — Mina — a new first-year student, rides along Parks Road, returning to her room after having tea with Alec, a friend of her brother. We follow like a camera as she weaves through the streets, past Keble, across the Broad, by the Bodleian Library and into the gates of Queen Anne. The college presents a predatory image: “Crouched, throwing out wings, like tentacles, along side the road and away, at hidden angles, towards the river.” It grabs Mina into these tentacles and this is the last time we get a breath of fresh air for the next three years.
Trevelyan could be accused of over-egging her cake. Mina is immature even by undergraduate standards, impressionable, obsessive, and given to exaggeration and excessive rumination. Her emotional amp goes all the way to 11. The grim old heads in the Senior Common Room take her measure early on: “Rather unbalanced, you know. Nerves and so on. Not quite the right thing for the college, perhaps.” Mina is quickly swept up in the first weeks’ welcoming activities:
What a rush. Lectures, and all the things you had to get for your room, and so many Third Years and Second Years asking you to cocoa. (And why did they call it cocoa? It never was cocoa. And they always made some joke about its being something else. Was that why? And people always popping in and out. So exhausting.
Mina’s college career careens through a series of crises, most of her invention and fueled by her desire to impress everyone by the intensity of her responses. At first, this seems to be the persona she’s chosen to take with her fellow First Termers — the family, as she calls them. When her mother falls ill early in the term, she announces, “Dears, Mina may have to desert her family soon”: “I must. It’s absolutely indicated. I must go and stroke the lamb’s head.” Anyone who’s been in a high school drama club will recognize the type immediately.
The problem, though, is that Mina buys her own act. She quickly latches onto her tutor, Mlle. Claude Morlaix, a no-nonsense woman with little time or sympathy for her student’s desperate need for approval and, worse, affection. By the middle of the second term, classmates are murmuring behind her back: “Mina seems frightfully keen on her, doesn’t she?” To them, she refers to Morlaix as “the lamb,” tenderly but also slightly dismissively. Unfortunately, she uses the same language in her own thoughts, becomes convinced that it is Morlaix, not she, who’s the dependent. To make matters even worse, Mina has a competitor — Erica, a recent graduate. Morlaix and Erica share a flat outside of college and similar attitudes towards its environment: “It’s rather awful living in. So many people and none of them real.” When Morlaix suffers an eye infection and is out of action for weeks, Mina assumes the role of savior. “One must, simply must, rescue the lamb somehow. One couldn’t … absolutely and definitely could not … simply abandon the unfortunate infant to that … that woman.” Morlaix, of course, has no interest in being saved, especially not by some high-strung undergraduate.
After much angst and many scenes in which the various college choruses — the family, the faculty, the kitchen help — comment on her histrionics, Mina moves on to another obsession: Professor Ferrand, a quiet English tutor recently widowed and perhaps a bit careless of his appearance. She becomes convinced she is destined to be his helpmate, an illusion he unknowingly fosters through simply being polite. When even he finds it necessary to disabuse her of any interest in having another wife, a classmate asks what she plans to do: “Do, my lamb? But … but as if that … as if that made just any difference. As if it did. In any case … absolutely in any case … there’s … there’s the edge. And one just has to jump.” Unfortunately, by this point, near the end of the Third Year, no one has much time for Mina’s melodrama. “Oh, yes, of course. Yes, I see,” the classmate replied, puzzled.
Although things are less claustrophobic in universities now — Lady Margaret Hall has been coed for decades — the artificial and self-contained nature of college life still presents adaptation challenges after graduation, particularly for anyone who stays in a dorm or fraternity/sorority house the whole time. We can recognize the despair Mina feels at the prospect of going down. “But it’s got … just got … to go on. All this. The college. It can’t just stop.” “We’re all going down, aren’t we?” a classmate replies. “It can’t make very much difference.” But to Mina, leaving school is not moving forward. For her, it’s “complete, utter, dissolution….”
By this point in the book, we feel as if we’ve spent the full three years locked in a cramped and overheated college room. The final section of Hot-House — “Bedding Out” — takes us a year or so later. Mina’s classmates are out in the world: teaching, working in a store, worried about the practical tasks of daily life. But also writing to and about Mina. Though out of school, her way of dealing with things hasn’t changed. She tracks down Alec in South Africa and pursues him, convinced the “lamb” needs her care. Rejected, she selects another object and follows him to South America. And so on. I needn’t say how the story ends.
After 380-plus pages inside Queen Anne’s College, however, “Bedding Out” seems, as Coleridge said in his famous comparison of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, like stepping from “a stuffy, hot sick-room, and Fielding to an open lawn on a breezy day.” Had the whole book been like this, I would consider Hot-House one of the better English novels of its time. But the truth is that pages 1 through 384 are in dire need of an editor.
Trevelyan’s greatest strength is her willingness to go into her fictional experiments completely. When she commits to a setting, a viewpoint, a cast of characters, she gives it her all. Sometimes, as in the case of William’s Wife and Appius and Virginia, this risk-taking pays off in stunning returns. In the case of Hot-House, I suspect some readers would feel short-changed. It’s true, as Anna Bogen has written, that Trevelyan’s treatment of Mina “wrests from the reader an uncanny mix of irony and empathy.” We can feel for her while also thinking her ridiculous.
But Trevelyan also makes some unwise choices. At the macroscopic level, the book needs to be cut ruthlessly. There is no need to dissect, re-dissect, and re-re-dissect every little crisis in Mina’s hyper-crisis-filled three years at college. The narrative falls into a predictable pattern one wearies of. At a microscopic level, there are things like Mina’s italics-laden thoughts and dialogue: a little of this goes a long way, n’est-ce pas? Worse that this — unforgivable, really — is Trevelyan’s attempt to capture the accent of Irma Lupo, a Brazilian woman loosely attached to the faculty of Queen Anne’s. One comes to dread the character’s appearance — partly because she’s used as a caustic, eating away at the fabric of just about every relationship in the school, but mostly because of sentences like this: “Eet ees a week since I meet ‘er…. I wondaired eef you know eef she ees eel?” It’s as bad as anything out of Uncle Remus Tales or any other execrable dialogue fiction from the turn of the 20th Century.
The novelist Barbara Pym read Hot-House when the book first came out, while still a student at St. Hilda’s College in Oxford. “Reading Gertrude Trevelyan’s novel Hot-House,” she wrote in her diary. “I desperately want to write an Oxford novel – but I must see first that my emotions are simmered down fairly well.” A bit of simmering down would have helped Hot-House: inside this book is are 250 pages of a terrific novel. Would that Trevelyan’s editors at Martin Secker had handed back her manuscript with a single instruction: “Distill.”
Good luck on finding a copy of the first edition of Hot-House. I didn’t even bother to link to AddAll.com because there’s nothing there. The title links to WorldCat.org, but there are just eleven library copies listed. You can, however, purchase it from the academic publisher Routledge. What you have to look for is this gripping title: Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II, edited by Dr. Anna Bogen. Act now and you can get it for the low, low sale price of $148, or as the folks at Routledge should call it, “our direct-to-shredder rate,” since fewer and fewer institutions have the appetite for such prices and no individual readers have the stomach for this nonsense.
Other Reviews
- • Leonora Eyles, Times Literary Supplement
- Miss G. E. Trevelyan, as she showed in her first novel, Appius and Virginia, is undeniably a writer with an unusual gift of psychological penetration. This is displayed to the full in Hot-House, yet we doubt if any but specialists will persevere to the end of it. A psychoanalyst may read it as he would a case book, and the principals and staff of girls’ school and women’s colleges should read it as a matter of duty. But it is doubtful if many of the readers will be able to stand this “listening-in” to a neurotic girl’s thoughts and babblings, or bear the stifling monotony of the style — cleverly enough designed as it is to show the suffocating atmosphere of Miss Trevelyan’s college….
- Only a deep concern about modern youth and its tendencies could drive a reader through the book from cover to cover, for it is not so much a novel as a social document and may well be laid aside with a sense of disquiet. Can Youth — sheltered Youth — really become so unbalanced, so morbid, so stifled as this. Is Oxford such a forcing-ground for pettiness and neurosis?
- • Britannia and Eve
- A clever book and also very difficult to read. The prose here, instead of being hurdy-gurdy, is a series of gasps and wriggles…. The principal character, a girl called Mina, has no discoverable purpose or power of reasoning, and is hard to distinguish from a lunatic.
- • E. J. Scovell, Time and Tide
- Hot-House has merit as art, but it is bad, because it is unbalanced, social criticism. It is a very well disciplined book. The deterioration of Mina Cook through her nine terms at Oxford is carefully and subtly observed, and for all the monotony of the narrative, which gives one a mistaken sense of repetition, there is no waste in the recording of it; indeed, the author has preserved so devotedly the unities of place and of subject that the novel is a little like a scientific monograph on some subject studied in deliberate isolation….
- Miss Trevelyan could reply to this that Hot-House is not sociology at all. It is satire, and no one (except the victim) asks to be fair; it is art, which has to select and simplify and exaggerate…. But it is all rather dull. The stifling evenness of temperature makes it heavy reading, and that evenness is through all the book; for even the characters that escape from the hothouse seem to exist chiefly in their reaction to it. Any story is likely to become wearing too, when almost all its events and emotions are moonshine, existing only in the character’s imagination: and this is true of Hot-House.
- • The Guardian
- Where this novel falls into the hands of an Oxford man his first instinct will be to say, “I told you so.” … The book itself is written with quite remarkable skill. The heroine is one of those girls whom one calls “vague.” She thinks and speaks with the utmost incoherence. She is extraordinarily suggestible; and in the course of three years of uneventful college life she succeeds in erecting out of nothing, and brooding over and living through, a full half-dozen of emotional crises. It is an uncomfortable novel, as all really successful studies of hysteria are likely to be.
- • The Sydney Sunday Sun and Guardian
- G. E. Trevelyan has been so determined to give us a minutely detailed picture of life in an Oxford women’s college that the result is rather like looking at a collection of insects through a microscope. This would be endurable if the microscope were properly in focus, or the insects were at all interesting, but the author adjusts it at such a distorted angle that the mind of the normal person revolts from it. There are, moreover, running through the book sly, faint suggestions of a type of perversion not usually discussed much except by the ultra modern, and irritatingly enough, the suggestions are never sufficiently definite for us to know whether the author really intends them or whether it is our own nasty minds at work.