This is my contribution to the #1920Club, a unique collective reading event organized by Kaggsy and Simon Thomas. I offered some less-than-well-known candidates last week, but I deliberately saved this one for myself.
Development was the first novel published by Bryher, pen-name of Annie Winifred Ellerman. It was the first of three loosely-fictionalized autobiographical novels, followed by Two Selves (1923), which was first published by Contact Editions, the Paris-based press established by Robert McAlmon and West (1925). All three of the books are virtually unattainable in first edition, but the University of Wisconsin Press did reissue the first two books as Two Novels: Development and Two Selves, edited by Joanne Winning, back in 2000.
Development takes Nancy — Bryher’s fictional self — from her earliest conscious memories at the age of three or so to her first visit to the Scilly Isles around the age of 17. The Scillies were deeply important to Bryher, to the point that she took the name of one of the isles as her pseudonym, and the remote wildness of the Scillies seems to have motivated her to reject many of the customs and values of the conventional world she’d been raised in.
Bryher was one of Dorothy Richardson’s closest and most loyal friends, and Richardson’s Pilgrimage, which was itself (to some extent) a fictional autobiography, was clearly an inspiration. As in Pilgrimage, the story is told through the stream of the lead character’s consciousness, but in Bryher’s case, there’s a certain stiffness to the stream, if that makes any sense. Pilgrimage radiates such a vibrant sense of living in the world; in Development, on the other hand, the world is seen through a very literary/rational sensibility. And, frankly, one perhaps a little too satisfied with its own opinions — something it was refreshing to see is not unique to young men.
Perhaps this is because Bryher felt she had been born the wrong gender. As she once wrote her long-time lover, the American poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), “I am quite justified in pleading I ought to be a boy—I am just a girl by accident.” At a very young age, Nancy finds herself thinking, “Her one regret was that she was a girl.” When many little girls wish for dolls, Nancy dreams of owning a pocket-knife. She longs to be a sailor, imagines stowing away on a ship when she turns fourteen: “Why was she born with a boy’s heart when she might not go to sea?”
Little of Nancy’s knowledge of boys comes from first-hand experience. The only child of an enormously wealthy father — Sir John Ellerman, Bryher’s father, owned shipping lines and newspapers and was likely one of the richest men in Edwardian England — Nancy rarely have the opportunity to play with others. “Henceforth, her games should be shared with her elephant, a safer and quieter companion” than a girl she encounters one day in front of her house in Cornwall. She also learns about the world through books written for boys, especially the historical novels of G. A. Henty. Although Bryher never mentions the novelist, it’s clear that her first inspiration is Henty’s 1887 novel, The Young Carthaginian, A Story of the Time of Hannibal. Nancy begins to write her first novel: “Hanno was a Carthaginian boy. He was nine years old. He was very glad because he was going on his first campaign” — taking her hero’s name from one of Henty’s leading characters. The allure of Carthage fades, however, when she sees the actual remains of the city “a darkness of mud, a greyishness that held no violet about it, set with a few bleak stones.”
If Bryher/Nancy is sure she was meant to be a boy, she’s equally sure she was meant to be a writer. Even more frequent than her dreams of the sea are those of writing a book. One reason that language has such importance for Nancy is that she is a synesthetic. As she grows, her associations between words and colors grows more intense — “until her whole vocabulary became a palette of colours, luminous gold, a flushed rose, tones neither sapphire nor violet, but the shade of southern water.” This sensation extends even to letters: “Seven letters were white, C, G, Q, S, T, O, and U; three of the others were black, D, E, and I. W was crimson; H, M, and Y were various shades of gold and primrose.” Because of Nancy’s fascination with language, Development is as much as anything a bibliomemoir — long before anyone was tossing that word around. We follow along as she falls in love with Shakespeare, partly for his poetry, mostly for his history, dislikes Keats, gorges herself in the lush exoticism of Salammbô. The third and final section of Development, “Transition,” is a catalogue of the reading of her late teens, each book leading her towards the one she is preparing to write. Fortunately, when she does put pen to paper, she sticks to original material: “The intervals of her reading Nancy filled with her own manuscript, wrought neither of imagination nor remembered stories but of the one experience she knew from end to end — herself.”
Before this last burst of the intellectual development in her late teens, however, Nancy has to endure her middle passage: boarding school, or as Bryher un-subtly titles this section, “Bondage.” Like Bryher, Nancy is sent relatively late to a girl’s school, joining the Fourth Year and quickly being progressed to the Fifth. Her two years, though, seem an eternity. A decade before Antonia White’s Frost in May, fifty years ahead of Deschooling Society, Bryher was scathing in her criticism of mass education. Downwood — the fictional equivalent of Queenswood, the school Bryher attended — is a typically grim English boarding school, “one of the coldest, bleakest places she had seen, with open windows, worn-out carpets, and a mass of white paint inside, and outside a long weedy lawn and a few flower-pots.” While slightly more comfortable than Dicken’s Dotheboys Hall, Downwood is hardly better in its approach to instruction. Rote learning, repetition, memorization, and progress in locked step are the hallmarks of its regime, compounded by ruthless conformity. Nancy learns never to mention she has travelled widely. Having never really known other children, she finds them more like cattle. “For the first time the spirit of the crowd — an oppressed thing in turn oppressing, judge of outward aspect only, blind to the finer shades, with the strength of the sloth,
the ferocity of a brute — weighed her and weighed her distrustfully.” The effect of being in class is deadening: “Not a girl was idle, joyfully idle; not a mind was interested; not a thought was alert.”
As much as we sympathize with Nancy, there is a certain superiority in her views towards her classmates that’s hard to like. She pities them “the poverty of their monotonous restricted thought.” Indeed, as much as I enjoyed Development, I found it undermined by a deep-seated solipsism. For great stretches of the book, it really does seem as if no one else exists. At one point as she recounts Nancy’s experiences around the Mediterranean, for example, Bryher writes, “Unshaken from her Italian allegiance, Nancy left, one January morning, for Algiers.” Nancy is at this stage around the age of 10 or 11. Nancy didn’t leave for Algiers — she most certainly went along as one of a party led by her mother or father or both. Ditto for the visits to Egypt, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, etc.. Did Nancy have a governness? A tutor? Apparently not. In reference to her own parents, the words “mother” and “father” appear just three times each. Looking back, I see I had much the same impression about Bryher’s much-later non-fictional memoir: “The Heart to Artemis is remarkably depersonalized. If Bryher were to take a Myers-Briggs test, I’m pretty sure she would prove to be an NT. We learn a great deal about her thoughts and very little about her feelings. For a life so full of experiences, it’s almost creepily dispassionate.”
Development was in some ways Bryher’s most successful novel. Published in both England and the U.S., it went into second printings. One reason was the controversy stirred up by her account of Downwood. After publishing an article titled “Cramped School Girls” that summarized Bryher’s descriptions of the school, The Daily Mail solicited “the opinions of our readers, particularly those who have attended such schools as are the subject of Miss Bryher’s outspoken criticism.” Over the next few days, numerous women wrote in. One girl said “To pass examinations was the main object at my school. The rules were particularly stupid.” A former teacher said she had led “the cramped life of a nun,” though she felt the experience of the war meant that many were coming back “with a far more human outlook.” A Miss Cowdroy, principal of Crouch End School, however, thought that schools like Downwood had become “as extinct as the dodo. Every modern school aims at complete self-development and self-expression.” One father supported Bryher, writing that “Parents need to insist upon the reform of the mid-Victorian system,” while Avery H. Forbes, a teacher with 38 years’ experience argued somewhat ironically that “girls are far better taught than are boys of the same age.”
Bryher responded with a letter to the editor, rejecting Miss Cowdroy’s argument and suggesting that schools like Downwood weren’t becoming extinct fast enough. She spread the fault widely if evenly: “I blame the parents. It is their duty to insist that a suitable and healthy education should be given to their children…. I blame the teachers. They should insist on freedom of life and thought…. I blame the children themselves. They should fight for an education that will fit them for their future life….” The Mail, however, gave the last word to Miss Angela Brazil from Coventry, who said she’d received letters from hundreds of schoolgirls, most of whom wrote of the “gorgeous fun” they had at school. Despite Miss Brazil’s optimism, though, sadly too many of Bryher’s criticisms of Downwood remain valid for our schools a hundred years later.