Most writers will be forgotten. While there are plenty of examples where a writer’s work has been neglected through deliberate acts of suppression, there are far more where the neglect is due to the lack of any deliberate act of remembrance. Fortunately, when it comes to the work of British women writers of the 1920s to 1950s, there have never been so many people committing deliberate acts of remembrance on a daily basis. Beginning with the ground-breaking Virago Modern Classics series, publishers such as Persephone Books, Dean Street Press, Handheld Books, Turnpike Books, NYRB Classics, and the recently-launched British Library Women Writers are busy bringing the work of dozens of writers back to print. Dozens of book bloggers are helping promote and celebrate these reissues. Academics are collaborating through such initiatives as the Middlebrow Network and Transatlantic Literary Women. And through his Furrowed Middlebrow blog, Scott Thompson continues to reveal just how rich and vast the ranks of these women writers were.
Yet even with all these hands to the task, some remain overlooked. Take Honor Croome for example. She published five novels between 1943 and 1957, all of them received with enthusiastic reviews that praised her precise prose style and her sensitivity to the qualities of even her most unlikeable characters. Two — the ones discussed here — deal with the relatively popular subject of the experience of women during the Second World War. And yet not only have her books all fallen out of print but her name doesn’t even appear in what is likely the most comprehensive catalog of the writers, Scott Thompson’s Master List on Furrowed Middlebrow. It’s not through lack of trying. But when being lost and forgotten is the default end state for writers, there can never be enough deliberate acts of remembrance.
And so I want to take a few minutes to recognize Honor Croome’s work by looking at her first two novels: O Western Wind (1943) and You’ve Gone Astray (1944). O Western Wind focuses on the lives of four women and their children while You’ve Gone Astray deals with just two — yet it’s the latter which ultimately has a broader scope.
O Western Wind opens on a crowded passenger ship crossing the rough waters of the Irish Sea, on its way to take hundreds of British women and their children to safety in Canada. Most of them are in the Third class compartments: “One can get away from the smell of ship in the first class lounges and even, occasionaly, in Tourist; never in Third. There is oil in it, and brass, and sea salt, and, particularly in Third, disinfectant, and bad sailors find it conducive to seasickness.” Sitting in the Third class bar are two cousins, Margaret and Cora, happy to have their children settled for the night.
Margaret is older, longer married; Cora is younger, wed to an RAF bomber pilot, and stunningly attractive. “I wish I could feel like Cora looks, at the end of a day like this,” Margaret muses. In the lounge, they meet Mary Hallam, a nervous mother, with a two-year-old daughter and just months from delivering a second child. To these three women, Croome adds Daphne Torrance — divorced with two teenage sons and an eye for available men — and then takes us through their first year of life as evacuees.
The women are settled outside Boston with the help of a local refugee committee. The contrast with wartime England strikes them as soon as they leave the train station: “No sand-bags or strong-points anywhere. No road-blocks, no sentries. Not a man in uniform to be seen. Not a plane in the sky. No one carrying gas-masks. No steel helmets on the policemen. A carefree, lovely land. And tonight there would be lights again.”
Margaret and Cora and their children end up in a remote country house. The peace and quiet of their surroundings seem unworldly after life in crowded, busy, noisy London:
Margaret and Cora, like dwellers on another planet, went marketing and swept and scrubbed and cooked, tended their children, drank their tea, and sat by the fire, evening after lonely evening. They had the children; they had housework. There — as mothers and drudges — they stopped short. It was a great deal, but a great deal was missing. Friendship meant an envelope with a printed slip “Opened by Examiner 3697” gummed over one end.
“Whole tracts of faculties lay idle,” Croome writes, and in both novels she examines the uneven and often unbalanced mix of domestic, economic, and intellectual demands that women who take on the responsibilities of child-rearing have to meet. Margaret thinks, only half-jokingly, “We should have been Victorian wives…. Then we should have found this a lovely, lovely rest.” Except, as she quickly adds, that probably would have meant she would have had eight children to care for and Cora four.
Eventually, the Greater Boston Hospitality Committee brings the four women and their kids together to live at Southwood, a large mansion left empty after the death of its dowager owner. In some ways, it comes to seem even more artificial than the isolation of their farmhouse in the country. Everything around them speaks of wealth, luxury, comfort — but it’s all given by the grace of the Hospitality Committee. “It seemed as though several new layers of unreality had interposed themselves between them and the great tragedy from which they had cut themselves off; and in their varying ways they fretted against their physical good fortune.”
I was often remind of Paul Cohen-Portheim’s Time Stood Still, his account of four years spent as an internee in a British camp during the First World War. Like him, these women are not abused in any physical way; and yet, the very artificiality and limitations of their situation become, in the end, a sort of torture. And like Cohen-Portheim, Croome’s women find that “The worst tortures of camp life were due to the small failings of one’s fellow creatures everlastingly in evidence.” Margaret thinks at one point:
For the duration, Clive Torrance would infest the dinner table. For the duration, they would have to check their conversation to keep it within Mary Hallis’s scope. For the duration, they would chit-chat with Mrs. Torrance about nothing in particular. Margaret found herself wanting, frantically, to hear the sound of a masculine voice, preferably several of them. I’m not turning into a man-hunter, I’m resigned to celibacy, but I am tired of being a full-time hen….
It is only after several crises that Margaret, whose voice seems to speak Croome’s own thoughts most often, finds a way to look beyond the walls of their comfortable but indefinite existence. “There would be moments of black depression,” she thinks, but she can at least “distinguish between the superficial and the real, now.”
O Western Wind draws in part on Honor Croome’s own experiences. She left Liverpool bound for Canada in July 1940 with two children (and, like Mary Hallam, within weeks of delivering another). Although the family would eventually settle in Ottawa after John Croome was appointed head of the British Food Mission to Canada, Honor and the children spent over a year living as refugees in Westwood, Massachusetts outside Boston. While there, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe taking exception to another British refugee’s suggestion that Americans were not showing sufficient gratitude for Britain’s sacrifices: “You owe us much, we owe you much,” she wrote. “Among other things each owes the other for their share in our joint victory over Hohenzollern Germany. Of what those shares were, let our dead as well as our dollars speak.”
When the Croomes returned to England in 1946, they needed a much bigger cabin. They were now a family of seven, bringing along three sons born in Canada. In other words, Honor Croome managed to produce two novels and three children during her own indefinite existence in the US and Canada. Her capacity for work seems astonishing. Both before and after the war she was a frequent reviewer for The Economist, and one of her editors, Sir Geoffrey Crowther, once said of her speed in reading, “A thousand pages in her sight are but an evening gone.” The same may have been true for her speed in writing. She must have been one of those rare writers who can work in short snatches, for she dedicated her second novel to “John, Ursula, Gilbert and David, because they occasionally kept quiet.”
Yet in neither book does Croome suggest that the solution to a woman’s challenges in juggling both family and a career is simply to work harder. You’ve Gone Astray (1944), in fact, is a demonstration that this is a recipe for failure. In some ways, the book is a prequel to O Western Wind: taking place between the early 1930s and the first year or so of the war, it follows two women — Linda and Kitty — from a short spell of sharing a flat in London through marriage, children, and successes and failures at work.
You’ve Gone Astray is far more about Linda than Kitty. Kitty — slight, beautiful, flirtatious and starting out as a writer of romance novels — is more of a leitmotif than major character. Though we enter the story through Kitty’s eyes, it’s Linda — tall, Amazon-like, with a fearsome intellect (if less formidable practical knowledge) — with whom we spend most of our time.
The daughter and niece of vigorous Edwardian activists, Linda feels somewhat guilty for taking a job with a reform-minded organization called the Housing Plan rather than heading off to India to run a hospital as her aunt did or crusading for women’s right as her mother did. Her work brings her in contact with Hugh, a journalist with a strong interest in social reform, and soon the two are married — and Linda is pregnant.
As she tries to raise her daughter while continuing to work for the Housing Plan, she realizes she’s missing out. On burning the midnight oil with colleagues, on a pint after work, on the Budapest Conference. She struggles with the cognitive dissonance of being both mother and manager: “She had to turn dislocating psychological somersaults, morning and evening, Saturday and Monday, switching from the role of expert and organizer to that of suburban housewife and back again.” And the simply physical toll: “She was almost always tired.”
Kitty encounters the same issues when she becomes pregnant several years later than Linda. She expresses a feeling my wife often recounted during her pregnancies: “It’s so inevitable. As though something had you by the scruff of the neck and were whispering in your ear, ‘You can’t get out of this. You can’t get away. You can’t talk your way out, no one can help you out, it’ll happen, I’m not sorry for you, my name is Nature.'” Unlike Linda, however, Kitty can afford to park her son with a kindly couple in the country while she types and socializes away and her husband — present in the book for little more than the essential biological moment — is off on archaeological expeditions.
Croome captures the blur of considerations and commitments that must swirl through the head of any working mother:
… waking with an eye on that clock, working, still with an eye on that clock, frantically, among perversely uncooperative kitchen utensils and crockery, listening desperately for Mrs. Pratt’s click at the gate, picturing the London train remorselessly pulling out of the station a mile away; crawling home in a rush-hour train, supper menus and unfinished business dancing an unholy saraband in her brain; listening to Mrs. Pratt’s chronicle of leaking taps, spoiled potatoes, mistakes in the grocery bill, and misdeeds by Diana (more a problem child than ever these days); flinging off her town clothes, flinging on an apron, plunging through the preparation for supper, with scarcely time to give Diana a good-night kiss; spending her evenings on endless letters to agencies and to the malevolent half-wits or mere phantoms whom those agencies recommended.
In a sentiment many women might share, she adds, “Linda yearned for a good servant as a prisoner for freedom, as a miser for money, as a sick man for health.”
The strain of it all takes its toll in numerous ways, leading to arguments, separation, even death. There are some grim chapters in this book. And though Linda and Hugh find some happiness on the other side — and Kitty finds an escape from her worries — Croome doesn’t offer us happy endings, just sustainable compromises. She was nothing if not a realist.
Croome’s own background bore some resemblance with Linda’s. Her mother, Mildred Minturn, was an American socialite who graduated from Bryn Mawr, where she became a close friend of Frances Fincke, later wife of the famed judge Learned Hand. In fact, Fincke turned down Hand’s first proposal to marry because she and Mildred had planned to live together and pursue careers as scholars and social reformers. Bertrand Russell met Mildred while she was at Bryn Mawr and the two maintained a flirtatious relationship even after she married Arthur Hugh Scott, an Englishman, in 1906.
Mildred took graduate classes at Barnard and traveled widely after leaving Bryn Mawr, visiting Japan and Europe and taking a desert caravan in Egypt with a fellow classmate. She was outspoken in her views, writing frequent letters to magazines in England and the U.S., and translated French Socialist Jean Jaures’s Studies in Socialism shortly before her wedding to Scott. She struggled, however, with health problems and died in 1922, when Honor was just a teenager.
Honor had a most cosmopolitan upbringing. She spent her early years in France, where her father taught at l’École de l’ Île-de-France, a French boarding school run on the model of an English public school. She attended a girl’s school in Switzerland (an experience she used as the basis for her 1955 novel, The Mountain and the Molehill), the Hayes Court School in Kent, Bryn Mawr College in the US (for a year — “I did not flunk out,” she was careful to note), then the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally the London School of Economics.
After the LSE, she wrote her first book, The Approach to Economics, then landed a job at the New Fabian Research Bureau, a left-leaning organization involved in statistics and planning — most probably the inspiration for the Housing Plan in You’ve Gone Astray. Soon after, she married John Lewis Croome, who’d been a year ahead of her at the LSE.
In 1935, as she informed the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, she took a job as political secretary to Lady Astor. She wrote that “It’s tremendous fun” but also tiring: “I am rapidly going grey and can hear imaginary typewriters and telephones in my dreams.” A year later, she wrote that she left the post “owing to (a) nervous exhaustion and (b) incompetence” and “returned to the fleshpots and to society of son [John] and heir aged 2½.” “Very nice, too,” she added. She gave birth to a daughter, Ursula, in 1936 and wrote her classmates that she was busy with a family “to cook for, a job to hold down, and book to see through the press.” The book she referred to was her weightiest economic text, The Economy of Britain: A History, published in 1938, which she co-wrote with R. J. Hammond.
After nearly six years in the US and Canada, Croomes returned to their home in Claygate outside London in 1946 and Honor resumed her work as an economist and journalist while continuing to write and raise her children. She published her third novel, The Faithless Mirror in 1946 and began publishing articles for the general public in magazines such as Home & Garden. Included in Who’s Who’s starting in 1950, she answered the book’s pro-forma questionnaire by listing her primary form of recreation as “domesticity.” She published two more novels in the 1950s: The Mountain and the Molehill and The Forgotten Place (1957). She also published a further economics text, Introduction to Money in 1956.
When she died in 1960, The Economist made an exception of its practice of being “anonymous by conviction as well as by tradition” and printed a black-boxed notice of her passing. “To those who knew her,” the editors wrote, “every piece she wrote could only be hers; to those who did not, her reviews were no less identifiable, running like a strong shining thread through these pages. The style was the woman.”
They paid tribute to the high quality of her prose: “The cutting-edge and quality of what she wrote was that she knew, respected and was mistress of the English language. It was almost impossible to alter or cut her contributions.” As a reviewer, she was “lively and learned in the right sense of both words; sensitive but never soft; humane and good-humoured but never sentimental or trivial; critical, sometimes in a biting and indignant fashion, but never censorious; a civilised human being with a zest for life and people as well as understanding of great ideas and arguments.”
“It is hard to believe that there can ever be another like her,” The Economist piece concluded. “This is understatement,” responded Sir Geoffrey Crowther in the next issue. “Such beauty, such wite, such capacity to understand other people’s minds, sometimes even better than they do themselves, such capacity to move with grace in so many different fields from housewifery and writing about it to the most abstruse theoretical economics — all these in combination made her unique.”
Perhaps this post will now motivate other readers to discover Honor Croome’s unique qualities as a novelist.
O Western Wind
London: Christophers, 1943
You’ve Gone Astray
London: Christophers, 1944
Both by Honor Croome