This was the most surprising book I’ve read in a long time. I was initially interested in The Woman’s Harvest because, having been published in 1916, it appeared to be the first English novel to deal with the situation of women on the home front in World War One. And at first, that’s what it proved to be.
Harvey Brunsdon is a floorwalker in a department store on Kensington High Street when the war breaks out in August 1914. Married and with an infant daughter at home, he decides it’s better not to volunteer for the Army out of purely practical concerns: how will his wife manage on 12 shillings a week when they’ve been living on £170 a year — or worse, on 9 shillings a week if he gets killed? After being shamed as a coward by a young woman presenting him with a white feather, though, he and his wife decide it’s better to do the patriotic thing.
Harvey enlists and his wife leaves the child in the care of her mother goes back to work. The independence and power of being an income earner seems to compensate for her loneliness — more than compensate for it, in fact: “If Elsie Brunsdon could have analyzed her tangled emotions during the autumn of 1914 she must have admitted that, contrary to all her expectations, she was enjoying every moment of her life.”
When Harvey is mustered out and returns, he finds it hard to return to the dressed-up interior work of the store and he seeks out the widow of his regimental commander, who has an estate in need of farm workers. Despite his lack of experience, he moves the family to the countryside. He takes to it like Oliver Wendell Douglas in Green Acres, while Elsie is less enthusiastic. In the course of a year, hard work and good old English pluck turn Harvey into a proven landsman.
Then, in Chapter IX, as Elsie is finally warming to rural life, Anna Floyd throws in this bombshell:
A disbanded regiment, nearly all young students and professional men, mustered in civilian clothes in Trafalgar Square, marched in silence down Whitehall, and hanged four members of the Cabinet on the lamp facing the entrance to Downing Street. The ringleaders, a major, two sergeants, and a private soldier, surrendered themselves and were arrested at once. They were sentenced to death, and on the evening of their trial four more prominent politicians dangled from the same lamp. The Prime Minister, arrested in his own official residence, was taken to see the bodies and informed that whilst the four men lay under sentence, four politicians would hang punctually every evening.
I did not see that coming.
Floyd goes on to tell us that England then experiences a renaissance of the land and within two years achieves near-total self-sufficiency in food production as thousands of veterans turn their swords into ploughshares, with commensurate benefits for Harvey Brunsdon as an early adopter, and we are back into his story, the most violent and tumultuous revolution since Oliver Cromwell having been introduced and passed over in the space of three pages.
But wait: there’s more.
At this point, we are precisely at the halfway point in the book and can be excused for wondering where this is all going.
And the answer is … polyamory.
Over the next 100-some pages, two of the local women disappear for months at a time — to France, to a clinic for “fatigue” — and return with infants of mysterious origin. A foundling. A dead cousin’s orphan. We learn that Harvey has been sowing his seeds in more than the land. In fact, there’s a third affair well underway. When Elsie finally figures this all out, Harvey chastises her. It was her own fault: “You’ve never offered me love of your own free will.” And it’s certainly not the fault of the other women: “They’re victims of the war. You ought to feel sorry for them. You are the fortunate one amongst your unfortunate sisters.” Elsie needs to understand that Harvey is merely doing his patriotic duty — and chill. Turn your head and think of England, in other words.
Though she was writing when the war had been raging for less than two full years, Anna Floyd seems to have been certain that it would result in the loss of a generation of English men and that her country’s future lay in a massive return to an agricultural economy and a massive embrace of sexual freedom … for men. And thus we discover what she meant by The Woman’s Harvest.
I was hoping this book would be a glimpse into how English women, recently emboldened by the Suffragette movement, responded to the early effects of the war. Silly me. The critic Gerald Gould called The Woman’s Harvest “unreadable.” I found it highly readable, blazing through in little more than a day. Highly readable — and highly ridiculous.
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D. E. Stevenson’s book sounds very, very similar in concept to Rene Clair’s early movie, Paris Qui Dort, which is about a group of airplane passengers who land in a Paris that has been put to sleep by a mad scientist. It, however, is a lovely, charming film (a pair explore the Eiffel Tower alone, for example).
Well, that was a plot twist I was NOT expecting. Wow. Not surprised that this novel has gone out of print!
It reminds me a little of a very strange novel by D. E. Stevenson (known for her rather cozy middlebrow domestic novels) called The Empty World. It was published in 1936 but set in the future, and starts out with a cross-Atlantic flight on a dirigible (!) which upon landing, turns out that some anomaly has caused most humans to have vanished. Only people who were above a certain altitude survived, and when they returned to Earth, must rebuild a society. It turns dark rather quickly and things don’t look good for the remaining women. It’s a very weird novel and totally unlike the rest of her other books.