G. E. Trevelyan

I write this piece with a mixture of sadness and disappointment. Sadness because this is the last novel by the remarkable G. E. Trevelyan I have to write about. And disappointment because A War Without a Hero is not a book I would recommend to anyone not interested in becoming a G. E. Trevelyan completist.

Over the last year and a half, I have tracked down, either purchased (usually at greater expense that I’m used to) or copied (thanks to the British Library), read, and written about all eight novels that Trevelyan wrote between 1932 and 1939. And I’ve become convinced that her utter absence from any history or study of the English novel between the two wars has nothing to do with her merit or significance as a writer and everything to do with the tendency of literary academics to stick to well-travelled paths. I’ve contacted several dozen researchers specializing in this period over the last year and in every case had the same responses: ignorance (“Who? Never heard of her.”) and uninterest (“Good luck with your research. Goodbye.”).

G. E. Trevelyan, perhaps more than any writer of the generation that came after Virginia Woolf, followed Woolf’s advice in “A Room of One’s Own.” An only child whose father’s occupation on census forms is always listed as “independent means,” she came down from Oxford, found herself a flat in Kensington and went to work writing novels. Though she once said that she went through three drafts of every novel, she managed to produce eight in the space of as many years and in each case, to produce something that was not in any way like the others. It may have been health problems that kept her from developing a wider circle of connections to the literary world: though she died from injuries sustained when a German bomb hit her building, her death certificate also mentions that she suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis. She didn’t review other people’s books, didn’t get her photo taken at other people’s parties, didn’t travel much, didn’t lose herself to drink, sex, or politics. She sat in her room and wrote.

And took enormous creative risks. If she took anything from the example of Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, it was to commit fully to her artistic vision and hold nothing back in trying to realize it. In some cases — Appius and Virginia (1932); As It Was in the Beginning (1934); Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937); and William’s Wife — she succeeded. In others — Hot-House (1933); Theme with Variations; and Trance by Appointment — her experimentation had mixed results. And in the case of A War Without a Hero, she failed.

If she failed, it was not due to half-heartedness. In A War Without a Hero, Trevelyan built upon the experience of writing As It Was in the Beginning, which takes place entirely in the mind of a woman in her dying days and uses the stream of consciousness approach developed by Woolf, Richardson, May Sinclair and others of the generation before hers. Where As It Was involves one character’s thoughts and perceptions, A War interweaves the streams from multiple sources.

Unfortunately, none of these sources is fully convincing — and the story itself implausible if not unbelievable. The book opens as Ann Cavan, a London woman with some money and artistic interests, approaches the tiny Channel Island where she’s decided to lay low while waiting for her divorce decree. In her late twenties or early thirties, attractive, well-dressed and used to good food and fine accommodations, she has for no obvious reason set upon taking a room in a rough cottage on a tiny island accessible from a slightly larger and more populated one only at low tide.

Four people live in the house: Mrs. Hymes, a widow, her sons Matthew and Joshua, fishermen, and Davey, who is blind. They live off the fishing and a few cows and pigs that roam freely around the island. The cottage has no electricity and no running water. The island is enveloped in fog much of the time, rough and rocky all of it. This is not B&B territory.

Once settled in her upstairs room at the cottage, Ann quickly realizes there is nothing to do. She’s not a reader, not a sketcher or painter or whatever her vague artistic inclination might actually manifest itself as. And the Hymes are not much for conversation. Matthew and Joshua spend most of their time out fishing and when on land communicate in grunts and monosyllables. Mrs. Hymes is bitter, tired, and contemptuous of the silly useless woman renting her room. Davey spends his days doing little besides sitting in a chair outside the cottage.

“This is utterly hopeless and sickening and impossible,” Ann thinks early on in the book and it’s this sense that Trevelyan is most effective in expressing. Things like listening for hours to water drip from the gutters:

Water ran into the butt almost continuously. Foghorns boomed without an interval through the darkness. Revolution, earthquake, half London wiped out: lot of difference it would make, she thought bitterly. The drips were joining up, drip drip drip drip and then the pause of a heart-beat. And drip again, and pause, and drip, and drip drip dri-i-p, and a thin, trickling stream.

This is not fertile ground from which any vibrant drama is likely to spring … and it doesn’t. Ann convinces herself that Davey is a prisoner of his family’s ignorance and arranges to take him to London to see if a Harley Street specialist can restore his sight. Once Davey can see, Ann then decides the two of them will marry and break free of Mrs. Hymes’ tyranny.

But then they return to the island and make themselves at home in that upper bedroom. Able to see, Davey is transformed. Once a bore, he’s now a brute. Mrs. Hymes takes revenge by carrying out her own transformation, turning Ann from a woman of the world and into a slave:

Mrs. Hymes slapped their food on the table; she pinched her mouth. And him that’s been brought up so nice. Never let to get into no rough ways. She saw Annie standing, looking at him. “What you standing there for?” Gaping at him that you’ve done your best to drag him down and down. Done your best you have, and aren’t fit to black his boots. “Get out and shut up the chickens.”

And so it goes. Life on the island is nasty, brutish, and endless. Everything is painted in shades of grey. There is a lot of staring and hopelessness. A War Without a Hero is like the written equivalent of a bad art film. Fin.

Reviews in the Thirties tended to run under 300 words and offer little insight into a book, but in the case of A War Without a Hero, the reviewers took its measure with deadly accuracy:

• A. G. Macdonell, The Bystander:

It is very seldom that a true-blue, hard-boiled reviewer, born and bred in the trade — a tough baby, in fact — reads a book that makes him want to go and shoot himself. But if ever a book was liable to induce insanity, melancholia, tendencies towards suicide, inflammation of the eyes, and general Dostoievsky-complex, it is A War Without a Hero by Miss G. E. Trevelyan. Consider the plot for yourselves. Just run your eye over it and let me know by post-card, duly stamped, whether you think it is a reasonably likely one. An artistically-minded lady wants to be divorced from her husband. During the six-months time-lag she decides to go to a remote Channel Island, and there she lodges with a fearful family of illiterate yokels. One of them, David, a lad of twenty, is blind, and the artistic lady decides to marry him. This she does. Her life is then devoted to looking after this fiendishly dull, semi-witted youth and to washing up dishes and scrubbing floors in mid-Channel. I ask you. The real trouble about the book is that the moment the arty lady decides to marry the blind youth, all interest vanishes. You simply cannot believe that such a thing is possible, and the moment you find yourself doubting the possibility of a plot you find yourself either bored to tears, as with Miss Trevelyan, or excited beyond works, as with the late Mr. Edgar Wallace.

• Peter Quennell, The New Statesman:

A War Without a Hero is an intelligent book, but not very readable. Miss Trevelyan certainly knows how to write; but I wish that she did not mistake abruptness for vividness, and that her characters’ thoughts were not perpetually cropping up in broken bits and pieces of interior monologue scattered broadcast all over the printed text. Her story would be twice as impressive if it were half as long. Incidentally, the complete aimlessness of the central character — a young woman of means who marries the blind boy she discovers on an imaginary Channel Island — lends a sort of reflected aimlessness to the whole narrative…. After almost four hundred gloomy, capable and unsparing pages, the reader’s spirits have declined to their lowest ebb.

• The Observer:

If Dostoievsky had laid a wager that he could write an even gloomier book than The Brothers Karamazov, and if, while trying to win the wager, he had been attacked by biliousness, gout, arthritis, and neuralgia, and if he had lost all his money, and if he had been sent back to Sideria, he might well have written A War Without a Hero. And if he had, he would undoubtedly have won his bet hands down.

• Leonora Eyles, Times Literary Supplement:

In each of her previous books Miss G. E. Trevelyan used her talent to delve into morbidity to such a degrees that they fascinated while repelling the reader. In her latest novel, A War Without a Hero, the same talent for atmosphere is there, but we get very little of the compassion and humanity that lightened the others. And the story is so incredible — even more incredible than that of the woman and the ape [Appius and Virginia] — that it sometimes tasks the reader to go on with it…. In this book, as in the others, the reader gets a sense of unendurable spiritual claustrophobia, a sense of life lived in unutterable degradation of mind and body from which there is no escape. The style is very difficult; sometimes it becomes so allusive as to be hardly comprehensible. Once again Miss Trevelyan has given us an insight into things that seem to find their real place in a psychiatrists’s notebook.

• Francis Iles, The Daily Telegraph:

In A War Without a Hero, Miss G. E. Trevelyan set herself a difficult task: to depict a marriage between a lady and an oaf, and the slow deterioration of the lady to the oaf’s level. The task was too difficult; for never for an instant does the book carry conviction…. None of this will do. Ann, as she is first shown to us, would (a) never have married the young oaf, (b) if she had done so, would never have stayed with him, to be buffeted and bullied. There is a D. H. Lawrence vague fog over it all, in which ideas become personified and actions stultified because real human character is disregarded.

As an experiment in fictional technique, A War Without a Hero is a failure. As a book … well, it’s waiting there in the British Library and a few others around the world for the next time a Trevelyan completist comes along.

A War Without a Hero, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Martin Secker, 1935

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.

Hot-House, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Martin Secker, 1933

I’m not sure what the point of this post is. There are seven copies of this book worldwide listed in WorldCat.org. There are none available for sale. If you want to read it, your best bet is to get a copy of amateurish scan I made of the British Library’s copy. There are few enough people who even read these posts in the first place. Given those odds, Lord knows whether anyone else will ever read Trance by Appointment.

Publishers seemed interested in publishing what she wrote. Martin Secker published her first four books; Victor Gollancz her next three; George Harrap this last one. She got consistently favorable reviews, but perhaps it was more the cachet of the Trevelyan name (G. M., G. O., R. C., Sir Charles, et al.) that attracted them. In any case, none of them ever went to a second printing, let alone a reissue. I still have to get to the archives to track down the contractual correspondence, but the dearth of copies of any of her books today certainly suggests that no one was queuing up to reserve the latest G. E. Trevelyan novel at their local Boots Book Lover’s Library.

And so, Gertrude went out of her flat on Lansdowne Road on a stretcher in early October 1940 and disappeared. The Times and a few other papers published a few lines when she died of her injuries in early 1941 and that was it. She was buried in the cemetery up the road from her parents’ home in Bath, and from what I’ve seen in terms of coverage in English literary history and criticism, they might as well have buried all of her books with her. There is nothing. I’ve gone through all the surveys of the 20th century British novel they have here in the UEA library: nothing. I went through the biographies of her contemporaries (Bowen, Greene, Orwell, Waugh, Woolf, etc.) looking for mentions of her name: nothing. The one trace is in Barbara Pym’s A Very Private Eye: a single entry, dated 4 September 1933. “Reading Gertrude Trevelyan’s novel Hot-House. I desperately want to write an Oxford novel – but I must see first that my emotions are simmered down fairly well.” I’ve been checking with a number of academics specializing in British women novelists of the mid-20th century — which is something close to a minor industry — and get the email equivalent of blank stares. Not only is her work lost, but no one else appears to be looking for it.

This is not entirely true. Just last year, the academic publisher Routledge reissued the very novel Barbara Pym got all excited over: Hot-House. Not that you’d know by anything that Routledge’s website will tell you. What you have to look for is this gripping title: Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II. This is one of a series of novels and other narratives of university life — meaning Oxford and Cambridge — edited by Dr. Anna Bogen. The series includes Neapolitan Ice (1928) by Renée Haynes (a classmate of Gertrude’s at Lady Margaret Hall), Rosy-Fingered Dawn (1934) by Rose Marie Hodgson, and other hard-to-find titles — companion texts to Bogen’s 2015 study, Women’s University Fiction, 1880–1945 (which doesn’t actually mention Trevelyan, by the way). The way in which Routledge has packaged and marketed these books is execrable — and I’m being as polite as I can. There are only two things in Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II: Hot-House and a 10-page introduction by Bogen. And this is what the title page says:

To be fair, if you click on the “Contents” tab of the Routledge page for Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II, Volume II, you will see the following: “Table of Contents: Volume 2. Hot-House (1933), Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan.” So, it’s not like Routledge is denying they’re reissued Hot-House: they just not particularly interested in telling anyone. If you’re dying to read it, by the way, be aware that the hardback edition will cost you £110.00, which may be why UEA doesn’t own a copy.

All of which is a tediously long preface to a discussion of Gertrude Trevelyan’s last and easiest rarest novel, Trance by Appointment. Trance tells a simple and sad story. Jean, the middle daughter of a working-class London family, is a psychic. As she grows, her family comes to recognize this talent and introduce her to Madame Eva, who runs a fortune-telling business from a basement flat in Bayswater. Eva, who encourages Jean to develop her skills, then introduces her to “the Professor,” Norman Mitch, an astrologer, who sees the commercial possibilities of a “trance by appointment” business run in a better part of town. In some ways, from this point forward the story will be familiar to anyone who’s read Tolstoy’s Kholstomer, usually translated as “Strider: The Story of a Horse” — or, if you’ve read Marx, the story of labor in the hands of capitalism. The resource is used up in a relentless quest for profit, then tossed aside in contempt.

In this case, the means of production are a little unusual. Trevelyan tells much of the story through Jean’s perspective, which means that though she has visions as early as when she’s strapped in a stroller and being wheeled along the street by her sister Joyce, it takes her a while to understand what’s happening.

“Where does it come from, Mum?”
“What, lovey?”
“The trees and things that come when it’s dark. When you lie and look hard, but you have to keep still as still or it goes. And the bubbles that’s all different colours and jumps about, where does it come from, Mum?”
“Stuff and nonsense. Is my water boiling yet?”

Gradually, the family comes to recognize that Jean has “the Sight,” but her mother caution, “It’s a precious gift to them that can keep their tongue still, but no good ever come to them that didn’t. You keep it quiet, my dearie, to yourself.” Jean tries at first to fit into the normal workday world, taking a job selling cigarettes from a little stand in the nearby Underground station. But the energy that bombards her from the thousands of souls that pass her every hour overwhelms her and she collapses. Mum takes Jean to Madame Eva, who’s happy to have “a nice, quiet, refined sort of girl to ‘elp her in the house and learn the business.”

And “Jean did love it, being at Madame Eva’s”: Eva takes the girl under her wing, shows her how to recognize the signs in a client’s expression, clothing, manners, and language that Eva relies on to produce the appearance of clairvoyance. “Remember this, though,” she advises, “everyone wants money, it doesn’t matter how much they’ve got. That’s always a safe one.” Fascinated by Eva’s use of the crystal ball, Jean reveals her ability to fall into a trance and see visions, and Eva begins to organize seances: rare occasions for which a much higher fee can be demanded.

This in turn attracts the attention of Eva’s friend, the astrologer. Trevelyan is a little too eager to let us know he’s not to be trusted: “Mr. Mitch was a bit fat, with a white face, and his hair was curly except that he oiled it down, and was starting to go bald on top, he brushed it across.” His manners are well-oiled, too — taking Jean’s hand, stroking it, murmuring, “My dear lady.” Soon, he’s talked Jean into marriage and sets her up in a West End studio — to “Get you further with the clee-an-tale.” He gives up reading the stars “to manage for Jean” and sets her on a schedule of frequent seances. He convinces Jean that the visions are communications from the dead — specifically his dear departed little sister, Daisy — and soon Jean imagines Daisy calling to her: “Jee-een, I want to talk to you, Jee-een.” Unfortunately for Norman’s plans, he also sleeps with his new wife, and with the predictable results. Two of them, in fact. And when Jean resists strapping on the seance harness again after the second child, Norman takes his anger out on her. “You can thank your Mum for that,” he snaps at his son after slapping Jean around. Although Jean continues to give readings — reluctantly, with ever greater hesitation, ever less appetite to fight or even care about her fee — Norman all but abandons her to strike out on his own again.

Most reviews of Trance by Appointment offered moderate praise. Edwin Muir, writing in The Listener, called the book “a sordid, pitiable little story, told with that cruel attention to detail which characterises Miss Trevelyan’s art.” Leonora Eyles, her most consistent advocate among critics, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, “Once again Miss Trevelyan gives us an insight into human minds that is quite uncanny, and her Jean, though such an unusual character, is completely convincing.” The New Statesman’s John Mair, on the other hand, thought Trevelyan had wasted her time — and his: “Apart from her mediumistic talents Jean is a complete nonentity, and no writer could present her otherwise. A good novelist would never have made the attempt.”

I truly did not enjoy Trance by Appointment. It is a grim story, a story of a soul being ground down by an abusive husband and the relentless pressure to pay the rent and put food on the table. I found myself, like Jean, taking pleasure from the littlest things — yellow flower petals floating in a blue bowl or the solid, if at times ineffectual, goodness of Madame Eva.

But my respect for Gertrude Trevelyan’s talent and courage as a writer grew as it has with every one of her books I’ve read. This was a woman who grew up in a family with a prestigious name and a modest but comfortable fortune. She went to university when a tiny fraction of women did. She didn’t go out of her way to establish herself with her contemporaries or to seek celebrity. And in Trance by Appointment, as she did in her two previous books, William’s Wife and Theme with Variations, she collected material by listening, by taking in talk and attitudes and expressions while walking through the city, while riding on the bus or Underground, while standing in queues or waiting in shops, and then returned to her room in Kensington and put herself deeply, intently into a mind, a situation, a life completely different from hers.

Trevelyan’s Jean is not a specimen pinned to a piece of cardboard for disinterested examination by an omniscient narrator. She tells Jean’s story as if Jean’s sister, or Madame Eva, or Jean’s neighbor were trying to tell it, aided occasionally by Jean’s own awkward, imprecise attempts to explain what she sees. Maybe John Mair was partly right, that Jean’s is “an aimless and random mind.” Evidence of Jean’s exercise of free will are rare (but not wholly absent). But managing to tell this woman’s story and keep it utterly convincing, utterly coherent for over 260 pages is no small accomplishment as a writer. Name one other contemporary of Trevelyan — male or female — who took this kind of risk, who undertook this level of experimentation.

This is a picture of Trevelyan taken in 1933 to celebrate the publication of Red Rags: Essays of Hate from Oxford, a collection to which she contributed an essay attacking the complacency of “Garden Cities,” the new suburbs around London. Who would guess that the smallest person in the group, the one woman in the photo, would be capable of leaps of imagination that would put all the men around her to shame?

Trance by Appointment, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: George G. Harrap & Company, Ltd., 1939

The anonymous TLS reviewer described G. E. Trevelyan’s third novel, As It Was in the Beginning (1934) as “almost unreadable in its intensity.” Thumbing through the book after getting it in the mail last month, I could see that was an apt assessment, and somewhat dreaded the level of attention I would have to devote to it.

Thank God for airplanes. I have by now developed a reliable regime in which I strap myself into the seat and strap myself into a book and fairly successfully tune out the rest of the world for however long the flight takes. And so I took As It Was in the Beginning with me on a short work trip to Turkey this week. It proved a wise decision, particularly when we sat on the tarmac in Istanbul for several hours waiting for some mechanical work.

As It Was in the Beginning takes place entirely in the mind of Millicent — Lady Chesborough, widow of Lord Harold — as she lies in a nursing home bed in the last days before her death from the effects of a stroke. Childless, her only visitor is one of her late husband’s nieces. Nurses come in and go out, always adjusting her sheets, lifting her numb left arm as they do. Her thoughts dwell on Phil, the young man she took as a lover, who left her not long before.

This is a tour-de-force of stream of consciousness writing and construction. As Millicent lies in bed flowing in and out of consciousness, she revisits repeatedly certain moments from her life, rerunning these memories as one sometimes does in the same way as a bit of song gets caught in the head. The servant coming to her in the garden of the house at Chesborough, which she had turned into a rehabilitation hospital for wounded soldiers, with a small orange envelope bearing the message that Harold had been killed on the Western Front. Her sense of dread at that sight, combined with her fear that the young man she was tending to would sense her distress. Phil’s approaching her in the lounge of the hotel in Brighton where they met: if there hadn’t been that shelf under the table that forced her to turn herself sideways, facing the entrance, would they not have met?

At the same time, though, Trevelyan gradually and almost imperceptibly steps Millicent back through her life. She traces her affair with Phil from his leaving in anger over her refusal to purchase a new automobile to their road trips in his first one, their nights out in London as she scanned the faces in clubs and restaurants, wondering who took her for an old fool, to their first meeting there in Brighton. And though her longing for Phil and her self-recriminations — both for losing him and giving in to his dubious romancing — remain constants in her thoughts, we see her in the first years as a widow, in the claustrophobic world of Chesborough, where “I always felt I was something very small cowering inside a figure labelled The Squire’s Wife.” She leaves for London, where she can enjoy the freedom of anonymity:

It was like a tonic, sometimes, to stroll along the High Street in the sunshine and hardly be glanced at. And in a ‘bus one person is very much like another. I remember being grateful, even, to a ‘bus conductor, when he punched a ticket and pushed it at me, looking the other way. Just the right amount of notice. One must have a ticket: one exists. But not expected to be anything.

This view of life as older woman in London contrasts with that of the spinster in her first novel, Appius and Virginia: “Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the ‘bus … and the half compassionate, half contemptuous had of the conductor, grimy and none too gentle, as she clambers down the swaying steps on to the sliding pavement.”

But unlike Virginia Hutton, who sought ferociously to imprint her will upon another being, Millicent struggles throughout her life for a sense of identity. Much of the time, she feels herself “there, but not in the body: watching it from the outside and feeling responsible for it, without having it firmly in hand. Having to creep back in to pull the strings.” Looking at herself in a mirror as a newlywed, she thinks, “I’m much too small for this huge room…. Harold ought to have married somebody imposing.”

The one place she feels most at peace is in a London cinema, where she can be lose all sense of herself:

People aren’t people, they haven’t any faces. And all quite quiet, looking at the screen. They’ve left their anxieties outside in the street, in that big, glaring porch with the big posters. They’ve chained them up. Anxieties, waiting and hissing outside.

So many people. That’s why they come here you know. In here they needn’t be people. It’s dark in here, it’s dark in my room, I like my room. And I’m not separate. I don’t think I am, I’m part of the darkness, and the people who aren’t people. All part of the darkness.

I’m like anyone else. All alike and nothing, staring at the screen.

Some reasons why Millicent has such a fragile sense of self become clear as we go back into her youth and childhood. The only child of a country doctor, her main playmates are Dick and Hilda, children of the local Lord, who make it clear her invitations are at their bidding. Her first brush at romance ends before it even begins, with the young man barely aware of her presence. Her parents have little time to spend with her. Her tutor, Miss Cresset, has little patience for her needs: “Tell me a story.” “You’re old enough to tell them to yourself.” Only her Nanny, open and affectionate, notices the strange absence in Millicent’s life:

“It’s nice when there’s nobody here.”

“Why, there never is anybody here, is there? You’re a funny little thing. Don’t you want to have other little girls and boys to play with?”

“There’s only Dick and Hilda.”

“Well, don’t you want to have them?”

“No.”

And even earlier: “Nanny, why am I inside this?” “Inside what?” “Arms and legs and things. Why am I inside it? It’s nasty.” And on to her earliest sensations: “And want and full and nothing, and want and warm and nothing. And want and want and want and want. Alone and alone and alone.” Her only sense of security comes at the very beginning: “Back, back: sheltering darkness and safe, yielding warmth…. Strong, perpetual beat of the dark.”

I found Trevelyan’s handling of the final rush back through infancy, through birth, back to the womb surprisingly moving. She manages to convey quite effectively how enormous and intimidating the world can seem to a little thing, particularly without a strong maternal presence, without any base from which to look out at the world. As Millicent nears her birth, she also nears her death and her thoughts reach out in desperation for her lost lover, Phil. You know exactly where this story is going, yet Trevelyan makes it intense and unfamiliar.

One could see As It Was in the Beginning as something of a set piece, the kind of assignment a writer might give herself to test and hone her skills. But this is far more than that. Trevelyan builds a powerful sense of a woman whose life was a constant struggle to reassure herself of her own identity — a struggle she often lost. Considering that she did it within the narrow confines of a single room in a nursing home and in the span of perhaps a week or less, it’s a bravura performance. Having read five of Trevelyan’s novel now, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that she was the only English woman writer of her generation to pick up Virginia Woolf’s baton and run with it. And sadly, due to injuries suffered in a Blitz raid on London, she died barely a month before Woolf at the early age of 37 and was quickly and utterly forgotten. The time for her rightful recognition is long overdue.

Reviews

• Times Literary Supplement, 24 May 1934

Once again Miss Trevelyan has used her gifts of psychological insight and imagination to produce, in As It Was in the Beginning, a work of striking talent. And once again, as in Appius and Virginia and Hot House, she has written a book which is almost unreadable in its intensity, but which compels one to go on reading in spite of almost physical discomfort, by the admiration one feels for the author’s ingenuity and her uncanny insight into human beings….

Miss Trevelyan has here chosen a more everyday type of character than she did in the other two, but even so she has not yet produced anything universal: the agonies, the twists, the cravings of futile and hapless people still obsess her; she has a genius for suffering and such power in describing it that the reader feels worn out after a few chapters. Should Miss Trevelyan ever write of beauty and kindliness, using for purposes of stimulation the powers which she now employs to sear and suffocate her readers, it is hard to set limits to what she might achieve.

• Vernon Fane, “The Book World,” The Sphere, 2 June 1934

“Technically interesting” is the description of Miss G. E. Trevelyan’s As It Was in the Beginning (Seeker. 7s. 6d.). Life is laid bare by comments and reveries and the sustained delusions which precede death.” There is a dearth of verbs an abundance of full stops a fumbling at word patterns. Technical fiddlesticks Miss Trevelyan is suffering from an overdose of Gertrude Stein.

• Sheffield Independent, 21 May 1934

As her previous novels (Appius and Virginia and Hot House) showed, Miss G. E. Trevelyan cannot be classed as a conventional novelist, but the strange technique she has used in her latest book, As It Was in the Beginning, though extremely interesting, proves rather irritating. The book is a mass of comments by a woman of fifty who is dying in a nursing home. These comments, reveries and delusions cover her whole life, gradually working back to her birth.

• Aberdeen Press and Journal, 30 May 1934

To translate into unemotional print the disjointed memories of a nursing home patient re-living the past before “death’s kiss” is a technical feat of daring, for another’s experiences presented in this form can be so easily boring. The fact that Miss Trevelyan succeeds. remarkably well in sustaining interest is at once a tribute to her skill and the pathos of her tale, the tale of a woman grown too old for love, her passion for a, man younger than herself, desperate, vain resistance of the attacks of old age, and the shock of his ultimate desertion. Here is all the tragedy of ari ageing woman unwilling to give up what she never had in youth. Memories, memories, an unhappy marriage, a boy and girl fruitless friendship, childhood (particular effective word-building) birth, and birth and death unite — “light and blinding space, blank and boundless and without shadow: stark unending light.”

• The Tatler, 13 June 1934

… if you are fond of pointing out to people in distress that we all must like of the beds of our own making, then Miss G. E. Trevelyan’s new novel, As It Was in the Beginning, is not for you. You will find in her a ruthless destroyer of that optimism which, in reality, is either a desire to be left emotionally undisturbed, or a pretty shelving of all life’s ugliness and pain on God’s understanding of what is best for us after all…. Not a pleasant story, nor a happy one.

• Northern Whig and Belfast Post, 21 July 1934

The cleverness of it is indisputable, it is also effective in passages, yet one cannot agree that this method has perceptible advantages over that adhered to by most of the writers of fiction.

As It Was in the Beginning, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Martin Secker, 1934

William’s Wife is the natural history of a bag lady. Starting from the day of Jane Atkins’s wedding to grocer William Chirp, a widower in his late fifties, G. E. Trevelyan takes us step by step through her metamorphosis from an ordinary young woman in service (a good position, more of a lady’s companion) to a queer figure haunting the streets of London, bag in arm, scavenging for food and firewood.

In Jane’s case, the process is triggered by William’s tight-lipped parsimonious complacency and intolerance, but eventually becomes self-propelled. It all starts with a broken window cord: “‘The window cord’s gone, upstairs,’ she told William, watching him chip warily at the gaping mutton leg. ‘Eh? Ah?'” A week later, she raises the subject again:

“How about that window cord,” she said in a low, Sunday voice, straight forward into her collar. “Did you tell someone about it?”

“Cord? Eh?” He shut the gate behind them and they went on around the drive, still talking in low voices in case one of the neighbours should hear, or someone in the road.

“Yes,” she said. “What I told you. It’s gone in the lower sash.”

“Don’t want to open the lower sash.” He fitted his key in the door. “That don’t matter.”

Then there is the matter of her clothes. Two years after the wedding, Jane gingerly suggests that the few dresses that made up her trousseau are growing shabby:

And he wasn’t even looking round. Pointing with his pipe. “Waste not, want not.”

“I know, William, but it’s the best part of two years and….”

“Save something for a rainy day.”

He drew at his pipe for some minutes, then he looked round at her. “My poor wife….” He cleared his throat. “My first wife didn’t go spending on new gowns, not once in ten, no, fifteen years.” He put the pipe in his mouth and turned back to the fire.

Jane does have some small sum of her own, some twenty pounds saved from her wages. But this money now belongs to William, of course. Makes no difference to him: it’s all wastage.

And so Jane begins a slow, quiet campaign of guerrilla warfare, saving a few pennies from her weekly grocery allowance. It must be a small amount, for William carefully totals the bills. And then what she does accumulate must be spent with even greater care, as he would notice anything new. She resorts to having near-copies made of her old dresses.

Then William announces one day that he’s sold the shop and retiring. Now it is not just the money given for groceries that Jane has to safeguard, but her time as well. Each Tuesday, William stands at the door as she returns, questioning any deviation from her normal forty-five minutes. And once a day at four, if it’s not too wet, he goes out for a walk: “If she slipped upstairs at once she had half an hour for certain, if it didn’t come to rain, to do any little thing she wanted: to sew a bit of new frilling on a collar without him asking what she was doing, or turn out a drawer, or just stand, drumming on the window, and look out at the road….

It was the only bit of pleasure she got.

Even the outbreak of the Great War doesn’t alter William’s steadfast routine or his selfishness. Jane takes up knitting for the soldiers, which gives her the gift of an extra hour out of the house each week, but finds it hard to convince William to send a parcel to his son-in-law serving at the front:

“Socks, eh?” And then he began to chuckle. “He doesn’t want any socks. What does he want with socks? Socks? He’d smoke them!” He burst into a loud chuckle, knocking his pipe on the bar of the grate.

Smoke-them. Hu. Hu. Smoke-them.

Then one day, William catches a cold and within weeks is gone. And now we notice how much of him has infiltrated Jane’s thinking:

She saw Mrs. Peat out and shut the door after her and put up the chain. And that was the last, she hoped. Didn’t want any more coming round to help, poking their noses in, for that was all it meant. Minnie Hallett would have come there to sleep fast enough for the asking, and she wasn’t the only one either. Sooner be without: doing nothing but make work and there was enough to do as it was. Some might like it, but she didn’t. At a time like that you wanted to be quiet to yourself. Whoever would have thought.

Left with an annuity of two hundred pounds, Jane is free to buy new furniture for the house, to have someone in for repairs, to buy some new clothes. Instead, she decides the best way to be quiet to herself is to sell the house and move to something smaller and newer in a different town, closer to London. And to rent: “It made you shudder to think your money might be tied up in property like that, and no way to get at it.”

But she finds it harder to get rid of William’s old Victorian furniture. It seems such a shame: “good solid furniture that had years of wear in it yet, and twice the quality of what you could buy new: nasty rubbishy stuff, a lot of it, painted up to sell, and no wear or value in it.” And her new neighbors too forward, the new town less attractive than it seemed at first. She moves. And moves again. And again.

Each move takes her to a smaller space, but Jane just stacks up her furniture. Finally, she is living in a dank basement on a busy street, a place of too little account for anyone to notice. Which is fine with her: fewer eyes spying in and coveting her things. But even this is not enough, so she buys a large black shopping bag and begins to fill it with her best gloves and newest pair of stockings. Plus her umbrella and good scarf. And the spoons and forks. And the sack with her important papers. Can’t afford to have someone breaking in and taking them.

And she sets out each day to spot the very cheapest produce and meat. Shocked when she first comes across a stall selling odd bits of meat as cat food, she finds herself wandering in. “Not that that didn’t look good enough very often, as if anyone could have eaten it.” When a potato rolls off a greengrocer’s cart and lands at her feet, she picks up. “Waste not, want not, as my poor husband used to say.”

We experience the entirety of William’s Wife through Jane’s eyes, so we are slow to recognize her metamorphosis into a suspicious, miserly, and tight-lipped old woman until the process is irreversible. The ability of Oxford-educated Trevelyan to slip inside the mind, culture, and language of a woman of a different age and class is remarkable and utterly convincing. As with Theme with Variations, I found it as riveting as watching a car crash — or, in this case, a human crash. When I set the book down, I felt as if all the air has been sucked from my lungs. William’s Wife is a chapter of the human comedy that would have made Balzac proud.

William’s Wife, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1938

After reading G. E. (Gertrude Eileen, for the record) Trevelyan’s fascinating Appius and Virginia back in September, I became intrigued to learn more about her life and work.

And soon discovered there really wasn’t much — at least within the confines of the Internet — to be discovered. She was born in Bath, grew up in Reading, attended Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, was the first woman to win the Newdigate Prize for poetry, moved to London, pursued a career as a writer, was injured in the Blitz in October 1940 and died four months later.

She wrote eight novels in the space of seven years, all apparently quite different in subject and approach. Of these, only one — her second novel, Hot-House (1933), based on her Oxford experience — is in print. Not that you’d know it. The book was reissued in 2017 with the exciting title, Women’s University Narratives, 1890-1945, Part II: Volume II, part of a series edited by Anna Bogen. Of the rest, less than twenty used copies are available for sale, most of them going for over $100. Her last book, Trance By Appointment (1939), is not to be found outside a dozen libraries scattered around the world. Even the book covered here, Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937), no copies available for sale, so I must include a link to its WorldCat.org listing.

I hate to use blurb-speak, but if I had to sum up Two Thousand Million Man-Power in one line, it would be “John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. meets Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road in London between the world wars.” The book is both about how a man and woman — in this case, Katherine, a school teacher, and Robert, a chemist (as in scientist, not pharmacist) — meet, share their dreams, then watch as those dreams are slowly eroded by the relentless friction of everyday life. And it’s about the swirl of events going on in the world around them, many of which make not the slightest impact, a few of which slam into them like a car spun out of control.

The Dos Passos connection comes from Trevelyan’s frequent use of a motif resembling the “Newsreel” feature in U.S.A., the last volume of which appeared the year before Two Thousand Million Man-Power was published. Trevelyan peppers her text with snatches of news of the world, using the technique almost like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. Thus, when Katherine suggests she and Robert have a child because “We could afford it now” and “Things are improving everywhere,” the news provides the evidence:

The successful trials of R.100 were completed. A Dutch scientist was working out a scheme for the production of artificial rain. A Beam wireless service was opened between England and Japan. A pilot flew over six thousand miles of African jungle to carry anti-hydrophobia serum to a missionary. Agricultural machines in France were grading and marking eggs at the rate of a hundred and twenty a minute. Escalators were speeding up, the biggest building in the Empire was in course of construction at Olympia, Katherine and Robert were in their white-enamelled kitchen one Sunday afternoon, washing the tea-things in instantaneous hot water and hanging them to dry in an electrically heated rack.

Like Yates’ Frank and April Wheeler, Robert and Katherine see themselves as superior to most of their neighbors and co-workers — at least at first. They meet in a League of Nations debate (Katherine envisions the League’s headquarters as a glowing “Temple of Justice” on the shores of Lake Geneva). Having been dissuaded by his father from pursuing an academic career, Robert works in the lab of the Cupid Cosmetics Company Ltd. but labors away in his room at night, trying to discover “the precise mathematical formula for the nature of Time.” Katherine disdains the mundane worries of her fellow teachers (rumors the London City Council will let married teachers go) and lovingly darns Robert’s socks at night, knowing he’s engaged in an effort of profound significance.

As they become more deeply involved, though, that business of married teachers becomes more relevant. Katherine cannot bring a man to her room. Robert’s landlady keeps close track of the frequency and duration of Katherine’s visits. They spend endless hours walking up and down along the Thames. Trevelyan shows a keen awareness of how public and private mores and spaces conspired against single people:

Every twenty yards or so, where a tree overhung the pavement, or at the farthest point between two street lamps, they passed a couple pressed against the wall or pushed into a gateway. Some of the couples were speaking in low voices and some were quite quiet. As she passed them Katherine would draw away from Robert, just a little and without meaning to: just a very slightly wider strip of pavement between them. He came near again, not noticing. “They’re like us,” he said. “Nowhere to go.”

They marry eventually — secretly at first, to avoid losing their rooms and Katherine losing her job. But Robert invents a new formula for a make-up remover and the royalties allow them to rent a small house in the suburbs, complete with hired furniture, wireless, and vacuum cleaner. Of course, being out in the suburbs has its disadvantages, so soon they buy a car on installment as well.

And if you know anything about 20th century history, you know what comes next:

In the last week of September the bank rate rose to six per cent; the Stock Exchange closed for two days; England went off the gold standard. On the first of October Robert lost his job.

Robert joins the army of unemployed, and one by one the appliances, then the car, and finally the house go away and they find themselves trapped together in a dismal pair of rooms, with nothing to do but scour the job notices, write ever-more-desperate letters of application, and grow more frustrated with each other. Katherine takes a job at a sad girls school run out of a Bayswater house and allows her contempt for Robert’s failures to show more openly. Each day he brushes off his one last threadbare suit and heads into the city with a few pence in his pocket; each day he comes home defeated.

He knew he had to get a job, because of Kath. Kath couldn’t go on, he couldn’t go on letting Kath. He plodded along with his eyes on the windows, hair-cut and small tailors, Apprentice wanted, Smart Lad to learn. He knew there was a job somewhere, and he had to find it. He turned a corner and came face to face across the street with a slab of house-high hoardings, Bovo for Bonny Bairns, and a grinning crane-top in a gap between roofs. He knew suddenly with certainty that he would never get a job. He stopped short and read it over, Bovo for Bonny Bairns. It meant nothing to him and the crane meant nothing, and it meant nothing that a dingy house or two had been pulled down and hoardings were up house-high along the site. But when he had first seen the five-foot blue letters on the red ground, and the slanting crane-head and a yard or so of tiles on the next roof, he had known he would never get a job.

It takes sixteen months for Robert to find a job, by which point he hovers just short of suicide. Trevelyan’s depiction of the grim ordeal of unemployment rivals anything in the first half of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. And Trevelyan shares Orwell’s cynical assessment of capitalism’s effects on the individual. “They might always have been like that, he a coward and she not really caring about anything, but they hadn’t known it,” Robert thinks. “That was what the machine had done to them, shown them one another. Each had seen the other as something the machine didn’t want.”

It would be interesting to take a closer look at the parallels between Trevelyan’s work and Orwell’s. The powers of capitalism — abetted by the opium of consumerism — depicted in Two Thousand Million Man-Power are every bit as relentless and dehumanizing as anything in Nineteen Eighty-Four. When their fortunes take a turn again for the better, Katherine grows harder and colder (her hair in “tight, metallic waves”), like a well-tempered piece of machinery. Robert, on the other hand, edges closer and closer to insanity:

When he thinks about it, he can see the rims of his glasses, he tries to push the glasses further on so that he can’t see the rims; he finds he can always see them; now he has once seen them he can’t stop seeing them: he is conscious of seeing everything through the small round portholes of his glasses, as if he were seeing it through the end of a tunnel; he can always see the frame edging the picture. It gets on his nerves, always seeing the rims: he blinks, and the blink becomes a habit; he frowns, and stretches his brown and frowns, trying to drag the frame further on.

In the end, his only way to survive is to surrender: “There’d been a time when he used to believe in things, and in Kath, and in himself, and now he didn’t believe in anything.”

I’m no expert in British literature, but it seems to me that Two Thousand Million Man-Power could well be seen as the closest counterpart to The Grapes of Wrath one could find among British novels of the Thirties. It carries a powerful punch in both social and psychological terms. It could easily bookend Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s social history of 1930s Britain, The Long Week-End — only the title would have to be changed to The Seemingly Endless Week. And it serves as another demonstration of the need to rescue G. E. Trevelyan’s work from the slough of neglect where it’s lain for the last eighty years.

Two Thousand Million Man-Power, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Victor Gollancz, 1937