Gertrude Trevelyan’s neglected 1938 novel William's Wife is the a story of a woman who uses her cunning and abilities (including the needlework skills she perfected as a domestic servant) to survive her marriage to a domineering and abusive husband. It was reissued in 2023 by Boiler House Press in the UK in a series called ‘Recovered Books’, which puts the spotlight on overlooked twentieth-century fiction. Among them are Trevelyan’s six novels which were widely reviewed and sold well in the 1930s before being allowed to go out of print in the 1940s.
The prize-winning author Alice Jolly has written the introduction for the reissue of William's Wife, and I'm honoured to have contributed the afterword, ‘Connecting Threads: Gertrude Trevelyan and Virginia Woolf’. I think it’s very good news that British and Irish women novelists from the interwar years are getting attention again, after being overlooked for so long by mainstream publishers (see this article in the London Review of Books).
Below is a link to my essay, published in two parts, and out from behind the paywall. I particularly enjoyed diving into the connections between Gertrude Trevelyan and Virginia Woolf, who was invited to give a lecture at Oxford University while Trevelyan was a student there.
This Monday, 8 July 2024, I’m giving a short lecture online about Woolf and her nephew Julian Bell for Literature Cambridge’s summer course on Woolf and Childhood. I’d be delighted if you joined us! For more information, and to sign up, follow the link here.
Everything here is so interesting, thank you! Can you tell me the painting that's used for the Woolf and Childhood course? I'm sorry I've got to it late, it sounds fabulous.
Wonderful. And thank you for re-sharing your essay on Woolf and Trevelyan.