Connecting threads (2)

Gertrude Trevelyan and Virginia Woolf in London

This is Part Two of my afterword for the recent reissue of Gertrude Trevelyan’s 1938 masterpiece, William’s Wife (BoilerHouse Press, 2023). It is republished here with the kind permission of the editors. This second part is about Trevelyan’s career after she left Oxford, and how her experiences informed her six powerful, ambitious and critically acclaimed novels. She mostly kept herself apart from the Bloomsbury set in London, but it’s likely that Virginia Woolf’s words on modern fiction inspired her. You can read more about this in Part One:

Connecting threads (1)

Gertrude Trevelyan in the 1920s

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After Oxford

After completing her studies at Oxford, given her family background, connections and literary promise, Gertrude Trevelyan could easily have chosen to live a comfortable life on her inherited money. Like Woolf, she had at least five hundred a year but — also like Woolf — she valued her ability to earn her own money and live as unconventionally as she wished. In 1927 Trevelyan moved to London and worked as a private tutor for a few years, while also publishing poems in the Nineteenth-Century Magazine and writing articles for literary journals.[1] She turned down the offer of a prestigious research fellowship at Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts and lived at various addresses until in 1931, when she and her friend from Lady Margaret Hall student days, Paule Lagarde-Quest [2] settled at 107 Lansdowne Road in London’s Notting Hill.

The following year, Trevelyan published her first novel Appius and Virginia under the non-binary name of G.E. Trevelyan and with a dedication to ‘PLQ’. The novel tells the story of an unmarried forty-year-old woman who sets out to raise a baby orangutan as if he were a human child. She strives to establish her connection with another species but is eventually forced to realize that the divide between them is too great. ‘It must have required considerable courage to conceive Appius and Virginia and to carry out the conception so carefully,’ wrote Leonora Eyles admiringly in the Times Literary Supplement. ‘Miss G. E. Trevelyan demands equal courage from her readers.’[3]

Other critics were less appreciative, including the Daily Mail’s James Agate who dismissed the novel for its ‘frantic silliness.’ Trevelyan’s next published work, Hot-House (1933) resembled more conventional fiction, set as it was in the overheated atmosphere of a fictional women’s college.  Barbara Pym read it while she was still a student at St. Hilda’s in Oxford, dreaming of becoming a novelist herself one day.[4] ‘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.’ Pym’s summing-up pinpoints why Trevelyan’s attempt at a campus novel failed: the subject was too close to her own experiences at university for her to turn it into the imaginative fiction at which she excelled.

That year Trevelyan contributed an acerbic piece ‘On Garden Cities’ to the collection Red Rags: Essays of Hate from Oxford (1933), described as ‘a counterblast to Oxford Communism’. A photograph of the book’s launch party shows her in evening dress and wearing glasses, the only woman contributor among sixteen suited Oxford men (the biographer Renée Haynes was the only other female author to contribute an essay).[5]  It is the last time that Trevelyan is photographed at a social engagement; from then on, she appears to have remained in her London flat and immersed herself in writing fiction.

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The six Trevelyan novels that followed in as many years were as boldly experimental as they were thematically disparate, and included such ambitious novels as As It Was in the Beginning (1934), War Without a Hero (1935), Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937), ‘a twentieth-century literary classic’ according to novelist Rachel Hore. There was no equivalent of the Bloomsbury group for Trevelyan in 1930s Notting Hill. ‘She had a small circle of friends, avoided the limelight, reviewed no books, neither taught nor edited, made no trips abroad or otherwise diverted her time and energy from the task of writing,’ Brad Bigelow observes. ‘This allowed her to take great risks in style, structure and approach, to create works of imaginative intensity unequalled by any novelist of her time aside from Woolf herself.’[6]  

There may of course have been personal reasons for Trevelyan’s solitary dedication to her novel-writing. Archival records reveal what she chose to keep secret from everyone but her closest friends: that she spent periods in London hospitals throughout the 1930s being treated for her pulmonary tuberculosis. Trevelyan may have realized that if she only had limited time in which to write, everything else must take second place.

Jane had worked for her money, she knew the value of it. Knew how to save, and knew how to spend, too. All good quality, all of the very best. Mr. Chirp might have done worse for a manager. Gone further and fared worse.

Economic independence – the ability to earn, save and spend one’s own money – is, like education, a source of power. The injustice of denying both to women because of their gender is threaded through Gertrude Trevelyan’s searingly honest novel, William’s Wife. First published in 1938, it was one of her last published novels, and develops a motif from Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937) and Theme with Variations (1938): the sense of an individual at the mercy of overpowering societal forces. Towards the end of Two Thousand Million Man-Power, Robert Thomas thinks of himself as one of millions of human cogs in ‘one vast, intricate machine, speeding up, quicker and quicker, running on man-power.’ He and his wife Katherine are figures in an industrial landscape, struggling to survive in a world that constantly threatens to crush them.

William’s Wife shifts the focus, developing this theme entirely through the perspective of one woman, covering her story from the late 1890s until just after the First World War. It’s a remarkable tour de force, striking in its psychological insights and immersion in a character’s mind. Jane Atkins is a twenty-eight-year-old domestic servant who, thanks to her sensible, hard-working, and prudent principles, has risen to the status of lady’s maid. The story begins on her wedding morning, as she prepares to step into an unfamiliar new world. Her mood of excited anticipation as she dresses is caused less by thoughts of her husband-to-be William Chirp (a stolid older widower with a grocery business) than about her wedding trousseau.

She stooped and lifted her skirts to do up the high new boots. It was a pity, in a way, she couldn't have put on the smart slippers she'd bought, with the beads sewn all over the toes; but they never would do for out-of-doors, even with going in the cab. Have them nice and new for afterwards.

From her fancy straw bonnet to her primrose kid gloves, Jane Atkins is proud to have paid for every item herself with her own, hard-earned savings.

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At first, the new Mrs Chirp enjoys her status as a married woman. For a working-class girl with no formal education in Victorian England, marriage to a property-owning businessman represented a substantial step up the social ladder. 

She was grateful to Mr. Chirp, he'd made her the mistress of The Elms, she hoped she knew her duty by him.

There is little actual work for her to do in her husband’s substantial home in the fictional market town of Jewsbury, apart from mending clothes and dusting the front parlour every Saturday. Here, she feels proud of ‘the clock under its glass dome and the pair of china vases and the candlesticks hung with bunches of gilt grapes: it was her furniture now, her ornaments, hers, Jane Chirp's.’ But her growing suspicion that all is not as it should be is manifested initially in her imagined rivalry with the first Mrs Chirp. When Jane finds her old sewing basket, complete with its broken scissors, unfinished mending and reels of cotton thread, she carries it to the kitchen to throw it in the fire, but ‘just before she pushed the basket into the round, red hole of the stove, she took out the reels and slipped them in her pocket’.

It’s a beautifully economical piece of writing, demonstrating Trevelyan’s skill and subtly indicating key themes of the novel. Jane’s insecurity and sense of displacement is revealed early in the book by this impulsive action, along with the fierce inner life that she must hide for the sake of appearances. Saving useful reels of thread from the flames shows both her natural frugality and the value that she places on her own sewing skills, which helped her to rise from household servant to lady’s maid.

The thread also has symbolic value in connecting Jane’s experiences as a wife not only to her predecessor, but to all other Victorian wives. During William Chirp’s first marriage, English law stated that a woman must surrender her right to her own property and inheritance after she married. Before the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, a wife had no individual legal status, and anything she earned or owned during her marriage  automatically passed to her husband. Around the time when Jane became the second Mrs Chirp, the law had changed in her favour and she was entitled to keep her savings. But because of her lack of education, she has no idea of her legal rights.

By the time she realizes that her husband is a miser who is pathologically unwilling to spend money even on basic household repairs, it is too late. Two years on, when William refuses to permit her to buy the clothes she needs to keep up a respectable appearance, Jane realizes that she will have to develop new strategies in order to survive. 

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.

Powerless to confront William, Jane becomes artful in her deceitfulness, saving pennies from her household allowance and hiding the paper-wrapped coins in places he is unlikely to look. She congratulates herself on her ingenious schemes, but is constantly on a knife’s edge of tension, in fear of discovery.

One day Jane put the screw of paper among her sewing, last place William would ever look, and then she came hurrying back from the town in a prickly heat, for fear the girl might have been at her basket for a needle and thread.

Today we would recognize William’s controlling behaviour towards Jane as a form of ‘gaslighting’, or coercive control, revealing the novel’s powerful resonances in our own time.

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Jane enlists the help of her dressmaker friend Minnie Hallett to make her a dress that is so similar to her old one that William will never notice the difference. This connection to a woman who is beneath her in social class is of vital significance to her, as is the affection she gets from her kindly, down-to-earth stepdaughter. Yet later in the book, she will reject them both.

Instead, the dress becomes symbolically the last thing Jane remains attached to. She eventually adapts it for a new purpose: ‘made a most lovely bag, just the skirt, with the bodice cut off: big as a sack you could have carried coals in, or bigger!’ As a respectable wife, she managed to keep up appearances while William was alive by using skills of subterfuge and resourcefulness. ‘All she wanted was a bit of what was due to her,’ she reminds herself. But as a wealthy woman after William’s death, free to live as she pleases, she finds that she has internalized his suspicious attitudes towards other people and her paranoia makes her isolated and vulnerable. Yet her tattered dignity remains intact to the end.  ‘Up we come,’ she tells herself, after collapsing in a gutter. ‘Be late for dinner if she wasn't careful.’

‘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’ writes Bigelow of William’s Wife.[7]  We know very little about Gertrude Trevelyan’s personal life in the late 1930s, but clearly as a working novelist she paid close attention to and imagined the inner lives of people she observed on London’s streets, in shops and travelling by bus. The sight of a dignified-looking woman carrying all her possessions in shabby bags, or scavenging for food in the gutter, might well have made Trevelyan wonder about such a woman’s past and how far she had fallen.

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Women in history

In A Room of One’s Own (1929) Virginia Woolf describes looking up ‘Position of women’ in the index of History of England (1926) by the Cambridge historian G.M. Trevelyan, a distant relative of Gertrude Trevelyan’s.[8] Disappointed to find only references to arranged marriage, wife-beating and Shakespearean heroines, Woolf wondered why G.M. Trevelyan could find no room in his capacious book for the lives of real women throughout history, showing their creative work and independent spirit. In the late 1930s she began making notes for a very different sort of history book that she hoped to write one day, following the ‘unmarked tracks’ of women ignored by male historians: ‘the progress of Anon from the hedge side to the Bankside.’[9]

But war broke out and Woolf’s book survives only in two draft chapters. In September 1940, while the Woolfs were staying in Sussex, their home at 37 Mecklenburgh Square was badly damaged in the Blitz. Returning to London to salvage what she could, Virginia felt a strange exhilaration to be free of most of her possessions, ‘save at times I want my books & chairs & carpets & beds — How I worked to buy them —one by one — And the pictures.’[10] It’s a poignant reminder of how proud she still was of her earnings as a writer. Woolf never lived in London again.

The following month, Gertrude Trevelyan’s Notting Hill flat was destroyed by a German bomb and she was severely injured. A few months later, in February 1941, she died at her parents’ home in Bath of pulmonary tuberculosis, according to her death certificate. Her few obituaries recorded the Newdigate Prize as her greatest achievement.

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• My thanks to Recovered Books editor Brad Bigelow, the Lady Margaret Hall Archivist Oliver Mahony, the Society of Authors team for their helpful advice and the Women’s History Network for their generous Independent Researcher award.

• Further reading: Daisy Dunn, Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars ((W&N, 2022)

• Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (Gollancz, 1935)

• Francesca Wade, Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (Faber & Faber, 2020)

• Virginia Woolf, Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read (TLS Books, 2020)

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1. G.E. Trevelyan, Red Rags, op.cit., p. 134; other biographical information from Lady Margaret Hall student register, with thanks to LMH Archivist, Oliver Mahony.

2. Paule Honorine Jeanne Lagarde (also known as Lagarde-Quest) was born in Paris in 1905, and attended Lady Margaret Hall from 1926-29. She became a French lecturer at King’s College London (1943-45) and taught at the London School of Economics (1945-73). Biographical iInformation from Lady Margaret Hall’s student register.

3. Alison Flood in The Guardian on the lost novels of Gertrude Trevelyan: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/10/if-she-was-a-bloke-shed-still-be-in-print-the-lost-novels-of-gertrude-trevelyan (accessed 24.3.23).

4. Ann Kennedy Smith, ‘The Ascent of Barbara Pym’ in The Critic, 4 September 2022

5. See Mary Evans Library website (accessed 24.3.23).

6. Bigelow, ‘The Eclipse of Gertrude Trevelyan’, afterword in Gertrude Trevelyan, Two Thousand Million Man-Power (Boilerhouse Press, 2022), pp. 283-4.

7. Brad Bigelow, ‘William’s Wife by G.E. Trevelyan (1938)’ on ‘The Neglected Books Page’ (accessed 24.3.23)

8. Gertrude's father and G. M. Trevelyan shared the same great-grandfather (the Venerable George Trevelyan, 1764-1827).

9. Quoted in Francesca Wade, Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (Faber & Faber, 2020), pp.307-8.

10. Quoted in Wade, Square Haunting, p.314.

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