Alice – Elizabeth Eliot (1949)

Review copy from the Publisher

Elizabeth Eliot was a new name to me. Well done to Dean Street press for bringing these neglected writers to a whole new audience. I had already seen some good reviews of this novel so I was fairly sure this would be a good match for me – it certainly was. Alice was Elizabeth Eliot’s first novel – and a very assured debut it was.

I had seen Elizabeth Eliot’s writing likened to that of Rachel Ferguson and Barbara Comyns – well the cynic in me took that with a pinch of salt. However, now I can see why that comparison has been made. Eliot’s writes in very much her own style – and yet there is much to remind us of those other writers, small quirky events and odd conversations give it a slightly altered feel. This is a writer who understands that the world has dark corners, and not every home is a settled one, not every ending happy.

“To live in the world as not of the world,’ Alice said. ‘That always sounded so nice, as if one had a little world of one’s own floating about inside the big one.”

Margaret is our narrator – and Alice is her best friend, we follow them from their final year at a boarding-school in the 1920s – where it is quite possible to persuade your headmistress not to expel you – to just before World War Two. Margaret; an only child – is the daughter of a beautiful society woman, a notorious divorcee, who finds her daughter a little dull. Alice the daughter of a wealthy landed family – rather eccentric and fond of hunting. The girls regularly visit one another’s homes – here servants play an important role. Margaret lives mainly with her grandmother – where she spends a lot of time with her grandmother’s maid Ellen, gossiping. It is Ellen who is the most comforting figure in her life – someone who can be depended on. The servants represent the world that Margaret and Alice feel they are missing out on – sheltered as they fear they are, from the real world that exists beyond their reach.

“But the servants! Anything might happen to them. They might go in a train to Woolwich and meet the love of their lives, or be murdered almost for the asking. Not that one wanted to be murdered exactly, but there was frustration in being denied the possibility.”

Both Alice and Margaret have wonderful imaginations and rather enjoy dreaming up dark and dreadful fates for others. They wonder at the lives they might have lived had they been born into a different world.

“You see,’ Alice was very earnest, ‘if we’d lived in the slums and our mother had had fifteen children, and our father had got drunk and knocked us about, we should have been brought up against “real life.”’ ‘Daddy does drink—a bit.’ Anthony was hopeful. ‘It’s what makes him do card tricks after dinner.”

School is Groom Place – another slightly odd world, a school without uniform, that employs a chaperone to sit in on the one lesson taken by a man. Margaret describes it as a ‘fourth-rate school which went in for midnight feasts.’ That was the kind of school I wanted to go to back in my Mallory Towers days.

After school, Margaret and Alice are presented at court – and thrust upon the world – with not very many people looking out for them. Margaret enrols in the cheapest secretarial college she can find, with a view to earning her living. Young men start to come into their lives, and Alice’s love life falls foul of her beautiful elder sister who manages to steal away her first real boyfriend. Margaret knows that this won’t be something Alice gets over easily – she understands that there is a darkness in Alice, that isn’t immediately obvious to others.

“Then very clearly I saw Alice, and her eyes were wide with fear, and I knew that she was afraid of something tremendous. The time of the Deserted Garden was at an end. My mother and the dentist were the fears of children. Jennifer and I would never have to contend with the terrible fears that beset Alice, for Alice was afraid of life itself. Like, the winter sea, against which no man could stand.”

Margaret’s mother re-marries and her step-father brings his daughter ‘Poor Jennifer’ into the dysfunctional family. With Margaret’s mother and step-father in Devon and Poor Jennifer in Sussex – Margaret is left more and more to her own devices in various places around London.

Alice marries unhappily, and Margaret is drawn deeply into the darkness of her friend’s life. Taking up sailing in Weymouth, with a whole host of other odd characters. Her marriage already failing, Alice meets another man, older – and rather controlling. Suddenly Alice decides she will take up acting – and enrols in an acting school. Against the odds Alice is a great success, but it seems as if everything has just been a little too much for this fragile young woman.

I thoroughly enjoyed my first experience of Elizabeth Eliot, and I shall no doubt be adding the other three Elizabeth Eliot titles that Furrowed Middlebrow and Dean Street Press have brought out; Henry, Cecil and Mrs Martell.