Father – Elizabeth von Arnim (1931)

With thanks to the publisher for the review copy.

There is something so wonderfully engaging about Elizabeth von Arnim that her books often feel like a tonic. Despite the fact that she is usually telling a truth about women’s lives that isn’t always happy she does it in a way that is touching and wry, more than a little tongue in cheek, while showing us the wonderful absurdities of a certain kind of pompous male. In Father one of Elizabeth von Arnim’s later novels she employs both light comedy and poignancy to tell a story of unmarried women reliant upon men for the comforts of home.

Jennifer Dodge is thirty three, living in Gower street with her father – her mother having died some years earlier – she is one of the surplus women of the 1920s and 30s following the Great War. Since her mother’s death, Jennifer has devoted her time to her father – acting as his secretary as well as running the house and directing the servants. Her father: Richard Dodge is a renowned novelist, revered more than he is read – he considers Jennifer’s assistance to be tied into the gratitude she owes him. Father has a rather unreasonable dislike of old maids – and while he expects Jennifer to be at his beck and call he is also irritated by her presence.

As the novel opens Father arrives home for tea with a very young woman in tow – and reveals that he has just married Netta and is about to go away for a month’s honeymoon to Norway. He is expecting a scene – certain that his daughter will have an objection to a much younger step-mother. Yet all Jennifer can see in front of her is freedom.

“Through and beyond father she saw doors open, walls falling flat, and herself running unhindered down the steps, along Gower street, away from London, across suburbs, out into great sunlit spaces.”

Surely, this is the chance she has always wanted. To live independently – away from London to have the garden she has always dreamed of. Her mother left her £100 a year (Simon Thomas, in his Afterword helpfully translates that into today’s money to be around £6,500 a year, a long way below the poverty line) and she decides that is more than enough to rent a tiny cottage and cultivate her garden. As soon as her father and Netta have gone away – he leaving instructions about editing his fifth chapter – Jennifer puts her plan into action. She will find a cottage and spend the weekends while her father is away beginning her independent life – in the week she will finish that fifth chapter and prepare the house in Gower street for her father’s return. After which she will leave finally to start her own independent life. Minnie the maid suggests that she consult the advertisements in a clerical paper called The Sussex Churchgoer – and despite never having been a churchgoer herself not having been confirmed even – Jennifer does so and is soon setting out for the countryside in reply to two of the adverts.  

In Jennifer’s expedition, to secure herself a little cottage, von Arnim is at her comic best. With only the train at her disposal she is obliged to walk miles through the Sussex countryside before she finds herself at the first vicarage that has a cottage for rent. Here, she manages to get on the wrong side of the dour faced clergyman – who we shall meet again later – and is then obliged to walk several more miles to get to the second. Here Jennifer is in luck – and secures herself the key of Rose cottage having paid six months rent in advance.

Rose cottage in the village of Cherry Lidgate is rented to her by Alice Ollier – the much older sister of young vicar James Ollier – and she only did so because she was in a temper with James and likes to have her own way. Alice controls James in a not dissimilar way to how father controls Jennifer – she rules his every moment, it is because of her he is a clergyman when he doesn’t really want to be – and she is forever silencing him by spitting out “bosh!” at him in reply to anything she disagrees with, a word he has come to despise. Alice is another of those surplus women – and her comfortable life would be under threat if her younger brother ever married. She has a nice home with servants where she has complete control – is at the heart of the community, a respectable spinster.

Meanwhile Jennifer secures herself a few necessary items, including a mattress and a kettle and takes up immediate residence in the cottage. Planning to return to town on Monday. During the weekend Jennifer makes James’s acquaintance and despite the short time they have together it seems it is a moment that changes everything – particularly for poor harried James.

“…listening with absorbed attention more to her voice than to what she was saying, and thinking how like she was, flowering through her voice into beauty in the darkness, to some butterflies he had come across in the Swiss mountains the summer before. When they were folded up they were grey, mothlike creatures that one might easily overlook, but directly they opened their wings they became the loveliest things in the world, all rose-colour or heavenly blue. So had she been to him in the daylight that afternoon, – an ordinary woman, not in any way noticeable; but now listen to her, opening into beauty on the wings of her voice!”

Alice senses danger – and spirits James away to Switzerland. Jennifer senses danger of a different kind when she discovers that Netta may have already begun to regret her hasty marriage. While Alice is desperate to prevent her brother bringing about the end of her comfortable life by having his head turned and marrying – Jennifer is equally desperate to prevent her young step-mother from turning away from her new husband.

This is a glorious novel – von Arnim’s tone is humorous though she is making a serious point. Exploring the expectations that were placed on unmarried women in this inter war period she reminds the modern reader (especially those of us who are single women) that while things may be far from perfect – we do, in this part of the world, at least have the freedom to live as we want to.