Friday 5 September 2008

 

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Clemency Burton-Hill
Clemency Burton-Hill

Clemency suggests


Axel Munthe: The Road to San Michele

Doctoring the record

Bengt Jangfeldt (translated by Harry Watson)
I. B. Tauris, 381pp, £25,
Jane Ridley
Wednesday, 7th May 2008

Jane Ridley reviews Bengt Jangfeldt's biography of Axel Munthe

The Crowded Street is a family saga, comedy of manners and roman à clef. It tells the story of Muriel Hammond, from schoolgirl to maturity. The Hammonds inhabit the determinedly genteel Yorkshire village of Marshington, its confines narrow, its mindset small. Muriel leaves school to embark on Marshington life armed only with a determination ‘so much to be good’ and a naive certainty that excitement beckons. Her disillusionment is slow but inexorable. Marshington values a single quality in women: marriageability. It is a quality Muriel lacks.

Written when Winifred Holtby was 26, The Crowded Street is strongly autobiographical. Holtby shared Muriel’s apparent unmarriageability. Yet Holtby, unlike Muriel, was able to forge strong emotional bonds, notably with Vera Brittain, whose Testament of Friendship celebrates the two women’s intense and creative relationship.

Compared with Winifred herself, Muriel is a cipher, passive and fearful to the point of self-annihilation, one ‘whose eager clutching hands let slip prizes’. Schooled in the conventions of novels of this sort, the reader follows Muriel’s fictional journey with a light heart — certain that, despite Muriel’s best efforts, glittering prizes will ultimately be hers. The reader is mistaken — or at least surprised.

Holtby’s resolution resists the easy fairytale of ‘happy ever after’, offering up instead an outcome nearer to the author’s own experience. In doing so, it strikes a pose characteristic of interwar feminism. To its first readers, among whom were those ‘surplus’ women left husbandless by the first world war, it threw a lifeline of hope. The challenge faced by such women — ill-equipped to earn their own living and defined by society exclusively in terms of their marital status — provides the key to unlock The Crowded Street. Read outside this context, it becomes vintage Bridget Jones’s Diary without the Chardonnay but with an extra stiffener of sourness.

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