Women and their guilty secrets; women and their innocent secrets; women and men’s secrets; women and state secrets; DNA tests busting women’s secrets – in her enticingly titled The Book of Revelations: Women and their Secrets, Juliet Nicolson comes at her subject from all possible angles. There is also a strongly feminist emphasis on wronged women across generations (Nicolson’s family included) who have somehow been coerced into keeping dark secrets by abusive men – or sometimes by abusive women.
One such abusive woman was Phyllis Eliot, the headmistress of West Heath School, near Sevenoaks in Kent, during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Known as ‘P’, she used to kiss every girl goodnight in bed. To Augusta Hope, whom Nicolson interviewed in old age, ‘P’ used to say: ‘Darling, what lovely little breasts you’re developing.’ And she would fondle them. The secret which Augusta divulges is not so much the act itself as her own reaction to it. As she put it to Nicolson:
I didn’t mind it. That’s what’s embarrassing. If the girls had been mass-groomed, but on the whole did not suffer any long-term effects, then where was the harm in it? P got her satisfaction. And the girls were shown there was no harm in touching, as long as it wasn’t spoken about.
Golly. Well done, Augusta, for admitting to such a deeply unfashionable opinion. Nicolson tried to interview another former pupil who may have experienced the same sexual abuse from ‘P’, but she refused, saying she found the memories of what happened at West Heath too painful to contemplate.
Augusta Hope’s secret is just one of many revealed in this quirky, haphazard collation. Also unforgettable is that of the American writer Kathryn Harrison, who had a four-year consensual affair with her father from the age of 20 and was reviled by reviewers for writing about it in 1977. (The Washington Post called the book ‘repellent, revolting, self-serving hogwash’.) And then there are the tape-recorded conversations from the 1950s (now in the Wellcome Collection) between the family specialist Dr Joan Malleson and a succession of female patients about their unhappy sex lives. The women had no idea whether what they were going through was usual. ‘We’ve only done it three times. Is that normal? Last time it was like hard manual labour.’ The euphemisms Malleson employed to advise these worried women remind us of how unmentionable private parts were in those days, even in the consulting room: ‘If you put a little more [lubricant] on, just outside and outdoors of the passage, so that the tension at the doorway is at its very minimum…’
Kathryn Harrison had a four-year consensual affair with her father from the age of 20
The arc of Nicolson’s argument is that in the 1950s women were expected to keep quiet about their deepest anxieties, whereas nowadays ‘those things that my mother’s generation had not dared speak about became for my generation things that we must no longer repress’. Are we revealing too much today – and would it be safer to keep the lid on?
Nicolson devotes a fair amount of space to her own secret-keeping family: her grandparents, Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, who pursued clandestine affairs behind the façade of their solid, garden-creating marriage; her father, Nigel Nicolson, and her increasingly alcoholic mother Philippa, née Tennyson d’Eyncourt, who were lonely and sexually unfulfilled in their loveless marriage but never discussed anything important or emotional at the supper table; and herself, who, while living in America during her first marriage, became addicted to both alcohol and the secrecy of a seven-year extramarital affair.
This strong personal element, interesting as it is to anyone who enjoyed Nicolson’s 2016 memoir, A House Full of Daughters, and longs to know more about the frustrated, tight-lipped Philippa and the recovering alcoholic Juliet, does rather unbalance the book. The author keeps returning to her story, as if to demonstrate how to be an honest admitter of secrets; as if to say: ‘This is a book about women’s secrets – and, by the way, these are my darkest ones.’
She admits that the driving force behind writing it was the desire to deepen her knowledge and understanding of her mother, who died, aged 59, in 1987, of drink – ‘to allow my mother and me to confide in one another at last… to share our secrets, woman to woman’. As well as being alcoholics, they both had extramarital affairs. When Juliet was young she used to listen through a hole in a beam to Philippa’s telephone conversations with her lover. Once, when forced by her mother to lie to her father about where they had spent the night (chez the lover), Juliet had to run to the bathroom to be sick.
Towards the end of the book there’s an account of how the author had a bad fall in her Sussex kitchen in November 2021 while carrying a saucepan of boiling carrots, and how the force of it was similar to that of a massive traffic accident. That’s not really a ‘woman’s secret’. She manages to weave in the subject by saying that when she started writing her diary again she confided in it her secret sense of despair. And there are other passages which don’t quite count as ‘women’s secrets’. The story of Helena Lee, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, seems more about how Lee deals with racial prejudice and aims to instil in her daughter a truer understanding of the British Empire by reading Sathnam Sanghera’s children’s book Stolen History.
So Nicolson takes us in and out of many scenarios. They include the #MeToo movement, ‘when women refused en masse to keep men’s secrets’; generations of her family; back to the feminist reaction against enforced domestic secrecy, led by Spare Rib; and on to a letter in the first issue of the American magazine Ms in 1971, signed by 50 women, including Anaïs Nin and Billy Jean King, admitting that they’d had abortions.
All women seem to feel better for getting such burdens off their chests. ‘Secrecy,’ Nicolson writes of her seven-year affair and the twisted excuses she came up with to explain her lateness and absences to her family, ‘is like an acid, rotting and destroying judgment.’
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