Falling foul of fashion

J. B. Priestley described the forgotten interwar novelist Dorothy Whipple as the Jane Austen of the 20th century. Posterity has balked at this assessment — as indeed, within Whipple’s lifetime, did both publishers and readers. Although in 1932 her third novel, Greenbanks, topped the bestseller lists in the Observer and the Sunday Times, by the Fifties Whipple had fallen sufficiently foul of fashion to take an enforced extended break from writing, only later to be resumed with a series of low-key children’s books. Hers is a Barbara Pym story without the happy ending in the form of late-in-life rediscovery. Whipple’s re-emergence had to wait for the reissue of her final novel, Someone at a Distance, by Persephone in 1999, 33 years after her death. Persephone, publishers of The Closed Door, continues to champion her cause: once again, Dorothy Whipple has a following.

Priestley had a point, of course. That ‘little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush’ referred to by Jane Austen also applies to Dorothy Whipple. In her novels and short stories, of which she published three collections, the compass of her concerns is apparently small. Her focus is the domestic life of a certain sort of Englishwoman at a given moment in time. Her heroines are unremarkable, distinguished only by anxiety or unhappiness. That they suffer is the result not of Grand Guignol or seismic events in the world at large, but the petty malevolence of the dysfunctional family. In a typical Whipple scenario, selfish parents conscript a grownup daughter into reluctant domestic servitude; invariably the daughter fails to protest, allowing herself to be bullied beyond the point of vocalising her misery — until, with the customary twist essential to the short-story writer, something supervenes to rescue her.