Bibliotherapy: What to read when you dread the darkness of winter

I am writing this on one of those November days when a dreary grey noon merges into a gloomy dusk; it’s not the cold that depresses me so much as the absence of light, and my heart sinks at the thought of the inescapable winter. So there’s only one thing for it: to embrace the darkness by re-reading ‘Wuthering Heights’. Emily Bronte’s novel opens in winter – its narrator, Lockwood, ventures up to Wuthering Heights because the fire in his study has been extinguished by a servant girl, and arrives there as snow begins to fall. “On that bleak hill top the earth was hard with a black frost…”

As the snow deepens, Lockwood is forced to stay the night in Wuthering Heights, and it is then that he has his famous encounter with the ghost of Cathy, a spectral child who taps at the window with ice-cold fingers, crying ‘Let me in – let me in!’ Given the novel’s mythic status, there are innumerable interpretations – as many as its myriad readers – but for me, one of its most powerful messages is that though we fear the cold shadows of winter, the darkness is also part of us.

Nearly everyone is horrible to everyone else in ‘Wuthering Heights’ – they bite, they scream, they stamp their feet, they hang puppies and mistreat small children – which makes it all the more curious that Heathcliff and Cathy (both of them the cruellest of lovers) have been deemed the epitome of romance. But this remorselessness is one of the reasons that the novel remains so potent – a bracingly subversive read, and a reminder (amongst many other things) that the dark season must be met head on.

When Cathy is sickening in her final illness, she wants the window open, even though it is midwinter: “There was no moon, and every thing beneath lay in misty darkness, not a light gleamed from any house, far or near; all had been extinguished long ago.” But her light is not extinguished by death; and nor was her creator’s. Emily Bronte died on December 19, 1848, on the eve of the longest night of the year, yet her fierce writing survives, unquenched by the darkness of every passing winter.

Red patent on a grey November day...

It has rained and rained and rained today; so much rain that the drain overflowed and the guttering fell apart and water poured in through the roof of my kitchen. I am currently mopping up, and contemplating the cost of replastering and repainting, though who knows how long it will take for the kitchen walls to dry out?
Anyway, in between mopping and moaning, I've been lusting after a red patent something to cheer me up. The belt above is from M&S, and I think it's the 21st century equivalent of Olivia's favourite red belt in my favourite Rosamond Lehmann novel, 'Invitation to the Waltz'. Speaking of which, here's my latest thoughts as a Closet Thinker ...

Are you in the red or in the black? And even if you’re not overdrawn, do you want to wear the colour of mourning at the onset of a winter of discontent? I ask these questions, because they’ve been on my mind ever since I started hankering after a beautiful red patent bag by Anya Hindmarch, the day after Lehman Brothers went bust.

Yes, I’m feeling just as anxious as everyone else is about the serious stuff. But I’ve also realised that I don’t want to walk around looking like a crow, because there’s already quite enough gloom on the streets. It’s not that I’m proposing to chuck out the black from my wardrobe, in a sartorial attempt to prove that life is a bowl of cherries, when quite clearly it’s not. But I think I could do with a bit of ruby patent leather to lighten things up, and perhaps even benefit from the traditional folklore that holds red as a lucky talisman. “Red is the colour of magic in every country,” wrote W.B Yeats, “and has been so from the very earliest times. The caps of fairies and musicians are well-nigh always red.”

If red is magical, it is also radical, and suggests that its wearer has a certain purposefulness. Rosamond Lehmann’s wonderful coming-of-age novel, ‘Invitation to the Waltz’, written in 1932 in the dark days of the Great Depression, has the heroine celebrating her 17th birthday with the precious gift of a roll of flame-coloured silk. She already cherishes her red jumper – ‘the crimson heartened the lesser days, put a firm face upon them’ – and wears a favourite scarlet patent leather belt on her birthday, which compensates for the deficiencies of her humdrum brown skirt. “The belt was an object which had virtue in it… Within its compass she felt a certainty of individuality, like a seal set on her…”

Those in search of affordable 21st century amulets – a more readily available version of the alchemists’ Philosopher’s Stone, or the ‘red tincture’ that would turn base metal to gold – should make haste to Gap, currently offering a chic red patent tote for £39.50, and a crimson pin-tuck dress for the same price. Alternatively, Miss Selfridge has a cerise angora beret for £12 that Yeats might have approved of, while the patent accessories at Boden are cheerfully berry-coloured. You don’t need to buy all (or any) of them; but my feeling is that if I’m going to be tightening my belt this winter, then it’s got to be a damn good red patent one.

Bibliotherapy: What to read when you're jealous...

Here's today's Bibliotherapy column. I've also posted a picture taken this summer, of me by the lake at Menabilly, the setting for 'My Cousin Rachel'. Can't believe that was only a few months ago, and I was wearing sandals, though of course, a dark and stormy November evening like this one would be even better as the backdrop for a du Maurier story. (I was, as it happens, feeling rather unsettled when this photograph was taken; but that's another story...)



Everyone knows to beware the green-eyed monster that doth make you sick, but it’s easier said than done, when you are eaten up inside with jealousy. I know – I’ve been there myself, reeling and writhing and troubled of heart – but the best remedy, in my experience, is to re-read Daphne du Maurier’s ‘My Cousin Rachel’, which is a like-for-like cure.

As with her most famous book, ‘Rebecca’, du Maurier sets the story in own home, Menabilly, the Cornish mansion that she called her ‘house of secrets’. Both novels also have a jealous narrator, but ‘My Cousin Rachel’ – first published in 1951, 13 years after ‘Rebecca’ – is seen through the eyes of a man. Anyone expecting the romance that du Maurier is often – wrongly – accused of delivering will be startled by the opening: a decaying corpse of a wife-killer swings from the gallows near the gate to Menabilly. And murder continues to preoccupy the narrator, Philip Ashley, the heir to the estate, whose older cousin and guardian has married their distant cousin Rachel.

I don’t want to give the plot away – it’s a fiendishly clever novel, with an ending that continues to haunt and trouble its readers. But what is made clear is that jealousy is poisonous; a truth that du Maurier knew only too well. By the time she wrote ‘My Cousin Rachel’, she had been married to her husband, Lieutenant General Frederick Browning, for two decades, and with their three beautiful children, they presented a perfect façade to the world. But neither had been faithful, and both were tortured by suspicions about the other’s infidelity. Daphne had had a wartime affair with another man, while her husband was serving abroad, and also an intense relationship with Gertrude Lawrence, an actress who had been one of her father’s lovers. All of which was mixed up into a venomous stew of emotions that later contributed to Browning’s breakdown, and tipped her over the edge into paranoia and delusions. Such was her consummate skill as a writer that out of the chaotic mess of jealousy came a novel that still cuts like a knife, with its sharp warning that this way, madness lies…

A discovery in the library...

I wrote a piece for the Sunday Telegraph about this exhibition at the Women's Library -- and I really do recommend a visit, because it's a fascinating show -- and I wanted to post a link to the piece on the Telegraph website, but for some reason, I can't, so I'm going to put the entire article here. Sorry, it's a bit long for a blog, but eagle-eyed readers (of this blog and 'Daphne') will notice a reference in it to Clement Shorter, one of Mr Symington's colleagues in the Bronte Society. Imagine my surprise when I discovered his discoveries of Bronte manuscripts, as recorded in the archives of the Women's Library... Truth is stranger than fiction (etc); though I'd need to write another novel to uncover the rest of this story. Still, as you'll see, there are a few more clues here about the activities of Mr Shorter et al.

Once upon a time, when I was a student at Cambridge in the early Eighties, I knew that my enjoyment of women’s magazines was a guilty secret, and that my stash should be kept hidden under the bed in case someone saw me looking at them. I’d grown up reading my mother’s copies of Vogue and Nova, and they played a part in the shaping of my ambition to write, despite the unwritten law that suggested their irrelevance. This was an era when everyone seemed to disapprove of women’s magazines: feminists declared that they oppressed the sisterhood, academics said they addled the brain, and the Right united with the Left in the firm belief that they were irrelevant to political discourse.

A quarter of a century later, I still occasionally find myself having to defend them against intellectual sneering, but the disapproval is less widespread; and a growing acceptance of their place in cultural history is evident in the mounting of a new exhibition devoted to their evolution from the 18th century to the present day, drawing on an archive of magazines at the Women’s Library in the East End of London. The collection is a treasure trove, as I discovered on a visit there last month; for the further I delved into its depths, the more was yielded up of the extraordinarily varied ways in which magazines have both reflected and defined the lives of their readership over the last three hundred years. True, there an abundance of ephemera – though that itself is intriguing; what looks like a rag-bag of custard recipes, health tips and soap advertisements turns out, upon closer inspection, to contain little gems and nuggets of information about the world inhabited by previous generations. In other words, beware of judging a magazine by its cover, because what might be dismissed as trivia could open hidden histories. “These magazines matter,” says Gail Cameron, curator of The Women’s Library, “because they were, and are, bought by hundreds and thousands of women, so that they’re an incredibly important source of information about women, as well as having been a source of information for their readers at the time.”

The past is a murky place, and some of this information will seem bizarre to modern readers; but then women’s magazines have often offered curious advice, or edged into disconcerting territory. If a woman’s magazine is a friend to its reader – and the best ones are – then it is also the case that those friendships will go through difficult patches, when each is irritated or confounded by the other. I have worked for several different magazines, and been involved in the launches of three new titles; but I still find myself becoming exasperated, at times, as a reader of magazines that I feel deep attachment to, particularly when they make me feel bad about myself or if they take on a supercilious tone. (Too chubby or impoverished for the new designer collections? Ho hum, get on your bike…)

Not that there is anything new in admonitory editorials; a chorus of tut-tutting arises from the pages in the archive of the Women’s Library. Take, for example, this declaration of intent from the Servants Magazine, published in 1849: “We neither scold, nor discourage; and if at any time we deem it necessary to point out a fault, we try to consider ourselves as occupying the place of an orderly, but kind, mistress, who whilst she will have everything about the house done properly, yet, if she observe any neglect, tells her servants of it, in such a judicious manner, as to secure both the attention and affection of those whom she has taught to look up to her as their friend and counsellor.” There are moments when a despotic fashion or beauty editor’s instructions in a 21st century glossy magazine can seem equally bossy; though at least we no longer have to put up with sartorial advice from Reverend H. Melvill, whose advice to readers, under the headline PASSION FOR DRESS, was as follows: “The beautiful attire is that which comes out of the loom of modesty; and all other, by whomsoever worn, is raiment ‘spotted by the flesh,’ and therefore perilous to the wearers.”

Nothing, however, could be more perilous to the flesh than the accessories advertised in the Ladies Diary in 1728, which included artificial teeth (‘they are not to be taken out at Night, but may be worn Years Together’) and other, more mysterious contraptions: ‘Steel Spring and other sorts of Trusses for Ruptures at the Navel or elsewhere.’ Nevertheless, the editorial content of the Ladies Diary – also known as the Woman’s Almanack – offers a satisfying refutation of the theory that magazines for female readers have always been filled with mind-numbing rot. This sprightly 18th century ancestor announced itself as ‘Containing many Delightful and Entertaining Particulars, Peculiarly Adapted for the Use and Diversion of the Fair Sex’; and the mathematical puzzles and poetical enigmas (a trickier variation of modern crosswords) suggest that its readership enjoyed a challenge; and its correspondents were equally clever. One of the issues preserved at the Women’s Library contains a letter to the editor in Latin; another a series of enigmas composed in verse by Mrs Utrecia Smith. (Question: “I, who was born to neither House or Land/ Have now heaps of Wealth at my Command/ And yet to gain this Power I nothing do/ But all to others Active Hands I owe…” Answer: A Dice Box.)

There are many more pleasurably idiosyncratic periodicals to be discovered within the archive; I was particularly taken with Home Notes, edited by the semi-anonymous ‘Isobel’, a hugely popular weekly women’s magazine launched during the boom-years of the genre in the 1890s. Its alphabetical index for a bumper issue in 1898 spanned a mind-boggling range of articles: from A for Alaska, Marriage Customs in; Antoinette Broderie, Design For; Armless People, What They Can Do; to Z for Zurich Cats, Citizens Proposing Tax On. It turns out that the talented armless people featured in Home Notes included the redoubtable Miss Sarah Biffin, a gifted artist ‘only thirty-seven inches high’ who painted miniatures exhibited at the Royal Academy; possibly a more interesting subject than the celebrities whose bodies are examined and found wanting in the current crop of gossip magazines. The same issue also contained a fashion report from Paris – ‘What Is Being Worn in the Gay City’ – which seems uncannily familiar to what we might read over a century later: the magazine recommended ‘simplicity combined with smartness’, in the form of a dark grey dress trimmed with scarlet cloth and black braid. I also like the notion of The Fairy Belt, ‘a unique invention which changes the form of the waist, making it look two to three inches smaller’, that appears to have been a Victorian precursor of Magic Knickers.

There are other overlaps between the past and present: recipes, beauty tips, health advice, agony aunts. The latter appear to have adopted a bracing tone from the start: in 1805, the ‘Old Woman’ who responded to readers’ letters by citing the wisdom of her age and experience, was a no-nonsense character: “If a miss scarcely entered her teens asks my advice respecting a lover… I surely cannot show myself more their friend than by conveying to oblivion their folly…” The 20th century doyenne of agony aunts, Evelyn Home, who took on the job at Woman in 1937, was equally firm with her readers. In answer to a letter which ended, ‘So he left me, and I knew my heart was broken and I should never be happy again,’ she observed, briskly, ‘This is an example of self-dramatization, of making melodrama of a boy-friend’s preferring another girl. People who have suffered far more know that it takes a great deal for hearts to break – it takes enormous self-pity, self-interest and usually a narrow mind to achieve despair.”

Of course, some advice varied according to the era: at the end of the nineteenth century, when a fuller figure was more fashionable, Home Notes gave its readers guidance on how to put on weight: “Use plenty of butter and bread… Laugh over everything, worry over nothing; the less exercise taken, the better. Eat no acid fruits, but heaps of black grapes.” By 1967, the effervescent Honey magazine – motto, Young, Gay and Get-Ahead – was outlining a fast-track diet to lose weight: an orange for breakfast, a lean grilled steak and one tomato for lunch, another grilled steak with two tablespoons of cauliflower for supper, and no more than a couple of cups of tea a day to quench the thirst.

By this point, Honey was up against younger competitors like Nova, which had launched in 1965; though its retaliation to the new girl on the block was a startling cover line -- ‘This Is I Hate Honey Month’ -- beside a picture of a snarling model ripping up its pages. Inside, however, the contents were slightly less radical: having invited its readers to send in their criticism, the magazine came up with familiar answers. ‘I hate Honey for telling us one month that short hair is in,” complained one correspondent, ‘then the next month showing us lots of lovely snoods which need long hair to go in them.’ Honey’s solution? ‘Buy a hairpiece for 5s. 11d.” Meanwhile, Nova was declaring itself to be A NEW MAGAZINE FOR A NEW KIND OF WOMAN, but was nevertheless edited by a man, and its first issue veered towards male writers (Sir Julian Huxley, Robert Robinson, Christopher Booker, amongst others), though it did contain a delicious recipe for syllabub by Elizabeth David.

All of which makes it impossible to claim that women’s magazines have represented emancipation and liberation; but it would be churlish not to recognise the freedom with which they have ranged beyond their remit. As it happens, my favourite discovery in the archive was an article by a male author in an 1898 issue of The Woman at Home, a hugely successful periodical founded by a man, William Robertson Nicoll, though he remained invisible, while ‘Annie Swan’, a pseudonym for the successful novelist, Mrs Burnett Smith, presided over each issue with her editorials and advice columns. The journalist was Clement Shorter, an avid collector of Bronte manuscripts and close friend of Nicoll’s; presumably this explains why it was in The Woman at Home, rather than an academic journal or national newspaper, that Shorter chose to reveal his discovery of two poems by Charlotte Bronte, written immediately after the deaths of her sisters Emily and Anne. The magazine also printed the first facsimiles of the handwritten originals of these and other Bronte poems, and when by chance I came across them in the archive of the Women’s Library, it was with the astonished thrill of knowing that they would be important clues to literary detectives and academics attempting to solve the puzzle of missing Bronte manuscripts.

If there is a moral in this – and women’s magazines tend to search for morals, as well as meaning, in the chaos of ordinary life – it is that one should beware of dismissing these magazines as being meaningless. What seems to be irrelevant might just turn out to be important; and even if it isn’t, why feel compelled to hide your favourite magazine under the bed?

Bibliotherapy: What to read when you feel shut out in the cold

The sad story of ‘The Little Match Girl’ by Hans Christian Andersen might seem like a perverse recommendation as the temperature drops and heating bills soar; for this is the tale of a child who freezes to death on a winter’s night, after trying to warm herself by lighting matches.

But as is often the case with Anderson, the tale is a subtle one, written as much for an adult audience as children. Like much of his best-known work, it reflects his own unhappy past, and his continuing sense of himself as an ungainly outsider – The Ugly Duckling or The Little Mermaid – locked out from human warmth and love. The only son of a cobbler and a washerwoman, he grew up isolated and bullied in a provincial Danish town. At 14, he set off for Copenhagen, hoping to make a new life for himself; once there, he was as starving and freezing as the Little Match Girl.

His imagination was to be the saving of him, the spark that set alight his story-telling; just like his heroine, who sees marvellous scenes in the tiny flames of the matches that no one would buy from her – a roast goose that walks, a Christmas tree with a thousand candles, rising up into the stars. When she dies, born aloft by her spirit of her dead grandmother to the radiance of heaven, the Little Match Girl escapes a cruel and heartless world: “No one knew what beauty she had seen…”

The world did come to recognise Andersen, yet for all his fame and riches, he remained uncertain of his place within it; and his awkwardness made him unwelcome. “He was certainly something of an ‘oddity’,” recalled Henry Dickens, the novelist’s son, after Andersen had come to stay during a trip to England, “so much so that the small boys of the family rather laughed at him behind his back.” Charles Dickens never wrote to him again, and the invitation was not repeated (the visit ‘seemed to the family AGES,’ said Dickens). So Hans Christian Andersen returned to Copenhagen, where he continued to tell his stories of ice and snow, still seeking to warm cold hearts.

Mary Poppins and P.L.Travers

I just wrote a piece for the Sunday Telegraph about P.L Travers, which was published the day before yesterday, but here's the link, in case anyone wants to see it. Regular visitors to this blog may remember the ongoing conversations and comments about Travers -- she has fascinated me for a long time, and I know that some of you are equally intrigued by her (Henri and Gondal Girl both recommended Valerie Lawson's biography of Travers, 'Mary Poppins, She Wrote', which is very comprehensively researched). And I still love the original books -- they're so much darker than the Disney version, but when I was re-reading them earlier this month, I was drawn straight back into that world that I loved as a child. I think it's something to do with the mixture of the magical and the everyday -- tea and toast and taking flight... And I was always haunted by Chapter 3 of 'Mary Poppins Comes Back', when Jane goes through the crack into the willow pattern plate. It terrified me as a small girl, but there must have been pleasure mixed in with the terror; because otherwise, why did I keep on re-reading it? That episode -- 'Bad Wednesday' -- was one of the inspirations for my first novel, 'Wish I May'. I don't think I've ever told anyone that until now.

Bibliotherapy: What to read on Halloween

“Nobody knows better than a ghost how hard it is to put him or her into words shadowy, yet transparent enough,” wrote Edith Wharton. “If a ghost story sends a cold shiver down one’s spine, it has done its job and done it well.” But that cold shiver is often mingled with a warm glow – for a ghost story is traditionally told by firelight, and its chilling effect accompanied by a pleasurable companionship between the teller of the tale and those to whom it is told.

My own particular favourites are contained in The Virago Book of Ghost Stories, which includes Wharton’s uncanny masterpiece, The Eyes, and Mrs Gaskell’s equally eerie narrative, The Old Nurse’s Story. I’d recommend the entire anthology, but Mrs Gaskell’s is best of all on a dark autumnal evening, when the clocks have just gone back; for her tale rewinds time, yet is also a reminder that there is no going back, even though the past returns to haunt us over and over again. ‘What is done in youth can never be undone in age!’

I don’t want to spoil a fine ghost story by revealing too many of its details; suffice to say it concerns a past crime, a living child and a ghostly one, and two dead mothers. Elizabeth Gaskell’s own mother died soon after her birth, and like the little girl in ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’, she was sent away to live with an older aunt. The infant Elizabeth was dispatched from London to Knutsford (which she later transformed into Cranford), but the orphaned Rosamond, whose nursemaid narrates the ghost story, is sent even further north, to the brooding Furnivall Manor in the Cumberland Fells.

Gaskell wrote the story in 1852, one of a series of commissions by Charles Dickens for his magazine, Household Words, though she ignored his increasingly exasperated requests to change her ending. Her resolution was heartfelt; for having lost her mother, she also knew the grief of losing a child, and had embarked upon writing after the death of her baby son, in the understanding that a story must feel true to its teller, if it is to draw back the veil between the living and the dead.