Penelope Fitzgerald

By the time he was 20 Henri Fournier wasn’t able to say whether it was the country itself that he missed – Epineuil-le-Fleuriel, in the heart of the old Berry province – or the time that he spent there. He shared his country schoolhouse childhood with his young sister Isabelle and their most intense memory was the arrival, at the end of the year, of the livres de prix. They hid themselves, and read every book. But though the dreaming reader persisted in Henri, he became tough and intransigent. He was sent to the Lycée Voltaire and didn’t like it, started to train for the Navy and didn’t like it, prepared for the entrance exam for the Ecole Normale Supérieure and didn’t pass it. In June 1905, however, while he was still a lycéen in Paris, he saw (almost as if he had been expecting her), and spoke to, and walked a few hundred metres with, a tall, blonde jeune fille. Her name was Yvonne de Quiévrecourt, and she was of good family, staying with her aunt. He told her, in the words of Pélleas: ‘Vous êtes belle.’ She dismissed him, saying they were both no more than children, and for the next eight years, during which he never saw her, she was his Mélisande, and (transferred to the deep country) the Yvonne de Galais of Le Grand Meaulnes, which was published in 1913. Meanwhile, Fournier – he used the pen-name Alain-Fournier from 1905, partly to avoid confusion with a racing driver – had become a journalist and had a succession of mistresses, the last being the strong-minded actress Simone Benda, who pulled every string, in vain, to get him the Prix Goncourt. He took to racing cars and flying – ‘like Peter Pan’, he told Francis Jammes. Le Grand Meaulnes was written, for the most part, in Rue Cassini. If he had survived the war, what would he have written? Not, probably, Colombe Blanchet, which he had begun, but, as he put it himself, about ‘the countries behind the painted doors of the Paris café-concerts; a world as terrible and mysterious in its own way as the world of my other book’.’

These three women writers were mythmakers. Alison Uttley created Little Grey Rabbit (1929-1973), Richmal Crompton thought of Just William and kept him going for 48 years, May Annette Beauchamp invented herself as Elizabeth.

When The Well of Loneliness came out in July 1928 the reviewers were not astonished. Both Leonard Woolf and L.P. Hartley thought the book sincere, but overemphatic. The Times Literary Supplement also called it sincere, and Vera Brittain said it was ‘admirably restrained’. It sold quite well, going into a second impression, and Radclyffe Hall, with her lover Una Troubridge, thought of taking a cottage in Rye. She may have felt some disappointment, having planned her novel in a crusader’s spirit. She claimed to have written the first full-length treatment in English of women who loved women. In Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, she said, ‘the subject was only introduced as an episode.’ (She seems not to have known Dickens’s Tattycoram and Miss Wade.) She wanted to ‘smash the conspiracy of silence’, but found herself instead mildly successful at W.H. Smith and the Times Bookshop.

Ada Leverson (1862-1933) said she had learned about human nature in the nursery. A little brother got her to help him make a carriage out of two chairs, but when he was taken out in a real carriage he was not in the least interested. Certainly she never under-estimated the human capacity for imagination or for disappointment.

Sylvia Townsend Warner expected her correspondence to be published, indeed she sensibly provided for it. ‘I love reading Letters myself,’ she told William Maxwell, her literary executor, ‘and I can imagine enjoying my own.’ She was born in 1893, an only child. Her father was a Harrow master, who, in a way not very complimentary to his profession (but quite right for STW), never sent her to school. She was allowed to study what she liked, and was devoted to him, emerging from the ‘benignly eccentric household’ as a musician: she was about to go to Vienna, to study under Schönberg, when the First World War broke out. When her father died, leaving her, as she put it, ‘mutilated’, she saw that it would be better to earn her own living than stay in the country and quarrel with her mother. She came to London, and worked as an editor on the monumental Tudor Church Music. Plain, frail, shortsighted, not quite young any more and, for the first time in her life, rather poor, she set out to enjoy herself. ‘I am sure that to be fearless is the first requisite for a woman: everything else that is good will grow naturally out of that.’