Amber Blanco White (1887–1981)

A Lady and her Husband, first published in 1914 surprised me with the modern outlook of several of the female characters. I hadn’t realised it would be such a feminist novel – it was a really nice surprise, and the element which would make me recommend the novel to others.

According to the Preface by Samantha Ellis, Amber Reeves was a brilliant young woman, the uncompromising daughter of a suffragette and Fabian society member. The inspiration for A Lady and her Husband came from a real-life project undertaken by Amber Reeves, her mother; Maud Pember Reeves and other Fabian society women, who spent four years visiting working-class families in Lambeth to find out all they could about their lives. The result of this was Maud Pember Reeves’s book Round About a Pound a week, which is also published by Persephone books, I have an old Virago edition which I have yet to read. Ellis considers this novel very much a companion piece to that other book.

The plot of this novel is fairly simple. Mary Heyham is the wife of a prosperous business man. Mary has spent her adult life so far bringing up her children, and running her home with the help of the usual servants. She has always been the conventional little wife – the soft, unquestioning mother figure her husband James so depends upon. Now her children are grown up, they don’t have the same need of her, her son Trent works alongside James in the business, Laura is recently married, and now her youngest daughter Rosemary has announced her engagement.

Rosemary is very much a forward looking young woman of keen socialist principles. She recognises that Mary needs something to do – a challenge. Rosemary can’t help rather fearing the result of marriage for herself – afraid of becoming soft and useless. So, Rosemary enlists James’ help, and they come up with a scheme for Mary to have a look at his chain of successful tearooms – enquiring into the lives of the girls who work there. James is happy for Mary to have a diversion, expecting her to find him out to be a wonderful employer. James is a brilliantly created character – one I wanted to frequently hit over the head with something heavy. His condescension is hugely irritating, pompous and complacent – he calls his wife ‘old lady’ and doesn’t ever expect her to think too hard about anything. The following quote perfectly demonstrating his patronising attitude.

“James was detached and good-humoured, perfectly ready to talk things over with her. He seemed to think that it was really very creditable that she should have stuck to the thing like this, and taken such an interest in it. One gets rather too much into the habit of assuming that women do not care about serious things. Well then, to what revolutionary courses did she – dear little person that she was – wish to commit her wretched husband and his old fashioned business?”

James and Mary love each other deeply – but they have become used to their conventional roles, and neither have ever had to face their differences. James is a different man in business than he is at home, and Mary has never really met that man before. Rosemary supplies her mother with a pile of socialist literature, and Mary engages a secretary – Miss Percival, whose own deeply held socialist and feminist beliefs are soon revealed. Mary’s education begins.

“Miss Percival shook her head. ‘I don’t know how it came,’ she said, ‘though I could find a hundred reasons – I can see a fresh reason in every man I meet! When I look at their faces in the street, in a bus, anywhere, their mean stupid faces – men who get their ideals out of the half-penny papers, men who think about money on an office stool all day, and then go home and treat some woman as an inferior -I wonder than any woman has ever loved a man.”

Mary begins to visit the tearooms in the company of Miss Percival, and her visits soon raise a number of questions. Mary discovers that the girls who work in the tearooms are expected to come from families where there is already money coming in, where they are not relying on the twelve shillings salary to live. Mary meets a young woman for who this is certainly not the case, and Mary is drawn awkwardly into the story of Florrie and her very sick mother’s life – and realises at once that the employment policy is not realistic and twelve shillings (though more than many women in service) not nearly enough. Her visits raise other questions too – why do the women not have a room in which to eat? She sees women standing in corridors hurriedly eating – no chance to sit down during their hours at work, the women whose job it is to wash up reduced to standing for hours, water slopping around their feet. Others are obliged to carry heavy trays and stand around looking bright and efficient. -1

The women work long days for little salary, and Mary starts to realise how very difficult and uncomfortable their lives are. James is not happy with the suggestions Mary makes to improve his workers’ lives – and Mary is made to feel quite unhappy about his reaction.

Mary starts to see the world very differently – she starts to ask questions – much to James’ discomfort and irritation. In starting to see the world very differently, Mary also begins to see her husband differently – it causes Mary to re-examine her life and her marriage.

A Lady and her Husband is a quite subtle examination of women’s lives at this period – before the First World War, we meet women from different sections of society, and see clearly how differently the world treats them.… (meer)

I thought that A Very Dangerous Woman would be my last book related to a woman in H. G. Wells's life, but when reading Rachel Ferguson's Alas, Poor Lady in a Persephone Books edition, I realized that Amber Reeves, a young socialist with whom Wells had an affair and a child, had written a novel also republished by Persephone Books, so I decided to extend my Wells journey (now in its six month) with one more book. I said when I read Rebecca West's rel="nofollow" target="_top">The Return of the Soldier that I felt guilty only reading her work because of Wells, so I was amused when Samantha Ellis's introduction to this book began, "I wish I had not found A Lady and Her Husband via HG Wells" (v).

A Lady and Her Husband opens with a young woman telling her mother she decided to get married, and I thought this book was going to follow her and be one of those late Victorian/early twentieth century novels about a young woman boxed in by her social limitations, much like the other two Persephone Books I've read. But actually this book is all about the young woman's mother, who for a couple different reasons decides to get more involved in the running of her husband's business. She's not a feminist... but she soon finds herself morphing into one, now that she's allowed to move outside the tiny box she's been confined inside her adult life, and starts seeing the disconnect between the morality Victorian women were supposed to safeguard and the morality that actually went on in the world. It's an incisive book-- similar to a few others I could name, but with more original insight.

Reeves is really good on character. Not quite as good as George Eliot or Thomas Hardy (well duh), but she doesn't present any one-sided caricatures. Even when the husband of the title does completely awful stuff, you get why he does it and why it seems rational from his perspective. On the whole, a surprisingly good book. The daughter's socialism verges into the Wellsian at time, but otherwise (like with Return of the Soldier and The Book of Catherine Wells), this book reveals a side to one of Wells's women that's completely unlike him. Thankfully.… (meer)

"Men..are not like women. They have different ideals and different standards of value", 12 July 2016

This review is from: A Lady and Her Husband (116) (Paperback)
First published in 1914, this is the story of wealthy, protected Mary Heyham. Joint owner with her husband of a successful chain of tea-shops, she leaves all the business decisions to him, occupying herself with her home and family. But as the novel opens, her younger daughter is about to get married and Mary's life feels pointless...
When her daughter encourages her to get involved in the business, looking out for the interests of the waitresses, Mary finds herself becoming increasingly caught up in the girls' well-being. But as her charming but patronising husband tries to put her suggestions down, it starts to cause tensions in the marriage.
' "I've the greatest respect, as you know, for any idea of yours, little mother, but I've no doubt that it has already occurred to you that if such a very simple measure would solve modern industrial difficulties, someone else would have hit on it." He smiled indulgently.'
But there are about to be much greater pressures on the relationship, and Mary thinks more deeply about the differences between men and women and develops a new inner strength.
Quite an enjoyable read: the socialist/ feminist leanings of both the author and her writer mother (Maud Pember Reeves) come through in the subject matter.… (meer)