Antonia WhiteBesprekingen

Fernanda Gray discovers early that the world is not fair despite her innocent attempt to create something worthwhile at the convent she attends. The nuns take an opposite view to the modern idea of "self-esteem" being a virtue.
This is a very good book, accurate in its detail concerning a Catholic girls boarding establishment in the first decades of the Twentieth Century, and is a good example of an autobiographical novel.

Would never have picked this, but ran out of books on hol and borrowed one of A's, and it's really really good. Not all that much happens, but it's very funny and quite moving in places.

Set in the early 1900s, Nanda is nine years old when her father enrolls her in the convent school outside of London called Convent of the Five Wounds. She quickly learns, in this closed society, that she has to please only God. And, of course, the stodgy, cruel nuns that run the place. (I can say that, as a lapsed Catholic who has had my fill of nuns.) There was a little too much of the holy affairs in the early part of the book but then as Nanda grew up to be a teenager there was a sense of dread that somehow her attention to the rules was slipping and the nuns were going to catch her doing something they didn't allow which was just about anything really. The author was great at character development and creating this sense of doom.

I followed it up by listening to the Backlisted podcast about the book and it was absolutely wonderful and revealed that the book was very autobiographical and played parts of an interview with the author from the 60s.

The Virago group is doing themed monthly reads and the first was "Nuns, Teachers, and Governesses". I have about 6 unread viragos on my shelf, so I'm trying to read them when they fit a category. I had never read [Frost in May], which is Virago #1, so I took the opportunity and I'm so glad I did!

[Frost in May] is about a young girl whose father has recently converted to Catholicism. He sends her to a conservative Catholic boarding school. There, 9 year old Nanda whole-heartedly discovers the Catholic faith, makes friends, and begins to know herself. She is immersed in the closed world of the convent, where self-control, discipline, and humility are demanded of these young children. The glimmers of non-conformity come from a few of her friends at the convent who have more worldly families and from Nanda's mother, who during brief visits, obviously shows that she does not buy in to the system. Though internally Nanda embraces the lifestyle, some of her actions don't fit with the convent rules and the book does not end happily from Nanda's point of view.

I unexpectedly found this book delightful. There is a subtle and slightly subversive humor throughout from the author, but at the same time she perfectly captures the rigidity of a child's mind as it opens up through the teen years.

I would love to know more about the politics/cultural ramifications of converting to Catholicism in England in the early 1900s. I'm curious if there was a deeper cultural statement being made in the book that I didn't have the background to comprehend.

Original publication date: 1933, Virago publication date 1978 (#1)
Author’s nationality: British
Original language: English
Length: 221 pages
Rating: 4 stars
Format/where I acquired the book: given to me by Barbara/romain from the Virago group
Why I read this: virago monthly challenge

The amazing mostly mental cruelty of nuns toward the children they are raising.

Every will must be broken and completely reset.."

A beautifully observed book, Frost in May is set in a Catholic girls' boarding school in England in the 1910s. Young Nanda Gray, the daughter of a recent convert to Catholicism, at once finds herself entranced by the romanticised religiosity of the nuns and her fellow students, and uneasy with the petty cruelties inflicted by the nuns that are designed to break down those girls who take pleasure in, show an aptitude for, or independently think about, well, pretty much anything.

As someone who was educated in a similar environment to Nanda, but who never had any faith to speak of, even as a child, the experience of reading Frost in May was at once alienating and queasily familiar. No contemporary YA dystopia comes close to the kind of hothouse, authoritarian, ritualised power games that play out here—and often for such small stakes.

This is a coming of age story of the an only child of her recently converted Catholic parents. She attended school at the Catholic school until she had to leave because of financial strain due to mother's illness. She then attends public school, gets distracted by things that teenage girls get distracted by. It is nicely written, not much happens until toward the end. After finishing the book, I read some introduction that said this book was written out of the authors own life, while it is not a memoir, it is fiction.½

What could be more appealing than living in a sugar house? This pleasant image turns sinister as young bride Clara equates her situation with that of Hansel and Gretel. After bad luck on the stage and in love, Clara impulsively marries a childish, alcoholic young man of indeterminate sexuality. The two are miserable together in every way. Finally, Clara seeks--and finds--a way out of the sugar house.

Clara is an unusual heroine; she's both naïve and determined, messy but honest about her faults. No doubt she is based on Antonia White herself.

This novel is the third installment in White's Frost in May quartet. I'm looking forward to reading the fourth one, Beyond the Glass.

The last book in the Frost in May quartet was quite a ride through the ups and downs of Clara's moods. Based on her own life, this final book looks at what happens to Clara as she is navigating the process to have her marriage annulled and then falls very hard for another man, into what feels like a manic-phase, and then spirals out of control and is put into a mental institution. Following along is depressing, disturbing and unnerving, but you can't take your eyes away either. A study of mental illness, and you hope for the best in the end.½

In The Sugar House, the 3rd book of the Frost in May quarter, Clara Batchelor has fallen in love with an older actor, while still pursued by her ex-fiancé. This was the best book so far in the series and I was drawn inexorably into the little tragedy of this novel. Really well done.½

Sheltered teen Clara Batchelor becomes enmeshed in family dramas after she returns home from the convent that had been her school since childhood. Her dysfunctional, self-absorbed parents, especially her domineering father, manipulate her loyalties, and finally send her away from home to be a governess for an obnoxious young boy. In the wake of tragedy, aimless Clara, the "lost traveler" of the title, comes close to making a rash decision that would affect the rest of her life.

This novel contains several scenes of great emotional impact, but also has long stretches of rather tedious descriptions. Structurally, at times it seemed like a series of barely connected vignettes. Despite my mixed feelings about the novel, I am curious about what Clara will do next, so I may follow through with the rest of the trilogy.½

This is considered the second book in Antonia White's Frost in May quartet. It's a bit confusing though, as the name of the main character changes from Nanda to Clara; I've read up a bit on White, and I understand things a bit better now, although I'm more curious than ever about what is autobiographical and what is made up.

White published this book 17 years after Frost in May; she has said that Frost in May was "so much my own life" and she wanted The Lost Traveller to be a real novel; she also said that everything in The Lost Traveller is "the sort of thing that happened" to her, "though many things are changed, many invented." This book explored more from the point of view of Clara's mother and father than the previous book, but clearly also focused on Clara from the time she returned home from a convent school at fifteen to when she got engaged at seventeen. There is a lot going on in this short time frame, some really disturbing stuff and a shock here and there. I'm quite curious to see how it continues.

Young Nanda Grey has a pious nature and wants nothing more than to be a good Catholic girl, but the stifling, rigid atmosphere of her convent school, where creativity is frowned upon and "particular friendships" are strongly discouraged, threatens to destroy her sense of self. Although the novel drags in places, especially when the reader is subjected to Nanda's retreat notes on Catholic doctrine, I do want to read more by Antonia White.

I read this for the Virago Modern Classics group's November 2018 author read and liked it very much. It's a posthumous collection edited by White's elder daughter; and while I didn't that much care for most of the fiction and short autobiographical pieces (except for "The Most Unforgettable Characters I've Met," about her two maiden great-aunts, which I loved), her actual autobiography, which made up the largest part of the collection, was wonderful.

This autobiography only covered the first four years of White's life (yeah, as we all know, White had a writer's block!) but it was a wonderful set of very detailed childhood recollections which reminded me somehow of Muriel Spark's Curriculum Vitae.

Highly recommended for lovers of White – but not at all recommended unless you've read at least the four novels or much of As Once in May will fly way over your head.

The Sugar House, the third novel in Antonia White’s Frost in May quartet, picks up four years after the events of The Lost Traveller. It can be read as a stand-alone; however, the context the previous book provides is useful. Now 21, Clara, having recently completed training at The Garrick School of Drama, is working as an actor with a travelling theatre troupe. She believes herself to be in love with an older actor whom she met at drama school, a WWI vet with a drinking problem, and she seems unaware (or unwilling to accept) that Stephen Tye mainly likes the reflection of himself he sees in her naïve, young eyes. When the relationship with Stephen—if you can call it that—does not work out, Clara allows dissolute oddball Archie Hughes-Follett back into her life. She had been on the brink of marrying him four years earlier, but her mother had been able to talk some sense into her. Now, Clara makes the fatal error she’d earlier avoided. With the urging and approval of two ardent Catholics—her father and Lady Theresa Follett, whose ten-year-old son accidentally died when Clara was his governess—Clara marries Archie.

Archie is from an extremely wealthy old Catholic family, and he is to come into his full inheritance at the age of 25. Until that time, his father’s will dictates he is under the guardianship of his uncle. Archie believes this is due to pure malice on the part of his father, whose hatred of Archie prevails beyond the grave, but everyone else is aware that Archie is an impractical misfit, full of dreams and unworkable schemes. For now, he receives an allowance, most of which he fritters away on drink, for Archie has an even more serious problem with booze than Stephen. Though I know that social awareness of alcoholism (and addiction in general) in the time White is depicting (the 1920s) was not what it is today, I was still slightly taken aback that two adults who ought to have known better would’ve encouraged Clara in making such a marriage.

Most of The Sugar House tells the story of Clara’s—and Archie’s, too—entrapment in an absolutely disastrous marriage. Although Clara experiences a certain sexual revulsion towards Archie, she hadn’t quite bargained for him falling into bed completely sloshed on their wedding night (and many nights thereafter) either. The fact is: Archie is asexual—something noted very early in the book by Clara’s fellow actor and roommate, Maidie. (In fact, the marriage is never consummated.) At one point, Clara’s domineering and controlling father blames her for Archie’s problems, which makes for some pretty enraging reading. Otherwise, the overbearing pater familias, Claude, plays a far less significant role in this book than the one that preceded it.

While I enjoyed this novel, I found that it lacked the narrative momentum of the other two I’ve read in the quartet. The reader knows from the start that Clara’s marriage doesn’t stand a chance; therefore, its unravelling is not overly compelling. Characterization, however, remains a real strength.

“I don’t think I want to be anything. In fact, I hate thinking about the future at all.”

“How do people become real? Does one just change as one gets older? Or did something definite happen to you?”

On the brink of the Great War when Clara Batchelor is almost 15, her grandfather dies and her mother, Isabel, becomes seriously ill with “female troubles” related to a dangerous, later-in-life pregnancy. Having had to finance Isabel’s costly operation, Clara’s father, Claude, can no longer afford to send the girl to Mount St. Hilary Convent School, where prominent Catholics send their daughters.

White not only tells the story of Clara, now back at home and attending the Protestant St. Mark’s Girls’ School, but she also spends a good deal of time on the two people who exert the greatest influence on the girl: her intense, conflicted, and emotionally disturbed father and her beautiful, narcissistic mother. Clara’s new friendships with two Jewish girls—the studious Ruth Philips and the flirtatious, high-spirited Patsy Cohen (whose lively, busy and noisy home provides a significant contrast to Clara’s dark and quiet one on Valetta Road)—are also explored.

Claude Batchelor converted to Catholicism when Clara was a child of seven. The ritual, the pomp, Claude’s self-identified “feudal temperament”, and a compulsion to rein in dark urges and a sinful nature were all factors in his decision. Claude’s relationship with Clara, though not literally incestuous, is certainly emotionally so. His reaction to her budding sexuality is alarmingly inappropriate. Claude is demanding, controlling, and ambitious for his daughter. A boys’ school classics teacher who would have preferred a son, Claude sees academic potential in his daughter and attempts to steer her towards Cambridge, at a time when few women attended institutions of higher education.

Clara is, however, “the lost traveller” of the title. She is rudderless after leaving the convent school. She belongs neither to the Catholic world nor the Protestant one, and though she claims she does not want to marry, she also rejects life as a bluestocking. She ends up taking a position as a governess to a precocious, spoiled ten-year-old boy, Charles Cressett, the only heir to a wealthy, old Catholic family in Worcestershire. Once installed in the Cressetts’ Jacobean great house, Clara meets a young man from a nearby estate who is even odder and more adrift than she, Archie Hughes-Follett. “From babyhood,” we are told, “he had attracted accidents and misfortunes of all kinds or [had] been the innocent cause of accidents to others.” A soldier, now at home convalescing after a grenade explosion that killed another man, Archie, is another only son of a wealthy old Catholic family. Clara’s meeting with this young man proves to be a fateful one, life-changing and tragic.

The Lost Traveller is an intense, absorbing, “old-fashioned” (in the best sense) read. It explores not only the adolescence of a young girl but the lives of her parents (and their influence on her). Though there are melodramatic elements, characterization is strong, the writing can be quite evocative, and White creates a convincing portrait of a girl who cannot find her way.

Rating: 3.5

This unusual and absorbing autobiographical novel is set in the early 1920s. It focuses on 22-year-old Clara Batchelor, a self-described “fifth-rate” actor whose three-month-long, unconsummated marriage to Archie Hughes-Follett has quickly unravelled. Archie is also an actor, apparently only marginally more talented than his wife. The reader isn’t explicitly told what’s wrong with him. (This is the fourth in a quartet of linked works by White, and it’s possible if I’d done the sensible thing and read the books in order, I might have a better idea.) Maybe it’s a combination of things. He’s a veteran of the Great War, and he may be psychologically scarred or physically injured. Quite possibly he is a closeted gay man. Whatever the case, he and Clara certainly love each other, but their relationship is not a sexual one.

Prior to Clara’s break-up with Archie, her parents had noticed “a coarseness in her looks and manner.” She’d gained weight and appeared haggard and prematurely aged. What they are unaware of is that she’d also thrown herself at a womanizing painter but then had physically fought him off when he responded to her encouragement. It was this episode that brought the marital problems to a head.

Clara’s hard-working schoolmaster father, Claude, converted to Catholicism when Clara was a young girl, and she is unusually close to him. Having psychologically invested a good deal in his daughter’s union with Archie, a scion of a well-to-do, old Catholic family, Claude is loath to give up his “Catholic” dream about his only child. His wife, Isabel, is far more pragmatic. As far as she is concerned, Archie is a “wretched boy” and the “ghastly marriage” is better ended. She rejoices when she learns an annulment is possible, though it it is a lengthy ordeal that involves both ecclesiastical and legal proceedings. One requirement is that Clara submit to a humiliating physical exam by two separate doctors to determine if she’s “intact”.

Once re-installed in her childhood home, Clara is apathetic and depressed. Though her marriage is certainly over, until the church and the law declare it so, she is expected to conduct herself discreetly and with decorum. She finds herself lying to her father about an impromptu dinner she has with Clive Heron, an eccentric friend, whom she’d bumped into on the street one afternoon. Even though he has met Clive before, Claude is horrified that Clara should have been alone with this harmless man in his private rooms. Through Clive, Clara meets her great love, Richard Crayshaw, a career soldier, who is on a month’s leave. The two experience an immediate spark and telepathic connection. There is no question that they will marry.

Over the course of the month that Richard is with her, Clara experiences problems with sleep and appetite. She becomes increasingly “absent-minded”, somewhat grandiose, and then, quite suddenly, delusional, psychotic, and violent. She ultimately ends up in a padded cell in “Nazareth”—an asylum the author has modelled on London’s famous Bethlem Royal Hospital (“Bedlam”), where White herself was committed in her twenties. During her institutionalization, Clara believes herself at various times to be a horse, a salmon, a mouse, an imp, a dog, and a flower. She is at the mercy of her hallucinations—some of which read like dark scenes from the Brothers Grimm or Russian fairy tales—and the rough hospital staff who handle her aggressively, forcefully administer medication and food using a nasogastric tube, and confine her in a straitjacket. Some of the descriptions are quite harrowing.

Clara spends nine months in a world “beyond the looking-glass,” the details of her identity and history entirely forgotten. Words lack meaning, she forgets how to write, daily events do not unfold consecutively or cohere in any sort of logical way. Clara’s return to the world on “this side of the glass” requires a “tremendous, absorbing effort of willing herself back to consciousness.” When she is released from the asylum for a two-week trial, the important thing is for her to know the truth about Richard. The author handles this well. (This section reminded me of the old Natalie Wood/Warren Beatty film, Splendor in the Grass.)

Although I’ve been aware of Antonia White for years, this is the first of her books I’ve read. I’m impressed by her portrait (based on her own experience) of a young woman’s sudden descent into and effortful re-emergence from madness. White provides enough detail about the disorientation and distress of her protagonist to help readers understand what psychosis feels like. She shows how mental illness takes fragments of the patient’s former life story and kaleidoscopically rearranges and distorts them to create strange new narratives about identity in the patient’s mind. However, White’s depiction of Clara’s parents and their relationship is a little less satisfying. Some of the dialogue between the two seems wooden and melodramatic. For one thing, there are just too many interjections of “Darling” and “Dearest”. Maybe people really did speak to each other like this once, but it doesn’t translate well across the years. Telepathic communications between lovers likewise weaken the realistic feel of the novel. Having said that, I still found Beyond the Glass a compelling and rewarding read.½

excellent

This play doesn't exactly rise to the level of, say, Twelfth Night, but it's really a better play than, I think, the author gave it credit for. As I understand it, White didn't particularly like this play and didn't allow reprinting. I assume Virago Press and White's daughters are adhering to this wish – unfortunately, because it would be worthy of a Virago VMC reprint.

The copy I have is one I stumbled across on ABE quite several years ago and just recently got around to reading. It's a WITHDRAWN copy from the City of Liverpool Public Libraries, published by Samuel French Ltd (1947) in French's Acting Edition No. 1135. A paste-on reads

Subsequently to publication, this play has been licensed by the Lord Chamberlain on the understanding that no performance/s is/are given unless the following lines from page 20 are omitted.

"How about Miss Bixby? You done your duty to-day?" To-day and every day I trust. To the best of my ability, that is. That's a good girl."

The "duty" to which the Lord Chamberlain's censorship refers is Miss Bixby's urination/defecation in the bathroom! (The paste-on's text is not precisely that of the script, omitting the names of the actors/soeakers, which is a bit confusing.)½

This is the first Virago Modern Classic published. A nine-year old girl enters a convent for schooling - her father has recently converted to Catholicism and wants her to learn what it means to be a Catholic. It explains in a very detailed way what life was like in the convent, what she studied in class, the rhythm of the days, feast days, celebrations and retreats. Her relationships with her classmates and the nuns are explored. She embraces it but it leads to a bad ending when she leaves the convent at fourteen.

This is a Virago Modern Classic, in fact the first book issued in that series. It is the story of a young girl coming of age in a convent school in the years just before World War I. To my thoroughly protestant and currently non-observant-of-anything outlook, this is the story of the systematic destruction of minds and souls in the name of "love" and obedience to an utterly perverse supreme being. Any expression of joy, kindness or love for fellow humans, appreciation of beauty, or even excellence is somehow suspect, and if taken too far, grounds for mortification. Our protagonist, Fernanda Grey, struggles with her desire to be a proper Catholic set against her terror that she may receive the "call" and be destined to take the veil, or worse, that she will miss the message, and be doomed to live life having rejected a vocation without realizing it. This reminds me of the terror of MY adolescence, born of precisely the same adult-fostered ignorance, that any number of perfectly innocent interactions with boys might result in having a baby. The most disturbing thing about this novel, I think, is that I'm not sure whether the author means us to feel what I feel while reading it, or whether she is presenting Nanda's story as some sort of cautionary tale. I suspect this will be made clearer in White's three "sequel" novels, and as cranky as this one made me, I am contrarily eager to read those too.

mostly very good. i didn't enjoy the stories featuring her mental problems as much.½

My final read of 2014 was Strangers, a collection of short stories which take as their theme; those boundaries between love and loneliness, madness and sanity, growing up and faith.
This slight volume of only just over 170 pages contains eight – largely autobiographical stories and a few pieces of poetry. My previous experience of Antonia White was in her novels that make up her famous quartet which begins with Frost in White, so I already knew I enjoyed her writing. Having completed that quartet of brilliant novels Antonia White produced no further novels, but these stories very much continue in the same vein, the themes recognisable to readers of those novels.

“She had come away for this holiday determined to shake off the shadow. With all his vigorous sanity, Richard himself had lately begun to look moody and careworn. She guessed it was for his sake as hers that he had made her give up work for a time and go away alone to the country. It had been dull misery being away from him, yet now that she saw him again she felt more shut away than ever, as a drowning man feels his isolation more bitterly when he can see people walking on the shore. There were moments when she hated him, but they were nothing to the loathing she felt for herself”
(From The Moment of Truth)

In the opening story; The Moment of Truth the reader enters the mind of woman suffering from mental illness, she’s young still, but her marriage is already in the process of breaking down because of her illness. While staying at a guest house surrounded on three sides by water, Charlotte finds evidence of her husband’s betrayal. The House of Clouds recalls rather terrifyingly the Bethlam section of Beyond the Glass, it’s tautly atmospheric, no one write about Psychiatric hospitalisation like Antonia White, it really is the stuff of nightmares. In the final story of the collection, A Surprise Visit, Julia Tye, is a woman who for fifteen years has been living a quiet, unremarkable life, holding down a good job, nobody knows that she spent most of her twenty third year incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. Julia learns that the hospital of her nightmares has been turned into a war museum, and considers paying a visit. This story is based loosely on the visit Antonia White made to the hospital she herself spent time in, and was added to the collection later.

The Saint, the third story in the collection set in a girls’ catholic school, is naturally reminiscent of Frost in May. The girls all adore Mother Lucilla, who is sadly dying of consumption. The girls are all sure that Mother Lucilla should be declared a saint, and when her replacement arrives in the form of Mother MacDowell, none of the girls takes to her and compare her very unfavourably with their favourite. Naïve, but fervent, the girls eagerly look for acts of miracle, that they could attribute to Mother Lucilla. In another story centred on the Catholic faith, The Exile, a lonely woman recounts the story of her exile from the church to another woman over a cup of tea in a college refectory; a story Hermione Lee calls a disturbing little satire in her introduction.

“Sad men in Norfolk jackets dropped in at intervals, poured themselves out cups of strong tea, drank them hastily, and departed as if to catch imaginary trains. A waitress peeled off the checked cloths and exposed the tables in their iron nakedness; the plain, unvarnished clock ticked on, the scum settled in my half-empty cup, and still Miss Hislop talked.”
(From The Exile)

The woman at the centre of Aunt Rose’s Revenge is a retired English governess in Vienna, a woman whose fierce temper is legendary in family stories. When her niece finally able to take a holiday in Vienna goes to visit her aunt, she finds a woman with inflated ideas of the world she has left behind in England. Aunt Rose imagines, her niece and everyone at home are far wealthier than she is, far wealthier in fact than they are in reality. The distance between married couples that was explored in The moment of Truth, is explored further and with huge subtlety in the title story Strangers. A woman receiving a phone call informing of her husband’s accident, rushes to the hospital to be at his side. She sits, chillily holding his hand, recalling their relationship. In The Rich Woman, White gives her central character Belle Chandler an oddly malevolent presence. The older woman seems to exert a strange power and fascination over the young Laura, who is about to be married, Laura’s subsequent marriage and very peace of mind affected by the ageing beauty.

In each of these stories, Antonia White shows herself to be a brilliant chronicler of life; her characters are real, and her stories perfect miniatures, in which the reader believes in a past and a future. She has a wonderful eye for detail, which sometimes help to create a sense of the sinister as well as the everyday.

Frost in May is a school-book about a young girl moving into adolescence in a repressive Catholic convent school. In an interview White said that this book, her first, was her own story. While White writes well, I found the heavy dose of Roman Catholicism, the focus on breaking the girls' wills, and the enclosed, repressive atmosphere a bit much. I may have to go back and re-read The Secret Garden, Heidi or Eight Cousins as an antidote. (read in 2010)

The novel starts with Nanda arriving at the Convent of the Five Wounds Catholic boarding school at nine-years of age. Her father had recently converted to Catholicism and she quickly picks up that this makes her a second class Catholic, compared to those who come from long-standing Catholic families. Nanda is a clever and creative young person who quite normally craves close friends. However, creativity, free will and young women talking in groups of only two are all frowned on at the Convent. Nanda continues to be very devout but has doubts when she can't quite reach the level of emotional engagement with Catholic traditions that others claim. Antonia White writes brilliantly and constantly makes fun of the Catholic faith, beliefs and dogma, as Nanda struggles hard to accept. The Nuns main aim is to break any free spirited child and achieve unquestioning acceptance of Catholicism and they take this to extremes. The novel is all set in the convent, apart from one section at home at Christmas, and has the same stifling and incense-rich atmosphere of the convent. An excellent and interesting read.