Letter

Fifty Persephone readers came to the lunch in Oxford celebrating the publication of Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan; Lyndall Gordon and Charlie Lee-Potter, both Oxford residents, spoke most interestingly about the book. The former pointed out how convincing Princes is about our mothers' generation and about that marginal state of mind, recalled in her mother's habitual self-definition, 'I'm only a housewife at the bottom of Africa.' And Lyndall claimed to be unsuited as a foreigner to comment on such an English book, remarking on her puzzlement over apparently secret codes of manners such as pulling on gloves in the right way.

A novel such as Love in a Cold Climate also confirms, in its witty way, the marginality of the wife and domesticity in the Oxford of the ‘30s and ‘40s: Lyndall read aloud Nancy Mitford's account of a ghastly dinner party in suburban Banbury Road (the site of our lunch) where the classy bride finds that she is dressed wrongly, that the food is vile and that the only good thing is the port - when women have to retire from the dining-room.

Lyndall ended by referring to Mary Wollstonecraft's ideal of domesticity in the late eighteenth century, so far ahead of its time, ahead of where we stand today, in that she suggests that domesticity should be politicised as a counter to public violence and governance based in contests of power i.e. domesticity should no longer be marginal but take its place in the centre of the political arena.

Charlie Lee-Potter then talked about the Oxford novel in general and Princes in the Land in particular as the definition of the insider versus the outsider. From Jude in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure to John Kemp in Philip Larkin's Jill, from Charles in Brideshead Revisited to Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse, novelists have used Oxford to expose the anxieties of those who do not belong. She described Princes in the Land as a restrained but unashamedly political novel, in which Patricia wrestles with the knowledge that she has no friends and no status. As her hair fades from
vibrant red to invisible grey, she sinks beneath her husband and children's egotism.

Charlie went on to point out that the archetypal Oxford insider is J.R.R. Tolkien and his Inklings friends. Tolkien once described himself as a ‘hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees and unmechanised farmlands. I smoke a pipe and like good plain food (unrefrigerated).’ Tolkien, the personification of the tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking, elbow-patched, English, Christian, intellectual Oxford male insider would have derided Patricia's son for becoming a refrigerator salesman, underlining yet again Patricia's role as the outsider. But Patricia triumphs in one sense. Joanna Cannan succeeds in making her readers not just sympathetic to Patricia's plight, but deeply
empathetic too.

After the lunch there was an Oxford Festival event at which I ‘talked up’ Dorothy Whipple as hard as I could, and also mentioned Rex Whistler; I then discovered that he is going to be the subject of an exhibition in Brighton from April to September this year: www.brighton.virtualmuseum.info.The June books, Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson and Gardener’s Nightcap by Muriel Stuart have gone off to the printer. Meanwhile we hope you have a wonderful Easter break, reading and walking and not doing too much. Some of you, indeed, will be walking over the South Downs, over the landscape shown in the poster we have hanging in the shop:

Nicola Beauman
15 April 2006
Lamb’s Conduit Street