It started with Frost in May way back in the spring of 2014. And then following quick on its heels that same year there was The Lost Traveller. How did almost two years pass before I took the story up again with The Sugar House? Poor Antonia White's most excellent quartet of Clara Batchelor novels (she started her journey as Nanda Grey by the way) has been dragged out and neglected a bit here online, but I did finally read the last of the books earlier this year finishing that long journey with Clara in Beyond the Glass. I read it closer to the start of the year and here I am trying to write about it at the end of it. Thankfully a very good introduction is in my edition of the book (any quotes I share come from that introduction by Virago founder Carmen Callil) which is helping me along, and as always thinking about it and writing about it after the fact helps set it more firmly in mind and allows me to revisit the story.
It's easy to see why Frost in May was the very first Virago Modern Classic and easy to see, too, why VMC has published and kept in print all four volumes by Antonia White. They are really brilliantly written and give a view upon a woman's life that VMC set out to do--tell women's stories. If you think about 'women's fiction' in light of the books Virago has set out to publish there is no question that women write quality Literature just as well as men do (but we all already knew that, right?) and that, and here is the sticking point so often in literary novels, that their stories are just as important to tell and worthy to read about as men's.
The books are based loosely on White's life, which was somewhat traumatic if Clara's story is anything to go by. She wrote only the four novels as well as a collection of short stories (which I have and must get around to reading as well), a play, a couple of children's books and two volumes of memoirs. Apparently she struggled for much of her life with writer's block, and perhaps that is why there is such a stretch of years between publication of the first volume in the quartet and the remaining three. She spent much time writing advertising copy and journalism pieces though she long wanted to write a 'proper' novel. She changed the character's name in the second volume of the quartet possibly to distance herself and her own story from that of Nanda/Clara's. I think Nanda in particular was an evocation of herself. When Nanda became Clara, White was writing less about her own life experiences than that 'proper' novel she so longed to write.
"Antonia White turned fact into fiction in a quartet of novels based on her life from the ages of nine to twenty-three. 'My life is the raw material for the novels, but writing an autobiography and writing fiction are very different things.' This transformation of real life into an imagined work of art is perhaps her greatest skill as a novelist."
The four novels follow the story of Clara's life from her childhood, her conversion along with her father (that father figure was predominant in her life) to Catholicism and her Catholic education, to her first love affair and life as an actress (when she began questioning her Catholic faith), her marriage and then the failure of that marriage. Finally in Beyond the Glass ("technically the most ambitious of the four novels") Clara grapples with mental illness. This last novel was perhaps the hardest to read, hard emotionally. Clara had struggled with her faith (though Antonia White makes a point, too, of saying that the influence of her Catholic faith "was profoundly enriching, in no way negative, part of an extraordinary life"--which just goes to show how little in life is ever black and white and that our lives are filled with many complexities).
"As a Catholic, her relationship with Catholic belief and practice has always been intense, a wrestling to live within its spiritual imperatives in a way which accorded with her own nature, clinging to her faith, as she says, 'by the skin of my teeth'. The struggle is brilliantly felt in this quartet, permeating everything that happens to Clara, affecting her adolescence, sexuality, her relationships with men."
And really that quite sums up nicely what the books are about. It is a coming of age of one young girl, into young woman and then adulthood but that passage marked along the way by so many challenges and roadblocks. Life is messy and White really illuminates just how much. She also brings to life the period--one girl's coming of age in the thirties and forties and just beyond the war years.
Antonia White wanted to finish Clara's story and her reader's asked for yet another novel, but she never managed more than just a chapter more in Clara's life. It is comforting to know (and I wish I could read that chapter) that Clara marries again (to the man she had an affair with in this book), has given up her religion and is living the "sort of life her father doesn't approve of . . . going out to work and having a wonderful time." Clara, until her breakdown, had been writing stories as well as advertising copy, too, much like White. And despite her struggles with her father, he had retired and was living with her mother in a Sussex cottage with a garden and full-size croquet lawn. No matter the difficulties Clara (and her parents) faced along the way, it sounds like a happy ending was in store after all.
The books are well worth reading and I can happily recommend them to you. I am not sure I could, the first time out, have read them all back to back, but I can imagine now reading them as a true quartet and seeing how Clara's life rolls out. Even if there were only four novels, Antonia White was an amazing writer.