The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault

[regshoe]

This is not a review so much as a collection of slightly-organised thoughts. Renault defeats my review-writing abilities.

The Friendly Young Ladies (1944) was written after Mary Renault read Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, thought it was silly and decided to make the point this way. And, well, there are many things that could be said about this book, and 'it's not The Well of Loneliness' is certainly one of them. (It's been a few years since I read TWoL, so I can't do a detailed comparison—perhaps it would be an interesting thing to do?—anyway...).


The Friendly Young Ladies begins in a remote Cornish village, with Elsie Lane, a naive and oblivious seventeen-year-old who lives with her awful parents who fight all the time. Elsie falls ill and is treated by Dr Peter Bracknell, an impressively horrifying man who has a lot of Psychological Ideas About Women and why it's a terribly good idea for them all to fall in love with him. Elsie falls in love with him and, under his influence, decides to run away from home and her parents and go to find her sister Leo (Leonora), who herself ran away nine years earlier. She finds Leo, who lives on a houseboat on the Thames with her girlfriend Helen (Elsie—very oblivious—never twigs the nature of their relationship; and in general it's very non-explicitly written), and writes Western novels; a writer friend of hers, Joe, lives nearby and writes serious literary novels. Eventually Peter turns up again, causes emotional turmoil for Elsie and decides it would be a good idea if Leo and/or Helen fell in love with him. Things... progress.

So, I'll start with what I thought about the book before the last two chapters. It seemed a bit muddled, really—there's the Elsie and Elsie/Peter plot which takes up quite a lot of time in the beginning, then Leo and Helen, and what with all the time we spend early on following Elsie, and Elsie's ignorance and obliviousness, I felt like there wasn't enough of Leo and Helen to get really invested in them before the important plot stuff towards the ending starts happening, and not as much as I'd like to have had for their own sakes either. Peter is a very well-drawn horrible person (one can hardly call him a villain), but ends up not actually mattering very much (I had thought the awful ending would be about something he does, but no, it's not!). As it was I spent a lot of time feeling horrible for Elsie (who, poor thing, could really have done with a nicer author who liked her better) and being confused and intrigued about Leo without it really going anywhere.

And then there's that comparison with The Well of Loneliness. Renault's basic problem is that TWoL takes itself too seriously and is overly gloomy about the lives and prospects of queer women, which, fair enough. And this is all very well—some of Leo's thoughts on the subject are fairly interesting:

For the rest, her way of life had always seemed to her natural and uncomplex, an obvious one, since there were too many women, for the more fortunate of the surplus to arrange themselves; to invest it with drama or pathos would have been in her mind a sentimentality and a kind of cowardice. Because of this confidence she had got what she needed from women easily, and without the sacrifice of pride.

But already here there's the suggestion of what becomes more obvious later on, that Renault's real problem with Hall's gloomy picture of homophobia is not so much 'come on now, it's not all bad, we can be happy sometimes!' as 'if you're being oppressed by society it's your fault and you need to get over it, stop being ridiculous'. She has to an extreme degree the twentieth-century attitude (Enid Blyton is the author I associate most with it, but it shows up all over the place, of course) that a thick skin is the greatest of all virtues and that anyone who's actually hurt by being mistreated has only themselves to blame—which is especially ugly in this context, of course. I think this is gloomier than anything in The Well of Loneliness, in its way:

'Why should they pamper oddities, anyway? It's they who are in charge of evolution. They think it's better not to be odd, as far as they bother to think at all, and they're quite right. There are shoals of women made up pretty much like me, but a lot haven't noticed and most of the rest prefer to look the other way, and it's probably very sensible of them. If you do happen to have had your attention drawn to it, the thing to do is to like and be liked by as many ordinary people as possible, to make yourself as good a life as you can in your own frame, and to keep your oddities for the few people who are likely to be interested.'

(Leo speaking to Peter there—one could question how far Leo believes what she's saying and how far Renault agrees with her; but Renault makes her own attitudes very clear in her afterword, which confirms my impression of her as a thoroughly nasty piece of work in general).


OK, then there's the ending. It is a strange ending. Renault admits in her afterword, in a passage which made me laugh a lot, that it's a silly ending. But what on earth she actually meant by it, I don't know. There's an obvious interpretation which is pretty staggeringly homophobic, and, more to the point, is so in a way that seems far too banal and, well, ordinary for Renault to have meant it like that. But if not that, what and why? I don't know. Um, it is certainly an ironic subversion of the ending of The Well of Loneliness, but an ironic subversion ought to be making some point, and this... I don't know. I am baffled. Baffled and horrified.

I think The Friendly Young Ladies is more like The Charioteer than Return to Night is, RtN's bizarre ending notwithstanding. The treatment of queer characters, of course, but more in the story about conflicting relationships, and most of all in the general impression that the whole thing was written as a cruel joke at the expense of the characters, the reader and the world in general. It did not upset me as much as The Charioteer did—partly because it's just not as good a book, partly because I didn't get seriously attached to any of the characters in time to care so much about what happened to them (if there had been more Helen POV, and more of Helen and Leo interacting, early on in the book, it might have been different. But maybe not! I still don't feel like I really get Helen).

So, um, if it annoys me as much as all this, was it worth reading? I think so, unfortunately. Renault's actual prose is as beautiful as ever, and she has—somewhere in between the above-mentioned tendency to treat the plot as a cruel joke—an amazing way of highlighting significant details in the midst of big emotional scenes (that bit right at the end with the green dress...) which is terribly effective. She uses unreliable narrators in a very entertaining way! The ideas about gender and sexuality are fascinating, at least in the detached, historical sense of 'fascinating' (I haven't got into the whole thing about Leo's relationship to gender, which is... a thing). And, OK, some bits of the book are in fact very funny (I enjoyed the scene where Leo decides to pay Peter back by chatting up his girlfriend). There's a lot here I enjoyed, or at least... no, actually enjoyed, it's just a shame about the All That.

Poor Helen. I want to give her a hug. :(

Comments

[osprey_archer]

This book is SO MUCH, isn't it? In some ways so good - the characters are so exceptionally well drawn (with perhaps the partial exception of Helen? Partly because we don't see as much of her and don't get much if any of her interiority), and even when they're horrible they're horrible in such believable, petty, ghastly ways. Why is Peter LIKE that? He thinks he's so self-aware and he's the opposite of self-aware.

LOVED the bit where Leo chats up Peter's girlfriend. A well-deserved takedown, which hopefully will spur the girlfriend to think about whether that jerk Peter is really what she wants. (She might honestly be the character I felt the worst for! Imagine having a relationship with Peter that lasts for YEARS.)

Elsie at least is aware of her own naivety, even though she doesn't make much progress toward overcoming it (never finds about about Helen & Leo's real relationship, etc). She reminds me of the narrator in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, another awkward naive girl who probably would have done better with an author who liked her more. But certainly for Renault and perhaps for du Maurier too (although I don't think the valorizing of a thick skin is as strong with her), that sensitivity is a big flaw.

(Another du Maurier connection: she fell in love with her publisher's wife, Ellen Doubleday, and referred to this side of her as "the boy in the box," which is in some ways reminiscent of Leo's conceptualization of herself as half boy. It must have been a thing that was in the air in the mid-twentieth century.)

I remember the bit where Helen is scoffing at Elsie for running away from home when it wasn't THAT bad, really, and I was like, I don't know, it sounded pretty awful actually... And poor Elsie at the end, where she's having an epiphany (which one could read as teenage melodrama, but I think we're meant to believe it) that she will Never Be Truly Loved because she's not brave enough or something of that sort.

The ending is really awful to everyone, though, except Peter who is the only one who would have deserved it. GOD WHAT AN ENDING. I don't think I'll ever get over it. In my head I like to pretend that after Leo stops crying, she realizes that going off with Joe is an awful idea and stays with Helen instead. We don't actually see her get off the houseboat, after all! It could happen!

As I was reading, I thought the ending must have been forced on Renault by her publisher. What other explanation could there be for its utter bizarreness? Surely it's MEANT to show that Leo is happy with Helen and that making her "normal" would make her unhappy. But then I got to the afterword and Renault is all, "This is a silly ending, as Leo would get in the way of Joe's work," and I was just like "THAT'S why you think it's a silly ending???" So apparently the ending was intentional and it was meant to... well, God knows what it was supposed to mean.

[regshoe]

This book is SO MUCH, isn't it?

Yes! Argh, you're very right about the characters being terribly well-drawn—that's what makes the rest of it so painful, really...

Hmm, that's interesting about the Daphne du Maurier comparison—yeah, I see what you mean about the narrator of Rebecca. As for the 'conceptualization of herself as half boy', that actually reminds me a bit of Blyton again, with characters like George from the Famous Five and Bill from Malory Towers—the younger Leo scrambling around on the cliffs of Cornwall with the boys would have fit right in with them—I suppose Leo is an attempt to solve the problem of what happens to characters like that when they grow up (it seems like the consistent 'boy' rather than 'man' for a twenty-seven-year-old is significant). Ugh, that image of 'the dead boy' was one of the most horrifying parts of the whole thing.

Anyway—yeah, that last chapter felt like such awful rubbing-in of the terrible ending, with scenes going through the different characters and showing how they're all heartbroken—Elsie 'turning herself in', Leo crying on the bed, Helen bravely hailing the ferry...—and then there's Peter just doing absolutely fine! There's no justice in a Renault novel. I hope Elsie grows up a bit, trains at secretarial college or something, gets away from her parents and finds a nice young man who isn't awful. I hope Peter gets dumped by Norah and then, idk, falls into the river or something.

The bit I really found bizarre about the afterword was Renault saying 'it is naive to present [relationships like Joe and Leo's] as happy endings'. Er... did you think you did present it as a happy ending...?? (Oh dear, I do not want to know what she thinks about the ending of The Charioteer. Or Return to Night, probably).

[osprey_archer]

Yes, there's definitely a thing going on with the whole tomboy archetype and the intersection of gender & sexual identity in the first half of the twentieth century. I like the idea of Leo as an view of what these characters might be like when they grow up: it's definitely not a thing that these children's novels often engage with! (Or you have a Caddie Woodlawn ending... which come to think of it is basically Leo's ending... where the tomboy heroine knuckles under and becomes properly feminine. "Haven't you run with the wolves long enough, Caddie?" her father asks her.)

I like to imagine that World War II is Elsie's big chance. She gets war work, meets lots and lots of people and has some adventures (romantic and perhaps also purely martial), and eventually settles down with a nice man... although given that bit in her diary about the crush on her teacher, I could definitely see one of the romantic adventures along the way being with a girl. And then the other shoe finally drops about Helen and Leo.

I'm SO curious what ye average reader in the 1930s thought of this ending. Did they think it was happy because it ended with a heterosexual love affair? Or were they vaguely disturbed by it all?

[sovay]

Renault admits in her afterword, in a passage which made me laugh a lot, that it's a silly ending.

I've never read an edition of The Friendly Young Ladies with an afterword! I am actually not surprised it doesn't help with the ending, since I think nothing could help with the ending except a different one. skygiants read and reviewed the novel a few years ago and I thought about re-reading it then and I still haven't. Most of Renault's contemporaries wrap themselves around telephone poles at the end, but I can usually figure out what caused the crash, and here it might as well be aliens.

[regshoe]

I read the Virago Press edition from 2005—the afterword is dated 1983, presumably written for an earlier edition then.

Thank you for linking to skygiants's review!—some interesting thoughts there.

Most of Renault's contemporaries wrap themselves around telephone poles at the end, but I can usually figure out what caused the crash, and here it might as well be aliens.

XD Oh dear, I think that about sums it up, doesn't it...

[sovay]

Thank you for linking to skygiants's review!—some interesting thoughts there.

Welcome! I recommend skygiants' reviews generally.

Oh dear, I think that about sums it up, doesn't it...

When I read Purposes of Love (1939), which for the record is a trainwreck, a friend pointed out that it was Renault's first run at her recurring concern of the difficulty of egalitarian relationships, especially when she is most interested in exploring them through a Platonic filter—who is the lover, who is the beloved, whether these roles are fulfilling and whether they can be refused and whether there exists any equal ground on which even to try to meet. These are reasonable questions to ask in a heteronormative society! The problem is that at least in her contemporary novels, Renault seems to be essentially pessimistic about the viability of any such relationships and therefore her narratives tend to warp their initial conditions in order to make someone fall off one side of the balance beam or the other and sometimes they're still well-written enough that I give her characters better odds than the text does and sometimes I think her opinions are just from Mars. Like, I agree with her that heteronormativity is terrible! I don't then feel I should naturally conclude that it's inescapable and a person is just embarrassing themselves and letting down the side by trying to change the world so that it's less bludgeoningly straight as opposed to gritting their teeth and toughing the patriarchy out. It's funny to me, by which I mean I find it sad, that she got so defensively conservative about queer rights when she wrote Alec in The Charioteer (1953), saying firmly and as far as I can tell with the support of his author, "I'm not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality . . . Criminals are blackmailed. I'm not a criminal. I'm prepared to go to some degree of trouble, if necessary, to make that point." Don't tell me that by the time of decriminalization that man wasn't an elder queer activist.

[osprey_archer]

I'm not sure Alec has the support of the author, actually, or at least not her full support for that particular sentiment. Insofar as anyone is expressing Renault's views, I think it's Ralph, especially given that Ralph's sentiments on this score chime pretty closely with Leo's in The Friendly Young Ladies. (My copy is packed right now but he says something very similar to Leo's line about "Why should they pamper oddities?")

Having said that, Renault definitely supports Alec as a person, and generally presents him as brave and astute. The fact that Alec is the one saying it, instead of Sandy or Bunny, gives the viewpoint a certain amount of weight even if Renault doesn't ultimately embrace it.

[sovay]

I'm not sure Alec has the support of the author, actually, or at least not her full support for that particular sentiment.

He almost ventriloquizes one of her letters at an earlier point in the same conversation (about how the treatment of homosexuality as a crime or at best a sickness has forced an artificial society onto people who have nothing in common but their sexuality: an attitude supported by Laurie's horror at the party and Renault's disapproval of gay liberation), so while I agree that he's not the sole voice of the author in the novel, I can't agree that he's not one of them. I have no evidence that she was herself, contra Alec, willing to view her sexual orientation as immoral, although she was certainly ambivalent enough about how to live with it that we end up in discussions like this one. Where she diverges from her character is therefore the rest of the conversation, which flanges off into her not necessarily historical ideas about ancient Greece, but I do think they are in synch for that line. She gives Ralph at least one drunken strawmannish response to it, which argues further that we can't trust him all the time (he doesn't seem able to admit the reality of bisexuality, which Renault for all her faults actually could).

(My copy is packed right now but he says something very similar to Leo's line about "Why should they pamper oddities?")

I believe he literally asks Alec what he wants, a medal for being gay?

I disliked The Bull from the Sea (1962) even more the last time I tried to re-read it, but I am always going to be fascinated that when Theseus and Hippolyta affirm their—m/f but queer-coded—relationship with one another, their repeated love-line is "We are what we are," which, I don't know about you, but it sure gives me the screaming La Cage aux Folles.

[regshoe]

That's very interesting! Having read three of Renault's contemporary novels now, I was definitely getting the sense that there's something in common thematically with the shape of her endings, but hadn't quite articulated what it was—that's a very insightful explanation of it. There does seem to be this consistent belief that the events of the ending are somehow fated—whether by society or the characters' own desires or whatever else—and that that isn't necessarily a good or a happy thing but it has to happen. I may read Purposes of Love at some point, but I think I may try the historicals next.

Alec! I don't think I paid enough attention to him when I read The Charioteer, but I remember that bit. You're quite right.

[luzula]

For the sake of my curiosity, could you rot13 the ending for me? I doubt I'll ever read this book, so I don't mind the spoiler...

[regshoe]

I'm not sure how easily summarisable the extent of the disaster is, but here's an attempt:

Fb rneyvre va gur obbx, Wbr unf ebznagvp srryvatf sbe Yrb, ohg fur ercryf uvf nqinaprf orpnhfr fur jnagf gb rkvfg ba rdhny, cyngbavp grezf jvgu uvz—guvf vf eryngrq gb ure jubyr guvat jvgu traqre naq ubj fur jnagf gb eryngr gb zra yvxr n zna jbhyq, naq gur vqrn bs ercynpvat gung jvgu n urgrebfrkhny eryngvbafuvc ubeevsvrf ure. Ng gur raq, n pbzcyvpngrq frevrf bs riragf vaibyivat Crgre rgp. yrnq gb Wbr cerffvat uvf fhvg ntnva, naq guvf gvzr—nsgre fur whzcf va gur evire naq fjvzf gb gel naq rfpncr sebz uvz—fur npprcgf uvz, gurl unir frk, naq vg gheaf bhg guvf vf ernyyl jung fur'f jnagrq zber guna nalguvat ryfr nyy nybat orpnhfr fur vf Hasbeghangryl, N Erny Jbzna. Ohg vg'f abg n pbzcyrgr nobhg-ghea vagb abezny urgrebfrkhnyvgl! Fur'f fgvyy ernyyl pbasyvpgrq naq srryf ubeevoyr nobhg vg. Gur obbx raqf jvgu ure fboovat ba ure orq va gur ubhfrobng bire ure ehvarq unccvarff jvgu Uryra nf fur qrpvqrf gb eha njnl jvgu Wbr gb Nzrevpn. Vg'f ernyyl, ernyyl njshy.

I, er, support your decision not to read it!

[luzula]

Ack, that sounds like a trainwreck indeed. I might someday read Return to Night, but not this one...

Thanks for writing it up!

[oursin]

Weeellll, I might say in its favour that it doesn't have Eeviilll Predatory Lesbian, and it doesn't have Wicked Bisexual Married Lady toying with the affection of the Invert (TWOL has one of these and they crop up elsewhere), and Helen comes over as a remarkably well-adjusted bisexual who understandably wishes to live her life with a woman (her remark that even Leo is capable of a spot of routine nurturing domestic behaviour, unlike the average bloke) with the occasional side-fling with men, no drama.

But Leo! what between the gender issues PLUS the Traumatic Het Initiation Backstory, oh dearie me. There is so much Angst and Draaaamaaaa yet to come, we fear.

[regshoe]

That is true! Heh, I suppose the Leo/Norah bit could be read as something of an ironic subversion of the Evil Predatory Lesbian, in fact...

Aww, I agree about Helen, too. I do want to like her a lot, but I never really felt like we got enough of her perspective to understand her properly—which, considering the ending, may be for the best—but what we do see of her is good.

[hedgebird]

A Renault biography I read mentioned that Renault later didn't think much of the four (?) novels between her first and The Charioteer. Completist me, who dipped out of The Friendly Young Ladies: "I'm off the hook."

[regshoe]

Hehe. I did like Return to Night, and even this one had its points, but I think the historicals may be worth a look next...

[starshipfox]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this one! I haven't read it and I probably won't, but it's interesting that it's a response to TWOL and I appreciate your take on it. In general, I find Renault contemporary queer novels a bit hard to take, because of the attitude you describe: She has to an extreme degree the twentieth-century attitude (Enid Blyton is the author I associate most with it, but it shows up all over the place, of course) that a thick skin is the greatest of all virtues and that anyone who's actually hurt by being mistreated has only themselves to blame—which is especially ugly in this context, of course. I remember reading her say that she disapproved of any kind of gay pride or fight for equality, because she thought we should just get on with things. Plato didn't need equality, so we don't either. It's weird? I find her historical novels so much more to my taste because that attitude isn't so obvious in them.

[regshoe]

Yes, I remember that attitude from The Charioteer (where I was too busy being upset by everything else that happened to be very bothered by it, but it's certainly a prominent feature). She goes into more explicit detail in the afterword here, and it is bizarre—especially from someone who does seem to appreciate at least to an extent the damage that not having equality can do. Oh well—I definitely intend to try the historicals next, so I'm glad to know that they're not so bad about this!

[starshipfox]

I read the historical novels when I was a teenager, and they captured my imagination, to the extent that I attempted to get a degree in Classics! So it's hard for me to look at them objectively as they are so much part of my make-up: they are *very* different to her modern novels, much broader in scope. She has a real genius for inhabiting the mores and imaginations of other times. The Alexander trilogy is my favourite.

[fawatson]

I tend to look on everything Renault wrote before The Charioteer as journeyman pieces as she learned her craft. They all contain passages which are well-written and none quite hands together - and that is from someone who owns them all and likes each to at least some extent. But they are all deeply flawed. Return to Night is usually considered the best of the bunch (though I just find Hilary irritatingly obtuse about Julian).

The Charioteer is a perennial favourite of mine (and has inspired the most fan-fic of anything she wrote). It probably helps to remember she wrote it in the early 1950s when homosexuality was illegal on both sides of the pond. It looks very understated to modern eyes but was considered shockingly explicit for its time.

If you have not read Renault's historicals before I strongly recommend you try them.

[regshoe]

Yes, from what I've read of them so far (I did like Return to Night!), it sounds like that's about it. I do definitely plan to try the historicals next!