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?