Modern Literature – The Literature Blog

Spotlight on… Enigma Variations by André Aciman

lightness, lust and the torment of arresting love

‘We lead many lives, nurse more identities than we care to admit, are given all manner of names, when in fact one, and one only, is good enough.
And which identity is that?’
-André Aciman, Enigma Variations

Enigma Variations picks at the scabs of our own lonely longing for love, exploring fully the human tendency towards irrationality and the fickle sway between despair and hope that defines many blossoming relationships. Aciman scoops romanticism and idealism in his hands, delicately juggling them with an underlying, melancholic realism throughout the novel; namely exploring the long littleness of life and a fear of wasted time, the subsequent sense of restlessness, jealousy and desire to find the ultimate love.

Both fluid and pacy, Aciman’s delicate, sensory prose feels breathy and intimate throughout, expertly navigating the disparity between the tormented, inner voice and the outward reality portrayed in human interactions with those that pique our interest. And yet, despite its lightness and heat, the novel also offers a heaviness which builds as it progresses, manifesting in the implications for the protagonist. We begin to identify his contempt for domestic, comfortable love, a perpetual longing and enigmatic view of what it means to be in a relationship. As we become increasingly aware of his own flaws and conflicted wants, we are left questioning – what is enough? How is he ever supposed to know? And what is it he, or perhaps we, as the reader, are searching for?

Structured chronologically with a chapter dedicated to each love of his life, Aciman explores the inner workings of desire, self-discovery and self-awareness – or lack of it, as sexuality shifts from an unexplored, shameful wisp in childhood, to a titillating, lustful and sometimes lonely fire stoked in adulthood. Detailing experiences of bisexuality, the beauty and questions that come with it, Aciman offers intricate depictions of arousal and pens carnal thoughts so wonderfully that you will linger over his descriptions with a bit-lip:

‘I’m shrouded in silence, like a beggar hooded in burlap, skulking in a cellar. I am a cellar. My passion feeds on everything but air, curdles like bad milk that never goes bad enough. It just sits there. And it wastes the heart a tick per day, still, anything that touches the heart is good for the heart, is like feeling, becomes feeling. When I do not speak to you I hope that you will, which you never do, because I never do, because we’ve stopped talking even before we’ve started speaking’.

The novel leaves you with a pang of sadness, as you realise the protagonist’s romantic, all-encompassing hope is the very thing that wears away the loyalty and charm held by long-term partners that he so openly agonised over at its start. Perhaps, Enigma Variations is thus, an exploration of self-sabotage disguised as romance. Or, merely an acknowledgement that love manifests in many forms and that we are compelled, wholeheartedly, to taste them, no matter whether they nourish or destroy us.

Written by Georgia Adsett.
www.georgiaadsett.com

“Life, about change”: symbolism and money in Ali Smith’s Hotel World’

People go past. They don’t see Else, or decide not to.
–Ali Smith, Hotel World, p. 39.

From ‘[t]wo ten pence pieces’ and ‘a handful of coppers’ to ‘the five pound note’, Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001) is a novel that is strewn with money; indeed, the language of ‘capital, transaction, and accumulation’ that pervades every interaction between her characters reflects the contemporary status of capitalism as the dominant world order.[i] It is a world order that was anticipated by Francis Fukuyama who, after witnessing the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, proclaimed that the ‘end of history’ was at hand:

‘the [twentieth] century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an “end of ideology” or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism’.[ii]

Unlike Fukuyama, who revels in the ‘ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy’, Smith rejects capitalism as an inherently oppressive system that repeatedly disenfranchises the poor. Her criticism echoes Jacques Derrida’s own disavowal of contemporary capitalism in Specters of Marx (1994):

‘it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy […] never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity’.[iii]

Specters presents a theory of ethics that demands a ‘certain responsibility and answerability’ from society in response to the injustices of capitalism; in Hotel World, Smith repeats this demand.[iv] Indeed, the novel begins with a testimony from the ghost of Sara Wilby, who returns from beyond the grave with an urgent ‘message for you’ (‘[y]ou. Yes, you. It’s you I’m talking to’), insisting that the reader pay attention and ‘[l]isten’ (pp. 30-31). As Smith exposes the violence of a system that is built on the exploitation of labour, the reader, in turn, is asked to bear witness to the harsh reality of these injustices.

Yet if, as Esther Peeren argues, the ‘ghostly system of capitalist production […] renders labor and its value invisible’ by ‘mak[ing] workers converge with their labor’, then how can it be possible to bear witness to the ‘invisible’ iniquity and oppression of a ‘ghostly’ system?[v] For example, the current alarming rise in homelessness is a result of the inequalities inherent within capitalism, a connection that Smith makes explicit in the novel through the headlines on the newspaper pages that Else, a homeless girl, wraps around her feet for extra insulation; the headlines read, ‘BRITAIN MASSIVELY MORE UNEQUAL THAN 20 YEARS AGO. ONE IN FIVE PEOPLE LIVES BELOW BREADLINE’ (p. 45). As Peeren identifies, however, the victims of these social injustices often ‘resemble dispossessed ghosts in that they are ignored and considered expendable’; indeed, passers-by ignore Else on the street, not seeing her, or ‘decid[ing] not to’, as she is made invisible by the dispossessing system of capitalism that marginalises her suffering (p. 39).[vi] How, then, does one act ethically and bear witness to the spectral?

Using Derrida’s concept of conjuration as a theoretical framework, I argue that Smith finds the answer to this paradox of bearing witness to the spectral through money; she commodifies the body and pathologizes money through the abject in order to conjure the exploitation of labour under capitalism. Thus, Smith ultimately causes the ‘magical spell’ of capitalism ‘to be undone and the reality of exploitation to be revealed’.[vii]

In Hotel World, Smith converges the human working body with the corporate ‘body’ of the Global Hotel. Whilst remembering the events surrounding her death, Sara’s ghost states that she had been working as a maid on the top floor of the hotel, which:

‘used to be the servants’ quarters two hundred years ago when the house had servants in it, and after that the house was a brothel and up there was where the cheap girls […] were put to sell their wares (p. 6).

Through the history of the corporate hotel, Smith creates a continuity of human labour that demonstrates how the worker’s body has been commodified under capitalism. It is from this top floor of the hotel that Sara then falls to her death in the dumb waiter. The reoccurring image of the long, vertical shaft of the dumb waiter is repeatedly associated with the human body: Penny, a guest, is ‘appalled’ by the dark ‘nothing’ of the shaft that ‘[runs] the length’ of the hotel ‘like a spine’ (p. 145) ; Else imagines a wall ‘made of phlegm’ inside her that ‘goes from her abdomen to her throat’ and mirrors the ‘hotel wall’ against which she rests her back (p. 40); Lise, the receptionist who worked at the Global Hotel before her illness, describes her bodily illness as a fall, ‘as if she had been upended over the wall of a well’ and ‘had been falling in the same monotonous nothing way for weeks’ (p. 84). By conflating the corporate ‘body’ of the hotel with the human body, Smith then pathologizes capitalism, specifically through money.

The material body of money, as Derrida asserts, provides the means through which to reify the abstract system of capitalism; it conjures the specter. Derrida defines the act of conjuration as that which ‘makes come’ what ‘is not there at the present moment of the appeal’.[viii] To conjure, then, is to make visible that which was previously there but invisible. Money, described by Derrida as the ‘[a]pparition of the bodiless body’ of capitalism, can therefore be understood as fulfilling this role of conjuration; its material form provides a ‘body’ for the otherwise ‘bodiless body’ of capitalism to manifest itself. Thus, money in its material form reifies the specter of capitalism, conjuring what was abstract and invisible into a real and visible form.

In Hotel World, Smith pathologizes capitalism by constructing money as waste. She continuously divests coins of their monetary value: a copper coin ‘tastes like meat gone off’ (p. 38); a homeless woman’s coins are ‘piled like a mistake, like rubbish’ by her side (p. 67); and the hotel receptionist carries a ‘wastepaper basket full of small change’ (p. 113). More specifically, money is routinely compared to bodily waste. After putting some coins into her mouth and spitting them back out, Else describes them as looking like ‘shining sick’; similarly, the taste of the catarrh that she frequently coughs up also reminds her of the ‘taste of money’, ‘always lurking at the back of her throat’ (pp. 37-38). As forms of bodily waste (‘sick’, ‘catarrh’), money is abjected, cast off and purged by the human body. In her essay, Powers of Horror (1980), Julia Kristeva discusses the abject, and the state of abjection. She describes the ‘spasms and vomiting’, the ‘repugnance’ and ‘the retching’ that turn her away from ‘body fluids’, ‘defilement’, and ‘shit’, all of which she categorises as the abject; it is ‘not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection’, Kristeva states, ‘but what disturbs identity, system, order’.[ix] By constructing money as bodily waste to be purged and rejected by the human body, Smith pathologizes capitalism through the abject. She suggests that capitalism is not an abstract or spectral economic system, but something violent and threatening that ‘disturbs’ by dispossessing the poor and the vulnerable through systemic oppression.

The language of money that structures every aspect of the novel reflects the contemporary culture of consumerism and commodification. As Catherine Belsey identifies, however, there is one aspect of the human experience that resists commodification:

‘[t]o the degree that [the] postmodern condition implies an unbridled consumerism, the cultural logic of late capitalism, pleasure for cash and a product to gratify every possible impulse – if not, indeed, to construct the impulse in the first place – love is a value that remains beyond the market.[x]

For Smith, the human emotion of love serves as an antidote to the violence of capitalism. Indeed, when Sara’s ghost proclaims that ‘[l]ife’ is ‘about change’, change refers to money, but also recognises the potential for a transformation that, for Smith, is motivated by human love that ‘cannot be bought’.[xi] Whilst sat begging for money outside the Global Hotel, Else remembers putting a coin into her mouth with a past boyfriend, musing that:

the taste was metal. After that when Ade had kissed her he tasted of metal too. He passed a ten pence piece into her mouth, in past her teeth and off his tongue, flat on to her tongue like a communion wafer (p. 37).

For Else, the taste of the coin now reminds her of the man she once loved, who had ‘kissed her’ and ‘tasted of metal too’. Smith reinscribes the coin with a symbolic value that is not monetary, as suggested by its comparison to a ‘communion wafer’. A similar reinscription of the value of money also occurs when Clare, Sara’s sister, meets Duncan, the only person who witnessed Sara’s death in the Global Hotel. While recounting Sara’s death, Duncan tells Clare that Sara had ‘bet him a fiver she could get into the lift’; now unable to pay his debt to Sara, Duncan gives Clare the fiver instead (p. 204). Clare accepts the money and addresses Sara in her interior monologue, stating, ‘I put the five pounds in the cabinet too I won’t ever spend it it is yours […] I will keep it for you it is worth more than anything’ (pp. 215-216). By keeping the five-pound note ‘flattened […] out between two books’ in her cabinet, Clare removes the note from being circulated again, and imbues it with non-monetary value as a memorial for her dead sister (p. 216). Smith suggests that love, purer than the capitalist desire for consumerism and commodification, is a transformative agent that reinscribes monetary value with a symbolic value that is far deeper, more intimate and, ultimately, more human.

In her foreword to Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2013), Marina Warner states that Smith’s fiction ‘quests’ to ‘reinvigorate the important things that matter to life, grappling with the meaning of love and loss without shying away’.[xii] In Hotel World, Smith criticises the contemporary culture of capitalism and commodification, under which the vulnerable are regularly disenfranchised. By amplifying these marginalised voices, Smith asks the reader to bear witness to the systemic injustices of capitalism; indeed, she asks the reader to hope for better by prioritising the ‘important things that matter to life’, such as love and compassion. When Sara’s ghost returns from beyond the grave, she returns with a message for everyone, from ‘the people in the cinema queue’ to the ‘check-out girls’ at the supermarket, and to the reader:

‘[h]ere’s the story.
Remember you must live.
Remember you most love.
Remainder you mist leaf.’

References
Cover Image: Front Cover of Penguin’s 2002 edition of the novel. See Ali Smith, Hotel World (London: Penguin, 2002).

[i] Ali Smith, Hotel World (London: Penguin Books, 2002). All further references to this novel are to this edition, and page numbers are given in parentheses in the body of the post.

[ii] Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, 16 (1989), 3-18 (p. 1).

[iii] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 85. From this point onwards, I will give the title in shorthand, thus referring to Specters of Marx as merely Specters.

[iv] María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, ‘The Spectral Turn/Introduction’, in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, eds. by María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 31-36 (p. 33).

[v] Esther Peeren, The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 21.

[vi] Ibid, p. 14.

[vii] Ibid, p. 21.

[viii] Derrida, Specters, p. 41, emphasis in original.

[ix] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 2-3.

[x] Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 72.

[xi] Ibid, p. 72.

[xii] Marina Warner, ‘Foreword’, in Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. by Monica Germana, and Emily Horton (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. viii-ix (p. ix).

Written by Akancha Gurung.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

Alienating the Foreign ‘Other’ in Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude

‘And what right, pray, had a German woman, a German Miss – at such stage of international proceedings, in the fourth year of a bitter warfare between the two nations – to allude, in such a way, to an English woman – an English woman on her own soil?’
-(Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude, p.131)

Throughout literature created during the time of the London Blitz, a continual preoccupation with foreignness is displayed. More specifically, foreignness is continually represented as a threat to English nationalism and security. This is clearly demonstrated in Hamilton’s Slaves of Solitude in which Miss Roach, threatened by the German national Vicki Kugelmann, persistently attempts to isolate her from British society. On first encountering Vicki, Miss Roach declares ‘The German girl’ (p.49) as ‘quiet, cultivated, and intelligent, and because isolated in the town (for different reasons but in much the same way as herself) admirably cut out as a friend’ (p. 49).1 Despite her clear approval of Vicki’s personality, this appears to be entirely quantified by Miss Roach’s instant demarcating of her as ‘Other’; Vicki, ‘the German girl’, finds herself immediately alienated from British culture. Further, in Miss Roach’s allusion to Vicki as a ‘girl’, Hamilton creates a power imbalance through the suggestion of Vicki as younger and therefore inferior to the matronly titled ‘Miss Roach’. Separated from British society through her German nationality, Vicki is ultimately isolated; her foreignness as a German national is determined to be a difficulty that results in her exclusion from British society.

This societal exclusion is further heightened due to Vicki Kugelmann’s rumoured connections with Nazi Germany. It is these rumours that Miss Roach attempts to exploit; in her repeated efforts to gain Vicki’s verbal approval of the Nazi regime, Miss Roach tries to use Vicki’s foreignness as a weapon to further alienate her from society. These attempts appear to be successful; after describing the fraught political situation as ‘a very complicated world…. A very complicated situation altogether’ (p. 195), Vicki finds herself instantly set upon by Miss Roach who fiercely demands:

‘Does being cosmopolitan in outlook… mean that you think things are so complicated that you support the Nazis in all the murder and filth and torture they’ve been spreading over Europe, and still are?’ (p. 197).

As a result of this, Miss Roach instantly seeks to alienate Vicki as a Nazi supporter who keenly approves of the ‘murder, filth and torture’ (p. 197). Associated in this manner with the extreme political principles of the foreign enemy, Vicki finds herself the victim of intense suspicion and societal isolation. Despite attempts by figures such as Mr Thwaite to allay suspicions surrounding Vicki, these prove entirely ineffectual; rather, such defence results in Vicki becoming increasingly more defined by her German heritage. During one such conversation with Miss Roach, Thwaite’s declares:

‘”There’s no need,” said Mr. Thwaites, “to insult a German woman in her own-” Mr. Thwaites stopped himself just in time. He had, in his confusion of mind, been going to say “in her own country”. But this, although it sounded so good on the surface, wouldn’t do. In her own country was exactly where the German woman was not. (p. 198)

In his attempts to correct Miss Roach, Mr. Thwaites ultimately finds himself unwillingly reiterating the supposed problem of Vicki’s nationality. Although accepted by some members of the English society in which Vicki resides, the error made by Mr. Thwaites regarding her home country acts as a continual reminder to the reader that Vicki is unable to escape her position as a foreign ‘Other’. Hamilton, through the competing of Miss Roach and Vicki for the affections of Lieutenant Pike, further accentuates the conflict of Vicki’s position in British society. Miss Roach, believing Vicki to be her love rival, finds herself musing over ‘the German girls’ intentions:

‘And what right, pray, had a German woman, a German Miss – at such stage of international proceedings, in the fourth year of a bitter warfare between the two nations – to allude, in such a way, to an English woman – an English woman on her own soil? (p. 131)

Clearly, Hamilton creates a situation that sharply mirrors the external war taking place between the two warring factions. Miss Roach, identified in the latter quote as a representative of British nationalist, finds herself in perpetual conflict with German ‘invader’, Vicki. Standing on her ‘own soil’ (p.131), it becomes apparent that Miss Roach believes herself to have the upper hand; as a British woman in her own home country, she believes herself to have a clear advantage over the ostracised foreignness that Vicki symbolises. This contrast between the local battle of two opposing women fighting for a lovers affection with the wider social context of horrific war serves to remind the reader that the war is ever present; even when the conflict cannot literally be seen, it remains underlying at all times.

In this way, it becomes apparent Vicki is a figure who is denounced as ‘Other’ to the British nationality embodied by both Miss Roach and the society in which Vicki finds herself living. In doing so, Hamilton explores the discrepancy in nationalities which ultimately leads to conflict and alienation of foreign nationals as figures of suspicion and threat. Thus, in Slaves of Solitude foreignness is clearly examined through the contrast between Britishness, the cultural norm, and foreign nationalities that are presented as ‘Other’ and threatening. In doing so, the comparison of foreignness highlights the direct and subtle points of difference between individual characters which are determined by one’s nationality.

References
Featured Image: Front cover of Abacus’s 2017 edition of Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude.

1. Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude (Cardinal: Sphere Books, 1991). All further references to Hamilton’s text are to this edition and will be presented parenthetically.

For Further Reading on Slaves of Solitude, see:

Bernard Bergonzi, Wartime and Aftermath: English Literature and its Background 1939- 1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Sean French, Patrick Hamilton: A Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1993)
Kristine Miller, A British Literature of the Blitz: Fighting the People’s War (New York: Palgrave, 2009)

Written by Imogen Barker.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.

Marriage as Mundane in Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets

‘Anxiety brushed her, the faintest breath, there and gone again…He’s not young…So certain, so undiffident … Expert.’
-Rosamond Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets, p.123.

Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets explores both the language of marriage and the language of desire alongside one another and in doing so it renders marriage as unfulfilling. Olivia, the protagonist, initially idealises a marriage with Rollo; she thinks, ‘Of course I had dreams of being Rollo’s wife’ (1). However, there are subtleties within the language which deconstruct Olivia’s hope. Her married sister, Kate, is the scolding and authoritative voice that asks ‘‘Still smoking like a chimney?’ […] through pins, beginning to cut.’ (p.31) It is no coincidence that Kate is undertaking a traditionally domestic task whilst ‘Olivia [had just] flung herself down in the basket chair and lit a gasper’ (p.30). They are the antithesis of one another. Kate’s questioning, made more aggressive with the placing of pins in her mouth, shows her to be cutting across Olivia’s new mode of femininity whilst simultaneously cutting through the fabric. Olivia later describes ‘Kate with her conventional, her sheltered successful life, tied to her husband by children and habit and affection and respect’ (p. 37). Olivia’s repetition of adjectives and verbs associated with restriction and routine reveals how she sees Kate’s married life as mundane. Similarly, when Olivia refuses to have some soup, Kate says ‘‘Look at me,’ […] ‘I’m drinking mine up’’ (p.51) to which Mrs Curtis, their mother, replies, ‘Yes’ with ‘[a]pproval and exasperation […] ‘‘[y]ou’re a sensible girl, thank goodness’’ (p.51). Mrs Curtis approves of Kate’s sensibility which in turn groups them together and makes Olivia an ‘other’ figure. The anonymous third person narrator who crops up in between Olivia’s narrative goes on in free indirect discourse, mocking Mrs Curtis: ‘Kate, bless her, had slipped with no trouble into a suitable marriage within easy motoring distance […] a mother of four fine healthy children she had established herself beyond question in all eyes.’ (p. 52). It reveals, through the excessive use of ellipses and punctuation, how Mrs Curtis cannot articulate the lives of Olivia and her brother James because they exist outside of marriage: ‘now that Olivia…now that James…phases we hope; phases, we hope; phases, of course […] Hush…Pass on.’ (p.52). Marriage is Mrs Curtis’ ideal, but the adjectives used, ‘suitable’ and ‘healthy’, resemble those in Olivia’s perception of Kate’s marriage in that they show an absence of passion and desire. The text therefore uses both Olivia’s narrative and the third person narrator to suggest marriage to be emotionally unfulfilling and uneventful.

This view is further explored in the way that Olivia’s desirous language towards Rollo contrasts with the language of marriage. After their second meeting in the novel, the third person narrator observes how Rollo ‘pulled her towards him and began to kiss her […] [h]e went on kissing her, whispering to her, floating her away.’ (p.123) The multiple clauses along with the poetic image of ‘[n]ames, faces, times and places slipped off into the reel of darkness’ (p.123) reveal a quickening of pace and suggest how desire leads to a loss of certainty and an inability to focus on anything other than the present moment. This ambivalence contrasts with the language of marriage which is weighted down by familiar and conventional ways to describe it. The narrative continues: ‘Anxiety brushed her, the faintest breath, there and gone again…He’s not young…So certain, so undiffident … Expert.’ (p.123) Whilst Judy Simons argues that ‘[t]he textual ellipses highlights the fissures between imagination and reality as well as pointing up the connective emptiness of the experience’, I suggest that the repetition of ellipses here, shows how Olivia cannot articulate this desire because it exists outside of marriage. (2) There is no set vocabulary to describe the situation she finds herself in and this reveals an inadequacy of language to describe desire because unlike marriage, it is abstract. This novel resonates with the argument Stella Browne put forward at the British Society for Sex Psychology in 1915: that ‘the realities of a woman’s sexual life have been greatly obscured by the lack of any sexual vocabulary’. 3 This lack of language explains why later in the novel, Olivia uses cinematic techniques to describe the couple’s closeness on holiday. Olivia narrates their trip: ‘rivers rolling their turbulent, thick, grey snow-waters through Innsbruck, Salzburg; spacious white peasant houses with their painted fronts and shutters and rich wooden balconies covered with vines and geraniums’ (p.210). Olivia’s narrative is a series of images which resemble cinematic sequences and again suggest the inability of language to express desire. This comparison between the way in which desire is articulated, and the recycled language of marriage again suggests the text’s critique of the domestic situation; it renders marriage mundane and deconstructs it as a goal.

References
Featured Image: Front Cover of Virago Press’s 2006 edition of Rosamond Lehmann The Weather in the Streets. See Rosamond Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets (London: Virago Press, 2006).

1. Rosamond Lehmann, The Weather in the Streets (London: Virago Press, 2006), p.157. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically.

2. Judy Simons, Rosamond Lehmann (Horndon, Northcote House Publishers, 2011), p. 50.

3. Stella Brown, as quoted in Judy Simons, Rosamond Lehmann (Horndon, Northcote House Publishers, 2011), p.47.

Written by Estelle Luck.
© The Literature Blog, 2018. All Rights Reserved.