📚 'Rather Dated' January: E.M. Delafield's 'The Messalina of the Suburbs' 📚

[MotherofPearl]

Welcome to the Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' book club. This month we are reading and discussing E.M. Delafield’s ‘The Messalina of the Suburbs’. Please do add your thoughts when you are ready.

About the threads:

We are reading and discussing fiction from the 1930s to the 1990s that would have been described as 'contemporary' in its day. We are reading one book a month. Spoilers are permitted!

We started the chat thanks to a thread where we kicked off with a discussion of Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield.

Currently we have these separate threads:
November: Anita Brookner, A Start in Life
December: Margaret Drabble: A Summer Bird-Cage
January: Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Beautiful Visit.
March: Winifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.
April: R.C. Sheriff, The Fortnight in September.
May: Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.
June: Margaret Kennedy, The Feast.
July: Mollie Panter-Downes, One Fine Day.
August: Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April.
September: Barbara Pym, An Academic Question.
October: Dorothy Whipple, High Wages.
November: Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September.
December: Monica Dickens, The Fancy.

Link to the main thread:

📚The Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' Book Group - All welcome to join📚 www.mumsnet.com/Talk/whatweree_reading/4624300-the-mumsnet-rather-dated-book-group-all-welcome-to-join

[MotherofPearl]

Apologies about the formatting in my opening post. Something seems to have gone awry with the margins (probably because I did a lot of copy and paste to get the main text).

I am keen to read everyone's thoughts on this one. On the main thread a few posters hinted at strong feelings!

I thought this was quite absorbing, but not as good as some of the other books we've read on here. The depiction of Elsie/Edith was quite unsympathetic overall, though I thought we were also able to see how at that time, women of her social class didn't have a lot of choices available to them. And by the end, Horace's behaviour was bordering on what we would now characterise as coercive control, so that when Leslie kills him, the reader is quite sympathetic in some ways - though also horrified. The device of the clairvoyant worked quite well to create the sense of foreboding that runs through the novel.

I felt that there was a lot of imagery of dirtiness in the novel. Mrs Palmer's house sounded pretty grimy, and there's that awful description of Elsie's dirty hairbrush. The doctor's wife also kept a dusty, dirty house.

Irene was quite a canny character, I thought. She has much more insight and good sense than Elsie ever realises. And though Mrs Palmer (gurls!) is primarily concerned with self-interest and maintaining petty respectability, at the end her devastation for Elsie is quite evident. I'm not sure though that there are really any likeable characters in the novel. Geraldine is a bore, though you can see that she's been completely ground down by Elsie.

[ChessieFL]

Thanks for setting the thread up MotherofPearl.

I hadn’t heard about either the book or the real life case before it was mentioned for this thread, and I was intrigued to read it. I have also enjoyed the Provincial Lady series by the same author and while I knew this would be a different kettle of fish I still expected to enjoy it on that basis.

However I found the book a bit disappointing. I was surprised it stopped so abruptly after the arrest - I was expecting to read more about the court case and the public outcry about the final decision.

I also understand that the book wasn’t really accurate with the details. I gather that in reality there wasn’t much of an age gap between Edith and her husband, which makes me wonder what else in the book wasn’t really represented properly. Perhaps I was expecting too much considering it is a novel and therefore never claimed to be a true representation of events.

I agree that there are no likeable characters in the novel. Elsie certainly isn’t written in a sympathetic way.

[BookEngine]

Just got a little to finish, on it tonight!

I do love a Becky Sharpe type character, unlikable but circumstances mean survival comes first.

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

Hello all I read this fairly early on in January and I'm reading it through again to refresh my memory.

I found it an absorbing read but I think the book is below par in terms of what we usually read which is very good to excellent. This book is odd, creepy and sometimes distasteful. I'm thinking here of Doctor Woolley calling Elsie his ('dear little gjrl') and Mr. Williams' telling her that he would look after her as a father would to win her over and take her away. There is a pervasive grimness and grimy-ness (autocorrect is suggesting grimness!) throughout as MotherofPearl has suggested. However, I did read it very quickly and I wanted to know how it ended for Elsie although the book stops short of the real ending.

I was wondering if anybody else thought Elsie was written in an unflattering way. Delafield sets her up to never be more than her physical, sexual self. She seems to have a sexual superpower that is almost comical. One look and they are hooked! I had pity for her that she didn't have any guidance in becoming a woman.

The book also seemed sensationalist to me. The ending was rushed and the last paragraph was badly written. It reminded me of a student scrambling to write a conclusion in an exam. I still think the case of this woman, her lover and the husband is really interesting. This book didn't really do it justice.

[BookEngine]

Based on a true story - I wonder if that's why the end suddenly seemed a bit rushed. That if we were reading it in 1924, the case would have been fresh in our minds, the couple only convicted in December 1922.
So written to explain how a young girl could end up swinging from a rope.

[BookEngine]

I liked Irene, she was the only one who made a strong effort to check that Elsie had a plan, could influence events. Everyone else seemed keen to keep her ignorant but was straight there wronging hands when it looked like it may go wrong.

[BookEngine]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Thompson_and_Frederick_Bywaters

[Terpsichore]

I was interested to read this and, having read F. Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to See the Peepshow (and seen the TV adaptation years ago) plus knowing about the Thompson-Bywaters case, was curious to see how Delafield would approach it.

I'm not entirely sure what she was setting out to do - as BookEngine says, the case was still very fresh in peoples' minds at the time, so it was clearly written with the intention of relating to real-life events, but the details (which attracted enormous contemporary publicity so were well known) don’t tally with them.

Edith Thompson wasn’t like Elsie; she had a good education, a good job and had known her husband since they were teenagers. I agree with Fuzzy on the sensationalist way Delafield portrays Elsie's less-than-spotless moral character and her distinctly sleazy adventures, sneaking out to meet men and seemingly powerless to resist her own innate sensuality - that would be one thing if she was writing fiction (except I don’t think it's all that well written, I’m afraid), but then why base it on such a well-known true and shocking event when so many of the provable facts were quite different?

When I was trying to find some other reviews of the book I came across some contemporary 1920s ones praising it as a 'powerful psychological study' or words to that effect (!) but also this interesting article by Sarah Waters. She’s really talking about A Pin to See the Peepshow, but she mentions Messalina as well - and isn’t too impressed!

[MotherofPearl]

Interesting as ever to get everyone's views. I hadn't heard about the Thompson/Bywaters case before, and though I knew the novel was based on it, I deliberately didn't look up any of the details until afterwards, so took the novel on its own terms, rather than thinking about how it compared with the real case.

It seems like the case was more of a loose inspiration for the novel rather the basis for it?

I'm going to read the Sarah Waters article now.

[mynameisnotmichaelcaine]

@MotherofPearl I took the same approach of not reading anything about the case until afterwards.

I thought Elsie seemed a bit like a nasty Enid Blyton character - it does seem as though Delafield presents her as deserving what she gets.

I felt sorry for Geraldine. I enjoyed the descriptions of domestic detail in the boarding house.

[BookEngine]

I also read the book before looking into the background, with the added unknown of not knowing quite how many pages were left in the tale on my epub version.
It was quite a full stop to get to 'Dawlish 1923' as my copy signed off and check if there was part 3.

Dawlish would have been rammed with boarding houses, inspiration all around if that's where Dalefield wrote a chunk. Her home was mid Devon, so it would have been an easy trip on the train for a few days of sea air.
Perhaps it was dashed off, a casual seaside writing exercise in places.

How did it read a second time through @FuzzyCaoraDhubh ?

[Terpsichore]

Yes, I’d like to know what you think of it the second time round, Fuzzy?

It's not to be helped that I couldn’t 'unsee' knowing about the RL case, but in terms of the writing, I just felt Elsie was so relentlessly 'common' and 'no better than she should be', it left a bit of a bad taste. I felt E. M. Delafield could have explored further beyond the standard tropes and dug a little deeper into Elsie's thoughts and motivations.

Elsie was firmly lower-class; she stupidly married Horace which was a social step upwards, but was too vacuous and silly to do anything about it except realise it was a terrible mistake and then wait dumbly for something or someone to come along to rescue her. She had no agency.

There was a noticeable (and very crunching) gear-change in tone when the murder happened; we felt pity for Elsie then, in that hurried final section, but to me there was a lurking feeling that it shouldn’t be a huge surprise because she'd been playing with fire all along. I was surprised to read other reviews praising Delafield's sympathy with Elsie, although of course she does paint a gruesome picture of the awful Horace and his undoubtedly controlling behaviour, so you do have to hand her that. It’s clear, though, that Elsie has always been ‘man-mad' and brought up in a 'slatternly' house by a disorganised, inattentive mother. It just feels a bit too uncomfortably like blaming to me.

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

I'm nearly at the end of the book (again) @BookEngine and @Terpsichore at the part where Elsie has been arrested. Reading it second time round has not improved it at all. The treatment of Elsie by the older men is awful and very sordid. The solicitor asking her how far she went before with the doctor, for example. The doctor forcing her to drink port and making the comment 'girls like you' to insinuate that she has had lovers before even though she is very young and comes from a respectable home. I know she went into it with her eyes open and was prepared to go along with it or even was excited about it but then you learn that she hasn't a notion about pregnancy or about sex. That makes you feel uncomfortable.

I think I feel sorrier for Elsie this time round. She is a very unpleasant person, but she doesnt have a great home situation. The women (her mother and aunts) couldn't even say that Mrs Williams was pregnant, but that there was going to be 'an event' and Elsie was ushered out of the room. At least Irene (Ireen!) helped her out in that respect, although you could argue that she also put her wrong by encouraging her to marry Mr. Williams.

What also struck me that it's reiterated time and again about 'the tragic act'. It's the inevitability of fate. There's no ground-breaking psychological insight into Elsie's frame of mind. One day she was having an extra-marital affair, the next day she finds herself accused of being an accomplice to murder. It happened. It was always going to happen because the clairvoyante said so. Elsie's crime is that she married a man she didn't love for material gain and to move out of home. Then she fell in love at the right age but was trapped in her marriage.

By the way, did anyone else think it was strange how easy-going Leslie suddenly swung from liking Elsie a lot to committing this very bloody crime in the course of one day?! It's so melodramatic towards the end. Delafield seems to get a bit swept up in it. It's a bit thin, a bit rushed, as BookEngine says. I still think it's sensationalist. Thanks for your thoughts on that, Terpsichore. That's what I was thinking.

Also, Elsie is portrayed as not being very smart, but as a hysterical woman. She screamed when she saw Leslie in the station. (How did they trace the knife at the scene to Leslie? It's all a bit sketchy). She also screams when her husband comes home early and she's with Leslie.
I agree with the article that there is a classist attitude going on in the book.

Anyway, I'll go read it to the end. I would have been interested in reading about the trial, but was relieved that Delafield didn't go there. We were spared the description of Elsie arranging her curls to drape over her half-open eyes on the stand :)Thanks for the article Terpsichore. The other book sounded better!

[StellaOlivetti]

I’d been wanting to read this, so I’m glad we chose it. It couldn’t track down a paper copy at a sensible price, though, so had to read a kindle edition, and I’m not sure whether it’s just my kindle, but the formatting went a bit odd at times which made it a bit difficult to read fluently. I wonder if that contributed in a small way to my finding it, as someone else has said, less than satisfactory compared to our other reads.
It’s a very melodramatic title, so I suppose to be fair to EM Delafield she was telling us what to expect. Messalina (in I Claudius anyway) is very sensual and uses her attractiveness to gain advantage and ends up coming a cropper … which is what happens to Elsie. It’s an awkward read because even if you’re a tiny bit familiar with the RL case it’s based on, you know where it’s going and that puts the reader in the uncomfortable position of reading about a very young girl who’s going to end up being hanged. I felt a bit as if I was being salacious reading it. But I didn’t feel like that reading A Pin to see the Peepshow, or indeed Fred and Edie, so it must be something to do with the way it’s written.
Elsie isn’t all that much like the real Edith Thompson, in that she’s much younger and less well educated and not employed in such a good job (in RL Edith outearned her husband and paid the lions share for their marital home … which was, of course, in his name). And I felt that the author was observing Elsie from a distance, fascinated and horrified by the details of how dingy and dirty things are (there’s a good description of her tatty underwear, I think, and the hairbrush detail) without attempting to give her any real agency. There’s one bit where it said something like: Elsie, “ like all the girls like her” would do so and so … as if describing in a half horrified half sneering way the vissicitudes of a whole (lower) class of women.
Horace is ghastly, and I thought the author did a good job of expressing how limited the options of “girls like Elsie” are. It did feel very rushed, as if she was hurrying to get it into print asap after the events it was based on. That might be unfair, but it seems possible. On the whole, I didn’t love it like I’ve loved most of the others. But I would characterise it as an interesting, flawed novel.

[MotherofPearl]

All the points raised have helped me to better understand my response to the book. I agree with Walters that Delafield's attitude to Elsie is sneering. Her class position and her (lack of) morality seem to be closely linked in the novel.

[Terpsichore]

I was surprised to read other reviews praising Delafield's sympathy with Elsie

Just quoting from my own post here to make it clear what I clumsily omitted - I don’t mean reviews on this thread! I mean reviews I found when googling, to try and gauge whether previous readers had felt the way I did.

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

Yes, I understood that, Terpsichore.

'An interesting, flawed novel' is how I think of it as well, StellaOlivetti. 'Fascinated' and 'horrified' describes Delafield's attitude towards Elsie for me as well. Definitely she is considered as a class apart, MotherofPearl.

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

Just coming back to say I really liked your suggestion of Delafield writing this novel casually at the sea-side @BookEngine with 'Dawlish 1923' as a clue at the close of the book. That makes sense to me. Has anyone read anything else by Delafield? Wondering if other books are more measured and thoughtful and less biased?

[maldoandwae]

I still feel somewhat sheepish 😅 for proposing this, as I ended up loathing it. But I came to it having read and enjoyed quite a few Delafield books, and an entire non-fiction book about the case (Laura Thompson's Rex v. Edith Thompson -- which also wasn’t great) so it's been interesting to read the responses of those of you with different starting points, though we all seem to be converging on a verdict of dislike. 

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh In my experience, EMD novels are of two distinct types. She is by far most known for the Provincial Lady series, which began as a Bridget Jones-level hit column: satirical diaries of an upper middle class woman juggling freelance writing, kids, running a house, overbearing neighbours, pompous bore of a husband. Little plot, much wry comedy of manners. But many of her other novels are women's tragedies, in which the main drivers are the failures of Victorian education/values for her generation, and terrible relationships Overbearing yet misguided mother/figures, uncongenial siblings/friends, and stultifying husbands (much older in spirit if not in age) are signatures -- all present in Messalina, but also in Provincial Lady, though given a lighter spin.

Buffeted by all these forces, her protagonists tend to be passive, alienated (including from themselves) and so socially awkward that these days I think would be read as ND representation. It was striking to me how much of a Messalina Elsie wasn’t. Even her ‘sexual magnetism’ was outwith her control, like that recurring description of the ‘Japanese doll look’ that she herself would be surprised by in the mirror. Men trying to pick her up at random, not necessarily when she’d particularly set out to attract, etc. I was struggling to see why EMD would change what seemed to be the most unusual details of the Thompson/Bywaters case, those decisive in T’s conviction (her being 8 years B’s senior, potentially financially independent of her husband, the quantity and content of her letters to B) to write such a conventional story, but evidently the didactic victim-of-society/circumstance tragedy was what she decided to make of it (or what her dedicatee ‘Rose’ asked for).

I’ve sometimes found EMD’s other tragedies overly determined too, but always thought her writing at the sentence/paragraph level very good and often quotable -- until Messalina. @BookEngine 's suggestion that it might have been dashed off rings true, and she did have a lot going on in 1923 (relocated back to the UK from Malaya, one young child and possibly pregnant with a second, new editorship of Time and Tide, responsibility as primary breadwinner following husband’s departure from the army…) but then again she was so prolific, some stinkers among the novels were probably to be expected. All the other EMDs I’ve read have been set in her own upper middle class milieu, so perhaps that also accounts for the thinness and conventional griminess of Messalina’s world.

Despite the (loooong) moan, I would still recommend reading Consequences as an interesting mirror to Messalina — the writing’s far superior, it’s semi-autobiographical, typical of EMD’s tragedies, and out of copyright, so free here.

[maldoandwae]

Argh, NC fail. ^This was HenryTilneyBestBoy.

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

Thank you Henry @maldoandwae
That was really interesting and I'll definitely follow through with Consequences at some stage.

[BadSpellaSpellaSpella]

I don't think I can add much more to everyone's thoughts. It was almost like a first draft where the characters would be fleshed out later, everyone seems very one dimensional, the portrayal of the working classes was abysmal and then it just randomly ended. I'm more perplexed by the whole thing really and would love to know the thinking and the background to the author writing this.

[JamesGiantPledge1]

I would like to join the group. I didn’t know the story but I suspect that may be an advantage. I think if I had read it 10 years ago I would have had little sympathy for Elsie. Now I saw her as a groomed and abused younger girl, one I didn’t like, but a victim nonetheless.

I also read the book on the kindle and there were formatting issues and spelling errors.

[MotherofPearl]

Welcome @JamesGiantPledge1

Please do join us; link to the main thread is in my OP. Our next book is F.M. Mayor's The Rector's Daughter. I'm about a third of the way through it.

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

Welcome @JamesGiantPledge1
This is a wonderful bookclub. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

I liked The Rector's Daughter very much.
I thought it started rather slowly, but it really drew me in once the story got going. I thought it was profoundly sad and I would describe it as a restrained love story. I won't say any more for now so as to not give anything away for people reading it.