Gertrude Trevelyan - Unusual 1930s novelist who maybe should be revived

[Jane3212]

I've not read her yet but this article got my attention.

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/70470/gertrude-trevelyan-is-a-novelist-for-the-1930s-and-now-eye-books-boiler-house-press-spiracle

She sounds very interesting, I'd like to read. The theme of someone raising a monkey like a human is something that several scientists have tried (I read a good non fiction book once, Feral Children and Clever Animals) and I'd like to see how she treats it in Appius and Virginia.

I wonder why Virago never revived her? Or Persephone? I suppose they could still do so now, and she sounds worthy of revival.

Another good article :

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/10/if-she-was-a-bloke-shed-still-be-in-print-the-lost-novels-of-gertrude-trevelyan

I think Boiler House at UEA reissued several of her novels?

Two Thousand Million Man-Power has gone straight on my (virtual) tbr pile

Utterly forgotten for over 80 years, neither the book nor its author are mentioned in any history of 20th century English literature. Yet Trevelyan is arguably the finest novelist of the generation to follow Virginia Woolf and Two Thousand Million Man-Power is among her greatest achievements.

It is a masterly piece of social realism that traces the lives of a young London couple set against a background of rapid technological, ideological and political change, and satirizes contemporary bourgeois life and its fashionable interwar belief in endless progress.

Beginning on New Year’s Eve, 1919, Two Thousand Million Man-Power follows Katherine and Robert, as university graduates, through almost 20 years of British history. Starting as idealistic radicals, they become comfortable middle-class consumers, only to then be plunged into unemployment and poverty when the stock market crashes. Trevelyan’s portrait of life in the 1920s and 1930s is as fierce and gripping as George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier.

https://www.foyles.co.uk/book/two-thousand-million-man-power/gertrude-trevelyan/9781913861858

Do you think the fact that she was a spinster with no close family to push for her to be published after her death was a factor? She went out of copyright in 2012, her novels started being republished in 2020.

Thank you, I will look out for her books.

I find the 1920s and 1930s quite interesting. I read Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson, which is about women after WW1.

A big fan of ‘The Diary of a Provincial Lady’ too!

Edited to add: I also think that Sarah Waters manages to capture the interwar atmosphere quite well in ‘The Paying Guests’, although obviously the love affair takes centre stage!

Not necessarily. I work on recovering forgotten or neglected women writers, and one of the people I’m currently working was a bestseller in her day but died young in the 19 teens without children, so her estate went to her fiancé, who squeezed every last drop out of it that he could, pushing for reissues on both sides of the Atlantic, film adaptations etc. But even with him pushing it for all he was worth, I think her work just fell out of fashion, ultimately.

I think part of the issue with GM Trevelyan, too was that her work sounds incredibly various — each novel sounds very different. It was harder to market her. These days she’d be being lectured by her agent!

Very likely. And she died tragically early in 1941.

Do you think the fact that she was a spinster with no close family to push for her to be published after her death was a factor?

We collectively need to stop using the word spinster which is misogynistic, offensive and weighed down with the pity of the unmarried woman condemned to sit alone at her spinning wheel.

Except a spinner was once a positive word to describe a woman who had her own income. Just like a gossip was once a word used to describe the women who helped during childbirth. Thanks to misogyny there is no noun for a female that isn't eventually changed to be used in a derogatory way.