The doubly-depressing biography of Jean Rhys

The depressing effect that reading some biographies can have on impressionable readers has been mentioned in several articles, in this one about balancing the books for example. 

Too much reading about people whose lives were mostly one long nightmare scenario and who seemed to be under a curse or evil spell can make us feel that we too are trapped in hell with no way out. 

Carole Angier's Jean Rhys: Life and Work is the worst of the depressing biographies that I have read to date.

Something that the novelist Rebecca West said about Jean Rhys's autobiographical book After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1931) also applies to Jean Rhys's other books and to Carole Angier's biography - not to mention many other biographies and fictional works mentioned on here:

“It is doubtful if one ought to open this volume unless one is happily married, immensely rich, and in robust health; for if one is not entirely free from misery when one opens the book one will be at the suicide point long before one closes it.” 

This is exactly what I am talking about. Some books have an effect similar to that of the Dementors in Harry Potter! 

In addition to being overwhelmed by a general miasma of misery, readers may find some of the material acutely distressing: the details of the suffering that Jean Rhys's actions and lack of coping ability caused to others are very painful to read. The death from pneumonia of the tiny baby she put near a balcony door in the heart of winter, her physical violence against her husbands and the neglect of her dying third husband, who went unwashed and unfed, are some of the worst examples.

An important point here is that it may be even worse for readers for whom some of it comes very close to home. 

Cults and the cutting of personal connections: Part III

The previous article gives examples of members of cult-like organisations who were ordered to cut their personal connections so that they could dedicate themselves to the cause. There is another angle to broken relationships between members and non-members: sometimes it is the non-members who cut the ties. They may feel that enough is enough when it comes to being treated badly; they may do it to protect themselves. 

From another old post of mine:

“There is another side to this. It could be that it is the family and friends who do the avoiding – or dropping. They may come to hate the pressure to accept the ideology, the recruitment attempts, the lectures and the preaching; they may get tired of being pestered for money while at the same time being told how inferior they are. There may be nothing in in for them.”

They may also not appreciate being frequently stood up or let down by unreliable people: cult members are not their own bosses and are often given errands or sent away somewhere with little notice. 

Someone who has been involved with a cult member may come to understand that they have been cheated, lied to and made a fool of: misrepresentation is common cult practice.

They may feel resentful when they realise that they have been exploited and angry when they discover that they have been tricked and used. For example, they may have been invited somewhere under false pretences just to get the numbers up and make it look as though there are many supporters. 

The cult members know very well that people wouldn't go if they knew the true purpose of and ulterior motive behind an invitation, so they bait the hook with something attractive.

I remember an occasion when people were lured to a venue by the prospect of hearing good music; they got political speeches instead! Some of them got up and walked out in disgust.  

Just as some members decide to leave a cult after a last straw moment, some people decide to stop seeing their member friends after experiencing the final straw. 

Cults and the cutting of personal connections: Part II

The previous article described in general terms the cutting of personal connections by cult members. 

This specific example, which speaks for itself, comes from an ex-member of a religious cult:

“When my sister got married I was not allowed to go to the wedding. My biological family did not matter anymore; it was all merged into a greater unity. Secretly I thought it was terrible not to be able to attend the wedding. I found out later that my sister had also been deeply wounded by my absence.

It was even worse when my grandmother died. On her deathbed, she had specially asked for me. But Lella, who was  to bring me there, delayed everything so long that, when we eventually reached the hospital, my grandmother had already passed away. Other family members had been there on time—only I was too late. I felt an intense anger and pain inside. But I immediately knew to put a smile on my face, because my feelings did not matter. I knew that, didn’t I?”

https://web.archive.org/web/20200618084714/https://www.icsahome.com/articles/i-really-believed-that-this-way-of-living-was-right-goudsmit-it-2-3

'Lella' obviously delayed everything deliberately. Subtle sabotage and undermining are common practices in cults.

I said this on the old forum:

“It is a very sad subject. The members who cut connections with their families might have a terrible awakening one day when they realise how much suffering they have caused and that it was all for nothing.”

I might add that it is just as excruciatingly painful when they realise how much of the suffering that they have endured was all for nothing.

Cults and the cutting of personal connections: Part I

Another member of the old Conservative Conspiracy Forum highlighted a feature that is often found in cults when she said this: 

“Personal loyalty and love must be sacrificed for 'the cause'.”

This is very true. Such sacrifices are standard practice in many sinister organisations. 

The article about the inversion of values in cult members contains some examples of people ignoring their personal responsibilities in favour of working for the cause; it is even worse when cult members cut their personal connections altogether. I have seen some examples and been on the receiving end of this myself. Many more examples can be found online, including admissions from ex-members. 

This article contains more recycled material from my posts on the old forum.

Why do cult members cut off contact with family and friends?
“So why would a cult member cut all contact with you? There are several possible reasons. We know that a non-member might be dropped for rocking the boat by saying the wrong thing, criticising the organisation, the lifestyle or the leader or asking awkward questions. This is unforgivable in their eyes.”

This applies to individuals who question various aspects of the organisation rather than a member's entire network of connections; it is what happened to me when I asked about some disturbing information I had read.

“They may be telling you indirectly that they have better, higher, more important things to do than socialise with an unbeliever. 

Another look at Beverley Nichols's witch Miss Smith

Miss Smith, the cruel and evil witch with a very deceptive appearance, is a character in Beverley Nichols's Woodland Trilogy and its sequel. She first appeared on here in the article about three fictional modern-day witches and has been referred to in a few other articles. 

I read the four books one last time before donating them, and I found some more material to comment on. 

The Tree That Sat Down (1945), The Stream That Stood Still (1948), The Mountain of Magic (1950) and The Wickedest Witch in the World (1971) are intended for readers of 9 years and upwards. The younger readers will concentrate on the story and enjoy reading about the talking animals and the adventures of the children; I am interested in the incidental references to evil and the characteristics of witches. 

I would not have noticed such things when I first read the stories as I was very young at the time, but now they are the main attraction. They provide yet more independent support for ideas mentioned in many other articles.

Good and evil
The Tree That Sat Down, the first book of the Woodland Trilogy, has something to say about good and evil:

“Evil is a very powerful force; there is only one force more powerful, which is Good. Evil is infectious; it spreads itself far and wide. If there is anything evil at large, all the other evil things know it by instinct; they rejoice and grow strong.”

“Miss Smith shivered and felt quite sick; real goodness always had that effect on her.”

Goodness and evil often do attract like and repel their opposite.

“Miss Smith...felt somebody coming, somebody very good, somebody so good that he might do her a lot of harm. She must go quickly, before it was too late.”

Miss Smith is very wary of anyone who isn't evil. 

Some characteristics of witches
Witches dislike  inquisitive people; they live in fear that their crimes and their deficiencies and differences from normal people will be exposed. They are always on the alert for threats. 

They can sometimes get themselves off the hook by improvising cover stories and casting spells to distract and silence people, but they are not always able to raise the necessary power and they just dig themselves in deeper in the long run.

Jean Rhys and her witchlike personality

Just as psychological black magic is a major topic in this blog, so are witches, fictional or otherwise, unconscious or otherwise.

Carole Angier's biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work, which is generating a whole string of articles, contains material that suggests that Jean Rhys was witchlike in many ways. This material includes the devastating effect that she had on people close to her and her attitude, behaviour and experiences throughout her life. 

It was interesting to learn that in later years she became completely bent over, like an old witch in a fairytale.

This picture makes her look rather sinister:

A witch for a neighbour
Jean Rhys said herself that her neighbours in Holt in Norfolk called her crazy and a witch, and that her neighbours in the Devon village of Cheriton Fitzpaine also called her a witch. She said that one of these neighbours was a witch herself, and that there was black magic in the village!

The evil witch in action
Carole Angier tells us that in later life Jean Rhys had dreadful moods in which she became sinister, witchlike and cruel. As mentioned in the article about Diana Wynne Jones's evil witch Aunt Maria, in one of these episodes Jean terrified her nurse/assistant by locking the door to prevent escape. Carole Angier uses an interesting expression when recounting this incident:

“Janet had 'never been so frightened', 'she'd never wanted to get out of anywhere more'. As though by black magic, Jean had transferred her own worst feelings of terror and entrapment to another person. She had made someone suffer like her.” 

Cults and the inversion of values

This article contains two examples of people who neglected or abandoned personal responsibilities in favour of working for the cause. Both cases involve the same, Catholicism-based, cult. 

The material is based on posts on the old Conservative Conspiracy Forum; it consists of extracts that I found online and comments that I made at the time together with a few afterthoughts.

Abandoning the sick and dying
“...I slowly realized that behavior opposite to my natural self was the most rewarded....When I as a devoted physician would leave my duties for a weekend, to cook for 80 people on a weekend meeting, that seemed to be the ultimate proof of my trust in the voice of Jesus in our midst. 

When I left a dear person who was dying and I had promised to assist, to help out practically in the movement and that person died when I was absent, that was the proof of my love for the forsaken Jesus.”

This is very horrific indeed, all the more as Christians are enjoined to heal the sick and comfort the dying.  Where are the Christian values of love and compassion here? 

The worst aspect is that not only are members encouraged or ordered to perform such actions, they are commended for it. They are told that it shows how superior and committed they are; it really shows how far under the evil influences they are. 

Neglecting children 
“We missed our son's confirmation, left a teenager for 3 weeks alone while we went to school in Rome because we were told it was the will of God. We missed so many family events and were told that 'we had to leave the family in order to follow God. We would find them again in Heaven.'”

This is typical of many cults. It confirms what I have seen and experienced for myself: “We must make sacrifices.”

May Sinclair, Jean Rhys, L. M. Montgomery and the Brontës

After producing some articles about May Sinclair's novella The Flaw in the Crystal, I decided to investigate her background in the hope of finding some more material of interest. 

I found some very familiar biographical elements and other connections when reading about her life. I mentioned a blueprint for writers in an article in the Context and the Total Picture series; if I created a template for writers of interest, May Sinclair would tick many of the boxes.

I have seen, for example, the Celtic Connection in the biographies of many novelists, so it was no surprise to learn that May Sinclair had an Irish mother and a Scottish father.

It also came as no surprise when I found that she had some other things in common with Jean Rhys and L. M. Montgomery. May Sinclair too was interested in and inspired by the Brontës, whose works she may have first encountered in her father's private library rather than the local public library.

May Sinclair and Jean Rhys
May Sinclair was a very different person from Jean Rhys, but they had a few things in common:

They both wrote under assumed names. 

Both novelists lived for a while in Devon.

They both read voraciously as girls, partly for escape, and both later wrote Brontë-inspired books. 

They both had unsympathetic mothers who tried to force them to conform to the norm. They had some things to say about their childhood experiences that sound uncannily similar. 

Just as Jean Rhys's work is mostly autobiographical, so are some of May Sinclair's novels, Mary Olivier in particular. Mary Olivier's mother wants her to behave like a 'normal' girl:

“...you should try and behave a little more like other people.”

"You were different," she said. "You weren’t like any of the others. I was afraid of you.”

Cults and the restricted reading scenario

 A distressing article that I came across recently reminded me of yet another feature that is often found in cults of all kinds. 

This is the discouragement or even prohibition of the reading of unauthorised material. In some extreme cases, members are allowed to read only a few 'bibles' or the writings of the founder. 

By imposing such rules and practices, cult leaders make themselves into Sole Suppliers of information.

Censorship of a few controversial works is one thing; not permitting members to read anything much apart from the organisation's propaganda and other material that the cult is based on, generates, approves of, endorses and promotes is something else. It is criminal when any information Not Invented Here is banned because it is considered to be useless, irrelevant, distracting, dangerous or corrupting. 

Discouraged from reading literature

First, some past coverage. This is from one of my cult-related posts on  the old CC Forum:

This extract from an old blog by an ex-member is very upsetting:

“When I was a young girl, I was very interested in literature and poetry and I loved reading everything by many different authors, which, over time, gave me a lot in terms of maturation and culture. I wanted to talk a lot about this and I remember when, at one of my first meetings with pre-GEN (when I did not know to be a pre-GEN), I told that I read one of these books. I think it was a text by Erich Fromm. 

The girl who was the "white" smiled, almost casually, then dropped the subject and immediately turned to another girl. Over time, I realized that this was the way they were taking control of our interests. They encouraged us to read books by Chiara and the other members of the movement, while they subtly discouraged all the others.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20200920023204/http://blogfocolare.blogspot.com/

This has been translated from Italian, but the meaning is very clear. This is evil, just like their insistence that an enquiring mind is a handicap. 

Luckily the author got out at the age of 24, so there was plenty of time for her to make a life for herself in the real world and catch up with her reading.

Changing or dropping the subject and ignoring what was said are very familiar techniques. 

A last look at Walter de la Mare's Return

Walter de la Mare suggests several possible futures for Arthur Lawford, the main character in his horror story The Return. The ghost of the wicked Frenchman who is possessing him could slip away and he could be his old self again, free from the malign influence; his wife's circle of friends could declare him hopelessly insane and have him put away; he might leave his family entirely and go off somewhere else; he might even die, perhaps by his own hand.

The final outcome is unclear; the story ends suddenly without Arthur Lawford's fate being spelled out. However, there is still some miscellaneous material to comment on.

Arthur Lawford attacks a fat man 

There isn't much humour in The Return, but I was amused by one passage. When Mrs Lawford calls in a very fat friend of hers called Mr Danton, the French ghost attacks him through Arthur and makes some contemptuous and offensive remarks:

“Danton at heart was always an incorrigible sceptic. Aren’t you, T. D.? You pride your dear old brawn on it in secret?...Firm, unctuous, subtle, scepticism; and to that end your body flourishes. You were born fat; you became fat; and fat, my dear Danton, has been deliberately thrust on you—in layers! Lampreys! You’ll perish of surfeit some day, of sheer Dantonism. And fat, postmortem, Danton. Oh, what a basting’s there!”

The ghost of the Frenchman sometimes recedes leaving Arthur almost his old self, but the mischievous, saturnine, vindictive Nicholas Sabathier is definitely in the ascendant here. 

Other interpretations of the strange symptoms

It is possible that Arthur Lawford's  bizarre  behaviour was originally caused by a subconscious attempt to break out of his unsatisfactory life, the old 'deadly round'; 'Nicholas Sabathier the dark Adventurer' could be Arthur's shadow self, displaying all his repressed qualities and saying things that Arthur would not normally permit himself to say. 

More about Walter de la Mare's Return

The first article about Walter de la Mare's horror novel The Return ended at the point where Arthur Lawford, whose appearance has changed because he is possessed by the ghost of a dead Frenchman, has convinced both his wife Sheila and the vicar Mr Bethany that he is not an imposter.

They now have to decide how to deal with 'this awful business'.

They call in a doctor; he is not much use, which is not surprising as Lawford gives him only a modified version of what happened in the cemetery. 

They want to avoid comment or scandal so invent some cover stories for their friends and the servants: they tell people that Arthur Lawford is staying in his room and not seeing anyone because he is very tired and ill, and that the 'stranger' who has been seen in the house is a new doctor. 

From this point on, the story itself did not hold much of my attention. I couldn't find much to inspire commentary as I skimmed quickly through the details of the web of deception and Arthur Lawford's impersonation of the new doctor, the descriptions of Arthur's inner state, his disagreements with his wife and his excursions, not to mention the long philosophical discussions about life. I did however find a few more connections and a little incidental material of interest.

Another reminder of Jonathan Stroud's Lockwood 
Arthur Lawford makes a new friend, someone with the strange name of Herbert Herbert. This man believes Arthur's story about being possessed by the Frenchman when he fell asleep in the churchyard, and theorises that Nicholas Sabathier's restless ghost had been lingering on by his grave waiting for someone to ambush because he still has some living to do. 

Then, Herbert says, a godsend in the form of Arthur Lawford comes along. Arthur has been suffering from a dispiriting illness, he is half asleep, tired out and depressed; his weak inner state makes him a suitable vehicle for possession. This is spot on, and similar to what George Cubbins says to Lucy and Lockwood about ghosts homing in on vulnerable people in the previously mentioned article about Jonathan Stroud's Empty Grave.

Something about Walter de la Mare's Return

I like WaIter de la Mare's children's stories and poems very much indeed. I feel much the same about them as I do about the works of Eleanor Farjeon and Nicholas Stuart Gray. 

As is the case with many other poets and writers I like, nothing relevant about WaIter de la Mare came to mind when I was mining the past for people, books and other material of interest. However, I recently learned that he wrote a supernatural novel called The Return, a horror story about possession of the living by the dead that was first published in 1910. I am not a great reader of ghost and horror stories, but this one seemed worth investigating. 

I found a copy and soon saw that while The Return is not a particularly good read, it does contain a small amount of material of interest. There are some elements in it that remind me of May Sinclair's Flaw in the Crystal, and there are a few points and connections that inspire commentary. The Return rambles a bit and the story fades away; the quotable material comes mostly from the early chapters. 

The main character is called Arthur Lawford, who is a rather dull and conventional man. He is the object of psychic possession with its associated horrors.

How the horror starts
Arthur Lawford has been suffering from ongoing ill-health. He has taken to solitary ramblings because he senses that his wife Sheila has been finding his presence irksome and would welcome his absence from the house.

He wanders around in a churchyard and reads some of the inscriptions on the headstones. An unusual grave attracts his attention; the inscription is almost illegible but he tries to decode it. The grave appears to contain the remains of a French stranger called Nicholas Sabathier who died by his own hand in 1739. He kneels down to get a closer look; his heart starts to beat in an unusual way; he feels ill and weak. He decides to go home but falls asleep instead.

Jean Rhys, L. M. Montgomery, Jane Eyre and public libraries

Terry Pratchett has said that he owes a great debt to the public libraries that he used as a boy.

Jean Rhys and L. M. Montgomery are two more novelists who were great readers and had access to a public library when young. As girls they read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, which made a big impression on them and later influenced their writing.

Jean Rhys and the public library

As mentioned in the article about psychological black magic, Jean Rhys wrote a prequel to Jane Eyre: Wide Sargasso Sea is considered to be her finest work. 

Carole Angier says in her biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work that Jean Rhys was a member of the Hamilton Public Library in the British West Indies island of Dominica as a girl, and this was where she first encountered Jane Eyre. The course of her life might have been very different if she had not read this book at an impressionable age, and Wide Sargasso Sea might never have been written.

Jean Rhys had a lot of trouble with this book, which was probably started around 1945 but not published until 1966.

She said that she went to the local public library in Bude in Cornwall in 1957 to get a copy of Jane Eyre. She wanted to re-read it to refresh her memory of Mr Rochester's mad wife, whose story she was telling in Wide Sargasso Sea.

A last look at May Sinclair's Flaw in the Crystal

This article highlights some unconvincing elements in May Sinclair's The Flaw in the Crystal and lists some similarities between The Parasite by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and May Sinclair's novella. These similarities and some other connections I noticed make the effort needed to decode the obscurities in The Flaw in the Crystal seem worthwhile. 

First, two extracts that seem significant to me:

Playing the 'as if' game

There is no humour in The Flaw in the Crystal, but I find this passage where Milly Powell writes to Agatha about her husband Harding both interesting and amusing:

“She wrote as if it was Agatha's fault that he had become dependent; as if Agatha had nothing, had nobody in the world to think of but Harding; as if nobody, as if nothing in the world beside Harding mattered. And Agatha found herself resenting Milly's view. As if to her anything in the world mattered beside Rodney Lanyon.“

Off-the-mark, 'as if' messages are a special interest of mine. It was an unexpected treat to come across such a good specimen in a story written in 1912. 

It is a pity that the whole story is not written in the  straightforward style that we see in this passage.

Intention is everything 

Just as many other people involved with unseen influences have done, Agatha Verrall realises that there is a dimension where thoughts have power. There, the wish or intention to do something is at least as effective as actually doing it in the real world:

“...that world where to think was to will, and to will was to create.“

“For thought went wider and deeper than any deed; it was of the very order of the Powers intangible wherewith she had worked. Why, thoughts unborn and shapeless, that ran under the threshold and hid there, counted more in that world where It, the Unuttered, the Hidden and the Secret, reigned.”

Despite what Agatha Verrall believes, this dimension, this world, is not necessarily a good place and the Powers that can be contacted there are not necessarily benevolent.

Jean Rhys, Jane Eyre and psychological black magic

Psychological black magic, the illegitimate use of subtle forces, is an unseen influence of particular interest. This blog is full of examples of and references to it. I have learned what to look out for over the years, and I have recently seen some material in Carole Angier's biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work that suggests to me that psychological black magic was at work in Jean Rhys's life.

This article covers a small coincidence involving names that reminds me of something similar in the life of Charlotte Brontë, with whose work Jean Rhys was very familiar.

First, some basic information.

Jean Rhys and Jane Eyre

Jean Rhys read Jane Eyre as a girl in Dominica. It made such an impression that decades later she wrote a prequel in the form of Wide Sargasso Sea, her most admired and commercially successful novel. 

I suspect that her imagination was particularly stirred when she read that Mr Rochester's wife also came from the British West Indies – Mr Rochester brought Bertha Mason home to England from Jamaica.

I also suspect that Jean Rhys wished that an English gentleman, someone similar to the romantic Mr. Rochester, would do the same for her! He would rescue her; he would take her away from her unsatisfactory life.

She was sent away from Dominica to school in England in 1907, the year of her 17th birthday. She hoped to find a feeling of belonging there. She may also have hoped to meet the English gentleman of her dreams there. As Mr Rochester says to Jane Eyre:

“...the mountain will never be brought to Mahomet, so all you can do is to aid Mahomet to go to the mountain...”

Psychic powers in May Sinclair's Flaw in the Crystal: Part IV

I find some elements of the plot of May Sinclair's novella The Flaw in the Crystal contrived and confusing. 

The final resolution of Agatha Verrall's dilemma in particular seems unconvincing and unsatisfactory. She finds a solution to her difficulties that leaves some questions unanswered and some issues unaddressed.

Agatha Verrall's dilemma

We left Agatha Verrall in a situation where she is damned if she uses her gift to heal people remotely and damned if she doesn't.

Taking away people's suffering means becoming possessed by her subjects' former mental states: the psychic connection is a two-way street. The links that she creates between herself and her subjects may be also be cross-contaminated such that one subject can get at another.  

Cutting ties with people who have been healed means that their mental anguish returns. This entails watching them suffer and coming under both internal and external pressure to resume the healing. 

It would be an ideal solution to this predicament if Agatha could only use her Power without anyone involved experiencing any unpleasant side-effects.

This is much easier said than done, but Agatha eventually finds the way. Things get worse before they get better though.

Agatha Verrall cuts the tie with Harding Powell

Agatha Verral decides that saving Rodney Lanyon is more important than anything else. This entails sacrificing Harding Powell's health by cutting the tie that binds him to her. 

Harding puts up a big fight, hanging on desperately and tearing down the psychic walls she builds as fast as she can build them, but eventually with help from the Power she loosens his hold, casts him out and escapes from his malign influence.

Harding reverts to his former state. Poor Milly is distraught again and begs for the help that she knows Agatha can give. 

Agatha Verrall sees the light 

Agatha has always had the conviction that the Power she taps is benevolent. So, if it is so high, holy, sacred and pure, how can something like this awful mess happen? Why has her gift brought so much suffering to people?

Psychic powers in May Sinclair's Flaw in the Crystal: Part III

Just as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Parasite does, May Sinclair's novella The Flaw in the Crystal shows how dangerous playing around with occult forces can be for everyone involved. It is not just evil witches such as Helen Penclosa who end up in big trouble: after Agatha Verrall heals two of her friends using a pschic gift that she doesn't fully understand, things start to get unbalanced and out of control. She soon finds herself in a horrible mess of her own making.

May Sinclair gives a very detailed account of what happens next; she also has a lot to say about the Power that operates through Agatha. It is quite a challenge to identify the key points!

The regression of Rodney Lanyon

Agatha Verrall does not see her friend Rodney Lanyon for some weeks. She hears from him that his wife Bella is still well, so she assumes that he is too because he was only ever ill because of Bella. 

Agatha has been using her gift to keep him away; she has removed his strong inclination for her company. This is another unwise decision: she now feels a longing for his company! Something similar to the conservation of energy is involved here: the feelings that she took away from Rodney are now hers.

These feelings become so persistent amd so unbearable that she cuts the thread that connects her to Rodney. She hears from him again: Bella is still well, but he has has gone back to where he was before Agatha started to heal him:

“She might have known it. She had in fact known. Having once held him, and having healed him, she had no right—as long as the Power consented to work through her—she had no right to let him go.“

But what right did she have to hang on to him? 

Jean Rhys: feeling different and not belonging

Carole Angier's biography of the novelist Jean Rhys contains some very insightful remarks about her and her life. Some of these remarks are very similar to what I would have come up with myself if I had looked at the same source material. 

The miraculous deliverances and spiralling down elements of Jean Rhys's life have been introduced. This article covers some more key features: she felt different from most people and she felt that she didn't belong anywhere. 

Feeling different 

There is nothing unusual about Jean Rhys's feeling of being fundamentally different from the people around her; after reading biographies of other writers, I would think it very unusual if she didn't feel like that! It's what they all say; it goes with the territory. 

What does seem strange to me is how various people of interest quite independently describe their feelings and experiences in much the same words. 

Something that Carole Angier says about Jean Rhys could equally apply to many others, including Stella Benson and Antonia White:

“One of the strongest feelings Jean had always...was that she didn't fit in the world, that life was a game she had never learned how to play...She did not understand the rules.”

This is exactly how some people feel: everyone knows the rules of the game but them; everyone else knows how to behave, what to say, where to go and what to do, but they are baffled and clueless.

Such people may see the world as a club to which they will never belong no matter how much they want to and how hard they try. The article about Jean Rhys and Antonia White contains uncannily similar quotations about how something always goes wrong when they try to be like other people.

Psychic powers in May Sinclair's Flaw in the Crystal: Part II

Agatha Verrall, the main character in May Sinclair's novella The Flaw in the Crystal, discovers that she has a psychic gift: she can improve the mental states of both herself and other people by tapping into an internal power source. 

As often happens, this activity starts well but ends badly. As we have seen from what happens to Austin Gilroy in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Parasite, even actions taken with good intentions sometimes backfire on the originator. 

Rodney's Lanyon's recovery

The first recipient of Agatha's healing attempts is her friend Rodney Lanyon. He is in a terrible state because of the effect his disturbed wife Bella has on him. Not only does he improve out of all recognition after Agatha's secret interventions, Bella incidentally becomes much better too.

Agatha is delighted to hear from Rodney about this unexpected development:

“It was another instance of the astounding and mysterious way it worked. She must have got at Bella somehow in getting at him. She saw now no end to the possibilities of the thing. There wasn't anything so wonderful in making him what, after all, he was; but if...Bella...had been, even for a week, a perfect angel, it had made her what she was not and never had been.“

The future may seem bright, but what looks like the start of something big at the time often turns out to have been as good as it gets. This was the high point in Agatha Verrall's career as a healer.

The arrival of some more friends

Agatha Verrall has come to live in a remote place, one that Rodney can easily get to, so that she can concentrate on using her gift to heal him to the exclusion of everything else. 

Agatha has told two of her friends, the Powells, that she moved to the area for her health. What a tangled web we weave...

Psychic powers in May Sinclair's Flaw in the Crystal: Part I

I recently came across a horror story by the neglected novelist May Sinclair that immediately reminded me of one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's horror stories, a story that has been featured in a whole series of articles on here.  

The Flaw in the Crystal, which was first published in 1912, will probably not inspire quite so many articles as The Parasite did, but it has some material that is worth quoting. As is often the case, it is mainly the metaphysical elements and some connections I noticed that inspire commentary.

Both novellas feature a woman who uses supernatural methods to influence people, however May Sinclair's Agatha Verrall is very different from Conan Doyle's evil witch Helen Penclosa in that she tries to use her powers ethically and for the good of others.

Agatha Verrall's gift

Agatha Verrall has a psychic gift: she can affect people remotely by concentrating her mind on them. She discovered this gift accidentally and uses it deliberately.

Agatha uses her gift to heal people telepathically. Her friend Rodney Lanyon is her first subject. He has a troublesome, demanding wife, a 'mass of furious and malignant nerves' who often drives him to breaking point. As a sanity-saving exercise he regularly escapes to Agatha's house, which he sees as his refuge, his place of peace. 

Although Agatha loves Rodney, she refrains from using her gift to make him come to visit her but uses it – without his knowledge - to make him well when he comes of his own free will.

Jean Rhys: miraculous deliverances and spiralling down

As mentioned in the previous article about the novelist Jean Rhys, Carole Angier's biography is very comprehensive indeed. She has done huge amounts of research; she describes Jean Rhys's personality, life and works in great detail and provides much background information. She makes good points and provides neat summaries; she has many insights that seem spot on. So what more can there be to say about Jean Rhys, this woman who seems to have been by far her own worst enemy? 

Some of Carole Angier's material that is particularly interesting and relevant is worth highlighting and expanding on, as are some more connections and elements that are familiar from books by or about other writers. 

This article introduces a recurring element in Jean Rhys's life that I think is very significant indeed: whenever she was in deep trouble, something or someone would come to her rescue. Money, somewhere to stay and support and assistance would appear as if by magic and save the day. 

I suspect that there was more to this than just chance, benevolent, compassionate people – and victims and enablers - and sometimes unashamed begging and emotional blackmail on Jean Rhys's part: I think that unseen influences were involved. There are other elements and incidents in Jean Rhys's life that support this idea.

Jean Rhys and the miraculous deliverances

Carole Angier says that whenever Jean Rhys was in dire straits and at the end of her resources, something or someone would always turn up and bail her out:

“Whenever she was at rock bottom, someone would always help.”

“...Jean's life was full of benefactors – her unusual need drew unusual help, as though by magic.”

“Again the last-minute rescue, the magical, fateful possibility of change!”

This is independent confirmation of a phenomenon that I have mentioned in several other articles, Some of these deliverances do indeed seem almost miraculous; perhaps something metaphysical really was at work in these unexpected strokes of Providence. 

While I believe that some people do have the ability to manifest things that they need, there are good – and safe – ways and bad – and dangerous - ways of doing this. I have mentioned various aspects of this elsewhere. 

A last look at John Christopher’s Guardians

This is the final article in the series inspired by The Guardians, John Christopher’s dystopian science fiction novel. The young hero Rob Randall's story has been told and elements in common with other books described, but there is still something to say about some issues that The Guardians raises, serious issues that have wider applications. 

The people in The Guardians live in either the urban Conurbs or the rural County, places with complementary lifestyles. Rob Randall experiences life first in the Conurbs then in the County. He decides for reasons of conscience to relinquish his comfortable and privileged life and return to the Conurbs, where he will live secretly as part of an underground resistance group that is working to destroy the evil, oppressive system that controls both societies. This will entail a life of hardship and great danger - if he is caught he will be killed - but Rob sees dissidence as his only acceptable option.

The role of the Guardians

The Guardians run the show. They conspire to secretly manipulate, condition and control the inhabitants of both the Conurbs and the County and perpetuate the status quo. The people in the two areas are kept apart by a huge fence and psychological control mechanisms. 

We get an indication of how the Guardians operate when Sir Percy Gregory, Lord Lieutenant of the County, wants to know why Rob decided to cross over. The discovery that his mother had been born in the County was a factor. Sir Percy says this to Rob:

“Would the discovery in itself be enough to allow an enterprising youngster to break the conditioned taboos against the County, or did she, even without saying anything, unconsciously predispose you in that direction? Worth bringing up at the next meeting of the Psychosocial Committee.”

Dealing with dissidence

The aristocrats in the County rule over the masses in the Conurbs, but they are equally brainwashed. Only a few dissidents there realise that they are not free and that a life of idleness and pleasure-seeking is not worthwhile. There are even fewer dissatisfied people in the Conurbs. Both societies are conditioned to be contented with their lives.

Dissidence is not acceptable. The Guardians are on the look out for it; they crack down hard on it.They operate a kill, crush or co-opt policy.

Dissidence in the Conurbs is dealt with by killing off anyone who is a threat. Rob Randall's Conurban father was a rebel, and he paid for it with his life.

In memoriam: Nicholas Stuart Gray

The writer Nicholas Stuart Gray died on March 17th 1981, 40 years ago today. He was only 58 years old.

There are a few articles on here featuring characters from his books; here is another, more general, post to mark the occasion.

Nicholas Stuart Gray
Nicholas Stuart Gray was a very private person and there is little information available about his life, Much of the material that does exist can be found in a short Wikipedia entry and The Pied Pipers by Justin Wintle and Emma Fisher, which contains interviews with some influential creators of children's literature. 

Nicholas Stuart Gray was interviewed in 1974. He said something that I agree with very strongly. He said that he wrote plays -

“...to give the children a sense of magic. Nobody attends to this enough. They give them too much realism. They can see it all on the box, they can see frightful things there. They can read it in the papers. But they’re not being given a world to escape into…the world of the imagination...Children must have an escape line somewhere.”

Diana Wynne Jones, who was also of Celtic origin, had very similar views. She wrote about the uselessness and harmful effects of realistic children's books versus the beneficial effects of magic and fantasy. 

Both writers enhanced the lives of many children. They provided pathways into other worlds for children who needed to escape from something and escape to somewhere. They knew what this was like themselves; they both had awful mothers and as children they both made up stories to make their younger siblings' lives more bearable:

“From a young age, he (Nicholas Stuart Gray) made up stories and plays to amuse his brothers and sisters, and to try and escape his unhappy childhood.”

Stella Gibbons too created wonderful fairy tales that she told to her two younger brothers to help them escape from and temporarily forget their unhappy situation. 

A last look at Stella Gibbons's My American

This final article in the series inspired by Stella Gibbons’s novel My American features a major influence that I detected.  

First, a few comments about the construction and content of My American. I suspect that some of this book was written with the cooperation of what Rudyard Kipling would call a daemon and much of it without.

Up to the point where Amy Lee takes a trip to America, London scenes are alternated with US scenes; from then on most of the action takes place in the U.S. This construction seems bizarre, as though two separate novels have been merged.

The scenes involving guns, gangsters, bootleggers and violence do not inspire commentary, and unlike the descriptions of north London and its people are obviously not based on personal experience. 

I think that Stella Gibbons embarrasses herself when she writes about people, settings and activities that she has not seen for herself. She is not the sort of writer who can get away with relying entirely on research, her imagination and the media.

The inspiration for My American

My American was obviously partly based on Stella Gibbons's early life. However, just as I am certain that some elements in John Christopher’s Guardians were inspired by a book that he had read, I am sure that parts of My American were inspired by a book that Stella Gibbons had read. As with John Christopher, I am talking about being inspired to produce something with a similar theme rather than plagiarism. 

My American has some elements and settings in common with J. B. Priestley’s best-selling novel Angel Pavement, which was first published nine years earlier in 1930. 

I think that Stella Gibbons would not have written My American if she had not read Priestley's book, which is about ordinary people and their lives in London in the late 1920s. Perhaps she found Angel Pavement particularly interesting because many of the characters live in areas of north London that she knew well.

L. M. Montgomery, curses and two suspicious deaths

The article about the novelist Mary Webb contains an account of what happened some years after her death to her husband and his second wife. This is a good example of the 'curse or coincidence?' scenario, which is featured in several other articles.

I was reminded of this case by something that I recently read in a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery: there are two similar, possibly suspicious, deaths in her life too.

Each case is all the more significant in the light of the other one, and even more so when put into the wider context of suspicious deaths involving other creative people who might have used unseen influences against someone who injured them.

A summary of the Mary Webb affair

Mary Webb's husband Henry became more and more distant from her: she was difficult to live with and he was attached to an attractive young pupil of his.  When Mary Webb died, the sales of her books took off; her husband soon married the ex-pupil and they got all the royalties. Their new life of luxury came to an end when Henry Webb died prematurely after an 'accident' while mountain climbing. His widow remarried, but just like Mary Webb she died of an incurable disease at the age of forty-six.

A summary of the L. M. Montgomery affair

When she was around 23 years old, L. M. Montgomery became infatuated with a very attractive man called Herman Leard. They enjoyed each other's company, but nothing came of it. Her side of the story, which she mentioned in journals written for eventual publication, is that despite being overwhelmed by her feelings for him, she rejected him because he was unworthy of her. She considered him beneath her socially, intellectually and educationally. 

Herman Leard died in 1899, one year after she had last seen him, possibly of complications from influenza. He was almost 29 years old. He had been engaged to a very beautiful young woman who mourned him for some years, married someone else and died 10 years after Leard's death.

John Christopher’s Guardians: Part V

This article in the series inspired by John Christopher’s Guardians is mainly about some minor connections and a major influence that I detected.

Feeling different and Eoin Colfer's imp No.1

Both Rob Randall and the little imp Number One from Eoin Colfer's Lost Colony feel - and are - different from their colleagues. They take opposite approaches when it comes to saying this out loud.

Number One tells his teacher that even thinking about the slime associated with 'warping' makes him sick; he also tells him why:

“Rawley shook his head in disgust. 'Slime makes you sick? What kind of imp are you? The others live for slime.'

No.l took a deep breath and said something aloud that he had known for a long time. 'I'm not like the others.' “

Mike asks Rob Randall why Conurbans are not permitted to enter the County; Rob doesn't like to tell Mike why he found the courage to overcome his programming and enter the forbidden area:

"“Conurbans are not allowed to come into the County. Why is that?”

“They don't want to come.”

“You did.”

Rob could hardly say he was different from the rest. Immodesty, by the standards of the County, was one of the deadlier sins."

Incidentally, immodesty is not the only thing that does not go down well in the County: 

“To be described as clever was not, as Rob had discovered, a complimentary thing in the County. Most people who were clever did their best to disguise it.”

“One did not enthuse about things that impressed one: it was not customary.”

Custom rules all in the County; it is definitely not the right place for someone like Rob Randall!

Money and envy in Stella Gibbons's My American

This article in the series inspired by Stella Gibbons’s My American contains some minor material of particular interest.

The power of money
Stella Gibbons obviously knew the value of money. Some of her books describe the big difference that a small increase in someone's wages - or even a few extra coins - can make. 

She informs us that the Beeding children were rather afraid of their mother – until they became old enough to leave school and start earning some money for themselves:

“All three were larger, more self-confident, less afraid of their mother than they had been three years ago. Mona and Maurice’s weekly pay envelopes had done that for them...Dora had recently been given a rise of five shillings a week and promoted to taking letters in Spanish, which had considerably increased her ambition and self-respect.”

There are some good points here. I know from experience that having an income of one's own – money that has been fairly earned from suitable work, reflects competence and is a by-product of self-improvement – does indeed increase morale and self-assurance. A certain amount of independence is no bad thing; people treat you better when they know that you have other options.

Stella Gibbons balances the positive effect that earning a wage has on the young Beedings with an account of Amy Lee's increasing unhappiness after she becomes very wealthy: 

“It is commonly admitted that money is delightful: but it must also be admitted that money is not much use if you happen to want things which money cannot buy. There is no extraordinary merit in wanting such things; to want them does not give you the right to despise other people who want the things that money can buy; it only means that your money, though useful, will not be more important to you than anything else in the world.

Amy did not know what she wanted; but she was already sure that money could not buy it. She was deeply unhappy, and her unhappiness grew deeper every week. Her luxurious home, her lovely clothes, the charming and intelligent people to whom Lady Welwoodham had introduced her, did not make her one atom less unhappy.”