More memorable material from Dion Fortune's occult novels

This is yet another article in the series inspired by Dion Fortune's occult novels. It contains a few more of her thought-provoking propositions.

Three essential qualities
The Demon Lover contains what might be called a person specification for advanced occult work:

“Dr Latimer had brains and kindness, but no strength; the hard-faced man had brains and strength, but no kindness; the newcomer had all three, and Veronica knew by this that he was a far greater man in every way than either of the others was ever likely to be.” 

Each of these qualities needs to be developed to a far greater than average degree. Finding people who meet two of the requirements must be difficult enough; good luck with finding someone who meets all three! Such people may exist in fiction, but how many are to be found in real life? 

Balancing the qualities
Assuming that kindness includes mercy and that strength includes justice, this further extract from The Demon Lover is of interest because it reminds me of of a very similar statement in a very different novel:

“...although unbalanced mercy is but weakness, unbalanced justice is cruelty and oppression.”

When I first saw this, I immediately thought of some words from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre that support the above proposition:

“Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.”

Feeling that is not balanced with rationality may well be not much good to anyone on the receiving end, and judgement that is not balanced with compassion may indeed be too harsh for most people to digest.

Two incidents at the equinox

The article about depression at the autumn equinox describes how Charlotte Brontë suffered badly for a month to six weeks at this time of year. 

I have been feeing under the weather for around two weeks myself. It is worse than it has been in recent years, but nothing like as bad as it got in the distant past. 

While it helps to know that certain unseen influences may be at work, this doesn't stop the feelings of malaise, stagnation, despondency and being unprotected; it doesn't stop approaches from strangers who make me feel uncomfortable either. 

I experienced two such incidents when I went out shopping recently.

The first one happened when I visited a shopping centre some way from where I live. I have been there many times in the past, but I felt confused when I came out of the station. I made a false start or two, then set off down what I soon realised was the wrong road. As I walked past some tables outside a café, a rather weird and witchy older woman with straggly grey hair who was sitting there called out loudly, eagerly and triumphantly, “Hello darling” as if she knew me! 

I am wondering whether I fell into her psychic trap or answered her call and was drawn to that place because my defences were low at the time. The shopping expedition was not a success: the store I planned to visit had closed down and I came home with nothing.

The second incident happened when I was standing in a queue at a big supermarket. Someone just behind me started to comment in an over-friendly manner on the items I had selected; I looked round cautiously and saw that it was a rather weird and witchy older woman with straggly grey hair! The woman on the till was very slow and there were several people waiting in front of me, so I was a captive audience. I just smiled vaguely while she kept talking.  She also said loudly, “Hello darling” to the woman on the till! It was definitely not the same person though.

I am wondering what drew her to my queue and not one of the others. 

Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre: some 'coincidences' revisited

The 'coincidence' of Charlotte Brontë's childhood obsession with Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and the subsequent appearance in her life of Arthur Bell Nichols was first mentioned in an article about being careful what you dwell on and again in an article featuring Jean Rhys.  

Another 'coincidence' in Charlotte Brontë's life that is worth highlighting and was also mentioned earlier is her accident involving a horse that echoes something that happened in Jane Eyre, which was published seven years before the event. 

Other people have noticed these connections. While they may assume that they are just interesting, but not particularly significant, coincidences, I thought at the time that certain unseen influences were at work, and I still think so.

Many years have passed since I first mentioned these two 'coincidences'. Since then, I have come across other examples of such coincidences and accidents. 

Something I recently read in Carole Angier's biography of Jean Rhys inspired me to take another look at the two incidents involving horses in the light of some of the later discoveries and produce an updated and enhanced version of events and my ideas about them.

Jane Eyre and the horse incident
The incident involving Jane Eyre and a horse occurs when she first encounters Mr Rochester. 

On the way to post a letter on a freezing winter's day, she sits on a stile for a while. She hears the sound of approaching hooves, then Mr Rochester comes into view on his black horse. Just as they are passing her, the horse slips on the ice and comes crashing down. Mr Rochester is hurt, so he asks Jane to catch the horse for him. This is not an easy task:

“I...went up to the tall steed; I endeavoured to catch the bridle, but it was a spirited thing, and would not let me come near its head; I made effort on effort, though in vain: meantime, I was mortally afraid of its trampling fore-feet.”

From Jane Eyre

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.”

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.

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...”

In memoriam: Diana Wynne Jones

The fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones died on March 26th 2011, ten years ago today. 

There are several articles on here featuring or referencing various aspects of her life and works; here is another one to mark the occasion.

Diana Wynne Jones's book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing has already been mentioned as a source of fascinating and commentary-inspiring material; more information is available online in the form of interviews and various articles about her life and works.

I am particularly interested in finding connections between writers and detecting views, experiences, influences and elements that they have in common. It is very interesting to see them quite independently make the same points. 

Diana Wynne Jones has provided some good examples of connections with other writers in the past, most recently in the article about Nicholas Stuart Gray; I have found a few more to comment on.

A terrible realisation 

Diana Wynne Jones said this about her awful childhood:

“Children think they are unique in their misfortunes, and I want to tell them they aren’t alone. I thought my childhood was normal, and was terribly angry and miserable when I discovered it wasn’t.”

I hadn't read that when I created the article about parents and prison guards, from which this is an extract:

“...no anger, no fury is stronger than the final, unavoidable realisation that the protector has betrayed his role and is really the destroyer. But it takes a while to find out that the unthinkable is not the status quo, and that your daily 'normal' is very abnormal to a larger world.“

From Cat in a Midnight Choir by Carole Nelson Douglas  

They are both spot on here. Putting personal experiences into the context of other, more fortunate, children's lives often does result in great feelings of anger, outrage and betrayal.

Yet more about Stella Gibbons's My American

Amy Lee's story has been told and the writing, money and envy elements in Stella Gibbons's My American covered; now there is some amusing material, an unexpected connection and yet another unconvincing element to be commented on. 

I find this very funny:

“It was May Day, and Mrs. Beeding was indignant because on her way out to buy sausages she had been held up by a procession of Communists and on her way back from buying sausages she had been held up by a procession of Fascists.”

Such processions were very common in London in the years leading up to World War II. 

Demands to join in

I know from experience how unpleasant it is to be pestered to say something or do something or go somewhere by someone who just cannot keep quiet or sit still and must have company at all times, but the descriptions of the young Mona Beeding's unwelcome, sometimes unbearable, demands do have their funny side in addition to being very painful to read because of the memories they stir up.

Amy's first evening with the Beeding family after her father's death slowly turns into a nightmare:

“Only Mona was left, a bored and ever-present peril to the occupied, lounging round the room, picking up things and dropping them again, putting on the headphones and taking them off, interrupting Baby’s game, saying at intervals she wished she hadn’t finished her knitting.

John Christopher’s Guardians: Part I

The Guardians by John Christopher is a dystopian science fiction novel that was first published in 1970. Just like Michael de Larrabeiti’s Borribles trilogy, it was written for children and teenagers. 

The Guardians has nothing like the number of characters and adventures that can be found in the Borrible books, but this little story has an issue in common with them. 

The Guardians is a book of interest because of the character of the young hero Rob Randall and the question of which is the better of the two very different and complementary lifestyles it describes. It also contains some material that reminds me of other books mentioned on here.

The two worlds of The Guardians
The Guardians is set in England in the year 2052. England is divided into two distinct societies, the Conurbs and the County.

The Conurbs are highly-populated towns where modern technology is much in evidence. The majority of English people live in Conurbs. They are mainly workers. There are occasional riots, but the people are mostly kept quiet with entertainment in the form of carnivals and arena games that appeal to the bloodthirsty - bread and circuses with holovision.

The County is the sparsely-populated countryside, the home of the aristocratic minority. They are mainly people of independent means. They prefer not to use much technology; they have horses for transport. Their lifestyle is rather like that of Edwardian gentry at the height of the British Empire.

Huge fences keep the two societies separate physically, and a carefully controlled, conditioned and manipulated mutual 'us and them' mentality keeps them apart psychologically.

Something about Rob Randall
The story opens in a public library - this is an encouraging start!

The library is in the Conurb of London. Unfortunately it is dilapidated, decaying and well past its prime. People have become less individual, less inquiring and have mostly stopped reading books. Rob Randall, who likes solitude and has a love of reading, is the only person under fifty who goes there. He likes stories filled with excitement and adventures.

Rob’s mother, who was born in the County and who encouraged him to use the library, is dead; his father, who is an electrician, is killed in a work accident early on in the book. Rob is then sent by the authorities to a horrible state boarding school where the food is awful and he is given a very hard time by the masters, the prefects and the other boys.

Context and the total picture: Part III

The previous article in the series describes how some people who for better or worse put painful personal experiences into the context of a few other, often well-known, people’s lives decide to leave it at that.  They go just as far as they want or are able to go.

Now it is time to say something about the next steps on the path to detecting and understanding the unseen influences that appear to be at work in certain people’s lives.

Up to this point, candidates for moving on may have come across some interesting information incidentally and in small amounts; now they change their approach and do some investigations - actively looking for writers with Celtic connections after coming across one or two with Scottish ancestry for example. This involves a top-down rather than a bottom-up approach. 

This stage also involves putting aside the personal approach in favour of thinking objectively and analytically about various patterns and common elements in the lives of many people of interest. These may or may not be elements that the investigator shares with them. 

Investigators may then move on to a stage where they start to wonder what, if anything, might be behind the patterns they detect. They start to think about the What, the Who, the How and the Why.

For example, I have experienced some unexpected, unwelcome and unsettling encounters  with people from the past. Recently I discovered that this also happened to the novelist Antonia White.  These encounters are not just random painful personal experiences shared with one or two others: looked at objectively and summarised, they are typical of the unpleasant incidents that certain selected people endure when, for example, they are at a low ebb, have received a jarring shock or had an encounter with an energy vampire.

This leads to speculation about orchestration, distress signals, telepathy and people who are remotely controlled by puppet masters behind the scenes! What forces are in operation? How does it all work? Who or what is behind it?

Stella Benson and the nightmare scenario

Joy Grant’s biography of Stella Benson makes her life seem like one long nightmare scenario!

Stella’s deafness, depression, chronic poor health and frequent medical emergencies made much of her life a misery. 

Many of even her worst experiences would not seem so bad to strong, healthy, ‘real’ people with plenty of resources; other ordeals - the Zeppelin bombing raids on London during World War I for example - are not very relevant because she did not experience them as an individual: they were simultaneously endured by many other people. However, one or two very painful episodes in her life stand out; they are of particular interest because of some familiar elements.  

This article features a minor incident that affected her very badly.

The release of Sylvia Pankhurst

By the spring of 1914, Stella Benson had started a new life of independence. She came to live in London. She found work and became involved with the cause of women’s suffrage.

This led to an assignment that turned into a nightmare for her. Acting on instructions previously given, she went to Holloway Prison early one morning to witness the release of leading suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst.

From her diary:

“The policemen laughed at me, and pointed me out to their friends, the wardresses came out to shriek with laughter too. I got fainter and fainter...at last I began actually collapsing on the doorstep of a sort of church. The police, thinking it was a ruse, were more and more amused. I felt I should never see a friendly face again.”

Stella Benson cried and cried when she got back to her boarding house, fearing that she might not be strong enough for the life she hoped to lead.

On top of all the horrors she had endured, she was distressed to learn that Miss Pankhurst had been released the night before and her suffragette society had not bothered to let her know.

Marianne and the nightmare scenario

Stella Benson and Charlotte Brontë are not the only people whose descriptions of nightmare scenarios have inspired some articles.

The Marianne Trilogy by Sheri S. Tepper gives an example of someone who, just like Lucy Snowe in Villette, gets into the exact nightmare situation that she dreads the most.

In the article about the Marianne books I mentioned a laundry world. This alien dream world appears in Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods, the second book in the trilogy. The city that Marianne has been banished to by the evil witch Madame Delubovoska has a very strange attribute: it changes its name and rearranges itself every day around midnight, so the inhabitants need a new map for each day.

The rules are very strict; maps must be bought on the previous day, and it is a both a crime and extremely dangerous not to have one. Being without a map is something to be avoided at all costs.

Marianne runs a public laundry in the city. Her worst fear comes upon her one day when she forgets to buy her map for the next day. Despite increasingly desperate efforts in dangerous surroundings, she fails to get a new map.  This puts her into even more danger, and there is a good chance of permanent homelessness and destitution.

It all ends with a safe return to the laundry, but not before she has gone through a terrible ordeal which she has had to cope with entirely on her own.

Charlotte Brontë and the nightmare scenario

Stella Benson’s fantasy novella Living Alone (1919) ends with the arrival in New York of her autobiographical character Sarah Brown, who is ill, alone and penniless.

This scene in the book is my idea of a nightmare scenario.

Stella Benson put something of her own experience into the New York episode. She travelled by ship to America in July 1917. She had more in the way of resources than Sarah Brown did, but it was still an ordeal. Approaching New York Harbour, she was:

“...sick with excitement and fright at such an unknown day before me.”

She wrote in her diary on the evening of her first day in New York:

“I never wish for a more wretched thirty hours than this last.”

She was so overcome by loneliness, confusion and the great heat that she started to cry. She awoke the next morning from dreams of death and despair.

The Living Alone scenario and others from Stella Benson’s life sound familiar; they remind me of other writers’ accounts of permutations of isolation, desperation, dangerous situations, going into the unknown, lack of resources and dreadful inner states.

The many common elements make me wonder whether these scenarios are engineered, perhaps subconsciously or perhaps by sinister unseen influences.

Some of Charlotte Brontë’s writings are of particular interest here; they say to me that she knew the terrible feelings well and had experienced a few nightmare scenarios of her own.

Stella Benson’s imagination

Stella Benson had a powerful and vivid imagination, and from an early age she used it to enhance her life.

There are many factors in her life that help to explain why she should have turned to fantasy friends and an inner world for consolation and compensation, including a difficult family background, a critical and unsympathetic mother, feeling different from other girls, increasing deafness and, above all, very poor health that often kept her bedridden and hospitalised and entailed some horrible and excruciatingly painful medical treatments.

Such factors can be found in the lives of many other fiction writers. Mary Webb, who has been featured on here, also suffered from poor health and had a critical mother for example.

Great potential on the inside may be activated and employed when there is a hostile environment on the outside.

Am I the only one?

Stella Benson wrote this when she was 15 years old:

“I don’t know whether other people are the same as me in having an imaginary world filled with imaginary people to whom at every spare moment of the day one’s thoughts return. I daresay it is childish, but it has grown absolutely indispensable to me.”

The majority of people are not the same as her. For most people, the real world is all there is; they have little contact with an inner world or other dimensions.

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: wanting and getting

A further article or two about Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel has been outstanding for a long time now.

Angel has inspired three previous articles. I have described her imagination, her life and personality and her resemblance to various witches. So what more can there be to say about this strange and impossible woman?

There are some more familiar features and scenarios in her story to be described, and more details to come about the way she wants and gets things.

Wants and obsessions

Angel is an all-or-nothing person; she wants what she wants, how and when she wants it, on her own terms.

People like Angel are so single-minded in the pursuit of what they want that they may behave like addicts desperate for their next fix. They want nothing and no one except whatever they are currently obsessed with; if they are offered anything else they behave as if they have been given a stone when they wanted bread.

I have already mentioned Angel’s visit to her publisher in which she ignores his wife. Angel mostly ignores her aunt, except when she hears her say something interesting about life in the big house, something that she can use in her fantasies.

As a schoolgirl, Angel spends as much time as possible in her imagination, dreaming about living a life of luxury as a member of the family that owns the local big house. She surprises her aunt by actually asking her some questions after hearing her say something that catches her interest and provides food for her imagination. I have seen this behaviour in real life; it is not a good sign. The perpetrator blocks someone completely, then suddenly pounces on them if there is a chance of getting something they want from them.

Today is Charlotte Brontë’s birthday

Charlotte Brontë was born in Yorkshire 202 years ago today.

She came into this world on April 21st 1816, in Thornton in Yorkshire.

She appears in many articles on this blog, as both her novels and her life are of great interest and relevance. Innumerable articles and reviews and some biographies were already in existence, but the unseen influences and connections that I detected have inspired some original material.

To mark the occasion, here is a quotation from Villette that I particularly like because it mentions London:

"I did well to come," I said ... "I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?"

She also mentions St. Paul’s Cathedral in a descriptive paragraph that reminds me of the essence of London near the river on a fine spring morning:

“Prodigious was the amount of life I lived that morning. Finding myself before St. Paul's, I went in; I mounted to the dome: I saw thence London, with its river, and its bridges, and its churches; I saw antique Westminster, and the green Temple Gardens, with sun upon them, and a glad, blue sky, of early spring above; and between them and it, not too dense, a cloud of haze.”

St. Paul’s with Victorian visitors in 1848, a year in which Charlotte and Anne Brontë visited London together:

Charlotte Brontë’s St. John Rivers: Cult Leader

The inspiration for the title of this article came from the names of some recent mash-up novels such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and the article itself was inspired by the sudden realisation that St. John Rivers, a character in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, has some of the typical characteristics of a cult leader.  

It was reading about people such as Bronson Alcott to get material for forum posts about cults that stirred up memories of this fictional character. I went back to Jane Eyre to refresh my memory and look at St. John Rivers in the light of what I now know about charismatic cult leaders. 

The first few times I read Jane Eyre, I passed quickly over the chapters where he appears as he seemed an unsympathetic, not very exciting character; I much preferred Mr Rochester and other parts of the book. This time around, St. John Rivers was the main person of interest and his conversations with Jane the main scenes of interest. 

Re-reading the chapters in which he appears has confirmed my idea that he has some attributes in common with cult leaders. There is also his resemblance to Bronson Alcott: St. John Rivers too is tall and handsome with fair hair and blue eyes. He says himself that he has a hard, cold personality. He is a fanatic with a burning ambition to make his mark on the world.

In support of my case, here are some examples of the familiar attributes I found.

Unlimited ambition and a mission
St. John Rivers had a compulsion to change the world - or even save the world. His mission was to convert the Hindus to Christianity. 

In St. John Rivers’ own words:

“Reason, and not feeling, is my guide; my ambition is unlimited: my desire to rise higher, to do more than others, insatiable.  I honour endurance, perseverance, industry, talent; because these are the means by which men achieve great ends and mount to lofty eminence.“

This may have been spoken by a fictional character, but it is uncannily familiar: it sounds rather like something that Benjamin Disraeli might have said. 

Benjamin Disraeli: reaching the dizzy heights in politics

Benjamin Disraeli reached the supreme summit of his ambitions when he entered the House of Commons as Prime Minister in February 1868.

The politician who became affectionately known as ‘Dizzy’ had first entered Parliament in 1837. He was jeered and shouted down when, as MP for Maidstone, he made his maiden speech. He sat down in defeat, saying, “I sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me.”

His prophecy came true.

Lord Melbourne, who had condescendingly explained to Disraeli in 1834 why the likes of him could never become Prime Minister, said in 1848 after hearing that Disraeli had become Leader of the Opposition, “By God! The fellow will do it yet.”

He was right. Unfortunately, Melbourne didn’t live long enough to see his words come true.

What might be called The Politician’s Progress had been an uphill battle.

Disraeli spent around three quarters of his political career in opposition, some of it between terms as Prime Minister. He would have needed preternatural amounts of ambition, endurance, patience, persistence and determination, not to mention patronage by prominent people and emotional support, to recover from all the disappointments, setbacks, opposition and criticism, overcome all his handicaps, stay the course and reach his goal.

Was it all worth it?

Only Disraeli himself could tell us whether the game was worth the candle; all we can do is speculate.

I have seen what happens to some people when they concentrate obsessively on getting something, often to the exclusion of everything else.

Some of them attract forces that stop them getting it.

Some end up with what seems like a fifth-rate travesty of what they really wanted. In other cases, everything backfires and they get the exact opposite of what they had hoped for, perhaps losing what they already had.

None of this was for Benjamin Disraeli: he got exactly what he wanted. He became very powerful politically and all the top people knew who he was. He moved in the highest circles in the land. Queen Victoria became his friend.

Rudyard Kipling and the House of Desolation: Part III

Part I describes the abandonment of Rudyard Kipling and his younger sister by their parents. Part II continues the story and ends with his release from what seemed to him like a prison sentence with torture thrown in.

There are still a few questions outstanding and points to be made.

Did Kipling lie about or exaggerate his suffering?

I remember reading somewhere that when Kipling's parents first read the account of his time in Southsea, they tried to get his sister Trix to say that it hadn't been as bad as he said it was. This is what happens in many such cases; people said the same thing to Charlotte Brontë, when actually she had toned down her account of life at the dreadful school.

There is a lot that could be and has been said on this subject. Writers certainly use their imagination to create good stories. For many, what happens in their imagination seems real to them, more real even than what really happened. Some use what happened in real life as just the starting point for building a whole edifice of fiction. Some present occasional incidents as happening frequently and such things as minor criticisms as vicious attacks. This may seem like lying and exaggeration to some people.

However, it is not only a case of what actually happened, but the kind of person it happened to and what the effects were. Some collective-minded, grounded people might be resilient and recover quickly; they might let it all go, put it behind them, forgive and forget and get on with their lives. Others, perhaps more imaginative and sensitive and wide open to subtle energies, may have little insulation or resistance and be permanently affected in the core of their beings. Some people feel everything on an archetypal level; some get bad feelings in overwhelming and concentrated doses, enough for one hundred normal people.

I believe that Rudyard Kipling told the truth about what happened and did not exaggerate the effect it had on him. I also believe that a very different type of boy might have been much less affected and even been treated better. Jane Eyre said much the same thing about herself.

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: witches and writers

Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel has inspired two previous articles:

Angel’s Imagination covers the ways in which a very strong, active imagination can be a liability in everyday life.

Angel’s Life and Personality describes Angel and her life mainly in modern-day, this-world terms.

Much of Angel is familiar not only because I have read the biographies of Ouida and Marie Corelli that were the source of some of the material in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, but also because it reminds me of what I have read, and sometimes written, about other people of interest.

Angel Deverell has many characteristics and events in her life in common with both fictional witches and real-life creative writers.

Angel and some fictional witches

I had read only a few pages of the book when Diana Wynne Jones’s young witch Gwendolen Chant came to mind. They have selfishness, an abrupt manner and single-mindedness in common. Gwendolen wants to rule the world; Angel wants to dominate the world.

There is a scene in Angel where she visits her publisher at his home; she ignores his wife. This reminds me of something I quoted about C. S. Lewis’s witch Jadis in the article about Gwendolen Chant: 

“In Charn she [Jadis] had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wanted to make use of. Now that she had Uncle Andrew, she took no notice of Digory. I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical." 
From The Magician’s Nephew

Both Gwendolen and Angel are quick to take offence and become furious when thwarted. Both hate to see others in possession of things they want for themselves. Both are outraged when they don’t get the recognition they think they deserve.

Neither girl is interested in academic achievement; they just concentrate on their one obsession to the exclusion of everything else, with Angel exercising her imagination and Gwendolen her magical powers.