The mystery of Jean Rhys, Aunt Maria, and Diana Wynne Jones

The article about Carole Angier's doubly-depressing biography of the novelist Jean Rhys includes an attempt to answer a big question the book raises: if it has such a bad effect, why read it and why comment on it? 

I said something relevant to this question a long time ago in the first article about Diana Wynne Jones's witch Aunt Maria: I persevere with some infuriating and/or depressing books because there are lessons to be learned and points and connections to be made from them. 

This article attempts to answer a small question that arose recently when I noticed a few similarities between Jean Rhys as described in Carole Angier's biography and the fictional Aunt Maria: could Diana Wynne Jones have been influenced by Jean Rhys: Life and Work when she was writing Black Maria aka Aunt Maria? 

After dealing with some of the more significant topics connected with Jean Rhys, I decided to investigate the possibility that Diana Wynne Jones had read Carole Angier's biography and, consciously or unconsciously, copied a little of the material for her children's book. 

I started by re-reading Black Maria in the light of what I had recently learned about Jean Rhys; some of the common elements I found this time around seemed worth highlighting - and more than just coincidence.

Wheelchairs and walking
Both Jean Rhys and Aunt Maria pretended to be more disabled than they really were. 

The first article about Aunt Maria mentions a scene in which the horrible old witch, who is supposedly can barely walk and spends much of her time in a wheelchair, is quite able to get up and go to the window when she sees something that angers her. 

When I first read this, I was immediately reminded of something I had read many years earlier about Jean Rhys while looking into the Jane Eyre connection: when she became angry with her assistant, she left her wheelchair in a flash to run to the door and lock it. 

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.

Antonia White, a gold coin and impressionable children

This article was inspired by an incident that I read about in the novelist Antonia White’s account of her early childhood in As Once in May.

It concerns what she called one of the great disappointments of her life. It happened when she was only four years old.

In addition to being a schoolmaster, her father gave private tuition to young men. Antonia got talking to one of these pupils while he was waiting for his lesson. He was so impressed by her knowledge that he gave her a gold coin, a half-sovereign!

When her father arrived and noticed the coin, he forced her to return it. He could not possibly allow her to accept it; it was far too much money for a child of her age. Despite his pupil’s efforts on Antonia’s behalf, her father was adamant. The coin went back into the young man’s pocket.

As she left the room, holding back her tears, she heard her father say:

“It was exceedingly generous of you, but I’m sure that you’ll see my point of view. No, no, she won’t be disappointed. I’m sure she knew all along she couldn’t possibly be allowed to keep it. Don’t worry. By tomorrow she’ll have forgotten all about it.”

This is what Antonia White said decades later:

“He was wrong. After seventy-two years I have not forgotten that breathless moment of possession and the bitter sense of injustice when the treasure was snatched away...”

This is a very good illustration of something that that really stands out in the biographies and autobiographies of many writers: how hard they take some things and how they often never forget and never forgive a childhood injury.

Diana Wynne Jones had this to say, in connection with being permanently affected by not being permitted to read fantasy books as a child:

“And it does bring you hard up against the responsibility adults have, if only because it shows you what a truly lasting impression can be made on a child.”

This is from her book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing, which is full of such insights.

Diana Wynne Jones and two more coincidences

A previous article gives details of two occasions when something that Diana Wynne Jones had just written about manifested in her life. 

Diana Wynne Jones’s book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing contains two more examples of this phenomenon.

The first ‘coincidence’ happened at a time when she was working on her book Fire and Hemlock, for which the plot was, she thought, her own invention. An acquaintance railroaded her into a visiting a place where people started discussing a local legend - which strongly resembled her plot.

The second incident happened while she was working on Archer’s Goon. One of the characters discovers a newborn baby in the snow. The same acquaintance went out for a walk and found an abandoned baby!

The two incidents in Diana Wynne Jones’s own words:

The Fire and Hemlock incident 
“Sometimes, however, the book comes true while I am actually writing it, and this can be quite upsetting. 

Fire and Hemlock was one of those. One of the many things that happened while I was writing it was that an eccentric bachelor friend from Sussex University, who stayed with us while he was lecturing in Bristol, insisted on my driving him to some stone circles in our neighborhood. There, he began having mystic experiences, while I kept getting hung up astride the electric fences that crisscrossed the site. My outcries, he said, were disturbing the vibes, so he sent me to the local pub to wait for him. 

As soon as I got there, the landlady and the other customers began talking about these same stone circles and related the local story about their origins. This story is called “The Wicked Wedding”: the bride, who is an evil woman, chooses a young man to marry, but at the wedding, the devil comes, kills the young bridegroom, and marries the lady himself. 

This is the story behind Fire and Hemlock and, believe it or not, I had never heard it before - I thought I'd made it up. Well, after various other strange experiences, my eccentric friend went back to Sussex and I finished the book.”

Passing it on: Diana Wynne Jones and the fantasy ban

An article or two about the very big, complex and excruciatingly painful subject of why people who have suffered at the hands of their parents often go on to make their own children suffer in exactly the same way has been on my mental to-do list for many years now.

There is also something to say about people who make a conscious decision not to pass on to their children the ill-treatment they experienced. They may have been receivers but they did not become transmitters.

The time has come to look at a few examples and try to think of a few explanations. The examples mainly involve writers who have been featured or mentioned on here.

It was something I read recently in Diana Wynne Jones’s account of her early life that made me decide to finally get some ideas down on paper at long last Her story provides a very good example to start with: it tells of someone who passed it on to someone who didn’t. 

Diana Wynne Jones and two generations of censorship
In her book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing, Diana Wynne Jones tells us how she was starved for reading material throughout her childhood.

Her mother, who was an appalling person, added insult to injury by censoring the Piper at the Gates of Dawn chapter in The Wind in the Willows because it was ‘too fanciful’.

More about Diana Wynne Jones and her book deprivation

Some writers have very interesting things to say about books, reading and writing. I like it even more when they mention public libraries too!

Diana Wynne Jones is yet another writer whose thoughts on these topics have inspired some commentary. 

I have something to add to the previous article about the dire shortage of reading material that she experienced as a child.

I said earlier that thanks to public libraries I didn’t miss much in the way of good books when I was growing up. I am very grateful for that. I feel very sorry for imaginative children with enquiring minds who were forced to subsist on a diet of crumbs of reading material.

Diana Wynne Jones is a little ambivalent on the subject. After reading about the perpetual book famine and the desperate begging, saving and scrounging, I was surprised to see that she said that perhaps it was all for the best in some ways.

Diana Wynne Jones and the shortage of reading material

Diana Wynne Jones is yet another writer who was a voracious reader as a child. Unfortunately, she never had nearly enough books to satisfy her appetite for reading material. As she put it, she suffered from a perpetual book famine.

Her book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing contains some interesting - although very painful to read - autobiographical material; it was the source of an amusing anecdote, and it also provides some information about the vital part that books and reading played in her early life.

A few extracts will show what she was up against when trying to obtain more books to read. 

A starvation diet of books
Diana Wynne Jones’s father was stingy and tight-fisted in the extreme: 

“...birthdays were the one occasion when my father could be persuaded to buy books. By begging very hard, I got Puck of Pook’s Hill when I was ten and Greenmantle when I was twelve. But my father was inordinately mean about money. He solved the Christmas book-giving by buying an entire set of Arthur Ransome books, which he kept locked in a high cupboard and dispensed one between the three of us each year.”

So she too liked Rudyard Kipling and John Buchan! 

I would have felt very short-changed indeed if all I was given for Christmas was one Arthur Ransome book - and he is not one of my favourite authors anyway!

Today’s birthdays: Georgette Heyer and Diana Wynne Jones

Georgette Heyer was born on August 16th 1902.

Diana Wynne Jones was born on August 16th 1934.

There is nothing in Georgette Heyer’s novels relevant to the themes of this blog, although she has been featured here because of some similarities in her and Stella Gibbons’s lives. 

Diana Wynne Jones is very different: her life and her books have been mentioned in several articles and there is still more material to come. 

While Georgette Heyer never wrote about magic, witches or anything occult, Diana Wynne Jones wrote about little else. I wonder whether Georgette’ Heyer’s happy childhood and Diana Wynne Jones’s awful one had anything to do with this.

These two writers have only a few things in common.

They were both born in London and both moved around a lot - at least for a while. They were both heavy smokers, and both died from lung cancer.

While both were very tall, they were very different in appearance. Georgette Heyer was elegant, stylish and kept up with the fashions; Diana Wynne Jones was wild-haired and rather witch-like.

One of the biggest differences is their attitude to publicity.

Georgette Heyer kept herself from the world for most of her life. She is described as ‘ferociously reticent’.

Diana Wynne Jones gave interviews and talks; she visited schools; she wrote articles and spoke about the creative process and her life.

The two authors were usually treated very differently by people they met, as these two amusing anecdotes show:

Diana Wynne Jones: two alarming coincidences

I have written about some connections I made between certain scenes in Charlotte Brontë’s writings and events in her life. 

I doubt whether she ever realised that incidents she had created and dwelt on in her imagination had manifested in the real world. 

Diana Wynne Jones is another matter. She did notice a connection between what she was writing about and unexpected, unwelcome incidents in her life. This example comes from Diana Wynne Jones’s book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing:

“… And my books have developed an uncanny way of coming true. The most startling example of this was last year, when I was writing the end of A Tale of Time City. At the very moment when I was writing about all the buildings in Time City falling down, the roof of my study fell in, leaving most of it open to the sky.”