Diana Gardner (1913–1997)

I’ve come to appreciate the skill and beauty of a short story over the last few years. There is something special about being able to create a full and complete story in a few words, one which leaves the reader fulfilled and wanting only to read more because the characters were so compelling, and not because the story feels incomplete.

These stories are snapshots into the lives of various women. Some of those are fleeting, only a few pages. Others feel like the reader has been immersed in the character. The Land Girl, the short story that started Gardner on her path, is a brilliant insight into a complex character, one that is anything but the ordinary woman of the 1940s, usually portrayed on paper.

Each story is an observant look at the role women played in society, their expectations and the requirements they were assumed to want and need obviously not always coinciding. In The Woman Novelist, the central character has taken on the role of breadwinner, as her husband trains for a new career. With children and mothers to look after she casts aside worries about her husband to focus on the one thing that saves her, writing.

Stories cover a gamut of emotions and ideas, from childhood memories carried and mutated in adulthood, to forbidden love in a time of heightened danger to first love. There are hints of malice, of contentment, hints of secrets about to be exposed or kept for a lifetime. These stories are character studies, showing that women were not just home makers. That they can do untold damage, hold untold secrets and be made and shaped by the past or their future. Diana Gardner herself was a mould-breaker, writing characters that readers did not expect to see in the 1940s.

A fascinating, enjoyable set of stories that I will no doubt dip into again in the future.… (plus d'informations)

I feel almost a greater responsibility reviewing a book so few other people will know much about – neither wishing to undersell or over egg so to speak. When I read Diana Gardner’s short stories last year – I was captured by her beautiful writing, and her storytelling. There is subtlety, and clever little twists in those stories, in a couple of them she explored the oddness of relationships between people and destructive natures, which is a major theme of this novel. Though the relationship at the centre of this novel is far darker and more destructive than any in that collection of stories.

Gyles Ayscough, a north country squire who spent a few years serving with the Army in India returns to England and marries Sybil Ludlam, the daughter of a neighbour. A few years earlier, before going to India, Gyles had been invited to dinner at the Ludlam’s where he met all five Ludlam sisters, Sybil the fourth, only seventeen, almost immediately forgets him. Five or six years later, Gyles returns, India behind him, he is buying up land, and seeking a wife. Things have changed in the Ludlam household in the years since Gyles was there before, their mother dead, two sisters have married and gone abroad, one sister tragically killed in a freak accident, leaving only the eldest Zena, and Sybil at home with their ageing father. Everyone expects Gyles to marry Zena – including Zena herself, so it’s a bolt from the blue when Gyles asks for Sybil’s hand.

“Afterwards she went to her room and sat at her dressing-table. The sun was on the far side of the house, but she could see, through the window, its rich glow on the hill. She looked at herself in the glass. Today her soft hair looked vaguely, mysteriously dusty – like that beautiful, evocative, plaited hair one sometimes sees in Victorian lockets. Her skin, pale and soft, had never seemed so clear and glowing. Perhaps, in her own way, she was pretty? – she ruminated. Had Gyles Ayscough thought of her, then?”

Sybil is slight, quiet and obedient, an innocent, an old-fashioned kind of young woman, and people ask what it is the handsome squire sees in her. It is 1920, the world is changing after the First World War, but Sybil isn’t the kind of young woman ready for change, seeming at times a little Victorian in her fragility.

We soon realise that Sybil’s quiet fragility is the very reason Gyles chose Sybil over Zena, what Gyles wanted was wife who would be his idea of a wife, and live quietly in the country, with little society and few interruptions. We sense of course that there is something wrong with Gyles, he’s moody and reserved, speaking little of his past. At Mountfield; Gyles’s large country estate, he and Sybil slip into a contented quiet life, and Sybil find herself very happy with her life, learning to run a large house and finding great joy in her garden flowers. Gyles is anxious for a child, and in time, a son is born, and everything seems perfect, for a time. Only when their child dies, everything changes and the truths that Gyles has been hiding come to the surface.

Gyles’s behaviour becomes stranger, he retreats further from his grief-stricken wife, leaving her alone for longer and longer periods. Sybil discovers Gyles keeps a small sitting room/gun room in a distant part of his large house where he spends many hours away from her. In the room; is a trunk full of Indian women’s clothes, Gyles is furious she has discovered them, and Sybil is puzzled at what it all could mean.

Years before, while in India, Gyles suffered a humiliation at the hands of an Indian Woman, a woman, whose presence he was only in for a few moments, but who he has sworn vengeance upon ever since. His chauffeur Crayke, knows something of what happened in India – and over the course of the next few years protects his master from local gossips – when tongues start wagging about the Ayscoughs. What the gossips can’t begin to imagine, is that Gyles has become so obsessed and disturbed by that incident in India that he has begun to act out his revenge on his fragile wife. Never actually raising a hand to Sybil he forces her to dress up in the Indian clothes, posing for hours, heaping insults upon her, insults meant for someone else. It is an act of humiliation, such as he himself once suffered – Gyles wants to break the Indian woman, but instead he only breaks his delicate, loyal wife.

“…Gyles, standing against the mantelpiece – he sometimes leaned with the whole of his broad back against it, keeping the heat from the room – could mock at her awkwardness, undermine her confidence. His laugh was rasping and high, almost inhuman -sometimes she looked over to him quickly, imagining that a stranger, or some wild person had joined them in the room – and his dark eyes were dark, impervious to her feelings.”

Gyles’s domination and cruelty is bizarre, what makes it interesting is the psychology, Gardner demonstrates how little by little a spirit is broken, small acts of cruelty which might seem rather silly (especially to a modern reader) have an enormous effect upon Sybil, who seems unable to help herself.

With her sister, living an independent life in Scarborough, Sybil’s only friend is Mr Martineau the ageing local vicar, who Sybil realises she is unable to speak to about the behaviour of her husband toward her. Sybil needs help, deep down she realises her husband is destroying her. However, Gyles is sly, manipulative and quick thinking, and when his secrets are threatened he moves himself and Sibyl away, to another large country house, where no one knows them. The years pass, the world is changing, more cars on the roads, fashions and attitudes changing, but Sybil remains locked inside a marriage she feels it would be wrong for her to try and escape, in time she is simply incapable of it.

The Indian Woman, while lacking the perfection of The Woman Novelist and other stories, is a very good novel, it is utterly gripping and so compelling I could barely put it down. So, I certainly don’t feel I wasted my money, and I really wish that Diana Gardner had written a lot more.… (plus d'informations)

Diana Gardner was a writer and artist who knew Virginia and Leonard Woolf; they were neighbours during the war. Whether Virginia Woolf ever actually read Diana’s work seems to be unknown – though she is reported to have scribbled a congratulatory note on the side of the Horizon pre-publication leaflet, which announced Diana Gardner’s story ‘The Land Girl’ would be included in the Christmas 1940 edition. The Land Girl is for me one of the best stories in this really quite superb collection. Gardner’s depiction of jealous selfishness and its destructive nature is breath-taking. The narrator Una, is a cool, heartless creature, who comes we find out early on from a fairly well-to-do family – she is initially enraged by the lack of sugar for her porridge. From then on the girl wages her own little war on the woman whose home she is staying in.

“It was then that something took possession of me. The sight of the old, chipped thermos on the orange tray and his spent, thin shoulders bent over it caused my dislike of Mrs Farrant to well up into a sudden storm of hatred.”

(From The Land Girl)

With the exception of ‘The Woman Novelist’, these stories we were written during the Second World War; and although some of the stories taking place in the Germany of this period, there aren’t that many references to the war itself. In The Splash a young Nazi stormtrooper seeks to prove himself to be a specimen of Nazi perfection, while at the pool with a couple of English girls. While in A Summer Holiday Gardner explores how people can – despite all the evidence available – be completely blind to what is going on around them.

Gardner is great at atmosphere, whether it’s comic or mysterious, or gently illustrative of difficult times – she manages in just a few pages to give her readers a whole world, her characters have pasts which we can imagine, their futures less certain perhaps. In Crossing the Atlantic two unlikely people find themselves spending weeks together in a boat on a voyage to New York. In this story we have one of Gardner’s wryly comic, surprise endings. In Halfway down the Cliff, what appears to be a daring Cliffside rescue of a child has an unexpected, comic conclusion, Gardner showing again how she enjoys surprising her readers. The Boathouse is a tender little story of love in a time of war.

In the title story it is difficult not to place Diana Gardner herself in the character of Madeline. Madeleine is a woman who must juggle the running of her home, with her writing, on which her family depends. Her husband is rather useless; their marriage appears to be based less on love but on a mutual dependence. Madeleine feels more supported in her work by her faithful maid.

“On the far side of the house, everything was deeply still; the conservatory was enfolded by silence. In that detached, blazing hour after lunch even the birds were withdrawn, not moving, or visible, and the tractor which, all morning, had droned on the hill was now quiet.
Madeleine looked at her manuscript. The next section was going to be the most difficult and involved, and the most significant.”

(from The Woman Novelist)

Gardner explores the oddness of relationships with a wonderfully practised eye. It seems the couple in A Summer Holiday reach the end of their relationship when the Germans invade France, and they disagree about the coming danger. Another couple, in The Couple from London, leave hotel staff horrified and perplexed when one of them is left behind by the other – in very mysterious circumstances. In The Visitation a Shepherd leaves his family to the mercy of German incendiaries and rushes off to tend to his flock – his wife takes his apparent desertion in her stride – she understands her husband. The volume opens with The House in Hove a lovely story told in reminiscence of a house, where a woman left her children with their father. The memories of that desertion are still painful many years later as the narrator remembers her mother leaving and ruminates on the failed marriage of her parents.

I loved how Diana Gardner sometimes leads us down the garden path – we think we know where we’re going – but in fact we don’t. In Miss Carmichael’s Bed – there is an atmosphere of mystery – the reader is convinced that there is something supernatural about the old box bed that so intrigues the woman who has come as a housekeeper to Miss Carmichael. Gardner is never as obvious as that – and the reader is left surprised but certainly not disappointed. Gardner does the same in the story Mrs Lumley – here again we have an atmosphere which brilliantly has the reader holding their breath – and here again Gardner surprises us – subtly and cleverly.

Gardner’s use of colour in her descriptions show her artist’s eye – she paints tiny canvases of perfect storytelling, such a shame she didn’t write more. Her novel The Indian Woman (1954) is firmly on my wish list – but inexpensive copies seem hard to come by.… (plus d'informations)