Sarah Waters: how grim reality of war changed women’s lives
Jane Austen famously – and modestly – likened her masterpieces to a “little bit (two inches wide) of ivory”, limiting the scope of her novels to “four or five families in a country village”. Not for her what Walter Scott called “the big Bow-wow strain” – the vast romantic novels in vogue at the time.
Sarah Waters is today’s Austen, writing with great feeling and beauty about a particular section of society, and a very specific neighbourhood, while others hog the literary limelight with more grandiose sagas.
Waters’ latest novel, The Paying Guests, zeroes in on a south London suburb, Champion Hill, and a family left bereft by the first world war, and forced to take in lodgers to make ends meet.
Readers of what she’s referred to in the past as her “lesbo Victorian romps” won’t be surprised to hear that the central relationship in the novel is an affair between two women – the heroine Frances and her lodger, Lilian, a married lady.
Their clandestine romance takes a violent turn, and the suspense of the second half of The Paying Guests rests on a tragic moral dilemma.
But while the landscape Waters paints may be restricted both geographically and culturally, as in Austen’s novels the conundrums they wrestle with know no such bounds.
After the war, society was changing. Many servants had got jobs in the munitions factories, and traditional class boundaries had been upset. Decades before the sexual revolution, there were the first stirrings of discontent among women who had had a taste of a different life.
Frances reflects: “Everything was changing. Why shouldn’t we change too? We wanted to shake off tradition, caste, all that.”
Yet she and her friends are in a kind of limbo. Women had had the opportunity to work in the war, but society would have frowned on a well-to-do woman like Frances, or a married lady like Lilian going out to work. So, in the absence of servants, Frances is left to scrub the floors and lose herself in drudgery, and Lilian sinks into suburban boredom.
If the lives of women, and especially lesbian women, in the UK are very different now, there’s a very contemporary relevance to Waters’ reflections on the futility of war, and the terrible toll it exacted: entire families robbed of their menfolk, and maimed soldiers stalking the streets in desperate poverty.
When I spoke to the author – dodging an apocalyptic deluge in the Ruskin Park bandstand which is the backdrop for a particularly pivotal moment in the book – she told me that for all the nostalgia about the first world war 100 years on, the violent ructions unfolding across the Middle East are a reminder of the grim reality of conflict.
And while the Europeans tried to restore order to a disordered world by carving up the Middle East, the artificial borders they installed are, a century later, fracturing, endangering global security in the process.
So there’s no doubt Waters’ little bit of ivory is quite substantial enough to provoke, enthral, and engage.
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