These fantastic fellows are revered and encouraged in their work because they are surrounded by aco-lytes – often women – devoted to the task of keeping them free of disturbance, particularly from unruly children. As for the idea of a woman in their ranks, it’s unheard-of. True, there are women students at Oxford, but nobody seems to think much of them, and Protobibliotecarius Bodleianus abominates them. The three Smith boys have picked up on their elders’ ideas, to one degree or another. Thomas has a thirteen-year-old’s disdain for females, and James greets Maria with a home-made spider: ‘She’s a girl, most of them are frightened by anything.’ The boys are all very glum at the prospect of their mother hosting a croquet party for female students. Even Joshua, the kindest of the three, can only bring himself to tell Maria: ‘They’re rather knobbly and they wear spectacles… You’ll be one yourself one day.’
And so she will, I feel sure, but not in a knobbly way. Yet the path to knowledge isn’t easy for her. She is put to lessons with James, and it’s bad enough having to learn with an eight-year-old, let alone the most cock-sure eight-year-old in Oxford. The ‘original research’ idea gets its first spark when Mr Copplestone takes his pupils on an expedition to Jerusalem House, a huge stately home up the river from Oxford, and she discovers the unknown boy’s portrait, and her curiosity begins to grow.
You might think finding out about the unknown boy would not be that difficult, even in the days before Google and Wikipedia. Maria is in one of the finest cities in the world for libraries. But these libraries are not for little girls. Avery has concocted a splendidly farcical tale where just about every obstacle is thrown in Maria’s path, and she finds herself constantly breaking the rules, getting into scrapes and facing the spectre of punishment that might include the dreaded return to school.
Oddly enough for a feminist tale, her allies are all masculine and her enemies are all feminine. Professor Smith gives her some unconventional advice which becomes a bit of a refrain: ‘If you find being good too difficult, you’ll have to concentrate on being clever.’ The boys help her out, although sometimes with great reluctance. But the women, in the mould of Maria’s geography teacher Miss Ferguson, are dragons. There is not one maternal or female role model. They are all convinced the child is stupid, hopeless and evil, and she’s inclined to believe them. The Warden’s housekeeper, Mrs Clomper, upbraids Maria for her wickedness, and for worrying the Warden. (In much milder tones, the Warden upbraids Maria for worrying Mrs Clomper.) And the housekeeper at Jerusalem, Miss Hickmott, is a horror who condemns Maria as a ‘limb of Satan’. I suppose you can argue these women are just playing their allotted part in the patriarchy, but they are chillingly zealous about it.
“Oddly enough for a feminist tale, her allies are all masculine and her enemies are all feminine.”
Somehow Maria manages to piece together enough evidence for her paper, with a little help from Avery’s fortuitous plotting, but it’s not quite the triumph she envisaged. Still, it’s a start: the Warden encourages her to read it out to the Kentish Historical Association, where he has been invited to speak: ‘They would much rather hear a child prodigy than an elderly man.’ By now I feel sure that Maria has had her baptism of fire: if she can’t eventually become the Professor of Greek, or the Professor of anything else, at Oxford, then no woman ever can.
“In a world where everyone is constrained by conventions, and humiliation is the most horrible thing that can happen, these two in their different ways are free spirits who speak their minds and act out their desires, often with appallingly hilarious results.”
But I’ve missed out the funniest elements in The Warden’s Niece: the two wild cards, James and Mr Copplestone. In a world where everyone is constrained by conventions, and humiliation is the most horrible thing that can happen, these two in their different ways are free spirits who speak their minds and act out their desires, often with appallingly hilarious results. James, as Maria notes in her diary, is ‘OUTRAGEOUS’: the Mackervelly episode is the very least of it. He reminds me of a mix of Mr Toad and Roo, with the almost unbelievable self-assurance that only an eight-year-old boy can possess, and of course he is completely maddening. So wild is he, so rampant with egoism, that Avery has to write him out of the plot for a while with a bout of suspected scarlet fever, for if he had tagged along with Maria and his brothers, they would have got into far worse trouble. When he’s ill, I miss him.
The Reverend Francis Copplestone is a sublime creation, the tallest man ever seen in Oxford. ‘Too tall for my comfort, poor fellow, poor fellow,’ says Professor Smith. He is very shy with women and girls, and smiles at his feet in their presence; but he gets over it with Maria. Otherwise, he is loud and alarming and fearfully embarrassing. ‘Disasters always seemed to fall around Mr Copplestone like fallen leaves.’ He is the sort of fellow who gets a cabby to wait for him and kindly lends him a copy of his tract on fig trees in Babylonia to pass the time. He speaks in a formal, faintly ironic style that belies his weird behaviour. He is partial to bullfighting. He always means well. He is a fearless, cheerful bluffer who behaves as if every idiotic thing he does is entirely reasonable. He falls into the Smiths’ henhouse, frightens the Bishop away, shocks and insults the librarians, leads Maria on an expedition to Jerusalem House that amounts to burglary, and ends up waist deep in a pond after he gets his dearest wish, a chance to fight an escaped bull. Did the bull gore him? No. It’s typical of Mr Copplestone that the bull pays him no attention. I fell in love with Mr Copplestone all over again, and I laughed and laughed at him, but I could also understand why Maria concludes ‘I’d rather know nothing at all than have Mr Copplestone finding things out for me.’
By now, I’m insatiably curious about Gillian Avery. When I start looking, I can’t find any substantial biography, but I do discover that although her work is largely forgotten now, it was highly thought of in English book circles in the late 1950s and ’60s, and she was quite a prolific author. She was born in 1926. After working as a journalist and in publishing, she turned to writing historical books for children. According to a Penguin website, she felt an affinity between her own prewar generation and the Victorian child, characterised by ‘a meek acceptance of the power of the adult world’. The Warden’s Niece was her first novel and she produced fourteen more, as well as four books of non-fiction, including two historical studies of children’s literature. One of her novels, A Likely Lad (1971), won the Guardian award for children’s fiction, was a Carnegie Medal honour book and was dramatised for television.
I’m delighted to find that the characters in The Warden’s Niece didn’t disappear at the end of the book. Maria starred again in a sequel, The Italian Spring, where she went to Italy with a cousin; and the Smith boys and Mr Copplestone turned up in seven more books. One of them, Trespassers at Charlcote, has a familiar cover online, also by Dick Hart, and now I’m sure I read this book too, although I have absolutely no recollection of it. This must be where I read about Mr Copplestone’s penny-farthing, which turns up online as a cover illustration on another book, To Tame a Sister. While I’m glad to know they exist, the only one of these sequels I’m tempted to read now is The Elephant War, where the Smith boys are caught up in a battle to stop Jumbo the elephant being sold to the American showman P. T. Barnum.
“there is not much evidence that anybody reads Avery’s novels today. Which is a huge shame.”
I’d love to know what children thought of her books, but the only comments I can find (and not many of those) are from critics. The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature says The Warden’s Niece ‘can in retrospect be seen as one of the children’s books that marked the beginning of a renaissance in English juvenile fiction,’ and in a 1961 article for The Spectator, Marghanita Laski includes The Warden’s Niece in a recent ‘efflorescence of good writing for children, of books that are plainly worth keeping on the shelf with the classics of the past.’ The Continuum Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature is a little less enthusiastic: her work
bears the ‘marked influence’ of Dickens and Trollope, and ‘occasionally Avery creates a memorable character, such as the unpredictable tutor Copplestone.’ But apart from the occasional comment on Goodreads, or a 2009 post in Cardigan Girl Verity’s blog on ‘forgotten children’s authors’, there is not much evidence that anybody reads Avery’s novels today. Which is a huge shame.
The Warden’s Niece is very much an Oxford book, though Avery doesn’t wax romantic about the place. She must have known it well – she had lived there for much of her life since 1950 – and she certainly knew one Oxford don very well. In 1952 she married Anthony Cockshut, now an Emeritus Fellow at Hertford College, and the author of books on Anthony Trollope, Dickens, Walter Scott and on the art of biography and autobiography. He also wrote an introduction to Trollope’s The Warden. The Penguin website tells me that when the couple moved to Manchester in 1954, Avery set The Warden’s Niece in Oxford because she was so homesick, and that she returned to Oxford in 1964.
She was there when I went up to St Anne’s College to study English in 1968. I knew Oxford as the place where my fantasy gods C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien had held their clubby meetings as The Inklings (the pub where they met is now a tourist attraction) and as the rain-drenched forbidding city that Maria had run through when fleeing from school. Canterbury College is fictitious, but I recognised the clock chimes, the sixteen notes of an old hymn tune, hesitating over the last four notes: ‘She had loved the tune so well that she had always tried to be near the clock tower when it struck the hour, but however hard she had tried to remember them she had always forgotten the curious rise and fall of the notes by the time the next hour came round.’ In some ways, Oxford in 1968 was still stuck in 1875. There were women professors and far more women students, but in my first two terms I was taught Anglo-Saxon by a terrifying male professor I was reliably informed hated women. Oxford was a clubby place, with obscure gentlemen’s rules: when I went punting on the Isis, I thought of Ratty and Mole and Mr Copplestone, beside himself because some bounder from Cambridge was poling from the wrong end of the punt. The Bodleian, one of the most beautiful libraries I have ever entered, was also one of the most intimidating. I didn’t know how to look for books, and nobody seemed inclined to tell me. I had every right to be there, but now and again I still felt like a presumptuous little girl. In any case, I spent most of my research time in the library of the St Cross building, which was modern and down-to-earth, where boys passed me notes (‘Do you want to see Battleship Potemkin?’), and where they served pies and baked beans in the canteen.
Professor Smith tells Maria that in order to research, she needs three things: peace and quiet, a library, and ‘a subject you are passionately interested in… something you pursue single-mindedly.’ But as Thomas says, ‘Females never can be single-minded; they always have to worry about everything.’ It’s up to Maria to prove him wrong, to evolve to the point where Thomas can grudgingly conclude ‘For a girl who is so mouselike in nature, you do some pretty startling things.’
Her passionate interest develops gradually, but eventually she puts together a story of Stephen Fitzackerley, the ‘Unknown Boy’, a fourteen-year-old aristocrat caught up in the crosscurrents of the Civil War, and his untimely death. The interest for me here, then and now, isn’t her prowess or her daring as a scholar: it’s her imaginative, almost psychic grasp of what it must have been like to be young Stephen.
The Times Literary Supplement review of The Warden’s Niece concluded that its moral was ‘being good at lessons is not the be-all and end-all here, and that to be ourselves is a more glorious aim than to pass examinations.’ I think the book says more than that. The real getting of wisdom for Maria has nothing to do with coal and iron deposits in Germany, or how to be neat and tidy, or how to be good, the aspirations of Little Women. It has little to do with learning Greek and Latin and history, important achievements as these might have been for a girl in 1875. It is all about developing her confidence, initiative and natural empathy. And here’s the link to my own response: The Warden’s Niece taught me about empathy in reading, and empathy in life.
“The Warden’s Niece taught me about empathy in reading, and empathy in life.”
My last hypothesis was that I needed a cathartic release for my worst impulses. This has not, thank God, been proved wrong. But now I see the other side of the coin: I needed a cathartic release for my best impulses, and Maria gave me that. Indeed, I’m prepared to put up a new hypothesis based on Maria’s triumph: I needed a tale of vindication.
I wish I’d met Gillian Avery, but our paths in Oxford never crossed. I plucked up my courage to write her a very belated fan letter, and I was delighted when her daughter replied. I didn’t even know she had a daughter. Shenka Christmas told me that her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s three years before, and was now living very happily in a wonderful nursing home. ‘She read your letter aloud yesterday, quite fluently, and seemed very familiar with the names of the characters, although I am not sure if she remembers writing the books.’ I was so pleased, and so sad.
Gillian Avery died in 2016, at the age of eighty-nine. Her obituary in The Guardian fills in a few more details of her life. She was an only child, the daughter of an estate agent in Reigate, Surrey. She went to school in the town, where ‘we merely learned to write neatly and to learn by heart’. She always wanted to be a writer but got ‘caught up in various jobs’ until she moved to Manchester from Oxford and started to write as an escape from the ‘weeping skies’ and ‘raw fogs’. The Warden’s Niece was a runner-up for the Carnegie Medal, the top UK award for children’s books. I love the way the obituary writer, Julia Eccleshare, describes Avery’s characters as ‘anti-authoritarian’.
No other writer did so much to help me with my own experiences of authority. I knew exactly what it was like to be Maria, and once I had grasped that, it gave me courage, because other people – even people like James, Mr Copplestone or Protobibliotecarius Bodleianus – never again seemed quite so strange.
THE VERY END OF THE WORLD
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
by C. S. Lewis
At the top of the topmost flight of stairs in our house in St John’s Wood, on a derelict and deserted attic floor, stood an empty wardrobe. Quite often I would go up the stairs, stand outside it and dare myself, then usually I’d walk down again. But every now and then I’d find the courage to creep into it and close the door, putting myself into the dark, bursting with excitement as I breathed in rotting wood and damp plaster and pigeon poo. Then I’d take a step towards the back of the wardrobe, to come out the other side, to a lamp post in a snowy wood. Oh, the disappointment. It never got any less.
Did I really believe I’d find a way into Narnia? Yes and no. Of course I knew the stories were fiction and the magic wasn’t real. But something in me kept hoping that if only I believed enough, it would happen. So much took place in my imagination that seemed completely real to me: surely there was only a thin membrane between the real world and the imaginary world. Surely I could step through.
“So much took place in my imagination that seemed completely real to me: surely there was only a thin membrane between the real world and the imaginary world.”
I never told anyone I did this because I thought they’d laugh at me. It was like the fairy palace, but I was younger then, and had the excuse of being little. It was like the conker I kept secretly in my desk and took out every now and then and rubbed and made a wish, because in The Tree That Sat Down, by Beverley Nichols, there was a recipe for a magic wishing conker, and I believed in it utterly. I have no idea now what I wished for so fervently. Enid Blyton made me wish for adventures and Clive Staples Lewis made me wish for something more.
I could pick any of the Narnia books to write about. I loved them all with a passion I have never since felt for any book, and I remember all of them, I think, with much detail and clarity, though some better than others. The spell came upon me when I read my first Narnia
book, Prince Caspian, especially a scene where the young prince, who has been taught not to believe in fauns, comes across a moonlit gathering of the creatures in a woodland glade. I remember I was sitting up in bed, reading about drumming and piping and dancing, and I felt a deep vibrating thrill, almost sexual, rise through my body. Perhaps there was some link here with Grahame’s piper at the gates of dawn? Except the deity in the Narnia books is Aslan the lion, a stupendous and wise golden creature who manages to be both terrifying and cuddly, and fauns such as Mr Tumnus were much further down the cuddly end of the spectrum. But in that gathering of fauns, there was nothing cuddly: just a pagan magic and a sense that things supposedly forbidden and imaginary could spring into life. I bet Donna Tartt remembered it when she wrote The Secret History.
“I remember I was sitting up in bed, reading about drumming and piping and dancing, and I felt a deep vibrating thrill, almost sexual, rise through my body.”
There are questions I ask myself now that I never asked as a child. How come everyone in Narnia speaks English? How can you be an adult king or queen in one world and come back to another world a mere child again, wouldn’t that be devastating? But I decide these are mere logistical details: I must just accept these stories at face value. When I first read the Chronicles, I accepted everything – except for the ending. In the final book, The Last Battle, I was asked to believe that the generations of children who visited Narnia had all just died. I was supposed to be happy about it, but it seemed to me too weird, too horrible, and a cheat – as if Lewis had broken his compact with his readers, though I couldn’t have said what that compact was. So I will revisit that scene, but not yet.
I have picked The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to re-read for a number of reasons. I always loved journeys and quests, and this one is at sea, which makes it especially mysterious and exciting (I’d never been in a ship and had only seen the sea on holiday, from a beach in Cornwall). It’s a Sinbad-like journey to find some lords who have mysteriously disappeared, who all have funny names; the only one I can remember is Lord Rhoop. It features a fabulous medieval sailing ship that for a long time I misread as the Dawn Trader, which seemed a good name to me. It has an animal character who jumps out: the swashbuckling warrior mouse, Reepicheep. And it has a human character you are not supposed to like, but I found very interesting: the boy Eustace.
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