Book Review: ‘Beyond the Glass’ and ‘The Vet’s Daughter’

Following our call for book reviews from our readers back in February, Michelle Kopczyk contributed this post from Canada, which coincidentally builds on our recent In the Spotlight on novelist Antonia White:

“Clara Batchelor is twenty-two. Her brief, doomed marriage to Archie ended, she returns to her parents hoping for comfort. But theirs is a strict Catholic home, and its confines form a dangerous glass wall of guilt and repression between Clara and the outside world. Clara both longs for and fears what lies beyond, yet when she escapes into an exhilarating and passionate love affair, her fragile identity cracks. An extraordinary portrayal of a woman’s descent into madness.” May Quartet

Beyond the Glass is the last book in a trilogy-sequel to Frost in May (which I feel is White’s strongest novel).

The central theme in Beyond the Glass is the main character’s (Clara) mental deterioration–absence of identity, depression, great exultation, delusions, incarceration–and recovery. White experienced this in her early twenties, an affliction that revisited her a few times during her life.

The story is tragic. It is about loss and the reluctant acceptance of it. It also evokes a strange sense of hope, that Clara is moving towards developing a sense of self. In contrast, Barbara Comyn’s novel The Vet’s Daughter is similar in feeling, but it has a fantastical element that, unlike Beyond the Glass, mitigates the sense of tragedy for the central character and reinforces, what I believe to be the Vet’s Daughter‘s central theme, the sense of doom of being a human being. White’s novel is unbridled and hard to take in parts—on my third try, I got through it.

White, A. (1980) Beyond the Glass, Virago Press, London

Comyns, B. (1981) The Vet’s Daughter, Virago Modern Classics, London

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Medicine at the Margins: Conference on Medicine Beyond the Orthodox, 1500 – 2000

Shortly before Easter, the University of Glamorgan hosted an interesting one day conference on ‘medicine at the margins’, exploring ideas, knowledge and practice within aspects of medicine that have been considered (or portrayed) as beyond the boundaries of acceptability and legitimacy. Between 1500 and 2000, such borders have frequently shifted; thus, speakers looked at the way the status of such concepts as folk lore, magical healing, ‘quack’ remedies and herbal medicine have held a very different status at various times, as well as the ways certain illnesses or injuries, for example neuropathic pruritus or self-harm, can serve to put patients outside the limits of “respectability”.

Certain concepts have fallen at the crossroads between medicine and myth. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century French ethnographers collected supernatural tales of ordinary peoples’ experiences concerning werewolves. These were often dismissed as psychological delusions by contemporary commentators, as indicated by the inclusion of “lycanthropy,” as a “striking example of the superstructure of psychdopathy on fable” in Daniel Hack Tuke’s 1892 Dictionary of Psychological Medicine. Yet speaker Will Pooley argued that these stories can provide a much richer understanding of French rural life than either contemporary medicine, or modern historiography, has indicated, including villagers’ fears of duplicity, but also a deep underlying pity for those, like the supposed werewolf, perceived to have transgressed the limits of the community.

In addition to the academic papers at the conference, researchers from CISSMI (Collaborative Interdisciplinary Study of Science, Medicine and the Imagination, a group from Cardiff University and the University of Glamorgan) introduced an exhibition that will form one of the outcomes of their “Off Sick” project. This project explores the role of narrative in understandings of illness, incorporating historical and literary research to explore the experiences of people and families who have been affected by severe or long-term illness in South Wales. The project particularly concentrates on the experiences of carers, a much neglected area in the history of medicine and literature. To find out more about the project, visit:

http://literatureandscience.research.glam.ac.uk/cissmi/offsick/about/

To read abstracts of the conference papers, visit: http://history.research.glam.ac.uk/margins/

In the Spotlight: Antonia White

Philip O’Connor, the writer highlighted in last month’s In the Spotlight, wrote of his sense that “a thick glass pane…had been fixed between [him] and the world” upon his departure from the intense, even ‘intellectual’ environment of the Maudsley Hospital.

To another author of the same generation, who experienced the equally heightened atmosphere of the wards of Bethlem Hospital, the divider that mattered most was not a metaphorical one that separated her emotionally from others, but the window pane of her room at hospital, through which “she could see into a garden” in which “women and nurses were walking…like figures cut out of coloured paper”.

“And she could see birds flying across the sky, not real birds, but bird-shaped kites, lined with strips of white metal, that flew on wires. Only the clouds had thickness and depth and looked as clouds had looked in the other world. …They would take shape after shape to amuse her, shapes of swans, of feathers, of charming ladies with fluffy white muffs and toques, of soldiers in white busbies.”

Upon her departure from Bethlem, her perspective was reversed to that of someone on the outside looking in. “She no longer belonged to the world beyond the glass. There were moments when she almost wished she did. … Beyond the glass, however agonising the nightmare experiences, they had had a peculiar intensity.”

These quotations are from Beyond the Glass, the last novel in a trilogy of autobiographical fiction written by Antonia White (1899-1980). Nine months’ residence at Bethlem in 1922-23, when the hospital was located in Southwark, is vividly represented in this novel. This is not the place to attempt a summary either of the work or the life of its author. The dust-jacket of Jane Dunn’s 1998 biography of White promises a study of a “single parent and working mother” who “wrestled with the large questions of faith … Catholicism … being a woman and an artist”, not to mention “the threat of madness” (Antonia White: A Life). This is sufficient reason, we think, to read White’s novels (maybe Dunn’s biography too). In them White gives evocative, and at times searing, accounts of her experiences in and out of hospital.

Then for the short story ‘Surprise Visit’ (published in an anthology entitled Strangers), White drew upon her experience of returning, out of curiosity, to the Southwark site of her hospitalisation, some time after Bethlem had relocated to Beckenham and the Imperial War Museum had moved in. There White attributed to her protagonist the “peculiar satisfaction” she no doubt felt “to measure how far and how successfully she had travelled since that deplorably bad start”.

Used by kind permission of the National Portrait Gallery

Inside the Dome: Photographs

You might remember that, last September, the Imperial War Museum opened up the dome (formerly the chapel of Bethlem Hospital) for Open House weekend. We’re hoping the same event will go ahead this year. In the meantime, however, we were lucky enough to be back in the dome for an event at the beginning of April, and would like to share some of our photographs with those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to visit.

It was a gloriously sunny day, with plenty of light spilling through the high windows: the perfect conditions for viewing the bright, white room. The dome has required much restoration over the years, particularly after a devastating arson attack. However, it is still easy to picture the former uses of the room, from chapel to reading room, as you can see in the images below.

Inside the Dome, a set on Flickr.

Stories Awaiting Discovery

Last year, when highlighting the inclusion of searchable text from the minutes of the Court of Governors of Bethlem and Bridewell Hospitals from 1689 to 1800 in London Lives, an electronic resource for the history of London, we also reminded blog readers of the online availability of digital page-by-page images of minutes dating from 1559 to 1792 on the Archives & Museum’s own website. Not everyone’s research is limited to the eighteenth century. Nor is everyone’s research limited to Bethlem Hospital.

Bridewell Hospital, which for most of its history functioned as a reformatory for petty offenders, vagrants and orphans, and with which Bethlem was twinned from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, is the subject of a great deal of scholarly interest in its own right. A recent post on a blog of King’s College London called Strandlines is a small example of this. The civic hypocrisy (and, perhaps, the connivance with Jacobean society’s gendered power relations) of the episode the post recounts – in which degrading punishments were meted out to Agnes Allowin and Mary Brookes, while no serious effort to find ‘Captain North’ seems to have been made – is almost as shocking as the cruelty involved.

This is just one of thousands of human stories that are waiting to be discovered (by anyone who is equal to the palaeographical challenge) in the early modern records of Bridewell and Bethlem Hospitals records.

Caption for image: Bridewell and Bethlem Court Book extract about Mary Brookes and Agnes Allowin, 1603.