The Fall of Doctor Onslow
Read The Fall of Doctor Onslow Online
Authors: Frances Vernon
FRANCES VERNON
Georgina Frances Vernon was born on 1 December 1963, firstborn child of the tenth Baron Vernon (John Lawrance Venables-Vernon) and his first wife Sheila, and was raised on the Sudbury Estate in Derbyshire (this comprising the late-seventeenth-century country house Sudbury Hall, the village of Sudbury and its surrounding farmland).
At the age of eighteen she embarked upon a writing career, taking ‘Frances Vernon’ as the name by which she wished to be known. She completed six novels in the space of ten years, the last published only posthumously. Her literary accomplishment was widely hailed by a range of notable reviewers, and in light of her prodigious talent her early death in 1991, aged just twenty-seven, was felt by all who knew her and her work to be especially poignant.
Faber Finds is privileged to now be reissuing Frances Vernon’s entire oeuvre. This prefatory account of her life and work has been compiled from separate interviews kindly contributed by her mother Sheila Vernon, and her first cousin the photographer and author Michael Marten, who encouraged and advised Frances in her literary vocation.
MICHAEL MARTEN
: Frances’s father John was my uncle, so I knew her from childhood. I spent quite a lot of my childhood at Sudbury so I saw the old ways (
laughs
), at least as they were in the 1950s and 1960s . . . The family lived in one little bit of this vast place, Sudbury Hall, with a handful of servants. The upper two storeys were empty
and the ‘state rooms’ were only used once or twice a year. But the grounds were perfectly kept up, and the kitchen garden was astonishing, with cherry trees espaliered on the brick walls. The cost of upkeep, though, was huge. Either you turned it into a theme park or else . . .
SHEILA VERNON
: Johnnie’s father died in 1963 and Frances was born that year. We lived in the Hall for a time while Johnnie negotiated to sell it to the National Trust, really in part payment of death duties, which was all very complicated.
MICHAEL MARTEN:
My uncle John built a house in the grounds, screened from the Hall, and that’s where Frances and her younger sister Janna were brought up.
SHEILA VERNON
: Frances was always creative. She could draw very well from about the age of four, as a lot of children can, but occasionally she would make something that really did surprise us. I remember her nursery-school teacher telling me that Frances had said she was bored, and so the teacher gave her a darning needle that she was very pleased with, and handled beautifully. But the teacher also said, ‘It does worry me, she works on her own, she won’t join in with the other children . . .’
Her first school was the village school, though it was a slightly unusual set-up. There was an open prison there, which had been an army camp during the war. Most of the children were either tenant farmers of Johnnie’s, or living in the village, or else the children of prison officers. Frances told me one day that one of the children’s fathers was retiring, and her thought was, ‘Papa can go be a prison warder and we can live in his house,’ which meant she’d go on the bus with the other children. She did have friends, but still, I think she felt a bit of an odd-one-out, wanted to be more like the others.
She wasn’t an easy child, or a very happy child, to be honest, which is the sad part. She was anxious, she needed activity, wanted to be doing something creative
nearly all the time. We would watch
Blue Peter
together and she would want to make whatever the presenters were making, but if we didn’t have all the necessary materials at hand my heart would sink, because that would frustrate her. And then they would produce ‘the one they made earlier’ . . .
MICHAEL MARTEN
: I think everyone found Frances unusual as a child – and as she grew up. She
was
unusual, exceptional, in many ways. From a very young age, maybe six, certainly by eight, she spoke and behaved and thought just like an adult, asked questions and talked about adult things, with some gravitas, if you like. She didn’t behave like a child. In fact she had very strong opinions about childhood, and wanted to be treated as an adult from a much younger age than is usual.
Later in life she read a book called
Centuries of Childhood
, by a man called Philippe Ariès, which strongly influenced her. Basically its thesis was that modern childhood is a completely invented concept from the seventeenth century onward. Before that, children became adults at or around puberty, twelve or thirteen years of age – girls got married and so forth. Frances thought this was right and proper and ought to be reinstituted. She thought modern childhood was a form of slavery – children were slaves, and schools were prisons (
laughs
). She believed in enduring education, that one should be educated throughout one’s life, and that society would come round to this one day.
SHEILA VERNON
: She went to too many schools, really. First she was at a boys’ school where she was one of only two girls, and that maybe wasn’t a good idea. Then we sent her to boarding school in Kent, not a success, probably she was a bit young to go so far away. She was happier at Cranborne Chase in Wiltshire, it was more free and easy, no uniforms. She was eleven then, and already writing things for herself. Then both she and Janna went
to Queen’s College, Harley Street, and they both liked it. By that time they were teenagers – and Johnnie and I were separating, at not a good time, probably.
Frances always did well academically, but I remember one report said, ‘She does not want to learn. No, she does not want to be taught.’ That teacher was right. She didn’t submit easily. She thought all schools were too slow and didn’t teach you enough. She read so quickly, the likes of
Clarissa
and
Pamela
, and she and Janna were both keen on Georgette Heyer. She was quick, she found things easy. But I think socially she found that fitting into the world was the problem, in a way.
MICHAEL MARTEN
: Frances could be very direct, she said what she thought, and she wouldn’t do boring chit-chat – she liked to have serious conversations and she would cut straight to the serious point.
SHEILA VERNON
: I remember a boy she met at fourteen who mentioned that he was a Catholic, and she said, ‘Oh, then you must know about Thomas Aquinas?’ This poor boy knew nothing of the sort. But she laughed about that, in retrospect.
MICHAEL MARTEN
: I was staying at John and Sheila’s when Frances must have been about fifteen. She knew I’d written non-fiction books, and as I recall she told me she had written several chapters of a novel and would I read them? I did, and they were astonishingly good. There was lots of purple prose but . . . I mean, you immediately know when someone can write, and she evidently could, and could tell a story, and it was clear she had a remarkable perception about people and the way they behave and talk. Her characters and conversations rang true. I told John and Sheila how impressed I was, and I encouraged her to write more. And from that point I would read whatever she was writing and give her feedback. Though I was probably a very harsh critic.
SHEILA VERNON
: Michael took a lot of trouble writing letters to Frances and he really helped her with the writing. I think his view was ‘If you’ve written a very fine passage strike it out . . .’
MICHAEL MARTEN
: I was always a believer in a pared-down style: an adjective needed to be there for a reason, and things could be cut short. But she soon learnt to do that for herself. After that she would always show me her manuscripts, though maybe not the first draft. But we would discuss it, and I’d write to her. It would mainly be questions of structure, character, particular scenes, whether or not they worked. So I became her closest literary sounding board.
SHEILA VERNON
: Frances was still at school when
Privileged Children
was accepted for publication by Michael Joseph. At the same time she was accepted for a place at New Hall, Cambridge. She wasn’t quite eighteen when she went up to Cambridge, and she was only just old enough to sign the publishing contract over those Christmas holidays. But she wanted it done under the name of Frances. She was christened Georgina Frances, and we called her ‘Georgie’ as a child. But she wanted a change. One of her friends said, ‘“Frances” is more unisex, more middle-class and more transatlantic,’ – which sums it up quite well. And I got used to it.
She went back to Cambridge after Christmas, but there was a stage where things seemed to fall apart – having had a boyfriend the previous term who she was happy with, and made a group of friends, there was a falling-out, certainly with the young man, and things went downhill. And she left.
MICHAEL MARTEN
: My impression was that she couldn’t really cope. University is very rough-and-tumble and I think she found that hard, because of this sensitivity of hers. And again, she wanted to be fully adult, and she was
about to publish a novel. It wasn’t that she was running away, she had something to go to.
SHEILA VERNON
: She was lucky enough to be given a flat of her own by her father in Delancey Street in Camden, so she had a sort of independence, at the ripe age of eighteen, and embarked on this life of living and writing alone. But it’s a lonely form of life. Later she moved to a flat in Regent’s Park Road.
Privileged Children
was published in September 1982 and went on to win the Author’s Club Award for Best First Novel. The
Daily Express
praised its ‘genuine sparkle and invention’. In the
Times Literary Supplement
Jenny Uglow called it ‘highly enjoyable’, noting that ‘the novel’s most passionate statements concern childhood, which is seen as a fictional state invented by adults with amnesia’
.
SHEILA VERNON
: Frances gave me a copy of her novel, as she always did thereafter, and I was impressed. It was sad, in a way, that she couldn’t just have been like Alice [the heroine of
Privileged
Children
] – an artist, albeit an eccentric woman, with a husband, albeit under her thumb. Towards the end of the book Frances writes something to the effect that Alice and her husband were not unconventional in that they didn’t really know that convention existed.
Her descriptions were very brilliant, of people and places – she had the artist’s eye. I remember a schoolteacher friend of mine said to me of
Privileged Children
, ‘Not one single anachronism in the whole book!’
MICHAEL MARTEN
: I inherited Frances’s library when she died and there were a huge number of books in it about the Victorian period, in all its aspects, working class and upper class, social history, London and so on. She had a great memory for what she read, and great powers of
concentration. Her fourth novel,
A Desirable Husband
, is set in the 1950s, which is when I was a child, and it rings so true of that class of people in that time, pitch-perfect.
Her knowledge of human social relations – that came from her perception. My wife, who knew her for a year or two, says that Frances ‘was missing several layers of skin’ and it’s a good way of describing her: she was extremely sensitive, to people’s feelings and interactions, and that’s why she suffered so much, why she found the world so hard to deal with – things that most of us shrug off or turn a blind eye to, she didn’t. Everything impacted intensely upon her. Music she found very hard to listen to – it got through to her and she could get deeply disturbed by it, it set off emotions that were too intense to cope with.
Frances’s second novel
, Gentleman and Players,
appeared in May 1984 and earned further glowing notices. In the
Guardian
Robert Nye called the book ‘a delight . . . cool, precise, amused and amusing’. He predicted that ‘Frances Vernon should become a cult figure’.
The Bohemian Girl
followed in August 1985. Philip Howard in the
Sunday Times
called it ‘a pretty, witty little parable about Victorian values, and the hazards of being female and intelligent in a country as sexist and anti-intellectual as the United Kingdom . . . This romance has teeth . . . it bites the eternal issues of class, and sex, and freedom.’
MICHAEL MARTEN
: Frances did have a handful of romantic relationships, they were very consequential to her, let’s say, but none of them were lasting or major. That was an aspect of life that she found difficult. But she had friendships. At her flat in Regent’s Park Road she would have occasional evening drinks parties for about twelve to fourteen people. She wasn’t reclusive, but she didn’t like going out into the world.
I would meet with her every two weeks, usually to have dinner in each other’s flats or else out. We’d talk about
everything under the sun. And we’d discuss her work. She didn’t find writing easy – easier than living, but not easy. She worked at it and it was work she enjoyed. For any writer there are frustrating days or weeks when you can’t express what you want. But she enjoyed writing, she liked the quiet and the intensity and the discipline. She could retreat into her imagination, and emerge as and when she had to.
But she found the world very hard to live in. I don’t know if she’d have found it any easier fifty or a hundred years before.
SHEILA VERNON
: I remember Frances saying to me, ‘I must be writing or I just can’t bear my life.’ None of the books were bestsellers, she never made a lot of money. I do sometimes wonder if she’d really had to earn money, would things have been better or worse? I can’t tell, really. What would have happened is impossible to tell.
A Desirable Husband (
1987
)
would be Frances’s last novel for Michael Joseph. Her next
, The Marquis of Westmarch (
1989
),
was published by Gollancz. Inspired by her reading of a passage in Germaine Greer’s
The Female Eunuch
concerning a rare genital malformation that historically led to the misidentifying of certain infant girls as boys, the novel tells of a nobleman who harbours just such a secret, the revelation of which would imperil his inheritance. Philippa Toomey
for
The Times
called the novel ‘a fantastic, haunting, and extremely well-written story of love and death’.
MICHAEL MARTEN
: I found
Westmarch
very difficult to cope with as her literary advisor, but Frances was absolutely determined to write it. It was almost like a reversion to the sorts of first drafts she’d written as a young teenager. But there was something in there that she had to get out, about this business of male and female.
She had questions about gender. There was an element, I think, that she thought she ought to have been a boy. Whether this was a consequence of her father wishing for a son in order to inherit the title is a moot point. I don’t suppose her father consciously made her feel that, far from it. But he did regret that he didn’t have a son, there’s no doubt.
SHEILA VERNON
: Johnnie left Sudbury divided between the girls. But a place like that has gone on for generations by always going to a son. Yes, Frances did once say something to the effect of her having lost out on that by being a girl. Men do have more power in the world, still. And Frances didn’t like that – she found it difficult.
Michael has always said that most of Frances’s inner world is probably in
Westmarch
. Janna said she thought Frances wanted to be a homosexual man, because she wanted sex with men, but to be a man. For a woman that is usually very straightforward, but not for Frances, I’m afraid, sadly.
MICHAEL MARTEN
: Frances suffered from depression. She saw a psychotherapist for the last five or so years of her life, and sometimes she’d feel it helped. Maybe it delayed the outcome.
SHEILA VERNON
: I always saw a lot of her, and did what I could. It is a terrible illness. My sister suffered from depression, she died of heart trouble and had other physical problems, but she said to me once that depression was much the worst thing she’d suffered.
MICHAEL MARTEN
: For any outing Frances had to prepare herself, two or three days in advance – psychologically she’d have to work herself up into a state she could deal with. The travel would be difficult – the prospect rather than the actuality. Eventually she decided she ought to overcome her fear of travel and have a holiday. She took herself off to the Lofoten Islands off the coast of Norway,
organised it herself. Why she chose those islands I’m not quite sure, they’re pretty dour. She certainly didn’t enjoy herself, or the food. But she did it, it was an accomplishment for her.
As her illness got worse towards the last years, she found going places very trying – having to call a taxi then worrying if it would be late, or come at all, and once it came, worrying that it would get lost. She could become distraught over things that would seem minor to anyone else, it would all get too much very quickly – and this was a tendency that got much worse. As a child she’d had terrible tantrums, which she learned to control, but nonetheless the desperation behind them was always there. Sheila and John were, I think, very concerned about her.
Over some years she expressed to me a wish to die. She’d say, ‘I wish I was dead,’ or, ‘I don’t know if I can stand it any more.’ There is nothing you can say to that . . . you don’t dismiss it, but I didn’t feel it was something that ordinary advice or listening could really resolve. I’m sure I wasn’t as helpful as I could have been. But in reality I don’t know what I could have done.
What would be Frances’s final novel,
The Fall of Doctor Onslow –
originally entitled ‘A School Story’ – was inspired by her reading of the memoirs of the writer and homosexual John Addington Symonds, wherein he exposed the commonplace incidence of homosexuality at Harrow School in the 1850s, among pupils and indeed between boys and senior staff.
MICHAEL MARTEN
:
Onslow
was based on a true story about a headmaster at Harrow, who was effectively blackmailed or bludgeoned by the father of a pupil into leaving the school and wasn’t allowed to accept any preferment in the Church, such that when he tried to a few years later he got set back. It was a very powerful
story and Frances managed to convey it very well. It seemed to me her first novels were very good but of a certain type, novels of manners and mores, but they didn’t really go further than that. Whereas I felt that
Onslow
had more depth.
SHEILA VERNON
: Frances’s sense of humour wasn’t commented on. But it’s there in
Onslow
, especially in Doctor Onslow’s wife Louisa, who is a great character, I think. Nothing’s explained to her but she knows quite a lot. When she speaks of Onslow’s devotion to his pupils and then realises what she’s said . . . And when Onslow says he’s ‘upset over a boy’, she does know there’s something hidden. Or when they go together to a hotel and she comments on their lack of luggage, to which he replies, ‘A clergyman is always respectable . . .’ Even he has a joke at himself. Frances was very succinct in her writing, including her humour.
MICHAEL MARTEN
: Gollancz, who published
Westmarch
, turned down the first version of
Onslow
. It was a huge blow to Frances, and she was reluctant to rewrite it, but she did, quite considerably. She must have finished it not long before she died. And it was almost as though she had decided it was the work she had to finish, she had no ideas beyond that – and by finishing it, I think she felt released.
Frances died by her own hand on 11 July 1991 after what
The Times
obituarist would describe as her ‘long struggle with depressive illness’. Having promised her psychiatrist not to end her life using pills he’d prescribed for her depression, Frances created a ‘herbal’ concoction, which she took, and then lay down to die, apparently calmly and peacefully.
MICHAEL MARTEN
: It wasn’t sudden, it was a continual worsening. It was a cloud over her and it grew blacker.
She seemed less able to escape from the blackness. When it happened I was certainly shocked. But it was not in the least unexpected. And I felt thereafter that nothing would have saved her.
SHEILA VERNON
: I go over and over thinking how we might have done things differently, and probably we should have, you can’t help wondering. But . . . you just have to live with it as best you can. In a way it was rather like someone with a terrible illness that couldn’t be cured, and you don’t want them to go on and on suffering.
MICHAEL MARTEN
: A few months after Frances’s death I sent ‘A School Story’ back to Gollancz in its rewritten form but they turned it down. I got in touch with her agency Blake Friedmann and asked them to suggest other publishers who might be interested. They sent me a list of about twenty, to whom I sent copies, most of whom turned it down until André Deutsch accepted it. And I think it’s the best of Frances’s novels.