E.H. Young: For the Ages
A British Novelist Who Deserves a Place in the Limelight
In the recently published The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth Century English Novel, edited by Robert L. Caserio, the name E.H. Young appears just once, in a small list of British women novelists of the 1930s and ‘40s, all thematically lumped together by one of the book’s contributors, Kristin Bluemel, and briefly described as writers who “typically replaced a familiar feminist script of exile with one about home, opening the way for a new kind of feminist realist novel…”
Such short shrift is a literary crime of epic proportions, in many ways tantamount to a book about 19th century British fiction making merely a slight reference to Jane Austen. Emily Hilda Young (1880-1949) was a brilliant stylist whose simply plotted stories of ordinary people in ordinary domestic situations are infused with towering intellect and utterly original perception. She was a “realist,” yes, but hardly as one-dimensional as that word implies. Her novels only appear typical and generally easy to ignore or dismiss.
More Than Just One Good Novel
Young, following a few apprentice novels, hit her stride in her mid-‘40s with the publication of William, a virtuoso examination of a marriage divided between Kate, whose love for her children is clouded in judgment, and William, who especially in his relationship with his daughter Lydia achieves a perfectly believable purity and grace. William was followed by The Vicar’s Daughter, and then perhaps her very finest novel, Miss Mole, about an aging governess whose wit and intelligence touches and subtly transforms everyone around her.
Then came Jenny Wren, The Curate’s Wife, and Celia, a remarkable psychological examination of a marriage, free of soap operatic histrionics, and filled with fine-tuned, painstaking insight worthy of Henry James. Chatterton Square, Young’s final novel before her death from lung cancer, is a dazzling, multilayered portrait of a community in the months leading up to World War II.
Not Even Jane Austen Could Do That
Back to Jane Austen, who can serve as an interesting comparison to Young. Both women were fascinated with the machinations of domestic life, but Young’s novels generally take up life at the point where Austen lets it go. For instance, what happens after marital bliss has been achieved? It’s unclear whether even Austen’s supreme intelligence would have known how to illuminate the day-to-day psychological subtleties of a marriage, or of parents’ relationships with their children.
Young’s novels, in other words, wouldn’t make very exciting films, which perhaps accounts for her unpopularity. But in the 21st century, where other mediums threaten to bury literature, we need to understand what makes reading a unique, invaluable experience, and in that respect there’s no better novelist to focus on than E.H. Young. While her stories are realist, familiar and easy to visualize, their real power comes from the interior world of their characters and from Young’s patient, expert renderings of human emotion and thought, as well as those tricky moments when emotion and thought are intertwined. To know her characters is to know ourselves in body and mind.
Unlike D.H. Lawrence and other, more famous, British novelists, Young developed no grand theories about life, the kind that literary critics need a whole chapter in a literary guide to explain. She was too busy unfolding, sentence by sentence, the flow of life, and its potential to evoke the best in us, to have the time or the inclination to pin life down.
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