Mask of Apollo and "Restricted Books"

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

I think I've asked this before and nobody came up with any suggestions, but I'm doing another edit and thought I'd try again.

Nicola gets in trouble at some point because she takes this Mary Renault novel to school with her and not only is it an extra book, and (I think) from the local library, but in the Kingscote library it's Restricted or Limited or whatever the term is.  We've talked before about her take on why it should have been Restricted; and I am sad to think that it would probably still be the equivalent of Restricted in many American school libraries today.

My question was:  what other books would have been restricted in an English girls' school?  Books that would have been deemed suitable for the Seniors but not for the Juniors?  I need something written before 1938, something that might have appealed to an adventurous 12-year-old.  I need this for my own children's book, and it's the kind of thing that's impossible for a 20-year-old American RA to figure out!  I thought that somebody here might have an idea, though.

Comments

[richenda.livejournal.com]

>>>>>somewhat surprised to find the heroine touched up by a male school inspector on page 3 and fancying her female teacher, who was actually shagging the headmistress on page 4.

I think that it might have been the third item that my French (or my imagination) didn't quite cope with. All became clearer in "Paris" or perhaps I was just less naive by then.

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure my school library wouldn't have had that at all!!

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

We did it as a set book when I was twelve or thirteen. It took me a very long time to work out that it was set in a sort of parallel world where gymnastics was more popular than football.

The dreadful coach woman still gives me shivers.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Ariel is a sort of compound of Tim and Lawrie, which I wouldn't have thought was possible, and there are definite similarities between Olive and Lois, and Charlotte and Pomona.

[lizarfau.livejournal.com]

Yes - and, of course, Jenny comes from an established school family and her sister is the head girl.

The main similarity with the Dimsie book is that the well-respected head girl (Jess/Sylvia) is unable to come back to school for a term and the deputy, a quieter girl with less authority (Helen/Daphne)is chosen to replace her ahead of a more confident prefect (Olive/Nita) who thought she should be given the chance - and then goes out of her way to undermine the head girl.

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

This is rather brilliant. I already had some vague references to Sayers in this book and suddenly I can see a rather clever way to use her for several subplots, including in later books in my planned series. When I was an adolescent, Sayers and Forest were the two authors I knew best (not to say obsessively), so this is an easy tie-in.

I can well understand why her books were restricted. In fact, today I was trying to think of which one my sympathetic teacher can innocently offer my main character to read--one that's genuinely inoffensive in 1938 terms--and it was hard to come up with one. They're all full of adultery, odd episodes of nudity, drugs, and other forms of anti-social behavior (and of course lesbianism and anti-Semitism, which is off-putting even today). I'm thinking that *Nine Tailors* is pretty tame--the "adulterous" couple there didn't actually intend to not be married. As an adolescent I never picked up on any of this stuff, and I'm sure Nicola the Sayers fan didn't either, but a prurient adult would definitely have restricted those books.

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

Well of Loneliness would have been banned, not restricted. I read somewhere a reference saying that it was all the rage among male undergraduates at some Oxford college in the late 1930s and I do intend a reference to it in my next book, but not from anywhere near the school library!

[colne-dsr.livejournal.com]

"I Claudius" was published in 1934, but I doubt any pre-war schools would include it among the library for girls of any age. Possibly an adventurous 12-year-old with liberal parents might smuggle it in from home.

There's a book by Arthur Marshall called "Giggling in the Shrubbery" which might (or might not) be useful to you - it's a collection of reminiscences of pre-war schoolgirls (but probably more 1920's than 1930's). It needs taking with perhaps a pinch of salt - he appears to concentrate on noticeably odd behaviour - no school could exhibit all the conditions illustrated unless run by a truly certifiable head. Anyway, the books he mentioned as being banned in various schools are: anything by Angela Brazil (that was in 1920); "Tell England", by Ernest Raymond; "Sorrell & Son", by Warwick Deeping; "Gone with the Wind", and anything by Alexander Dumas (that was in a Catholic school). Georgette Heyer was mentioned as being permitted, but it may only have been for the older girls perhaps?

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

Why would Dumas have been particularly restricted at a Catholic school? He was actually my one previous thought of an author who would have been generally restricted.

[colne-dsr.livejournal.com]

I think it was just that Dumas was banned on the "Catholic Index" of banned books, and this particular girl was at a Catholic school. It may have applied equally to non-Catholic schools too.

[lizarfau.livejournal.com]

Is there any update re. the possible publication of your book, Elizabeth? A while back you mentioned having sent it to an agent. I have read so many teasers for your book on lj that I'm feeling quite desperate to read it, it sounds so brilliant.

[owl]

I'm hoping that you mistyped in some way when you said lesbianism ...which is off-putting even today. If you do feel that way about homosexuality, I would prefer that you keep it out of comments on trennels.

I don't remember any nudity (bar corpses) expect single-sex bathing places and Peter in his bedroom (can we infer from Mrs Ruddle's comments what height the window-frame was?), and I doubt that would have been terrible in 1938, certainly not on the level of drug-running.

Sayer's anti-Semitism would be one thing that wouldn't have got her books banned pre-WWII, because at her level it was institutionalised.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I've only read Dimsie once, years ago (and about twenty years after I first read Jenny And The Syndicate, so I totally failed to pick up on that at the time, but I can see you're quite right. Fascinating.

One thing that I think is completely Martyn's own, and good in its own right, is the creation of Mary and Sylvia and their friends - she manages to make them authentically fifteen or so without ending up falling over herself trying for 'relevance', and I don't think I've ever seen a clearer example of charisma in action than Sylvia Westminster.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Gone With The Wind was available in America in 1936 but I don't think it reached Britain until the War was under way - my grandmother, who was in the Army, used to reminisce about the one copy that got passed around her unit, everyone having subscribed to buy a hardback between them.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

I read them when I was fourteen or so, but I'm fairly certain that was from the local library and not the school one, which seemed to deal exclusively in anguished novels about inner cities or South Africa (though not, for some reason, inner cities in South Africa) with pastel pointillist paperback covers.

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

I missed a comma. It was the anti-Semitism that was off-putting today. My partner would be pretty dismayed if I claimed that lesbianism was off-putting.

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

I'm revising it before sending to 2 more agents and a publisher who've requested it. It turns out to be a whole lot harder to get a book published (1.5 years and counting) than it was to write it (27 days of frenzy). I've also come to the sad realization that I will never be as good a writer as AF--not just lesser, but not even in the same league. Still, the challenge is interesting.

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

I do assume that it's the lesbianism that's kept *Unnatural Death* from ever being dramatized--along with *Whose Body* and its anti-Semitism. They're the only two that haven't been done, right? But I don't know if it's the lesbianism per se, or the way that it's used in the plot as the "reason" for the murderer's twisted, unnatural psyche. For obvious reasons I don't reread that one very often (possibly not since I was about 18) so I don't remember the plot very well.

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

Hooray! Glad to have been of service. As I remember it, my mother gave me 'Have his Carcase' for Christmas when I was about fourteen and then the librarian let me read 'Strong Poison', 'Gaudy Night' and 'Busman's Honeymoon.' I think I only later found 'Murder Must Advertise' and some of the others - I don't think the library even had copies of all of them.

[owl]

Ah, I was hoping you meant that.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

Why do you consider Whose Body anti-semitic? Sir Reuben Levy is one of the nicest people in Sayers and the murderer - a large part of whose motivation is that he couldn't bear losing his girl to a Jew - one of the nastiest.

And given how many lesbian couples appeared in the Geraldine McEwan Miss Marple - all the ones Agatha Christie put there, and a few others for good measure - I can't imagine that being too much of an issue as to why Unnatural Death hasn't been dramatised (they did it on the radio as part of the Carmichael season, and Petherbridge only did the Vane ones).

I don't think it's quite fair to suggest, either, that Mary Whitaker's lesbianism (if she is a lesbian; her actions and reactions as depicted are entirely consistent with her having a horror of sex per se as well as a psychopathic personality type) is put forward as a motive for her actions; were this the case I don't think Sayers would have gone to the trouble to depict the relationship between Agatha Dawson and Clara Whitaker in the positive terms which she does.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Ummm (ignoring the comments about nudity, lesbianism etc, which appear to be adequately dealt with below): including diverse forms of anti-social behaviour was pretty well par for the Golden Age crime novel. Not just the actual murder but various surrounding circumstances. See any Agatha Christie; and several of Georgette Heyer's mysteries included homosexual (m&f) characters. It's a classic exemplar of the well-known fact (trenchantly delineated in an essay by Rebecca West) that writers of that period could get away with far racier and much dodgier situations in popular genres such as the crime novel than writers of 'serious literature'.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Sultry foreign (married) queen seduces upstanding young Brit, for purposes of begetting a healthy child instead of one fathered by her diseased and degenerate husband, to inherit the throne. I.e. it's as much about eugenics as it is about sex.

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

Yes, but were they all on the open school library shelves for third formers? That's what we're discussing, not the relative evils or not of DLS. And nobody seems to have realized that the reference to nudity was a joke, either. Of course I was referring to the body.

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

The dead body in the bathtub, that is. "The body" is what is generally meant when using the term nude.