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

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

Ah. I've been wondering which scene I missed in which St George dances around in his birthday suit in Shrewsbury quad. I'd have liked to have seen that!

Though technically there is nudity in Busman's Honeymoon, isn't there? In bed and at the window.

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

Yes, and I also had a vague memory of George, was it?--the one with shell-shock in *Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club*--taking off articles clothing and wandering about making a spectacle of himself. As told by his wife Sheila to Peter, perhaps. But the books are in my other house and I could be all wrong about that.

[lizarfau.livejournal.com]

Oh, agreed! Sylvia is fantastic and just takes over the books. In fact, you wonder why the books are called "Jenny and ... " because it's Sylvia who is by far the strongest character.

I think Miss Hamilton is a fantastic creation too - my favourite headmistress in the school-story genre. I also rather like the alcoholic housemistress, and the way the episode where she's tipsy allows us to see a different side of Sylvia.

[lizarfau.livejournal.com]

Someone I used to work with spent something like six years trying and failing to find a publisher for her novel. Now, five years after the first one was published, she has five more on the bookshelves and last year was offered a seven-figure contract to write more. So great things can and do happen - hang in there! :-)

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

Yes; look at "the Great Gladys". It's difficult to see a novel published in 1929 otherwise than in a "cosy" genre getting away with having an important central figure being transsexual and the sympathetic central character committing murder for the good of society and getting away with it. (I think the main character in Tey's To Love and Be Wise, the only real comparison which springs to mind, is mainly going in for situational transvestitism, but Everard definitely seems to self-identify as male). And then there's the vicar's wife in Mystery of A Butcher's Shop.

I'd have thought the main problem with a thirteen year old being caught reading Christie, though, in a 1938 boarding school context isn't that the teachers would have considered it contained sexually unsuitable material; more that they'd dismiss it as "trash" and below her assumed standard of reading complexity.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

can we infer from Mrs Ruddle's comments what height the window-frame was?

Given her “But it don’t follow” comments, Harriet’s reaction to the scene, the unlikelihood of Mrs Ruddle as she is characterised finding bare male chests particularly disconcerting, and that the window has a window-seat, I assumed that the sill was not higher than mid-thigh.

(And not that this is my specialist Mastermind subject, Peter also chucks off a dressing-gown in front of Parker en route to his bedroom, presumably just to embarrass the poor man and his Barrow in Furness straight-laces).

[(Anonymous)]

I've never thought of Mary Whittaker is a lesbian - in fact, I thought that it was hinted that this was definitely not the case, and that this is part of what makes her so unpleasant. I understood Miss Climpson's comments to mean that Miss Findlater is possibly a lesbian, possibly not, but admires Mary Whittaker either way, and that Mary realises this and is exploiting that admiration and affection without returning it in any way. So rather than the love and partnership that the two women had in the older generation, the two younger women have a totally one sided relationship where Mary Whittaker uses Miss Findlater to provide an alibi.*

* Having said all that, I can't imagine anything worse than running a chicken farm with Miss Findlater.

[elizahonig.livejournal.com]

Clearly I do need to reread this book. But I think you may be giving the divine DLS more credit than she is due here. The title "Unnatural Death" is surely a play upon the notion of *somebody's* sexual desires here being "unnatural," a common way to refer to lesbianism at the time.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

I agree - both about chicken farms and about the rest of it. Miss Findlater seems to be stuck in a girls' school mentality where having a crush on the prefect or junior mistress is a normal emotional outlet. What she'd have decided to be if she'd ever had a chance to get out into a wider environment and think for herself is a completely open question - it's a choice which Miss Whitaker deprives her of by leading her up the garden path about her own interest in her.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

I disagree: there is a plain and obvious significance to the title which has nothing whatsoever to do with anyone's sexuality, namely that it is a play upon the words "Natural Death" or, strictly, "Death by Natural Causes". These are formal coroner's court verdicts, and, as such go back to the time in English law "whereof the memory of man runneth naught to the contrary."

The phrase is also used in the case of R v. Price (1884) [which as the leading case on what it was legal to do with a dead body I am absolutely certain DLS would have been aware of, particularly as it was key to the legalisation of cremation, which was Miss Dawson's preferred means of having her remains dealt with] where "unnatural" was interpreted as "a reasonable suspicion that there may have been something peculiar about the death, that it may have been due to other causes than common illness".

What the Doctor got into trouble for was voicing precisely that suspicion about Agatha Dawson's death, and the whole book surrounds the difficulty not of proving whodunnit - there is never a question about who the villain is - but that a crime has been committed at all. It was rather daring at the time to write a "howdunnit" where the identity of the murderer was in plain sight from the very beginning.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

I assumed that "It don't foller" related to the incident of the "Wunnerful hairy man" not after all producing offspring and that Mrs 'Odges and Mrs Ruddle were producing anecdotal evidence of a lack of correlation between male body hair and virility.

But I agree that Mrs R. couldn't really have reached the "mother naked" conclusion from just waist-height and above, since "wearing pyjama bottoms" would have been the natural conclusion. Unless she was exaggerating for dramatic effect?

[owl]

Plus it wouldn't exactly be a stretch that Harriet's friend Eiluned is a lesbian too.

[legionseagle.livejournal.com]

And that extremely nice couple in Five Red Herrings - Miss Selby and Miss Cochrane - for whom Bunter provides omelettes, a bottle of claret and the remains of the rhubarb tart.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I assumed the hairy/offspring business was there as well, but that perhaps Mrs Ruddle was nudge/winking further corroborative evidence to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative – possibly along the lines of its being true what they say about men with big noses.

Exaggeration wouldn’t be out of character, but genuinely “mother naked” could also fit in with the impression of the new neighbours being decadent aristocratic/Hollywood types, as opposed to the Mr Ruddle characterised as going to bed with his boots on in a non-Duke of Marlborough manner.

[liadnan]

It wouldn't have been available at all save for copies illegally imported from France (which is presumably where any copies circulating in Oxford would have come from unless they were copies that had been bought and retained from the small circulation that escaped into the wild in 1928). It wasn't available in the UK, after the 1928 trial ordered it to be destroyed, until 1949 and as late as 1946 when the Home Secretary was asked if he would permit a new edition the reply was that any publisher would risk prosecution.

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

"I Claudius" was my first reaction. For comparison, btw, our new school library in the late 1950s, for use of all girls from 11 upwards, had on the shelves not only "I Claudius" but all the Mary Renault historical novels as they came out.

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

It may have applied equally to non-Catholic schools too.

You've lost me there. Why on earth should it? The books are pretty trashy, and the translations make them even more dire, but if anything any aspect of them likely to be iffy from the Catholic pov would be plus points for the C of E, particularly at that date.