Backlisted - Frost in May by Antonia White

Episode Date: May 25, 2020

Antonia White's debut novel Frost in May(1933) is the book under discussion in this episode of Backlisted. Joining John and Andy to discuss this powerful story of religion and adolescence - and the troubled life of its author - are writer Laura Thompson and critic and novelist Erica Wagner. Also in this episode Andy has been enjoying the book John Piper's Brighton Aquatints, while John is captivated by photographic anthology Once a Year by Homer Sykes.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)8'53 - John Piper's Brighton Aquatints by Alan Powers15'24 - Once a Year by Homer Sykes 18'53 - Frost in May by Antonia White* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness and July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. You've had a lockdown birthday, Andy, have you not? Yeah, I did have a lockdown birthday.

I don't really think, let's not dwell on it. It was a bit of a weird day and i sort of you know i've read about antonia white for a bit and yeah so you know i felt i felt every one of my 52 years let's ask our lovely guests where they're um where they're joining us from. Erica, where are you calling from? I am calling from either Bethnal Green or Shoreditch, depending on how cool you're feeling.

You know, you can say one or the other, depending on who I'm talking to. I'll sometimes say, oh, we live in Bethnal Green, or oh, we live in Shoreditch. So somewhere on the border there. I think you need to tell us which one you think is more appropriate for us. I'm down with Bethnal Green. You know, I think you're... Yeah, I think Bethnal Green is fine.

We're the hard people. Shoreditch is a state of mind now rather than an area. I mean, we get called Shoreditch and we, the office, that is. And it's clearly not. So that's where I'm calling in from, from my little ship's cabin kind of office here and thanks Erica and Laura where are you phone uh phoning zooming where are you zooming from I'm in rural Buckinghamshire um on a visit to my mother who's keeping two dogs at bay, the other side of that door. Excellent.

And is that near where Violet, your grandmother, had her famous pub? It is. It's about three miles away. Love it. And I've got all her stuff around me, all her glasses and all that. I've got her ice bucket at my feet just waiting for a key moment. And yeah, it's very near. What dogs are on the other side of that

stout wooden door that I can see? There's a Saluki greyhound, a rescue dog, who I think I just heard coming down the stairs at about 100 miles an hour. Who I see on Instagram. Yeah, he's. Who I see on Instagram. Yeah, he's got a certain following on Instagram.

He's got a lady vicar who thinks he's absolutely beautiful, which I think is very nice. And there's also a venerable black Labrador. They kind of tolerate each other. But it's their lunchtime or their high tea time. Once they've had that, they'll be, you know, dead. Does your terrier have high tea, Andy? It looks like it ought to.

High tea, do you mean we put him at a little table? He does have a young master look about him. Of course we do. Well, since we're revealing these personal details of his, which he hasn't signed off, he has his breakfast at 7am and his tea at 4pm. Two meals. See, I'm a one-meal-a-day person with these dogs.

And then anything they can scavenge. Julia Rayside was saying to me, how's Arrow? I was saying it's really been brilliant living with Arrow for the last few months because, you know, he doesn't know what's going on. He he's the same he's the same idiot he was three months ago he's an unchanging moron so the glorious stupidity of dogs it's just it's yeah it's just very very lovely should we um should we crack on let's do Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in an Edwardian convent school on the southern outskirts of London,

walking in silence through the whitewashed corridors towards Chapel, with its reassuring smell of beeswax and incense, the faint murmur of girls' voices praying in Latin. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and joining us today are two returning guests. Hello.

Hello. Did anyone hear that dog? Did everyone hear that dog? I did. The point is they've heard us now the dogs know we're talking about could you hear mine it's mayhem it's mayhem joining us today are dog listed are a load of dogs bark listed bark listed oh thank you very good nicky Joining us today are two returning guests. Hello, Erica. Hello, Laura.

Hello. First up, Laura Thompson. Laura was here for like the third or fourth ever backlisted, still listened to regularly, which was an episode on Nancy Mitford and The Blessing. Laura is the Somerset Maugham winning author of nine books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Six, about the Mitford sisters and two books about real-life murders the Lord Lucan story and the

Thompson Bywaters case. Most recently she published The Last Landlady with Unbound a memoir of her publican grandmother and an updated reissue of her Agatha Christie biography which was Edgar nominated last year. What's an Edgar? It's a, it's, oh, I was pretty chuffed. The Edgar Allan Poe Award, they're American awards for detective fiction and they have a non-fiction category. Fantastic. It's like a sort of the crime writer, CWA kind of thing here,

but even more prestigious. And a better ceremony. Oh, really? Laura writes occasionally for the TLS and for Harper's Bazaar and is a fervent lover of animals, the Rolling Stones, and the other Elizabeth Taylor. And therefore, you're extremely welcome back to Backlisted, Laura. I'm so glad to hear it.

She's not the other Elizabeth Taylor anymore, is she? She is Elizabeth. It's the other one. Cleopatra is the other Elizabeth Taylor, I think. We like to think so on this podcast. Our second guest is, drumroll, Erica Wagner, now making her fourth appearance on Backlisted. Bless you, Erica.

Thank you. She was previously here to talk about Alan Garner's novel Red Shift, Randall Jarrell's The Animal Family. And may I say that one of my favourite books that I've discovered through doing Backlisted was thanks to that Randall Jarrell episode. I love The Animal Family. I keep it near me at all times. Randall Jarrell's Book of Stories, which is a collection of stories that he edited, which manages to make you look at the short story in a completely different way.

It was thanks to that podcast, this beloved author who I have always adored, that I actually discovered how to pronounce his name. I'm looking forward to you telling us how to pronounce Antonia White. Antonia White, perhaps. And you were also here to talk, you came on for Dennis Johnson's talk about Jesus' son. So that's a range there, Erica Wagner. Quite a range. Erica is an author and critic, reader and listener.

Her latest book is Chief Engineer, Washington Roebling, The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge, published by Bloomsbury. She's the author of a novel, Seizure, published by Faber, and with storyteller Abbey Patricks and musician Linda... Edher. Thank you. The creator of Pas de Deux, A Concert of Stories. She was literary editor of The Times for 17 years

and is now a contributing writer for The New Statesman and literary editor for Harper's Bazaar. She's a lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths and went not doing any of the above. Knits, bang! Cooks, bang! Baked sourdough bread, bang! And most crucially, and the clue was there all along,

what she's called the midwife. all along, watch is Call the Midwife. You do, though, do you? I'm not even joking. You love Call the Midwife. I love Call the Midwife. I do. Yes, absolutely. It's crucial to my very being.

Well, great news, everyone, if you like nuns as much as we do. Yeah. The book that Erica and Nora are here to talk about is frost in may by antonia white first published in 1933 by a small publisher called harmsworth but famously reissued in 1978 by virago as the very first virago modern classic but um before we enter the chapel as it were i think i'm going to ask you andy what have you been reading this week okay so this is going to be quite tricky to do this in five minutes and also it's a visual book so the book is called john piper's brighton aquatint it's and this we're going to loop back to this it's not

called Brighton Aquatint by John Piper the book is called John Piper's Brighton Aquatint for which there is a good reason an aquatint is a print popular initially in the regency era but then repopularized by Piper in the 30s which resembles a watercolor which is made by etching a copper plate with nitric acid and then using resin and varnish to produce areas of tonal shading john piper he was a famous british artist of the 20th century painter printmaker designer of stained glass windows opera theater sets We would think of him in the same bracket as probably Reveillus and his work often focused on British landscape, especially churches and monuments. And he designed book jackets, including the famous Jacket of the Spire by William Golding from its first edition. so that's a long-winded way of saying this book john piper's bright and acquitance published by uh mainstone press in norfolk who are a fantastic publisher who do on average one

book a year and the reason why they do one book a year is because they pour so much time energy love and the production values are so high they they're probably their best known book is similar to this they republished eric revillius's high street but they did it as a book called the story of high street i don't own a copy i'd love to it's very expensive so i borrowed it out the library fortunately john piper's bright and aquatint is not as expensive and it's also a beautiful beautiful thing. What it is in essence is a series of pictures that John Piper did in the late 1930s of Brighton. It was published in an edition of several hundred that's all a few of which were colored by hand and it came out in november 1939 and therefore was difficult to manufacture and hardly sold at all because of the second world

war and indeed the limited stock some of it was destroyed i think i'm right in saying so it was an extremely valuable book and an original is still extremely valuable. But what Mainstone have done with this is they've produced a replica of Brighton Aquitines, but they've also give you the history of the book itself within the book. So it's almost like, it isn't a facsimile, it's actually a book about a book, which is hence the title John Piper's Brighton Aquatints, which is a thing obviously we love on Backlisted. Biography of a book, but it's also a book about Brighton. It's a book about what Brighton was like in the Regency era, what it was like in the 1930s, and what it's like now. They've added, in addition to an introduction by Alan Powers,

they've added text to each picture. So on one page you have a picture of, say, the Brighton Pavilion, and I'm going to talk about this in a sec, and John Piper's original text. And then you turn the page and you have the picture before it was hand-painted with a new text by Alan Powers recontextualising the picture. So it's like layer upon layer upon layer. And I didn't know the book was going to be that.

I used to live in Brighton. I love Brighton. I love John Piper. The book was a present. I thought, oh, what a nice thing. And then a few weeks later, I sat down to actually read it. And I just thought, wow, this is a real book. It's there to be read.

It's not a thing that you would just have on the shelf and get off occasionally and think that's a nice picture of the grand. It's a thing to be read and reread and learned from. So can I just read you John Piper's description? of the grand, it's a thing to be read and re-read and learned from. So can I just read you John Piper's description? I just love his stuff. Okay. This is what John Piper wrote, The Royal Pavilion, and then I'll read you what Alan Powers has, how he's updated it.

The Royal Pavilion, this is the John Piper one, built for George IV when Prince Regent. First he enlarged a villa on the site until it became a pre-possessing regency house. Then he commissioned Porden to build stables, now the dome, and a riding house in Indian style and soon found that these overpowered his charming seaside villa. Then he saw Cockerell's wonderful new house at Sezing Coast in Gloucestershire

and envied its Hindu fancifulness. Repton laid out the gardens here. And then he talks about it a bit more. He talks about John Nash. It now belongs to the Brighton Corporation and is carefully preserved. You can go inside it for six shillings. During the war, it was used as a hospital for wounded Indian troops who must have found it only vaguely like home. So that's what John Piper said. And then if you turn the page, you get the original drawing before it was coloured and facing it, you get Alan Powers

written in the last couple of years, the Royal Pavilion. The passage from laughter to affection, combining the appreciation of vulgarity and sensitivity in the last couple of years, the Royal Pavilion. The passage from laughter to affection, combining the appreciation of vulgarity and sensitivity in the same place, encapsulates the John Betjeman, John Piper project for architecture. The dark sky, very bad luck with your weather, Mr. Piper, as King George VI commented a few years later,

is vital to offsetting the stately pleasure dome floating midway on the wave, as Coleridge imagined in his opiate haze. Isn't that, I mean, so that like all Mainstone Press productions, Like all Mainstone Press productions, they've gone above and beyond to create a beautiful and thought-provoking item in its own right. It also led me on to reading another book called Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris, which I'm going to talk about on the next episode of Backlisted. John, what have you been reading this week? next episode of Backlisted. John, what have you been reading this week? Well, I've also been reading a book that's mostly pictures, which is a book that I feel I ought to have known about years ago, but didn't. And there's a kind of reason why I didn't know about it years ago, is that it's only recently been reissued. It's called Once a Year, and it's a collection of

photographs by Homer Sykes. I see it. It was published originally in 1977. And it's a collection of photographs taken, he spent seven years traveling around England, taking photographs of English traditional customs. And it's just a completely glorious, wonderful collection of photographs, first and foremost. Homer Sykes is still alive. He's on Twitter. He's done, he's in his his 70s now he was a relatively young man when he did this book and for a long long time it fell out of print and in uh i think it was 2016 the excellent uh welsh publisher dewey lewis reissued it and it's a beautiful collection of photographs obviously you know photographs on the radio always a challenge but as well as having photographs of the customs there is a

sort of gazetteer at the back where he homocytes explains what they are so it has a kind of anthropological sort of cecil sharpie uh quality to it but what i really love it's it's the it's the i guess it's the fact that the customs themselves are so insane you know the abbot bromley horn dance which has been perhaps going on for a thousand years you know the hatherley fire festival all these mad fire festivals the ottery saint mary tar barrel and they're terrifying and because it's the 1970s there is no concept of health and safety. They are superb in the social documentation style that I guess we associate with Martin Parr. They're beautiful photographs in their own right.

They're an extraordinary record of the 1970s. I mean, this wonderful bottle kicking and hair pie scrambling from 1973 from Hallerton and Leicestershire. I mean, that is essentially a football crowd carrying wooden barrels that they're about to run through. The photos are stunning. Did you say this is in print at the moment? It is totally in print.

It's £30, which I think is a snip for the glory of what's inside it. I happened to watch the other night the excellent film Kill List by Ben Wheatley, which is one of the best films i've seen for a very long time and i suppose those two things have somewhat merged in my head is that this country these countries are so much odder and weirder and and stranger than we sometimes give them credit for and there's something about the kind of 1970s downbeat kind of clothes the sort of knock back feel of the photographs and the exoticism of the of the customs itself that

sort of makes it work there's a lovely introduction from homer sites and he says i have in recent years retraced my steps visiting many annual british customs including this volume and others that are not many that i have photographed recently for the first time are almost unknown local village events but they still flourish tracking them down has been made possible with the internet allowing easy research and contact in the 70s was much more difficult so contrary to what i had believed the vast majority of those customs that i photographed are still thriving which is kind of an amazing an amazing thing anyway it's once a year some traditional british customs, Homer Sykes,

excellent Dewey Lewis publishing. Now, here are our sponsors telling you what to do. My guest today, Antonia White, was born in 1899, was received into the Catholic Church as a girl of seven, went to a convent school and later to St Paul's. Started her living at the age of 16. The first of her three marriages was at 21. Two of these were annulled and the third ended in divorce. She spent a year in Bethlehem Asylum in 1922. She was a copywriter. She was a fashion editor.

She worked for the BBC. She published her first book about her convent school experiences in 1933. This year, the Rago Press has chosen to reprint it, Frost in May. Well, that was... Brilliant. We're going to be hearing a few excerpts from that programme today. That was, of course, Mavis Nicholson and if you'd switched on Thames TV at about 1 30 in the afternoon in 1978 you will be confronted with this extraordinary 20 minute interview which is on YouTube we'll put a link up to it on the

website but we're here to talk about that very book, Frost in May by Antonia White. And because it's so autobiographical and because there is so much to say about her extraordinary life, Mavis agreed to do the biography right at the top of the show. So we should start with the question that we always ask our guests on Backlisted, which is, Erica, where were you? When were you when you first read Frost in May by Antonia White? The honest answer is I can't be precisely sure, but I know I was a teenager. I know I was not much older than Nanda is at the end of this book. And actually, the more I think about it, as was said in that little introductory clip, Antonia White went to St. Paul's. Her father was the classics master at the boys' school of St. Paul's. And although I grew up in New York,

I did a year of school, the first year of A-levels when I was 16 at St. Paul's Girl's School in West London and I know I read it around this time. It was something actually of a traumatic year for me, so things are a little hazy. But it's quite possible that actually I read it then, certainly not long after, so when I was 16 or 17. And so there were similarities in the book to my own experience of finding myself in a culture kind of alien and familiar. I knew nothing of Catholic England, but as a teenager, I had grown up on the Upper West Side of New York. And so finding myself in an English girls' school was very different. I went to an all-girls school in New York City, but they were very different kinds of schools. And so I felt, although in some ways the book was strange to me,

I also felt quite connected with it. And I was really starting to want to discover English writers, and Antonia White was formative for me in that discovery. I mean, we should say that the book is, it starts with Fernanda Nanda being delivered by her father to a convent school in southwest London. And the book really charts her progress, both as initiation into the Catholic faith, but also initiation, I guess, into a world of relationships. It's a school that's run on very strict lines by nuns. So, Laura, you've read a lot of Antonia White. Did you read, was this the book you read first? When were you where you first read her?

Not dissimilar to Erica, really. Probably same sort of age. I would have been in this house, because this is the house where I grew up. And I read Frost in May, but I read all four of the books in one big old bowl. I found them utterly compelling, utterly compulsive. Frosty May is the acknowledged masterpiece,

but I was reading in this brilliant biography, the Jane Dunn biography, which I think we've all read, the reception given to the other three books, which came much later on, and quite a grudging reception that kind of verges on um oh lady writer you know a little bit of that i feel um i was amazed by the reception for those books because i think they're all brilliant particularly the last one we should just i should just say what they are shouldn't i the so so frost in may is published in 1933 and then as you say there's a gap and the lost traveler

comes out in 1950 the sugar house in 1952 and beyond the glass in 1954 so as you say they're like uh there's uh the first one seems to well we'll hear from antonia in a minute but seems to fall out quite easily. And then no other book ever falls out easily for her. No, she had terrible writer's block. But it's interesting because people know her for that one. And it reminds me slightly of Jean Rees, whom I also adore. And I think there are certain parallels.

People know why it why Sargasso Sea but there are these four others that are utterly I mean people know them of course they do but they're utterly brilliant possibly even better in my view but they're known for that one but I I know we're talking about Foster May but I really shout out to the other three as well but it's a continuous story he changes the name from Nanda to Clara but it's a continuous story he changes the name from nanda to clara but it's a continuous story john you were talking about what the setting of the book is it's a convent school book convent school novel i just there's this i saw this description by penelope fitzgerald and she said frost in may is the most brilliant and at the same time the murkiest of all convent school novels.

And I thought that was really, that's Penelope Fitzgerald firing on all cylinders, isn't it? The most brilliant and at the same time the murkiest. And where is the murk in it? I mean, for me, it's the sense of fear and not knowing where you are. You know, Erica, you were saying, yeah, you know, you're in a convent school, okay, but where are you? What actual state are you in? And I think one of the things I said when we were corresponding about this book, and perhaps one of the reasons where I have to come clean and say that I have not read the other three, I will now. But there is a kind of hermetic, sealed in quality to this book. It is sufficient unto itself.

quality to this book. It is sufficient unto itself. So you as the reader feel completely captivated, surrounded by these convent walls. And almost as Nanda is, what she conveys so brilliantly, is the way in which Nanda is indoctrinated, not just into the religion, and she's kind of, because she is a convert, she's constantly being told that she does not belong. So she has that convert's desire to throw herself into this world, which sucks you in as a reader. And so by the time, what's fascinating in reading it again, by the time she begins to transgress, what would have seemed at the beginning of your reading the novel to seem like nothing much, she's not disobeying in any major way, by the time you come to that part of the book, you are aghast at her behavior, that she dares to do these terrible things, which in the grand scheme of things are not terrible at all once you're outside the world of the book.

That's so true. That is so true. Because she's a convert, but she's also possibly even worse to these nuns. She's middle class because they're all the girls at this school, which is called Lippington. And that word is so right, I think. It's really, is it the convent of the Sacred Heart at Rohan? But Lippington is a kind of ice, quality of ice in it. And there's high, there's a kind of subliminal hysteria in the atmosphere. But the nuns are the worst snobs on God's earth. And because most of the girls are aristocratic and they come from family and that's all done so brilliantly the scene in the father's

study where he suggests to her that she might go to another school and she bursts into tears and says i don't want to leave and then he does something that's even worse he confesses to her that money is tight and then he might have to go back to the nuns and say there is not enough money for us to pay the full fees and she has watched the systematic ritual humiliation of another girl who uh whose family couldn't pay their fees by the nuns. Just the subtle way in which she wasn't allowed the quality of her uniform, the paper and pencils she was allowed to use at the school, the fact that she wasn't... It's so subtle. But what's incredible about this book, I think,

is that it is written... It's written like a school story. She wrote it like a school story when she was married and her husband said to her, write a chapter a week, read it out to me at the end of the week. And that seems to have sort of suited her because she was schooled in the discipline of the Catholic Church. In some way, she needs to rebel against it,

but also she needs it. It's that ambivalence which goes through the whole book. I don't even know how judgmental she is about Catholicism in the book. But it's a school story. You could read it. You know, it's written in the same way, almost like a really well-written for young, you know, 12-year-olds or something.

And yet it's so adult. There's this invisible adult overview. But I can't think of another book like it, really, that it's written so clean and clear and simple, and yet, my God, what's going on? You know, and that is Antonia White's great gift, I think. And it seems very easy. She seems like the last person in the world who'd have writers block.

Well, you were talking about the atmosphere, you know, the slightly, the atmosphere of suppressed hysteria. When we've got a clip here, clip number four, Nicky. We've got a clip here. number four, Nicky. We've got a clip here. The four novels were adapted very successfully for the BBC in 1982. And here's a clip of the nine-year-old Nanda. There's a question coming up. Which actress is playing the part of nine-year-old Nanda here? Triss is playing the part of nine-year-old Nanda here. Sink, sink deep into thyself and rally the good in the depths of thy soul.

Importance of retreat. Opportunity to know ourselves, discover our faults without flinching, set right our account with God. We are solitary beings. Naked came we into the world. No human friendship comparable to the friendship of God. Worldly pleasures interfere with spiritual life.

If a friendship hinders your practice of religion, give it up. That's marvellous. Anyone? Was she once married to Liam Gallagher? She was. Oh, yes. Hole in one. Unlikely as it seems. Was she once married to Liam Gallagher? She was Yes Hold in line Unlikely as it seems

Patsy Kensett everybody Not necessarily the casting I would have thought of For this particular role But there we are Also that's such a great piece to choose Because it's so touching The notes that she writes For Claire Rockingham,

who is like her, you know, not born a Catholic, and who she is desperate in this kind of fevered atmosphere to try and convert. And the 13-year-old or 12-year-old Nanda writes these really lyrical, beautiful notes for her to help her see the kind of mysteries of faith. Again, it's such a short book that has so much in it because the sense of her development as a writer, of which that's one of the examples, I think,

is one of the things that's one of the examples I think is is one of the is one of the things that's so so beautifully done before she starts on the fateful novel but also that sequence her writing that diary is wonderful too because she is on retreat yes And Claire is not allowed to go on retreat because she's not a Catholic. And you see suddenly this is a moment where Nanda for once feels as if she has some power. She's able to give instruction where usually she's the one because she is the convert. She's always feeling inferior. But here you see and you enter her written voice, her opportunity to give some both instruction and comfort. And I think that's also what makes that sequence really, really moving.

So while we're talking about that, let's hear another clip from the BBC adaptation. We're going to hear Eleanor David as Mother Frances talking to Nanda and by the end, thoroughly chilling the blood of anybody, of anybody listening. How many very goods have you had, Nanda? Seven. One more to go and you'll have a pink ribbon like Marjorie Appleyard.

I suppose you think you're a model little girl. There's goodness in goodness, you know. Think of St. Ignatius, St. Mary Magdalene. They were sinners before they were saints. God doesn't care about namby-pamby goodness. He wants real, hard goodness. That comes from conquering real, hard faults. Not that you haven't got faults.

The trouble with your faults is they don't show. Except at the practiced eye. You're quite independent. And if a child your age could be said to have spiritual pride, then spiritual pride may well be your ruling vice. Well, I can't take your exemption for spiritual pride. Only don't mistake a pink ribbon for a halo. Oh, I can see Nicky's face.

It's just, oh, that's made my skin creep. But Catholicism is still presented as tremendously alluring in the book. I mean, it's incredibly good on those slightly hysterical friendships that you have as a young girl, you know. I mean, I went to ballet school, so that nun doesn't sound that weird to me. That's exactly how they spoke to us all the time. And the friendships in this book,

particularly there's the most brilliant character, Leonie. She's amazing, right? Just the sort of girl that you form a kind of passion for when you're young and excitable. But her impregnable Catholicism is, you know, and it's something that I remember my best friend at school was Catholic and I thought it was so glamorous. I thought it was so romantic. There is a lot of that in the book.

It's presented as bad in many ways and cruel and sadistic, but it's also presented as something, because it's impregnable, because she can't ever quite get at it. And this thing, Leonie says to her, you'll never understand. You know, one of the girls, one of the lovely girls who'd been at school, school and she comes back she's going to become a nun and nanda is terrorized she said oh my god have a vocation that's the worst thing in the world and lenny sister you'll never understand you will never understand what you know they're so sure they're so certain there is something very alluring about it that to me comes across even in this book but maybe that's me I don't know sounds like it might just be me no no no I was no no no no I think that's what makes this book so much more interesting to be honest there is a kind of you know it's a convent school book um it's a book about that that kind of intense you know we sort of we sort of know we

feel we know that story but for anybody who thinks they know that story who hasn't read that book you really no one has done it like this no one has made it so intense and so compelling and seductive i think it is very seductive you're right it's eroticized i think very because also the seductiveness, I completely agree with you. Adolescence is about uncertainty. When you are an adolescent, you are uncertain. Who you are, where you're going. And so to be an adolescent like Nanda, who also has the fundamental uncertainty of a convert. But ranged in front of her are these other girls and the nuns who, whatever else they are going through, as you say, have this fundamental, rock-like, impregnable certainty and surely that's what's even if you are as I was and am

completely outside the culture of this book that's why it transcends its culture and is universal because to me that's what that is demonstrating yes yes anyone who's ever felt that they're an outsider and who's ever felt like they're trying to impress people to curry favor to to you know and the way that that that those very human impulses positive impulses about wanting to wanting to perform wanting to to give delight and share beauty, the way that those are turned into perversities, I don't think I've read anything. I mean, you know, possibly only Portrait of the Artist

as a Young Man comes close to capturing just the crushing, the crushing, the devastating kind of, as they say, it's about breaking the spirit, pulling the spirit apart and remaking it to better please God. It's a terrifying book. And you read the whole thing waiting for that, don't you? There's such a sense of foreboding the whole time. That's very true, yeah.

Erica, have you got something to read for us, a section to read for us? I do, and it ties in with quite a lot of what we've been saying, I think. So to set the scene a little, John was describing how there's another girl who's called Monica Owen, who is penalised because her father is, I think, a doctor, a doctor in a provincial town. Heaven forfend. And so she is,

as Antonia White writes, she's shabbily treated by the nuns, and because her father could not afford the full fees, and so she has all these secondhand lesson books and uniforms. But she's a lovely girl and she's very serious about her Catholicism. She has one vice, which again does not seem to us like a vice, which is that she's obsessed with dogs. We come back to dogs. I knew we'd get them in. And in the corners of her lesson books, she draws caricatures, one feels kind of inadvertently, of the nuns as dogs. What could go wrong? What could possibly go wrong? And she's obstinate in this. She won't stop doing this. And eventually it's discovered. And so that's what happens next is what I'm going to read. Is it true that Monica Owen is going to be expelled?

She asked outright. I don't think that concerns any of us, said Rose uncomfortably. It certainly does if it's true, insisted Nanda angrily. Well, you'd better ask Mother Radcliffe, said Rose with a nervous giggle. No doubt she's longing to take you into her confidence. But Rose's mild sarcasm was lost on Nanda. I'll go this very minute, she said, white with rage. Two minutes later, she was knocking at Mother Radcliffe's door. Summoned in, she found Mother Radcliffe busy writing letters.

What is it, Nanda? said the nun, rather irritably. I don't think I sent for you, did I? No, mother, said Nanda, very quietly, though her knees were shaking with excitement. Then what is it? Be quick, please. I am very busy, as you see. Anger and a hot sense of injustice had given Nanda the most unusual courage. It's about Monica Owen. Is she really going to be expelled? She blurted out. Mother Radcliffe dropped her pen with surprise. Really, Nanda? Is she really going to be expelled? She blurted out. Mother Radcliffe dropped her pen with surprise. Really, Nanda, what a very odd question.

I don't think that concerns you, does it? Is Monica another of those wonderful friends of yours? It was on the tip of Nanda's tongue to remind Mother Radcliffe of what she had said at their last interview, but she bit back the obvious retort. Still filled with her unnatural courage, she said in a cold and unreasonable voice, Because if you are going to, it's horribly unfair. Whatever Monica's done, she's been punished enough already. You know she's not quite like other people. She's not very clever, I mean. And people have always been rather unfair to her and laughed at her.

There isn't an ounce of harm in Monica. Everyone knows that. And if she is expelled, she's going to have a perfectly beastly time at home. She's got a very strict father and a stepmother who isn't any too nice to her in the ordinary way. During this speech, Mother Radcliffe looked at Nanda with a blank amazement. If a cat had begun to talk, she could hardly have seemed more astonished. When Nanda stopped, there was a strange silence, during which Mother Radcliffe's face slowly assumed an expression of sternness and distaste. Very interesting, she said at last. I have not often been told my duty quite so clearly by a child of your age. Invaluable as your advice is, I am afraid I do not see my way to taking it.

There are some things which are no doubt permitted in the high schools to which your Protestant friends are accustomed, but they are not permitted at Lippington. Monica Owen has done something which cannot possibly be overlooked, but even this did not deter Nanda. Monica hasn't spoken to a soul for three days, she said passionately. She's been shut up in the retreat house all this time and only allowed into the chapel. She looks half dead with sheer misery. It's too much punishment for anyone. I thought Catholics were supposed to be charitable. Can't some of us go and see her just for five minutes, three minutes even, she implored. Mother Radcliffe picked up her pen, dipped it in the inkpot and began a new paragraph in her letter. Without looking up, she said, there is no question of that. Monica Owen

was expelled from this house two hours ago. Oh, I've got a little dog outside the door applauding brilliant reading brilliant reading erica you know i i would like to come straight back at that with something that i would like i would like your your instant reaction to i found a review of the hound and the falcon which was a later book of Antonia White's, of letters, published in the 1960s. And I found a review of it by Stevie Smith in The Listener. And I'll just read you the very beginning

and very end. Stevie Smith, Catholic, I think I'm right in saying. Yeah. Miss Antonia White's think I'm right in saying. Yeah. Miss Antonia White's first book, Frost in May, was a brilliant and disturbing novel about the child Nanda in her fashionable convent school some 50 years ago. The nuns were snobbish and severe. Their treatment of Nanda and of the other little middle-class girl

who drew animals in her notebooks roused great anger. So well did the author write and then she goes on i began to wonder all the same if nanda was not a sad problem however ill handled for the nuns at her school and all the more i think she was when she writes of them now that perhaps nuns are harsher than monks because they have a double sacrifice to make husbands and children and that is why they feel embittered perhaps really letters should not be published especially letters from people about religion and themselves they are too hungry a trap for romantic egoism it is curious that in both cases the other side of the correspondence was lost.

One would like to have seen it. Stevie Smith at her kindest there. That word curious is doing a lot of work there, isn't it? I mean, one of the things, I don't really feel this is a spoilers kind of book, one of the things I don't really feel this is a spoilers kind of book but um one of the things that is intriguing about it is how closely it's based on Antonia White's own life right I mean this is pretty much exactly what happened to her um and as you've said Laura she went on to to pretty much unpack what happened to her in the next three books, ending up with the really extraordinary last book in that sequence, which is about her time spent in an asylum.

They didn't expect you to recover quite so quickly as you did. They didn't expect me to recover at all. They told my parents that I was incurable. I might get a bit better when I was 50, which wasn't much comfort to them. Actually, I recovered much to their surprise. But I had to, as soon as I began to be a bit conscious, you know, and sort of hold myself together, it was a terrific effort to hold oneself together for a whole day you could get a bit of it straight perhaps a meal or going to the washroom or something but you couldn't connect up with that terrific effort of will I did

eventually manage to piece days together because for a long time I had no idea I remember one time a nurse opening the door of my cell and something seemed to have come to for a moment and I said, where am I? And she said, you're in the hospital. And I said, what kind of a hospital? And she said, the hospital for girls who ask too many questions and slam the door.

Laura, that made my blood run cold again because you're hearing the cycle of behaviour that she's been subjected to with the nuns in Bethlehem Hospital. Yes, she describes her, I don't know a lot about mental health, so if I use inappropriate terms, please forgive me, but her descent into what should we call mania is described in some of the language is very reminiscent of the catholic church and the other is the father who converted at the age of 35 and took his wife who i rather liked actually um the sort of frivolous supposedly wife took his wife and the seven-year-old what was her name then irene botting uh antonio white's real name it took them into the catholic church and what is incredible though this life she had which on paper is like the worst life ever she was married three times the first two husbands the first two marriages were unconsummated the first time she had sex

she had an abortion she got pregnant and had an abortion. She had very problematic relationships with her two daughters, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, these bouts of mania. And yet in these books, Froster May being the best of them, but again, the other three are superb as well. There's a non-judgmentalism about the whole thing. She gets inside her father's head in a way that I, it's an incredible imaginative act of empathy. She actually describes at the beginning of the second book, The Lost Traveller, she actually describes, it must be an imagined episode, how her father actually came to convert.

And it comes from some sort of erotic, they're terribly eroticised, these books. It's an erotic impulse, almost sublimated. And of course, today, we would say that their relationship was heavily eroticised. She was the only child and they were very, very close. And when she went into Freudian analysis, she was in Freudian analysis, I thought, you know,

that's a mistake because there's almost too much material but but Laura she says it in that interview she does it in that very English way where she go where she goes well yes I was in the Freud analysis I mean you know with my father classic Oedipal she's brilliant I think also in that interview, it's very striking that she says that her parents were told that she might recover when she was 50. And I think that what she's saying is when she went through the menopause. Menopause, yeah, yeah. Therefore, this was the coded reference

is to a sexual hysteria, because of course it's sex that makes women crazy. We all know that and agree. And that comes to one of the things I had wanted to say that's really striking in this book is that clearly eroticized relationship with the very creepy father. Yeah. And there's that terrible scene in the biography where he threatens her with hitting her with a ruler and he's going to take her knickers down. She writes about her illness

as the beast, but she also writes about religion as the thing that she she's harder on herself than anyone else i mean and you know she's she's i think it would be fair to say that she is at times in life because of her illness because of what we would probably clearly see as bipolar now she's a difficult person to like dylan thomas said he thought of her as a wild animal tamed in a suburban zoo, dreaming of freedom. And then one day, waking, obsessed by those dreams, she escaped into liberty, a liberty that for her, necessarily because of a long, tame imprisonment, was far more terrifying than the safety behind the suburban zoo bars.

And you do get the sense that she's continually about to erupt. Laura, you've got a piece haven't you from um the fourth novel which is called beyond the glass yeah and this novel is the novel about her breakdown that we that we heard her talking about in that interview extract well it goes but she so she has i mean the second the third, The Sugar House, is about her marriage to this. See, her father, poor man, was also a terrible snob. He so wants her to marry this boy, Archie, as he's called in the book, because he's born Catholic and he's also upper class. And the relationship between them, this sexless love, no doubt about it, between them is so beautifully done it's phenomenal i

can't think of another relationship like it depicted in in literature anyway she comes out of that the non-consummative marriage comes out of that trauma and then falls madly in love which did in fact happen in real life with this very good looking young soldier. But throughout Beyond the Glass, you know, the glass, the idea that she's this mirror image of herself and she can't connect the two ever is the constant motif. And throughout the book, you feel her fragmenting. Again, there's this sense of foreboding that you can feel something bad is going to happen. It's done brilliantly. And then I was just going to read a tiny little bit, actually. When she starts, she talks about it in that interview. She started to piece things together again.

But her memory of this stuff. Which in the biography is set against the actual medical notes and her memory of it in this book is so accurate. set against the actual medical notes and her memory of it in this book is so accurate she must have been so the idea that you're submerged in mania and yet you you know what's happening is very touching and terrible isn't it so this is just a tiny little bit they moved her to a new room because she was starting to get better but she doesn't recognise her own surname because it's her married name. Hang on. So you've got yourself up and dressed, have you, said the nurse. Actually brushing your hair too. Good. I'm sorry I used the brush, Clara muttered. You see, I haven't one of my own. They're yours, all right. Can't you read? Some instinct warned Clara to make no comment. She said humbly, what a lovely room. May I really stay in it? As long as you behave yourself, yes. Now, do you think you can keep it tidy? Oh yes, said Clara eagerly. When I come back, let me see if

you know how to make a bed. The nurse went out. At first, the task seemed impossible. The sheets and blankets tangled themselves into a shapeless mess. But she persevered with desperate concentration. Suddenly, she remembered how to make a bed. She smoothed and tucked and folded, slowly but competently. Somewhere, a long time ago, she'd done this every morning for critical eyes. She remembered a long row of white curtain cubicles and children in blue uniforms and black aprons making beds. The door clicked open with a sound so much like that of a nun's wooden signal that she turned around and, without thinking, said, are my corners all right today, Mother?

That's brilliant. And from that point, she starts to put herself back together. I mean, some of the early passages where she thought she was a horse. A salmon. A salmon, a bell. It's absolutely extraordinary. When I finished reading Frost in May I didn't really know anything about Antonia White and I finished it and I thought well that was very good very uh but quite polite you know quite it's it's it's and then after I read

Jane Dunn's as you you say, superb biography, I realised that the politeness is only on the surface, of course, and that control is really what it is. I mean, we don't need to know the details of Antonia White's life on one level because it's there in the novel and it's what she wanted to tell us. But to take these events in car nervous breakdown incarceration and then tell you the story she wants to tell you as um carefully as she can seem to me far more of a a piece of artistic bravery than I had first given it credit for. There's a quote from Carmen Kalil,

who of course was the publisher of Virago. And this was, as we've said, it was the first title of the Virago list when it appeared. And Carmen Kalil asked her to write an introduction to this new edition of Frost in May. And Carmen Khalil said, I sat opposite her and I watched pain so great overcome her. It twisted her body. I was dumbstruck. She was a living ball of pain. And so Khalil, she wrote the introduction instead because Antonia White clearly was not able to do it. This is a really important novel twice over. Yes. It makes an impact in the early 1930s when it's published. But actually, it's so important to the success of the Virago project that this book becomes a bestseller. And it's a tribute to Carmen and the other people who worked at Virago that they recognize the potential for this particular book, that it has the perennial appeal of first literary quality but also you know you'll always go quite far with a book that could also be considered a misery memoir or contains no i'm i'm i'm not

really joking you know or contains elements of jane eyre or or the 70s comic that was the most popular comic that ever ran in the comic Misty which was called Slaves of War Orphan Farm which I've which I've talked about on this podcast before where basically you take a group of girls and you incarcerate them and you treat them terribly we'll always find an audience also, I get the point about incarcerated girls, but a Bildungsroman will always find an audience. It's a story about a growing up. As I said before, we can all, whatever our backgrounds, it seems to me, can't speak for everyone, of course,

but you can put yourself, particularly as any kind of young woman, into this situation and see yourself in it. Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye. And it's an extraordinary depiction of the febrile nature of female friendships. And that, it seems to me, you know, has not changed from when this book was published until now. I think that's the end. I think I hear the bell calling us to evening prayer. So thank you, Laura and Erica, for guiding us through this exquisite portal to the strange and difficult world of Antonia White. To Nikki Birch for conducting us this quartet across the uncomfortable distances of time and space and to our mound for keeping the altar candles burning. You can download all 110 episodes. That's right. 110. Probably adds up about 120 hours of this now. Longer than Das Boot. Plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website, Backlisted,

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