A triangular situation in another of my novels had certain parallels with a situation of which I was ignorant at the time of writing but which in fact later affected me closely. I was accused of exposing, exploiting it, causing embarrassment and bleeding hearts. Did I invent the fictional 'plot'? or subconsciously sneak up on what was going on unknown to me, and reveal the gist of it under the guise of fiction?
A character called Mrs Jardine that I once created, generated from a fusion of youthful impressions of relatives on the paternal side, has had five different 'real life' models attached to her, all ludicrously wide of the mark, three of them unknown to me even by repute.
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Perhaps it would not have been too conceited to tell myself that at least these characters, and others, must have been 'alive'. But an incurable ambivalence developed in me with regard to my profession after the smash-hit of Dusty Answer. It seems comical in retrospect that this impassioned but idealistic piece of work should have shocked a great many readers: but it did. It was discussed, and even reviewed, in certain quarters as the outpourings of a sex-maniac. Of those who had known me as an innocent child some were utterly dismayed. How could I have so upset my mother? And indeed my mother, ever loyal, but ever prone to believe one or other of her brood about to overstep the mark with fatal consequences, was startled and torn in her feelings. Was it a blessing, or one more matter for wild and vain regret that my father had long ago embarked upon his last tragic illness, and could not follow his daughter's disconcerting fortunes? Girls should be pretty, modest, cultivated, home-loving, spirited but also docile; they should chastely await the coming of the right man, and then return his love and marry him and live as faithful, happy wives and mothers, ever after. All this I knew and was by temperament and upbringing fervently disposed towards; assuming (or half assuming), with Mrs Gaskell, that 'a woman's principal work in life is hardly left to her own choice; nor can she drop the domestic charges devolving on her as an individual, for the exercise of the most splendid talents that were ever bestowed'. But I seemed to already be losing grip on the dual responsibilities of my destiny. Unhappily married, childless, separated, wishing for a divorce; and now all at once, good heavens, one of the new post-war young women writers, product of a higher education (Girton College), a frank outspeaker upon unpleasant subjects, a stripper of the veils of reticence; a subject for pained head-shaking; at the same time the recipient of lyrical praise, of rapturous congratulation, of intense envy, of violent condemnation, in the contemporary world of letters: a world I had burst into unawares. In those days I knew no other female writers, young or old; with the exception of May Sinclair whose novels excited me, I was singularly ill-read in fiction published in the twentieth century. With the Victorians I was well acquainted. I thought of the nineteenth-century literary giants as my great ancestresses, revered, loved, and somehow intimately known. So I remembered how acutely they had suffered from censorious and sententious critics, and when hot flushes, faintness, nausea, loud rapid heartbeats afflicted me, it was a drop of comfort to feel, if in no other sense their match, at least sisterly in suffering with such noble souls. Also, I thought with yearning of the androgynous disguises, the masculine masks they had adopted for the sake of moral delicacy; of the unimpeded freedom to immerse in the creative and destructive element which anonymity had bestowed upon them ~ might have bestowed on me? ~ on me, in whom rectitude, stern puritanic principles inculcated by my mother strove ever with an ardent, pleasure-enjoying, love-hungry nature; on me, who always got in my own way, and of whom there seemed, now that I was an author, far more, a far more manageable amount than ever. Where, oh where was my place in the lofty scheme of things entire? What with the general post-war fissuring and crack-up of all social and moral structures, coupled with the abject collapse of my private world, it was easy to fear I was nowhere.
Perhaps it was all this, and not true humility, that caused me to respond to praise and generous encouragement with a sort of anxious shrinking, a suspiciousness that soured the taste of simple satisfaction and gave to gratitude and budding confidence a tenuous, half-quenched glow. 'Don't read me, don't speak of me' was partly what I wanted to reply. 'That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.'