The House at the End of Hope Street Page 27

  Slowly, the music producer glances up from her phone. For a second she seems shocked, and then a smile of pure joy gradually spreads across her face. She will remember this moment for the rest of her life, for she has been waiting her whole career to hear a voice like this.

  —

  Alba sits on the sofa, her knees pulled up to her chin, with Zoë on her left and Albert on her right. They’re all watching the television, rapt.

  “It’s not as good as the book,” Alba whispers.

  “It’s not as good as your play.” Zoë squeezes her hand.

  “True, but hush,” Albert hisses. “This is my favorite part.”

  They watch Lucy Honeychurch step into a field of flowers to be swept off her feet and into George Emerson’s arms. Albert lets out a little sigh.

  “Dad, are you crying?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Albert sniffs. “I’m far too manly for that.”

  “Of course you are, Al.” Zoë winks at Alba. “Of course you are.”

  “It’s being around you two.” Albert pauses the film to blow his nose. “You’ve gone and turned me soft—very soft.” He pats his belly.

  Alba and Zoë giggle. On the screen Lucy and George are frozen in a sea of flowers.

  “‘From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view,’” Albert begins.

  “‘. . . and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts,’” Zoë continues.

  “‘. . . irrigating the hillside with blue,’” Alba finishes.

  “Oh dear.” Albert laughs. “What a funny little family we are.”

  “‘Little’ being the operative word,” Zoë says, “being that we’re all under five foot two.”

  “Steady on,” Albert says. “I’m five foot seven in my socks.”

  Alba laughs. “Of course you are, Dad, of course you are.”

  “All right then, enough ridiculousness,” Albert huffs. “Back to the film. I want to see what happens next.”

  “Dad, you know what happens next.” Alba laughs. “If we turned the sound off you could quote every single line from beginning to end.”

  “Hush,” Albert says, as the screen flickers to life again.

  They all gaze at the screen. Alba pulls Zoë’s hand into her lap.

  A fine mist of gold, the color of contentment, settles over them.

  And they sit together, until the credits roll.

  A Guide to the Women of Hope Street

  Upstairs Hallway

  Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917)

  The first female to qualify as a doctor in England.* At first a nurse, she was refused admittance by every medical school to which she applied. Finally, Anderson was admitted for private study by the Society of Apothecaries. She qualified to practice medicine in 1865, but the SoA immediately amended its regulations to prevent other women from following in her footsteps. Not allowed to practice in any hospital, she set up her own practice, fighting for the medical rights of women. In 1873 she was admitted as a member of the British Medical Association, but it would be another nineteen years before other women were allowed to join her.

  Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929)

  Elizabeth’s younger sister Millicent was a suffragist who campaigned for British women’s right to vote.* She believed in moderate methods, disapproving of the more militant Pankhursts. Like her sister, she fought to improve women’s educational opportunities and in 1871 cofounded Newnham College, the second Cambridge college for women, after Girton College in 1869. However, while female students at Cambridge studied to degree level and took the exams (Millicent’s daughter Philippa ranking highest in the Mathematical Tripos in 1890), they weren’t awarded full degrees until 1947.

  Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989)

  A British author and playwright,* du Maurier’s most famous novel is Rebecca (1938), which opens with the line “Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.” This book, along with her short stories The Birds and Don’t Look Now, were made into major films. The film version of Rebecca, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, won the Oscar for best film in 1940.

  Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928)

  Emmeline Pankhurst was a suffragette, a radical campaigner for the rights of women. Widely criticized for her militant tactics,* she still, like the less militant Fawcetts, played a pivotal role in finally achieving the vote for women. In 1999, Time named her one of the 100 Most Important People of the Twentieth Century.

  Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011)

  Taylor was born in London to American parents. Winner of two Academy Awards for her roles in BUtterfield 8 (1960) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). She also received the Presidential Citizens Medal, the Medal of the Legion of Honor, and a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, which named her seventh in their list of the “Greatest American Screen Legends.” In 2000 she was made a Dame of the British Empire. She married eight times, twice to actor Richard Burton.

  Bathroom

  Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)

  Born in Boston, Plath studied at two all-female colleges: Smith College, Massachusetts, and Newnham College, Cambridge. There she met the poet Ted Hughes. They courted with poems, married in 1956, and had two children before he left her for another woman. In 1963 she committed suicide. In 1982 she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems. Plath’s most famous work is The Bell Jar (1963), an autobiographical novel about depression.

  Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)

  Dorothy was a poet famous for her great wit. She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair in 1914 and worked there and at Vogue for several years. At Vanity Fair she met Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood and together they informally founded the Algonquin Round Table.* In 1925 Harold Ross founded The New Yorker and Parker’s first piece appeared in its second issue. Her first collection of poetry, Enough Rope (1926), contained the famous poem “Résumé,” about suicide. She received two Academy Award nominations for screenplays and worked very successfully until she was placed on the Hollywood blacklist for her liberal politics. She married three times, twice (like Elizabeth Taylor) to the same man. Despite attempting suicide several times she ultimately died of a heart attack.

  Living Room

  Doris Lessing (b. 1919)

  Lessing left school at fourteen and thereafter educated herself. Doris Lessing’s most famous novels include The Golden Notebook (1962), a significant feminist text influential in the women’s liberation movements of the 1960s, and The Grass Is Singing (1950). In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the eleventh woman in 106 years. In 2008 the Times ranked her fifth on its list of the 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945.

  Vivien Leigh (1913–1967)

  Also known as Lady Olivier, from her marriage to Sir Laurence Olivier, the British actress won two Academy Awards for her roles in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Gone With the Wind (1939). Leigh pursued the lead role in Gone With the Wind with great determination, despite being relatively unknown and British, telling a journalist long before the film was cast that she would play Scarlett O’Hara. Leigh suffered from bipolar disorder, which gave her a reputation for being difficult to work with. She divorced from Olivier in 1960.

  Vanessa Bell (1879–1961)

  Born Vanessa Stephen, sister of Virginia Woolf. Bell was a painter and member of the Bloomsbury Group, an influential circle of English writers and intellectuals including Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. Her significant paintings include portraits of her sister and of Aldous Huxley. Bell is considered one of the major contributors to British portrait drawing and landscape art in the twentieth century.

  Agatha Christie (1890–1976)

  Born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, Christie, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is the best-selling novelist of all time.* Her novels
have sold approximately four billion copies and have been translated into more than 100 languages. Her best-loved books are the Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot mysteries, though she also wrote short stories, and romances under a pseudonym. Her play The Mousetrap is the longest-running play of all time with more than 24,000 performances since 1952.

  When in 1926 Christie’s first husband asked for a divorce, she disappeared and, after a nationwide search, was found eleven days later. She never gave any account of her disappearance. Some speculated that (like Charles Ashby) she wanted the police to think her spouse had killed her. She later married Max Mallowan, an archaeologist, and remained happy with him until her death.

  Kitchen

  George Eliot (1819–1880)

  Mary Anne Evans took the male pseudonym to publish all of her seven novels, the most famous being Middlemarch (1871–72), Silas Marner (1861), Daniel Deronda (1876) and The Mill on the Floss (1860).

  She lived with George Henry Lewes for more than twenty years, referring to him as her husband and calling herself Marian Evans Lewes, even though, because Lewes was already married, they never wed. At the end of her life, after Lewes died in 1878, she married John Cross, a man twenty years her junior. Queen Victoria was a devoted reader of Eliot’s novels and admired Adam Bede (1859) so much that she commissioned an artist to paint scenes from the book. Virginia Woolf was also an admirer of Eliot’s work, calling her “the pride and paragon of all her sex” and writing that Middlemarch was a “magnificent book which, with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels for grown-up people.”

  Dora Carrington (1893–1932)

  Dora de Houghton Carrington was a British painter who painted portraits of E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and other well-known figures of her day. She was not a member of the Bloomsbury Group but closely connected with it through her relationship with Strachey, a homosexual writer with whom she lived, along with another man, for a time. Carrington was also bisexual. Virginia Woolf wrote of Carrington that she was “an odd mixture of impulse and self-consciousness… so eager to please, conciliatory, restless and active… so red and solid, and at the same time inquisitive, that one can’t help liking her.”

  Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962)

  The Honorable Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, but known as Vita. Her parents shared their surname, being cousins. Sackville-West was a writer and a poet, most famous for her novel The Edwardians. She and her husband Harold Nicolson had an open marriage and Sackville-West had affairs with several women, including Virginia Woolf.* Her greatest love affair was with Violet Trefusis (daughter of the mistress of King Edward VII), whom she met when she was twelve years old.

  Mary Somerville (1780–1872)

  Mary wasn’t formally educated but spent her childhood reading books. When she discovered mathematics she studied so hard her parents worried for her health. Unlike her first husband, Mary’s second husband encouraged her learning and love of math and science, so she began publishing papers to great acclaim. In 1835 Mary Somerville and Caroline Herschel became the first women to be elected honorary fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society. Mary was the first person to sign John Stuart Mill’s petition for women’s suffrage. Somerville College, Oxford, was founded in 1879 and named in her honor. It was the second college to be established solely for female students, after Lady Margaret Hall in 1878. Mary was friend and teacher to Ada Lovelace (daughter of Byron), a mathematician in her own right, whose discoveries assisted the invention of computers. Before she died Mary was awarded the Victoria Medal by the Royal Geographical Society.

  Caroline Herschel (1750–1848)

  Born in Hannover, Germany, Caroline lived to be ninety-seven. During her long and illustrious life she made her mark in the field of astronomy, discovering eight comets at a time when fewer than thirty were known. In 1828 the Royal Astronomical Society awarded her its gold medal, an honor it wouldn’t bestow again on a woman until 1996. Together with Mary Somerville, Caroline was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835, though the society wouldn’t actually allow female members until 1916. Caroline worked with her brother (William Herschel, who discovered Uranus in 1781) throughout his life and continued alone after his death. Just before she died, the King of Prussia bestowed upon her the Gold Medal for Science in recognition of her great contributions to the subject.

  Downstairs Hallway

  Florence Nightingale (1820–1910)

  Florence Nightingale was born into an upper-class British family that opposed her desire to take up nursing. But inspired, she said, by a call from God in 1837, Nightingale was determined to flout the social mores of her milieu and rejected marriage* to the politician and poet Baron Richard Monckton Milnes, to pursue nursing. Famous for her pioneering work during the Crimean War, she was called the Lady with the Lamp. Nightingale established her nursing school at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London in 1860. International Nurses Day is celebrated on the anniversary of her birth.

  Joan Greenwood (1921–1987)

  An actress famous for her sexy, husky voice, Greenwood’s most notable roles were as Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), one of Oscar Wilde’s most delightful plays, first performed on Valentine’s Day, 1895, and as wicked temptress Sibella in the glorious black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

  Emily Davies (1830–1921)

  Emily Davies was a feminist and suffragist who, with Barbara Bodichon, founded Girton College, Cambridge, in 1869, the first university college in England to educate women. A lifelong friend of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Davies campaigned all her life for women’s rights to a university education.

  Davies also campaigned for the vote for women and, like Mary Somerville, supported John Stuart Mill’s petition to Parliament in 1866. Refusing to surrender the cause despite widespread opposition, in 1906 she headed a delegation to Parliament. This was the year women were given the vote in Finland, the first country in the world to do so. The United States gave women the vote in 1920.

  The Forbidden Room

  Beatrix Potter (1866–1943)

  Helen Beatrix Potter came from a wealthy family and was privately educated by a governess. She wrote, illustrated and self-published The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1901. A year later it was published by Frederick Warne & Co., and Potter fell in love with her editor, Norman Warne. Because Warne was a tradesman Potter’s parents disapproved of the match but Warne died before they could be married.

  Establishing herself as a novelist, Potter bought Hill Top Farm in the Lake District. Over the years she bought more farms in an effort to preserve the countryside and left nearly all her property to the National Trust, thus creating much of the Lake District National Park.

  At forty-seven she married William Heelis and they lived happily together until her death. Potter published more than twenty beautifully illustrated books featuring animals, including The Tailor of Gloucester (1903), The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (1905) and The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies (1909).

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

  Born Adeline Virginia Stephen, her most famous works include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928). Her essay “A Room of One’s Own” (1929) extolled the importance of women’s independence, famously noting that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia was educated by her parents and raised among the Victorian literati, including Henry James. However, unlike her brothers, Virginia and her sister Vanessa were not permitted to attend Cambridge University.

  The death of her mother in 1895 triggered the first of Virginia’s several nervous breakdowns, and when her father died in 1904 she was briefly institutionalized. She committed suicide at fifty-nine by filling her pockets with stones and drowning herself in the River Ouse. Although she had several love affairs, most notably with Vita Sac
kville-West, in her last letter to her husband, Leonard Woolf, she wrote, “I owe all the happiness in my life to you… I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”

  Other Women of Hope Street

  Greer Garson (1904–1996)

  Eileen Evelyn Greer Garson was Greer’s namesake on account of Garson’s glamour and her red hair. Greer Garson performed in a television production of Twelfth Night in 1937, possibly the first time a Shakespearean play was shown on television. Garson received her first Academy Award nomination for her role in Goodbye, Mr. Chips but lost to Vivien Leigh for Gone With the Wind.

  She was nominated by the Academy five times, winning for Mrs. Miniver in 1942, and giving the ceremony’s longest acceptance speech—five minutes and thirty seconds—after which the Academy set a time limit.

  More Literature in the House

  In addition to all the books written by the women of Hope Street, the works of E. M. Forster play a significant role in the story. Forster (1879–1970) wrote a great many beautiful novels, most famously: A Room with a View, A Passage to India, Maurice and Howards End. He was an honorary fellow of King’s College, Cambridge (Alba’s college) and lived there for much of his life. He was gay, though he didn’t admit to it and his only novel about homosexual love, Maurice, was published after his death and he always lived a bachelor. Another significant work to feature in Hope Street is Tractarians and the ‘Condition of England’: The Social and Political Thought of the Oxford Movement (2004) by Dr. S. A. Skinner. This is the only book that Alba keeps reading after she’s thrown out of King’s College. This real-life Dr. Skinner was the author’s much admired and beloved professor of modern history while she took her degree in the subject at Balliol College, Oxford. While she borrowed his irresistible name for the character of Dr. Alexandra Skinner in Hope Street, the only quality both Dr. Skinners share is the brilliance and beauty of their lectures.