Introduction
LUCY THOMAS
It is a characteristic moment of marital discord between the central protagonists of The Soldier and the Gentlewoman: at ‘two o’ clock on a black morning’, tired and irritable, Gwenllian Einon-Thomas hears her husband, Dick, return to her family’s ancestral home following a night at the Country Club, where he has been squandering the money she has saved by her prudence and industry. As they walk towards one another, the pair bicker in stilted exchanges. They suppress their more extreme urges, and at first glance it seems little more than a commonplace squabble. But a far more suggestive scene is played out behind them, seen only by the reader, where ‘[g]iant shadows of a man and a woman rushed towards each other and fled away, in a fierce dance across the armoury on the walls.’ In their shadowy forms, projected onto the wall behind them like figures from a silent film, Gwenllian and Dick take on more epic proportions, their struggles becoming emblematic. In the darkest and most disturbing of Hilda Vaughan’s novels, we often find a gap between appearance and reality; the action takes place unseen, in thoughts and subtle words, hidden manoeuvres and deeds left undone.
Though it is a fleeting moment in the book, this is a subtle image from the assured hand of an author at the height of her writing career. The Soldier and the Gentlewoman was published in 1932, the fifth of the ten novels, one novella and several short stories and autobiographical essays by Vaughan that appeared during her lifetime. Her previous work had been met with enthusiasm by the press, bringing international attention. The Soldier and the Gentlewoman was no exception. The Evening News declared that it was ‘undoubtedly the best book Miss Vaughan has written’.1 The Book Society News announced it as the ‘selected Book for May’.2 Only three months before, her husband Charles Morgan’s novel, The Fountain, had received the same plaudit. The couple had met ten years previously, when Vaughan left her native Builth Wells for London, to enrol on a writing course at Bedford College for Women. Morgan was then the up-and-coming drama critic for The Times and he would go on to become a highly renowned author and playwright, enjoying a worldwide reputation that it is hard for us to imagine today, since his work has been largely forgotten. The pair became a formidable partnership and moved in elite literary circles. While Morgan’s letters attest to his admiration for his wife’s narrative abilities and despite her successes in her own right, there is a suggestion that Vaughan was somewhat in her husband’s shadow.3 Tellingly, in a speech she delivered at the Sunday Times Book Exhibition in 1934, she described her husband as an artist and herself as merely a novelist.4 There was a great deal of press interest in the couple and a number of articles promoting The Soldier and the Gentlewoman also provide an insight into the pair’s domestic life, describing with admiration their house in Campden Hill Square in London, where they lived with their children Shirley and Roger, and recounting the couple’s advice on childcare alongside their thoughts on writing practices.5 Though its positive critical reception did not quite match the rapturous reviews of Vaughan’s first novel, The Battle to the Weak (1925) or those elicited by her haunting novella, A Thing of Nought (1934), in many respects The Soldier and the Gentlewoman could be seen as one of Vaughan’s most successful works. It was translated into French and German, adapted for the stage by Dorothy Massingham in 1933 and broadcast on television by the BBC in January 1957.
The novel is one of five of Vaughan’s works to depict war or its aftermath. It opens with the return of a soldier. During the four long years of the First World War, Captain Dick Einon-Thomas has ‘hoped daily for nothing better than to escape death’. On his return from Mesopotamia the young Englishman learns that he has inherited Plâs Einon (sic), a country estate in Wales, following the death of two of his male cousins in combat. Dick rejoices in his inheritance: ‘Property, this miracle, made everything easy. Already it had freed him of the Army, and now – he could have pretty well what he chose.’ For others, however, it is a period of loss. The estate is entailed upon the nearest male heir and in order for him to take possession of Plâs Einon it must be vacated by its female inhabitants. He prepares to meet his cousins, Mrs Cecily Einon-Thomas, widow of the eldest son of the estate, Gwenllian the eldest daughter of the family and her younger sister, Frances, who has married a naval officer and lives in England. As Dick pays this awkward call, he feels sorry for the women. ‘That little glow of chivalry towards the disinherited gave him pleasure. Such feelings, he knew, became a soldier.’ The widowed Mrs Einon-Thomas leaves for the South of France with an air of polite resignation. Instead, it is her spinster sister-in-law, Gwenllian Einon-Thomas who most keenly feels the pain of the dispossessed. Determined and capable, more so than any of her male relatives, Gwenllian has managed the estate singlehandedly during the war. As one villager comments, ‘she’d have made a first rate man o’ business. Pity indeed she were born the wrong shape!’
Gwenllian’s increased responsibilities reflect the experience of many women across the UK during the First World War. In March 1915 females between the ages of sixteen and sixty-five were called upon to register at labour exchanges and, for some of them, this meant taking up roles that had previously been inaccessible to them. At the outbreak of war, Hilda Vaughan was twenty-two years old and she, too, became immersed in the war effort, serving first as a cook in a Red Cross hospital, where, due to her unfamiliarity with domestic tasks, she hid a cookery book under her apron. She went on to become Organising Secretary for the Women’s Land Army in Breconshire and Radnorshire. It was in this position that she particularly excelled, and at a recruitment meeting in Newtown, she gave a speech that impressed the novelist Berta Ruck to such an extent that Ruck portrayed the young Vaughan as a character in one of her books, recreating her stirring speech almost verbatim.6 Letters dated to this time refer to Vaughan’s efforts in helping to secure work for mothers of illegitimate children and coping with the elopement of her Land Girls. This role also brought her into close contact with the women who lived on the farms, and her experiences during this period played a formative part in the work she would go on to write, in particular, her notably sympathetic portrayal of working women.
In The Soldier and the Gentlewoman, the end of the war heralds not only the homecoming of the soldiers but also the expected return of its protagonists to traditional gender roles. Having been forced to relinquish her management of the estate, Gwenllian, Dick supposes, will now ‘take up something… Poultry, or breeding pet dogs.’ His assumption that the old order will resume is undermined by the text, however, which alludes to the destabilising effect upon gender roles that has been introduced as a result of the war. Textual descriptions of Gwenllian become increasingly masculine, and Dick is often perturbed by her characteristically male behaviour. By the end of the novel, having committed an act more terrible than any of the deeds perpetrated by her brutish male relatives, she looks up at her father’s portrait, realising ‘she had transcended him. Would you, a man, have dared as much? she asked silently.’
The end of the war did indeed bring some degree of change to the position of women in British society. It was partly in recognition of the contribution they had made to the war effort that the Representation of the People Act 1918 was passed, which provided the vote to women over 30 who met stipulated criteria, a fact that Dick refers to in the novel. While Gwenllian has proven her strength during wartime, Dick returns from active service physically weakened. His heart has been damaged, he has lost his nerve and, rather crucially when considering the future of his inherited estate, we are told that his life is now uninsurable. Descriptions of Dick constantly undermine his masculinity. His features are girlish and as Frances remarks, he is ‘so like a nice little pink fledgling, you can’t call him a man.’ As late at the 1930s, 639,000 British ex-servicemen were still drawing disability pensions as a result of physical injuries and mental illness brought about by war. The image of the damaged, war-enfeebled soldier is, unsurprisingly, a motif found in many novels written during the decades that followed the Great War. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) notably portrays how the failure of maimed masculinity to be reincorporated into society has tragic consequences, and injured soldiers feature in prominent texts from The Return of the Soldier (1918) by Rebecca West to D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).
While Vaughan’s novel can be seen as part of this literary engagement with war and its aftermath, it offers a specifically Welsh perspective. As Dick pays his first call on his female cousins, he attempts to make polite conversation about ‘the weather, the state of the roads’. This leads to a discussion that is rather more political than he had anticipated. The widowed Mrs Einon-Thomas tells him that the roads ‘are terribly cut up … So much timber-hauling during the war, you know’. She describes how the Welsh countryside has been exploited for the British war effort, with the valleys deforested for ‘the supply of pit-props to the collieries of South Wales’. Her remarks make reference to the fact that the British fleet during World War One was powered primarily by Welsh coal and Wales was mined and deforested to meet the huge demand during this period. Gwenllian laments the effect this has had on the landscape: ‘“It’s ruined,” she said. “There’s almost nothing left”’. Gwenllian’s comments lead Dick to question, ‘[w]as she thinking of men as well as of trees?’ The destruction of the countryside is linked with the slaughter of Gwenllian’s brothers and it is suggested that Welsh life and landscape have both been sacrificed for the greater demand of the British state.
For Dick, however, the Welsh landscape represents the safety he has longed for during the terrifying years of battle:
‘…he drew a long breath. The air was newly washed by rain. It held the saltness of the sea, and the sweetness of rising sap. The pungency of wet leaf mould and moss was in it, rank woodland scents, stealing up from the dingle below and blending with the tonic breeze that swept the hilltops. Cool, he thought, clean, restful, safe! He shut his eyes and smiled. Safe, he repeated to himself and then – home. He was poignantly happy. He wanted to cry.’
The ‘tonic breeze’ inhaled by Dick is suggestive of the perceived restorative powers of the Welsh pastoral landscape. It recalls another of Vaughan’s novels, Pardon and Peace (1945) in which the English soldier, Mark, returns from war to revisit a former Welsh holiday destination, in order ‘to be made whole again.’ There are early signs, however, that Dick’s presence in his new home is not to be as peaceful as he had foreseen. Not only does his inheritance of Plâs Einon displace its female inhabitants but it also removes the land from Welsh ownership. The tension this creates is insinuated as Dick’s relationship with his new surroundings is presented in terms that employ the imagery of imperialism. A villager shows Dick his estate from a distant vantage point, describing the vista as ‘unrolled like a map just for you to read’. As Dick surveys the landscape we are told that ‘he took off his felt hat with a delicious sensation of challenge, as though it had been a topee.’ This reference to a topee, a Hindi pith helmet, worn by the English in tropical countries in the-mid nineteenth century, is ideologically suggestive, and subtly implies that Dick’s possession of the estate can be read as an act of appropriation.
Dick’s enthusiasm for this rural Welsh idyll is somewhat tempered as he begins to notice the cultural differences between himself and the inhabitants of his new surroundings. Though he acknowledges that his cousins Gwenllian and Frances are undoubtedly beautiful, his first impression is that they appear uncomfortably alien. They are ‘too foreign, too much what you expected of the Welsh… those Italian features with so little flesh upon them, suggested bad temper, or worse, fanaticism. He shouldn’t wonder if they were rabid teetotallers, or religious, or something of the kind.’ Despite his initial efforts to ingratiate himself, he is even more disconcerted by his tenants:
‘He failed to understand half they said, and was at times unsure whether they were addressing him in English, or in the Welsh language which they used amongst themselves. When the good news had reached him that he had inherited an estate at home, he had not bargained for its being inhabited by a lot of jabbering foreigners.’
Early in her writing career, Vaughan had been made keenly aware of the difficulties faced by a Welsh writer depicting her country for a readership situated upon both sides of Offa’s Dyke. A letter from an editor, rejecting an early version of The Battle to the Weak informs her that years ago he ‘made great efforts to find a Welsh writer of idyll who would do for Wales what has been done for Scotland. I tried at least half a dozen. They found their severest critics among the Welsh themselves.’7 In this context, the effect that his encounter with cultural difference has upon Dick is interesting. The narrative reflects Dick’s point of view and the reader encounters Wales and the Welsh alongside him. This position becomes less stable, however, as Dick begins to ‘wonder whether the studied monotony of his own speech might seem as comic to them as the chanting cadence of theirs was to him strange and irritating. Well, not comic perhaps. They would know of course that his way of speaking was correct. But he was ill at ease among them.’ As Dick attempts to reassert the superiority of his own culture, this is delicately undermined by the author.
The politics of ownership and inheritance are explored most intently, however, in relation to Gwenllian herself. She has forfeited love, youth and happiness out of a sense of duty. For Gwenlllian preserving the estate for future generations takes precedence over any other obligations. As she tells Dick, ‘I managed to fight moss and plantains even during the war, when one felt it wasn’t right to put men on a job like that. I did everything else we were supposed to do, but I wasn’t going to have the beauty of Plâs Einon spoiled.’ She holds an unwavering reverence for traditions and customs and she is fiercely proud of her ancestry. Throughout the book the Einon-Thomas family are referred to as a ‘race’ in a manner that invites a reading of the familial line as representative of Welsh identity in a broader sense. Gwenllian declares, ‘English people with French names who are proud of having “come over with the Conqueror” can’t show a pedigree that compares with ours. We fought the Romans, and the Saxons after them, and held on to our own.’ With the estate entailed upon her English cousin, it is now falls upon Gwenllian to hold onto her own. For the Welsh woman, lacking the power or weaponry at the disposal of her forefathers, this means enticing Dick into matrimony and producing an heir.
Gwenllian’s name has particularly evocative cultural connotations, recalling two iconic heroines of Welsh history. Gwenllian Ferch Gruffydd (1097-1136), Princess Consort of Deheubarth, led an army during the Great Revolt of 1136 in which the Welsh endeavoured to recapture lands lost to the Marcher Lords. A later namesake, Gwenllian Ferch Llywelyn (1282-1337) was the only child of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last native Prince of Wales. She was captured by the English and held in a convent until her death in order to prevent the noble Welsh bloodline from continuing. Vaughan’s characterisation draws on both the need to protect her land and produce an heir and viewed in this context, Gwenllian takes on emblematic qualities. Despite being a member of the squirearchy, a social class that was widely viewed as anglicised, Gwenllian speaks Welsh with the tenants and villagers, her voice becoming ‘more resonant and flexible when she spoke the language of her race.’ While the use of the Welsh language is referred to in several of Vaughan’s novels, it is interesting that the author chose to locate this particular book that so explicitly examines the politics of identity, in Carmarthenshire, one of the Welsh-speaking heartlands. This is one of only a few notable geographical departures for Vaughan. Her work was largely set in or around her native Builth Wells on the Breconshire and Radnorshire border, a propensity that led the New York Times to suggest that she had made Radnorshire ‘as much hers as the Brontes did their moors.’8
The novel presents two opposing approaches towards inheritance; not only in terms of monetised land and property but also in its cultural, ideological and emotive aspects. Sisters Gwenllian and Frances have both been brought up in Plâs Einon. While Gwenllian has stayed at home and devoted herself entirely to the estate, Frances has taken flight as a young woman, giving up the comfort and security of a woman of her social class and finding ‘glorious freedom’, first at a post in the secretariat of a suffrage organisation in London and then as the happy wife of a naval officer, ‘without means or prospects’, and as a mother of three children. As nomadic as Gwenllian is rooted, Frances and her family move from one naval port to another. During her occasional visits to Plâs Einon, Frances shocks Dick with her liberal political views and exasperates Gwenllian with her apparent lack of regard for tradition. Frances muses the she and Gwenllian are:
‘…more alike than many sisters, alike in our appearance, alike in our streak of fanaticism. But all Gwen’s fanaticism has dragged her inward and inward on to the property; she’s given up everything for that. And mine has forced me outward, away from this property and all property. I want my life to be an adventure, full of love. I’ve flung away everything else – even things beautiful in themselves – things I do love and prize…for fear they’d become more precious than human affections – growth – change of ideas. She wants her life to be set, like a frozen stream. There must be no warmth in it, for then the stream would melt, and begin to flow, and carry her away.’
Interestingly, following the death of all the male members of the immediate family, Gwenllian and Frances take on roles that would traditionally have been ascribed to the eldest and the second sons. In their opposing relationship with their home and inheritance, two choices are presented in the construction of identity; a choice between an identification with a particular place and a people and a wider affinity with all humanity.
The themes of inheritance and identity explored here rework many of the chief concerns of Vaughan’s novel Her Father’s House (1930), the title that had immediately preceded The Soldier and the Gentlewoman. In many ways one is a photo-negative of the other, with the earlier book favourably presenting its heroine’s commitment to upholding tradition and identity and the latter providing a depiction that is infinitely darker. Nell in Her Father’s House walks from London to Wales while heavily pregnant in order to ensure that her child is born in her ancestral home. The novel concludes with her having successfully reinvigorated her family’s crumbling estate and it is suggested that her newborn child betokens hope for the future. Conversely, Gwenllian’s firstborn child, loved so little for his own sake, is viewed primarily as ‘this gift of hers to the race she worshipped’ and the novel ends with the estate referred to as a place of death, decay and destruction. It would be all too easy to read the later novel as a rejection of patriotism or even nationalist principles, however. In an explanation of her fervour, Gwenllian describes the agonising emotional burden of her role as a guardian of her family’s lands: ‘It seems to me so base to be the weak link in a long chain – the first poor soft thing to let it break.’ In so doing, a more complex picture emerges as she voices a sentiment that resonates with the work of Welsh-language poets such as Gwenallt, a key voice in twentieth-century Welsh-language literature and an early member of Plaid Cymru. His poem ‘Cymru’, published three years after The Soldier and the Gentlewoman, articulates the painful and relentless sense of duty in striving to protect a language and culture under threat. It asks of Wales, ‘[w]hy have you given us this misery, / The pain like leaden weights on flesh and blood? / Your language on our shoulders like a load, / And your traditions shackles round our feet.’ (Paham y rhoddaist inni’r tristwch hwn, / A’r boen fel pwysau plwm ar gnawd a gwaed? / Dy iaith ar ein hysgwyddau megis pwn, / A’th draddodiadau hual am ein traed?)9
Gwenllian’s gender adds yet further nuance to her position as a cultural custodian. Her battle with Dick to gain control over the estate is so fiercely waged because it is the last of a series of acts of dispossession, all of which have previously been committed against her by Welsh men, suggesting that the Welsh woman is doubly disenfranchised by both her gender and her nationality. Despite her superior skill, bravery and intelligence she has had to take a secondary role to her brothers, whose ‘invasion of her home’ she resentfully endured as a child. She has strived to gain the respect of a father who refused to see his daughter as of equal worth as his sons, and the culmination of this has left her feeling bitterly disempowered. Men are according to Gwenllian, ‘in possession, hour by hour and generation by generation, of all that she desired to possess; they invaded her integrity, usurped the inheritance of her soul. Without them, how little evil there would be in her…’ Her final act to win control of the estate is, in fact, not really an act at all but a form of neglecting to do what is expected of her as a caring wife. It is significant that in Vaughan’s novel the disenfranchised Welsh woman can only gain power by rejecting the gendered roles demanded of her as a nurturing wife and loving mother.
As the title of the novel makes clear, Gwenllian is not simply a woman but a ‘gentlewoman’. The mismatched pairing of the daughter of a squire and the son of a governess provoked a critic in The Times to write that ‘the final tragedy, impressively staged though it is, fails of its effect because the conflict turns on a difference of breeding and social usage rather than on the clash of character.’10 It is indeed suggested that Dick’s middle-class upbringing leaves him ill-equipped to run the Plâs Einon Estate. He eventually acknowledges that, ‘though he scarcely liked to admit it to himself, he was envious of the city clerks who lived in comfortable obscurity among their own class.’ Similarly, the Liverpool Post objected to the book’s reliance upon the country house which, it asserted, ‘harbours a society whose point of view is very remote from that of the average Welsh man or woman.’11 Though Vaughan skilfully portrays the lives of the working class Welsh in many of her novels, she hailed from a rather different background. The author was the daughter of a country solicitor, Henry Vaughan, Clerk of the Peace and Under Sheriff of Radnorshire. She recounts her relatively privileged upbringing in her autobiographical essays ‘A Country Childhood’ (1934) and ‘Far Away: Not Long Ago’ (1935). Vaughan’s social class was one reason cited for the critical neglect of her work in the latter part of the twentieth century. In an act of literary dispossession, she was not included in the influential study of Welsh writing in English The Dragon Has Two Tongues by Glyn Jones on the grounds that she writes ‘about the squirearchy and its anglicised apers.’12
The contemporary mainstream press in Wales, however, was enthusiastic in its approval of Vaughan’s writing. She was seen to inhabit the ‘truthful’ ground between the ‘pretty stories’ of Allen Raine and the ‘scabrous piffle’ of Caradoc Evans, whose fictional portrayal of the rural nonconformist communities of Ceredigion had provoked a national scandal.13 In a review of The Soldier and the Gentlewoman the Western Mail decreed that if ‘Hilda Vaughan were to devote herself entirely to her native heath as the background for her stories her countrymen would no longer have reason to complain of misrepresentation in the field of fiction.’14 Such an assertion is somewhat surprising, however, given the dark portrayal of its Welsh (anti-)heroine. Just as the chapel elders in Caradoc Evans’ My People (1915) commit acts of abuse and violence that go unpunished by the community so long as they contribute to the chapel’s coffers, Gwenllian’s crimes are concealed under a veneer of pious respectability, with the neighbourhood ‘beginning to speak of her as of a saint.’ This is thrown into sharp relief when the local vicar pays a call moments after Gwenllian has created a poppet or voodoo-style doll of her husband. She donates the brooch used to stick a pin through the wax doll’s heart to the sale of work in aid of the Church Lads’ Brigade.
As the latter image suggests, the novel owes much to the Gothic tradition of writing and can be seen as inhabiting a specifically Welsh strand of that genre, only recently considered in its own right by Jane Aaron in Welsh Gothic (2013). At first glance, Plâs Einon represents culture and civilization. It is the very image of the British country house with its paintings by Romney on the walls, the Nantgarw and Crown Derby in the china cabinet and the Chelsea and Bow figures on the mantelshelves. Amongst the waterfalls, artificial ponds and picturesque follies, however, there are clues that it holds a more primitive and specifically Welsh past. At the edge of the drive there stands a ring of yew trees that ‘were never planted in the Age of Reason. They seemed, rather to be survivals, like very ancient witches, of a time of faith and fear, when the land was still haunted by ghosts and demons.’ It is here that, early on in the novel, Gwenllian comes to hatch her plan to regain control of the estate. From time to time we gain occasional glimpses of the more Gothic elements of Welsh folklore. From the servants’ talk of death portents, to Gwenllian’s assertion that a stormy night heralds the coming of the Cŵn Annwn, ‘the pack of fiends, hunting for the souls of the wicked.’ It is during a moment of extreme frustration with her husband’s lack of regard for the future of the estate, that Gwenllian forms a wax effigy of him. She recalls being taught how to bring about the death of a man by an old ‘wise’oman’, who is believed to have been a distant relative. This is one of the few direct examples of the passing on of traditions found in the novel and it is significant that it manifests itself in the most sinister of forms.
The novel ends with the sense of Gothic menace in which it began. Having realised the full horror of the acts committed by her sister to ensure the future of the estate, Frances stands on the ancient burial chamber, the vantage point from which Dick first viewed his inheritance. She takes a final glimpse of ‘beautiful, devouring Plâs Einon’ before fleeing for England, never to return. The description seems to suggest that the characters have been figures in a sinister landscape that has itself been a powerful agent in bringing about this terrible conclusion. The novel provides a brutal and unblinking exploration of what it means to be Welsh, but above all, what it means to be a Welsh woman. At its close we witness the full implications of the choices made by the two sisters. Though Gwenllian now has sole possession of the estate ‘as if she were an only son’, her triumph has come at the price of her goodness. The narrative presents Frances’ decision to flee for England as the more rational and humane choice. This is not in itself an indictment of tradition, patriotism, or nationalism but instead it issues a warning against extremism in any of its forms, without consideration of the human cost. Vaughan herself was keen to lovingly preserve in her writing a rural way of life in Wales that she felt was rapidly changing. We see this in her novels but also in her autobiographical essay, ‘Far Away: Not Long Ago’ which makes explicit the author’s intention to record the past for future generations. Vaughan’s portrayal of rural Wales was not as an idyll, however, and she was ready to examine the more negative aspects of her land and its traditions, nowhere more incisively, perhaps, than in the dark tale of The Soldier and the Gentlewoman. As the sisters, Gwenllian and Frances, occupy opposing positions in their relationship with their homeland, perhaps it is Vaughan’s work itself, in its implicit call for moderation, which succeeds in negotiating a path between the two stances.
Notes
Further Reading