INTRODUCTION
‘I was brought up a child of light’, begins one of Frances Towers’ young narrators. The author herself was born into the haze of Calcutta in 1885, the eldest of five children of a British Government telegraph engineer and the daughter of a soldier in the Indian army. From age nine Frances was schooled in Britain. At nineteen she began in a clerical post at the Bank of England, making obtrusively lively contributions to its austere house magazine, until her resignation in 1933. Towers never wrote full-time, but produced stories, articles, and competition entries in the interstices of paid work, indulging there too her other passions, professedly ‘for Gothic architecture, Old Masters and mountains’.1 Towers’ first short story was published in 1929, when she was forty-four years old. Her work appeared most often in publications of a genteel ilk: The Queen magazine in Britain and, in the U.S., Ladies’ Home Journal (‘QUITE BY ACCIDENT, PRISSY LEARNS HOW TO FLATTER A MAN’, promises the latter publication’s strapline to ‘Tea with Mr. Rochester’, unpromisingly2). In the late 1930s Towers took up a teaching post at a girls’ boarding school in Harrow, where her sister was headmistress. Most of the stories included in this, her only collection, were written in the 1940s, while she taught English and History there. She died, suddenly from pneumonia, on New Year’s Day, 1948, aged sixty-three. Tea with Mr. Rochester was published the following year.
1 Frances Thomas, ‘Afterword’, Frances Towers, Tea with Mr. Rochester (London: Persephone Books, 2014), p. 169.
2 Ladies’ Home Journal, 1948 (65: 3), p. 41.
‘Her death’, wrote Angus Wilson in his review of the collection in the New Statesman in 1949, ‘may have robbed us of a figure of more than purely contemporary significance’. Even by British standards, this is rather mealy praise, but Wilson does warm to his topic. He goes on to commend Towers’ ‘subtle, allusive, but formal style’, quoting liberally some of her best and funniest lines, and ending decisively that it is ‘a bitter thought that we shall hear no more of this’. Wilson identifies a central figure of Towers’ oeuvre, a ‘little brown, humorous-eyed, plain, dowdy figure’. ‘It is’, he announces, ‘the literary daughter’, whom we as readers are urged to salute ‘as one of the great manipulators of the English literary puppet-show’3. This persuasive creature—diminutive, peripheral, but powerful in her observational capacity and her wit—is certainly very prominent in the earlier stories. Prissy, in ‘Tea with Mr. Rochester’, is almost already parodic of the ‘governessy’ trope (a rare literary son, Lucas Silverthorn, uses this adjective to describe himself in a later story). ‘One couldn’t believe that reading Jane Eyre was wrong’, Prissy exclaims. Initially, she shies rather prissily from the Brontëan darker recesses (the kind of thoughts discussed in her dormitory after lights-out), before revealing her hidden maturity in a sensual encounter when her Mr. Rochester makes her a gift of a shell.
3 Angus Wilson, review of Tea with Mr. Rochester, New Statesman 15 October 1949.
Towers rewards the ‘literary daughter’ tendencies in her readers with an array of cultural references that are rarely obscure but always revealing. Research into paintings (Old Masters, mostly), poetry (Keats, most often, but Burns, and Herrick, importantly, too), fiction (Jane Eyre, of course), and music (Chopin, and Schumann) offers up small, studious insights into characters’ sensibilities and relationships. Lisby, in ‘The Little Willow’, for example, is likened to ‘the watching girl who holds a basket on her head in the background of El Greco’s Christ in the Temple’. Towers’ eyes, tellingly, were drawn to this figure, right on the periphery of the Old Master’s view. But El Greco’s girl has her eyes cast down, in fact, and is swathed not in brown (like a timorous literary daughter), but in vibrant blue and yellow. The shared palette of their clothing draws her, we might first think, into aesthetic and moral alignment with the disciple Peter in the foreground, shocked at the temple’s desecration. And yet . . . the basket of Lisby’s double is capacious but empty, and her yellow shawl also matches the robe of the trader Jesus is attacking. Hasn’t she, too, been making sales? She is—isn’t she?—holding something in her hand. Could it be a piece of ill-gotten gold? Towers’ peripheral innocent, this comparison prompts us to conclude, is a far more complex character than Angus Wilson implied.
Towers’ gender, her reliably domestic subjects, her own assumed spinsterly gentility, all assign her work to a routinely critically condemned category—that of feminine literature. However, like an ingénue ruthlessly dissecting her society in a secret diary, the collection disrupts social expectations of femininity in an unusually uninhibited way for its time. A young girl dreading an engagement to bid goodnight to the guests at a dinner party cringingly envisages her own ‘shivering, skinned-rabbit nakedness, thrust in upon their vinous warmth, their conviviality, their terrible grown-up patronage, in her skimpy tussore and black ribbed stockings, her sharp little elbows sticking out like pins and her arms all gooseflesh’. Towers’ writerly matriline traces back to the unsaid ambiguities of Katherine Mansfield’s writing, but forward too to the audacity of Angela Carter’s work—indeed, Carter selected Towers’ ‘Violet’ for her 1986 edited story collection Wayward Girls and Wicked Women. Like Carter’s, Towers’ many rooms have dark corners and supernatural shades. Of Violet, a servant, Carter observed that she is ‘not averse to a little domestic witchery, verging—were her tale not told with such a light touch—towards the genuinely wicked’4. Violet is not Towers’ only domestic witch (there is Miss Dellow in ‘Don Juan and the Lily’, and Mrs Asher in ‘Spade Man from over the Water’), and ‘Lucinda’ is a surprising ghost story.
4 Angela Carter, ‘Introduction’, Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (London: Virago, 1994), p. xi.
And like Carter’s, Towers’ writing is full of contrary taxonomies of women that insistently expand the representation of female experience beyond the tropes of conventional morality and sexuality. Towers stocks her stories full of flowers, meticulously classified and arranged in diverse botanical varieties of female characters—lilies, tulips, gardenias, zinnias, and blowsy roses. Her women are wonderfully strange and humorous creatures. Sophy, giving the thrillingly wicked Violet ‘a quelling look’, stalks ‘out of the room with a giraffe-like dignity’. There are fish—queer fish—too. Elsa in ‘Don Juan and the Lily’ balks at the invitation to enter the bewitching Georgia Dellow’s home, for it ‘is one thing to watch enraptured an angel-fish going through its convolutions behind plate glass, and quite another to be asked to enter its tank’. Contrary to received expectations, Miss Dellow is revealed to be neither fish nor flesh. The story’s Dark Lady is revealed as cultishly chaste. Instead, it is Elsa the sunny virgin whose propensity for sensuality is revealed. Gazing at Miss Dellow’s hands, she imagines their boss, ‘stooping his lips to take lumps of Turkish Delight from those curled fingers’. Sex itself is never again confronted as it is by a horrified Ursula in ‘The Rose in the Picture’, who witnesses her childhood beloved with his latest conquest, ‘locked together and kissing each other . . . gobbling, as if they were starved’. Yet it is always here beneath the surface, sticky and tempting. Lady Hildegarde Pryde, in ‘The Chosen and the Rejected’, apparently an archetypal feminine invalid, reveals her love of a John Donne poem that recklessly ‘makes one his mistress’. As Towers notes knowingly, ‘the shadows cast by romance are stained with Tyrian dyes’: that noble, classical colour purple was produced by the Phoenicians boiling sea snails in a deeply savoury stench. Towers’ mostly young(ish) protagonists were written (mostly) in middle-age, and it is that queerness—that brew of innocence and knowledge, of romance and cynicism—that dissolves the traditional moral classifications.
As the stories accumulate, they become more and more concerned with the chiaroscuro—the light and shades of life, and their necessary co-existence in the best of people—and the best of art. In ‘The Golden Rose’, the pale Aunt Essie tackles her niece’s horror at the physical component of love first with ‘a scientific point of view, very cool and antiseptic’, then emphasizes its ecstatic glory: ‘with a spiritual legerdemain, she tossed it up to the sky and caught it again sprinkled with star-dust’. Legerdemain, meaning ‘lightness of hand’—the term is appropriate for Towers’ writerly touch, but also points to her prismatic work with light and colour. Like Sandra in ‘Strings in Hollow Shells’, we come to know, through these stories, ‘people so rich in temperament that they seemed to cast pools of amethyst and sapphire at one’s feet, like a rose-window’. Stories such as ‘The Golden Rose’ and ‘The Chosen and The Rejected’ turn on an understanding that beneath a bleached and conforming feminine purity lie the jewel-coloured passions with which girls become women: in Lucy Hillier’s case, ‘the red-gold woman of her most secret imagination’.
Décor and decorum—domestic goods and the Good—have always been closely linked, and Towers’ closely documented, chiaroscuro interiors are moral as well as aesthetic spaces. In ‘Violet’, the furniture of the Titmus family home is imbued with ancestral heredity. It has ‘that dumb but sentient look, as if something of their personalities had passed into it and fed and enriched it’. Georgia Dellow’s witchy mystique is destroyed with a glimpse of her bedroom, like a ‘dismantled old provincial theatre’ with dolls and poorly tinted prints. Though Towers never set a story in the region of her birth and earliest years, the household placement of Oriental objects reliably signifies commendable taste and conduct. One story, ‘The Little Willow’, makes a Chinese jade its emotional and ethical centre. Towers’ objets tend to have a striking radiance, even an agency. Lady Pryde’s diamond ring, for example, seems ‘to heliograph the intimation that she was a greatly cherished person, and to attract and hold all the light in the room’. In ‘Tea with Mr. Rochester’, as Prissy enters the home that is her Thornfield Hall, she notes of its furnishings that it was ‘as if these inanimate things were possessed of a magical potency, endowed as in a fairy tale with a strange life and consciousness of their own’. Across the stories, lustrous bowls, tables and shells, like the flowers displayed with them, are strangely animated. They invite the trailing of fingers, they implore a caress. And when the protagonist of in ‘Strings in Hollow Shells’ touches her new lover’s face, she does so as if he too were an objet: ‘“I can’t believe it,” said Sandra, touching his lips and eyes curiously with her fingers, as one touches a remote and haunting thing brought suddenly within one’s reach.’ All these domestic environments, simultaneously homely and strange, dappled with light and darkness and haunted by their pasts, are curated and presided over by women, for the domestic aesthetic, like the diary of the literary daughter, is a female art and a powerful dominion.
When a writer dies young, or rather, in Towers’ case, early in their career, the work they leave is inevitably tinted with loss. But this collection needs no artificial colouring—it radiates light and life in an utterly unconventional cosmology of women and girls, light and dark, fish and flowers, and shining objects on lustrous surfaces.
Alice Ferrebe
University of Chester
February 2024
Alice Ferrebe is Head of Academic Skills at the University of Chester. She is the author of Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950-2000 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Literature of the 1950s: Good, Brave Causes (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). She is currently writing a book on the writer Elizabeth Taylor.