Michael Pascoe charts the career of the novelist who described Clifton life between the wars.
If the straitlaced matrons of Clifton between the two world wars had known the secret private life of their favourite author, E H Young, it is quite possible that they would not have read her novels – at least not in front of their servants.
Emily Hilda Young was a best-selling novelist of the 1920s and 30s but few people today would recognise her name. Virago re-published her books in the 1980s which has helped keep her name alive but she was not widely ‘re-discovered’ by the critics. Emily Young was born in Northumberland 1n 1880, the daughter of a shipbroker and educated at Gateshead and Penrhos College, Colwyn Bay. She first came to Bristol in 1902 when she married a Bristol solicitor, Arthur Daniell. After first living near the Downs, in 1907 they moved to a top floor flat at 2 Saville Place, Clifton (a plaque records her stay there). This was at a period when the suffragette movement was at its height (in 1913 extremists burnt down the University’s sports pavilion at Coombe Dingle. Retaliation was swift. Male students wrecked the offices of the movement which were opposite the University).
Emily became a keen supporter of the struggle but still found time to publish three unremarkable novels. It was at this period that she began an affair with the married man who was to remain her lover for the rest of her life. With the outbreak of the First World War, Emily worked first in a munitions factory and then in a stables. Arthur Daniell was killed in the bloody battle of Ypres in 1917 and the following year Emily moved to London to join her lover, Ralph Henderson, who had been at Bristol Grammar School with her husband. To preserve appearances Emily lived in a separate flat in Ralph Henderson’s house in a classic ménage à trois.
This change seemed to be the catalyst that Emily needed to develop her art. Seven major novels followed, all based on Clifton, thinly disguised as ‘Upper Radstowe’. The first was The Misses Mallet, published originally under the title The Bridge Dividing in 1922. There then followed William in 1925, Miss Mole (1930), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for that year, Jenny Wren (1932) and a sequel The Curate’s Wife (1934), Celia (1937) and finally Chatterton Square in 1947. All the novels share a discerning examination of Clifton and its inhabitants and Emily has been called ‘the apostle of quiet people’.
The class structure and shibboleths of what was then a much more rigid and structured society and the ways in which these beliefs could distort their holders and their relationships are depicted in a style which has been compared to Jane Austen’s or, more recently, to Barbara Pym’s writing. Emily describes with equal ease all the social classes which made up the fabric of Clifton society, whether rich merchants, tradesmen, clerics of competing religions, charladies from Hotwells, and the increasing
number of gentlefolk attempting to keep up appearances in the straitened circumstances of inter-war Britain.
Like many of her generation Emily was a great walker and it is possible to trace most of the paths and streets which she describes in detail and even identify individual houses. Some of the names are fairly obvious to the Bristolian; Albert Square is Victoria Square, Nunnery Road an alias for Whiteladies Road and Chatterton Square is Canynge Square.
Whether describing ‘moving tramcars like magic lantern slides, quick and coloured’, the hawthorn on the Downs in Spring or the Suspension Bridge and the Gorge, she paints Clifton as no one else has done. It must be remembered that Emily was writing from memory which makes her achievement even more remarkable. Despite gently satirising the class, sexual and religious creeds of the time, no one was more aware of the danger of breaking these taboos. Her lover was no less than a Headmaster, and of a major public school at that – Alleyns School, Dulwich – and therefore bound by a stricter moral code than most professions. One hint of scandal could have destroyed Henderson’s career and seriously damaged her own. Emily was more fortunate than some of her characters. Mrs Henderson appeared to like her and she was generally popular. She and her sister, Gladys Young, the radio actress, were keen and skilful mountain climbers and they had many friends. The affair was never discovered. On Henderson’s retirement he and Emily moved to Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire and it was there that she wrote her last novel and two children’s books before dying of lung cancer in 1949. The couple never married.
