Women in Love, Class War and School Inspectors

Abstract

While Ursula Brangwen struggled through her last months as a pupil teacher of Standard Five at St Philip’s School her family went up in the world. Her father gave up his job as a lace-designer to become a peripatetic handiwork instructor, a new post created by Nottingham Education Committee. He was to spend two days a week at the forward-looking Grammar School at Willey Green. The family moved to the suburbs of the nearby colliery town, Beldover, where, said a friend, they would be among the élite. ‘They would represent culture. And as there was no one of higher social importance than the doctors, the colliery managers, and the chemists, they would shine, with their Della Robbia beautiful Madonna, their lovely reliefs from Donatello, their reproductions from Botticelli’ (R, p. 427). There may have been no one of higher social importance in Beldover, but beyond the grimy small town there was, of course, county society. It was some years before the Brangwens made an awkward début there. Ursula had taken her BA at the University College in Nottingham, where Gudrun went to art school; she had returned to Willey Green Grammar School as a class-teacher and Gudrun had gone to London. It was during one of Gudrun’s visits home that the other élite favoured the family with an invitation: the local industrial magnate opened his summer lakeside party to the rising professional class of Beldover, inviting for the first time the staff of the Grammar School and his senior managers.