Abstract
During the postwar period marriage was considered woman’s prime, if not only, career choice. While this view was reinforced by the romantic fiction of the period, other fiction written by women chose to question the bland assumptions behind the ‘happily ever after’ ending. Their ambivalence about such happy endings was centred on the woman’s choice of husband rather than on marriage itself.
‘I married you,’ he said slowly and clearly, ‘because you are going to be extremely beautiful, which means for me that you will be a pleasure to see, a delight to be with, and because, possessing you, I shall be envied by others.’1
… the tragedy of marriage is not that it fails to assure woman the promised happiness … but that it mutilates her; it dooms her to repetition and routine.2
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Notes and References
Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Long View (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. First published in 1956) pp. 223–4.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. First published in UK in 1953) p. 496.
Olivia Manning, The Doves of Venus (London: Virago, 1984. First published in 1955).
Ibid, p. 306.
Ibid, p. 37.
Elizabeth Taylor, Palladian (London: Virago, 1985. First published in 1946).
Ibid, p. 190.
Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty (London: Virago, 1982. First published in 1953).
Elizabeth Taylor, A View of the Harbour (London: Chatto & Windus, 1947. Reissued 1969).
Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Beautiful Visit (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. First published in 1950).
Ibid, p. 309.
Ibid, p. 310.
Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence (London: Grafton Books, 1981. First published in 1953) p. 52.
Pym, Jane and Prudence, p. 29
Ibid, p. 219.
Howard, The Long View.
Ibid, p. 254.
Howard, The Beautiful Visit.
Barbara Comyns, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (London: Virago, 1983. First published in 1950).
Ibid, p. 9.
Ibid, p. 213.
Ibid, pp. 217–18.
Barbara Comyns, Mr Fox (London: Methuen, 1987).
The term ‘wide boy’ was used during the war to describe men who profited from activities bordering on the illegal, especially in the black market. More guilty of sharp practice than of outright crime, they used cunning and shrewdness to survive in difficult circumstances.
Quoted on the book jackets of several novels and in Madonna Marsden, ‘Gentle Truths for Gentle Readers. The Fiction of Elizabeth Goudge’, in Images of Women in Fiction. Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Bowling Green, Ohio, USA: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1973) p. 68.
Lucilla and Sally appear in the Eliot trilogy and Stella in Gentian Hill.
The ‘green world’ is particularly important in The White Witch (1958) and represents the true power centre of the novel (see chapter 3 of present book). Note also the suggestive episode of the casting-out of the image of the Virgin Mary with its echoes from the cult of the goddess Artemis.
See Elizabeth Goudge’s autobiography, The Joy of the Snow (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974).
Ibid, p. 156.
Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1950).
Elizabeth Goudge, The Eliots of Darnerosehay (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1957).
Ibid, p. 57.
Ibid, p. 53.
Elizabeth Goudge, The White Witch (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1958. Reissued 1979).
Elizabeth Goudge, The Heart of the Family (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1951. Reissued in The Eliots of Darnerosehay).
Goudge, The Eliots of Darnerosehay, p. 58.
Ibid, pp. 235–6.
See particularly the portrayal of Margaret’s marriage in The White Witch. It is only on her widowhood that Margaret has the opportunity to mature and it is Parson Hawthyn who tells her, apropos of marriage, that ‘the propped never grow’.
Susan Ertz, Charmed Circle (London: The Companion Book Club, 1957. First published by Collins).
Ibid, p. 270.
Ibid, p. 22.
Ibid, p. 148.
Ibid, p. 319.
Susan Ertz’s earlier novels were not critical of family ideology. See, for example, the less subtle picture of a family during the war in Anger in the Sky (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1943). The social concerns she expresses in the novel are watered down by her portrayal of a middle-class family who are almost too good to be true.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Gollancz, 1965).
Mary McMinnies, The Visitors (Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1971. First published in 1958).
Ibid, p. 199.
Margery Sharp, The Tigress on the Hearth (London: Collins, 1955).
Ibid, p. 42.
Ibid, p. 123.
Pym, Jane and Prudence.
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© 1989 Niamh Baker
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Baker, N. (1989). Happily ever after? The consequences of acceptance. In: Happily Ever After?. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20288-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20288-1_3
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