Tosh mistress
Richard West
Nettle and Steele Penelope Dell (Hamish Hamilton .25.50) The reigning queen of heart-throb fiction, Barbara Cartland has written that 'Ethel M. Dell was the first romantic novelist I read and I remember being thrilled with her books which I borrowed for two pence from the Lending Library. Her strong, passionate often brutal heroes excited me, and her very feminine and elusive heroines were everything I was brought up to think a woman Should be be.' (From a preface to the Corgi, 1975 edition of Ethel M. Dell's The Knave of Diamonds.)
It is not, hard to See why The Knave of Diamonds, Ethel M. Dell's second novel, Published in 1913, was to inflame a generation of housemaids, ladies' companions, nurses, governesses and bored wives out in the colonies. Its erotic passion is all the more powerful because it is not made explicit in physical detail: 'It seemed to Anne that she had left the earth altogether, and was gliding upwards through starland Without effort or conscious movements of any sort, simply as though lifted by the hands that held her own . . . There was a quivering ecstasy in that dazzling, rapid rush that filled her veins like liquid fire.'
There was also a strong and explicit streak of cruelty: 'His hand shot suddenly , out from behind him, and there followed
the whistle of a thong with which he kept his dogs in order.' Indeed her biographer and 'adopted niece' Miss Penelope Dell says that 'Ethel was frightened of her latent sexuality and masochistic tendencies; with reason, for her descriptions of .whippings are intimate, frequent, and told with relish.'
This very well-written, sharp but affectionate memoir is not only valuable social history but answers the question that long has puzzled aficionados of P.G. Wodehouse: What was the resemblance between the real Ethel M. Dell, authoress of The Hon. Burford, The Black Knight and Sown Among Thorns, to Wodehouse's fictional Rosie M. Banks, authoress of Madcap Myrtle, A Red, Red Summer Rose and Only a Factory Girl? It may be recalled that when Bertie Wooster's friend Bingo Little falls in love with a café waitress and fears that his snobbish uncle may stop his allowance, Jeeves recommends him to read to the old man a number of Rosie M. Banks's books in which love conquers class prejudice.
The uncle, sure enough, is won round to the point of view of Lord Bletchmore in Only a Factory Girl that 'be her origin ne'er so humble, a good woman is the equal of the finest lady on earth', and all might have turned out well had he not been led to believe that Rosie M. Banks was a penname of Bertie's. and had Bingo not fallen in love with and married a different waitress, this one serving guests at the Senior Liberal Club, where he and Bertie go when the Drones is shut for the holidays. Because the uncle is shocked by Bingo's fickleness, Bertie is once more roped in to use his power of persuasion quoting Rosie M. Banks's Woman Who Braved All: "What can prevail"— Millicent's eyes flashed as she faced the stern old man — "what can prevail against a pure and consuming love? Neither principalities nor powers, my lord, nor all the puny prohibitions of guardians and parents".' Strong stuff, but unnecessary because it turned out later that Bingo's new bride was the real Rosie M. Banks who had taken a job at the Senior Liberal in order to gather material for her forthcoming book Only a Rose: The Story of Mervyn Keene, Clubman. All ends well, and Rosie M. Banks makes an ideal wife apart from the tendency to write articles called 'How I keep the Love of My Husband-Baby' in which she refers to Bingo as 'half god, hay prattling, mischievous child'.
We now know that Rosie M. Banks was altogether more glamorous than Ethel M. Dell, who appears from this book as,a shy, rather plain woman who managed throughout the years of fame to keep any photograph out of the newspapers. The daughter of unremarkable middle-class parents, she became very dependent on her elder sister Ella (or `Sissie'), a highbrow who sang Mahler lieder and disapproved of Ethel's books, while not refusing a share of the royalties. She also disapproved of Ethel's marriage at forty, implying unfairly that she had been taken in by a gold-digger. In fact Colonel Gerald Savage, if not a hero from
one of Ethel's own book, (he had been in the Royal Army Service Corps) seemed to love and satisfy this passionate, not to say oversexed lady.
It is clear that Ethel M. Dell wrote most of her love stories without ever having been in love or even so much as been kissed by a Man. Her friendships with women, though often intense, seem not to have been anything more than friendships, although sister Ella may have had lesbian tendencies. Her very innocence may have allowed Ethel M. Dell to write in that style which strikes the modern reader as so blatantly erotic. Womens bodies constantly 'shudder, quiver, tremble, pulse, flutter and throb', are 'pierced' or 'stabbed' with 'darts' or 'fiery' emotion. In her naiveté she allows a heroine dressed up as a cabin boy to be fondled and whipped by a naval officer, and one of her last books, written after her marriage, contains the astonishing declaration: 'I will only make love to you with your feet on my neck', which sounds like something out of the Kama Sutra.
But then Ethel M. Dell was never a stickler for detail. For a woman novelist, she was oddly uninterested in dress or colour. The birds, whose snatches of song announced the arrival of lOved ones at harbour or garden seat, were almost invariably blackbirds and thrushes, though sometimes transposed into mavis and throstle, apparently to avoid repetition — not that she minded much about repetition. Although Ethel M. Dell based some of her characters on her servants, she would never have dared, like Rosie M. Banks, to go to work at the Senior Liberal Club.
Most critics agreed with Rebecca West, writing in 1925, thatEthel M. Dell 'rode the Tosh Horse, hell for leather', but ridicule did not seem to upset her. She and her sister mixed little with intellectuals except with Maurice Bowra, who seems to appear by some kind of statutory right in every literary book about the 'twenties. As usual he is described as a tremendous wit but is made to sound pretentious and boring.
As early as 1924, one or two critics observed what to us seems glaringly obvious, of Ethel M. Dell's romances the amazing resemblance in theme, inspiration, idea and even in prose style, to the novels of D. H. Lawrence. The only important difference is that in Dell it is the women who fall in love with someone above their station, whereas in Lawrence it is the other way round. Instead of Only a Factory Girl, we get Lady Chatterley's Lover.
The comparison is unfair to Ethel M. Dell, whose name is perhaps better remembered in the delightful round sung at Cambridge, about 1927, which, so Penelope Dell says, would much have delighted Ethel: con brio Shakespeare, Milton; Shakespeare, Milton; Shelley as well; Shelley as well, dim Ella Wheeler Wilcox; Ella Wheeler Wilcox, PP Ethel M. Dell; Ethel M. Dell.
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