The Love-Child by Edith Olivier

I have blogged before about The Love-Child, one of my favourite books and in my ongoing list of 50 You Must Read, but I've never been very happy with my post on it.   Nor do I think the following wholly encapsulates how wonderful the novel is by any means, but... I thought it worth sharing.  I wrote it for Hesperus Press's Uncover A Classic competition - but, sadly for me, a different book was chosen.  More on that soon, but I decided not to put my '500 word introduction' to waste - and so, just in case you've yet to read this beautiful novel, here is the piece I wrote for the Hesperus competition...

photo source

Edith Olivier’s The Love Child (1927) was her first novel, and easily her best.  Although rediscovered as a ‘modern classic’ in 1981, it has not been reprinted since – perhaps because it resist categorisation – yet it deserves a far wider, rapturous audience.


The Love Child tells the story of Agatha Bodenham, a middle-aged childless spinster mourning the death of her mother as the novel opens.  She fondly recalls her childhood imaginary friend, Clarissa, and even copes with her loneliness by talking to Clarissa again.  This attachment grows until one afternoon, to Agatha’s surprise, Clarissa herself appears in the garden: ‘She was smaller even than Agatha had imagined her, and she looked young for her age, which must have been ten or eleven.  […] Physically, she looked shadowy and pathetic, but a spirit peeped out of her eyes, with something of roguishness, perhaps, but yet it was unmistakably there.’

Initially Clarissa is visible only to Agatha, but gradually others can see her also – and Agatha copes with both the joy of new-found companionship, and the embarrassment of explaining the sudden appearance of a child.  Eventually she decides she must pretend that Clarissa is her own daughter; her love child.  ‘She had saved her.  But at what a cost!  Her position, her name, her character – she had given them all, but Clarissa was hers’.

Olivier constructs a mother/daughter relationship which is more poignant, and more vulnerable than most.  Clarissa may disappear as suddenly as she appeared – especially when, as the years progress, a local man named David begins to fall in love with her.  Agatha’s possessiveness and uncertainty are drawn beautifully, demonstrating the pain suffered by one unused to love when her creation may be taken from her.  She is not cast as a villain, but simply a lonely woman battling for the solution to that loneliness.  Olivier herself had neither husband nor children when, in her fifties, she was inspired to start writing novels.  According to her autobiography, the idea for The Love Child came to her suddenly in the middle of the night, and was written ‘during those feverish wakeful hours when the body is weary but the mind seems let loose to work abnormally quickly.’  The novel certainly reads with the enchanting spontaneity this writing process suggests and, although often addressing sad topics, is far from a melancholy book.  This is primarily due to Clarissa herself.  She is a captivating character – naïve, almost elfin, yet fascinated by science and delighted by motorcars – she animates not only Agatha’s monotonous life, but enlivens the whole novel.

In a short book, which could easily be read in two or three hours, Olivier encompasses moving and involving themes in a warm, lively manner; it seems absurd that this beautiful novel should ever have fallen out of print.  A new generation of readers deserve to discover The Love Child.

Country Moods and Tenses - Edith Olivier

It's no secret that I love Edith Olivier's The Love Child (by the by, any of you who are enjoying Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child, I definitely recommend The Love Child as a companion read).  I keep reading more books by Olivier, and being disappointed that they're not as good... Well, this blog post mentioned Country Moods and Tenses (1941) as their favourite of her works, and it sounded like it might be useful for my thesis, so I got a copy online and read it speedily.  And I paid a teeny bit more to get this unusual and beautiful cover, created by Olivier's friend Rex Whistler.

Sorry the photo is a bit dark, but you get the impression.

Well, long story short, it won't replace The Love Child in my affections - but it's still rather a lovely book to have on the shelf, and is quintessentially Olivier.  The more I read by her, especially her non-fiction, the more I realise that she sees herself primarily as a countrywoman, and as a Wiltshire-woman.  She was mayor, after all.

Country Moods and Tenses is subtitled a 'Non-Grammarian's Chapbook', and in it Olivier outlines village life in five grammatical tenses/moods: Infinitive, Imperative, Indicative, Subjunctive and Conditional.  The associations between these and the chapters is somewhat fanciful (Indicative for travelling; Conditional for the changes of modern life; Subjunctive for human relationships, etc.) but it's as good a method as any for discussing the countryside in a period where traditions and village-individuality was already fast disappearing.  There's plenty of country folklore, which Olivier swears by:

Birds and animals have many habits which indicate the coming weather to a wise watcher.  If the partridges are still flying in coveys on February 1st, it foretells a late spring; if they pair as early as the last week of January, the season will be an early one.  Pheasants crow in the night to warn of the approach of bad weather, but lately they have decided that German bombs are as bad as tornadoes.  They are extremely sensitive to the sound of a coming raid, and can hear, or feel, the fall of a high-explosive bomb quite twenty miles away.  Then at once they lift up their voices in shrill chorus.

But it is not just the flora and fauna in which Olivier is interested.  She turns her attention to the human inhabitants of Wiltshire, including many photographs.  Those of scenery are a little underwhelming (being in black and white, they offer rather less than modern day equivalents) but the many and various photographers (including Cecil Beaton) have captured some astonishingly natural shots of labourers and villagers.  These were the most interesting to me.  Indeed, through Olivier's country moods, it was human behaviour which most appealed to me. Those of us who are familiar with E.M. Delafield's Provincial Lady will identify with this excerpt - which, by the by, is one of the elements of Olivier's countryside which certainly hasn't changed:

In spite of the country genius for making festivals out of buying and selling, nothing can prevent a Sale of Work from being a terribly dreary affair; yet every village must have at least one every summer.  For weeks beforehand the whole parish is busy with preparations.  A garden is lent; the morning arrives; the stalls are prettily arranged; and then, a few hours before the time fixed for the opening ceremony, the goods have to be hurriedly scrambled into the schoolroom to escape a deluge of rain.  Everyone agrees to make the best of it.  A leading lady of the neighbourhood declares the sale open.  The clergyman makes a tactful speech.  The members of the audience look feverishly round.  There is nothing at all to buy, and nobody to buy it.

One of my problems with Olivier's writing elsewhere is that her writing is rarely witty - all a little too earnest. So I was grateful to find the above section, with its Delafieldian tones.  Although Country Moods and Tenses does lean towards the solemn for the most-part, these little flavours of humour help elevate the book.  And Olivier finds humour in her observations about the countryside she so dearly loves, in both present and past.

In the Middle Ages, the traveller in Europe (or even in England if he went beyond his own county) had to be an adventurous fellow indeed.  Morrison, who published one of the earliest road-books, tells his readers that they should certainly make their wills before leaving home; and one of his first bits of practical advice is an instruction on the different technique of duelling in each European country.  He tells the traveller that he will meet with more thieves in England than anywhere else; but he adds this encouraging postscript: "Having taken purses by the Highway, they seldom or never kill those they rob.  All private men pursue them from village to village with hue and cry."

It is the future which Olivier cannot observe with laughter, from her 1941 vantage.  She worries about universal education meaning that village children no longer learn a trade, or follow in their parents' farming footsteps; she is concerned about the buildings which are insensitive to their surroundings; she fears that village will become homogeneous, losing their customs and heritage.  Who's to say that she was wrong?

But this certainly isn't an exercise in hand-wringing.  Olivier writes joyfully about the countryside, even while documenting its changes.  Who knows quite what her purpose was in writing Country Moods and Tenses?  Surely she couldn't have hoped to stall the changes.  Perhaps she just wanted a simple set of recollections.  It would be impossible to encompass all of 1940s village life in one book, but Olivier does capture at least her enthusiasm.  I'll finish with one sentence, entirely honest, which demonstrates Olivier's ethos - as well as the shifting sands she was up against:

And no one with a first-hand knowledge of the two could possibly prefer a screen decked with film-stars to a sty full of little pigs.