A room for a girl

Let’s start with Lucy Honeychurch in A Room with a View:

Driven by nameless bewilderment, by what is in older people termed "eccentricity," Lucy determined to make this point clear. "I've seen the world so little--I felt so out of things in Italy. I have seen so little of life; one ought to come up to London more--not a cheap ticket like to-day, but to stop. I might even share a flat for a little with some other girl."

"And mess with typewriters and latch-keys," exploded Mrs. Honeychurch. "And agitate and scream, and be carried off kicking by the police. And call it a Mission--when no one wants you! And call it Duty--when it means that you can't stand your own home! And call it Work--when thousands of men are starving with the competition as it is!..."

"I want more independence," said Lucy lamely; she knew that she wanted something, and independence is a useful cry; we can always say that we have not got it. She tried to remember her emotions in Florence: those had been sincere and passionate, and had suggested beauty rather than short skirts and latch-keys. But independence was certainly her cue.

"Very well. Take your independence and be gone. Rush up and down and round the world, and come back as thin as a lath with the bad food. Despise the house that your father built and the garden that he planted, and our dear view--and then share a flat with another girl."

As soon as the first nicely-brought-up, semi-educated middle class girl expressed a wish to leave home, to find a job and thus to live an independent life, mothers and fathers began gnashing their teeth in anguish. Lucy Honeychurch in Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) was by no means the first girl to detonate a maternal explosion. The very next year HG Wells published a whole novel, Ann Veronica, based on his eponymous heroine’s determination to leave the parental home and find lodgings in London, to the absolute outrage of her father. Frederick Macmillan declined to publish Wells’ novel because it would be too shocking (Ann compounds her misbehaviour when she embarks on a love affair with a married man), but in fact both these novels end with their heroines respectably embarking on marriage. The safe ending.

Of course, for some women there was little choice in the matter of where and how to live: Dinah Mulock, author of the the Victorian bestseller John Halifax, Gentleman, had no mother to protect her and was forced to earn her living by writing, as her father was incapable of providing for the family. As early as the 1850s she was known to be sharing lodgings in Camden with another young woman, Frances Martin. The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell reported with some curiosity that they were ‘handsome young girls, living in lodgings by themselves, writing books and going about in society in the most independent manner, with their latch key.’ Dinah and Frances were lucky: finding lodgings prepared to take single women could be a challenge, as Ann Veronica found out: ‘One or two landladies refused her with an air of conscious virtue she found hard to explain. ‘We don’t let to ladies’, they said.’

Dinah Mulock (on the left) c.1858, possibly with Frances Martin?

The early nineteenth century novels of Austen and the Brontes are full of impecunious young middle class women who are forced to find work as governesses or lady’s companions, a respectable choice, and of course bringing accommodation with it. But there would never be enough domestic positions for all the women who needed to work by the 1900s. The 1871 census showed there were 3.25 million unmarried women, and a close study of the 1891 census suggested that there were more than one million ‘extra women’, ie more women than men, who would require some means of financial support. The gap in the numbers was exacerbated by male emigration, military service and a higher male mortality rate. Also, of course, men could delay marriage until it suited them, and then take their pick of the youngest entrants on the market. The situation for a woman in her late twenties or thirties was very different. As the nineteenth century progressed, the trickle of women who needed to support themselves and to live independently became a flood. Fortunately, developments in society gave them greater freedom than their grandmothers had ever known - it became acceptable for women to travel alone, to enter restaurants and shops, to establish their own clubs and societies, even to spend time alone with men. Women such as Nelly Erichsen and Bertha Newcombe, aspiring artists in the 1880s, took studios off the Kings Road in Chelsea where they could both live and work, and entertain friends like George Bernard Shaw.

Educational opportunities began to multiply: women could attend college in Oxford or Cambridge, even if they could not get a degree, and many other universities and colleges began to admit women on an equal footing with men. And for those who wanted a marketable qualification, there were teaching hospitals, teacher training courses, and schools offering courses in Pitman shorthand and typing. The big cities and towns created a demand for women prepared to do office work - but it was poorly paid, and unless the woman was able to stay in the family home and commute, accommodation was required. It made sense for working women to share lodgings, to pool incomes, to give each other physical protection and moral support. Parents were more likely to be reassured if their daughter was not living alone. The natural progression of this, and a welcome solution to the lack of accommodation, was the development of hostels or clubs devoted to the single working woman. There is a perfect description of just such an institution, the home of Miss Matfield, in JB Priestley’s novel of 1930, Angel Pavement.

The Burpenfield Club, called after Lady Burpenfield, who had given five thousand pounds to the original fund, was one of the residential clubs or hostels provided for girls who came from good middle-class homes in the country but were compelled, by economic conditions still artfully adjusted to suit the male, to live in London as cheaply as possible…there was accommodation for about sixty girls. For twenty-five to thirty shillings a week, the Club gave them a bedroom, breakfast and dinner throughout the week, and all meals on Saturday and Sunday. It was light and well-ventilated and very clean, offered an astonishing amount of really hot water, and had a large lounge, a drawing room (No Smoking), a small reading room and library (Quiet Please), and a garden stocked with the hardiest annuals. The food was not brilliant…fishcakes, rissoles and shepherd’s pie, but it was reasonably wholesome and could be eaten with safety if not with positive pleasure….What more could a girl want?

For some women, this was the ideal solution, and a happy continuation of the communal life they had enjoyed at University. For others it became a sign of failure: a failure to marry, a failure to provide for one’s own future, a trap that was hard to escape. For poor Miss Matfield, spending her days in the gloomy offices of Twigg and Dersingham, suppliers of veneers to the furniture trade, in tucked away Angel Pavement, it was a very worrying place to live :

Sometimes when she was tired and nothing much was happening, Miss Matfield saw in her [neighbours] an awful glimpse of her own future, and then she rushed into her bedroom and made the most fantastic and desperate plans, not one of which she ever attempted to carry out…soon she would be thirty. Thirty! People could say what they liked but life was foul.

JB Priestley in 1926

Angel Pavement is a great novel, written when Priestley was in his thirties and published within a year of The Good Companions, the novel that made his name and his fortune. Nowadays Priestley is known for his plays: An Inspector Calls is regularly revived and features on many school syllabuses, and When We Are Married still raises laughs. But his earlier novels deserve attention. Angel Pavement is a dark and smoky cul-de-sac in the City of London. Into the offices of Twigg and Dersingham bursts a confidence trickster, Mr Golspie, of unspecified but dubious Baltic origin, and he and his glamourous flapper daughter will wreak havoc on the lives of the unsuspecting and naive office staff. It is set in the midst of the 1920s Depression, when the spectre of unemployment haunted people’s nightmares, and when the power of the cinema was creating a new sort of dissatisfaction with everyday life and a yearning for something more glamorous. This is the weakness that Golspie will exploit, and one of the saddest victims of his deception is poor Miss Matfield, who finally becomes convinced that escape from the Burpenfield Club is within her grasp. But Priestley leaves us with the hope that this was just the shock to the system that she needed, and that she will now find the energy and determination to turn her life around.

I’m going to tell them there isn’t anything in that office, or connected with it, I won’t or can’t do if they will only give me a chance…I’m going to be really in business, not just sort of hanging on there…He could easily get another girl to do my typing and that sort of thing…Very soon, I might have a real job, with a decent salary and proper responsibility and everything…

Miss Matfield has finally had her ambition kindled, and if the sky is not exactly the limit, at least she might aspire to not just a room of her own, but her own little flat, and maybe a country cottage for the weekends, and a car…a girl can dream…

This exploration of how working women lived does not have a neat conclusion: perhaps the obvious punctuation mark is World War Two, which dramatically changed the social as well as the physical landscape. Women joined the workforce in unprecedented numbers, either directly in military service, or as the agricultural Land Army, or as nurses, or simply filling the office and factory jobs vacated by men who had gone to the Front. By 1945 social attitudes had completely changed, there would be no ongoing stigma for single women wanting to work and live away from their families, and the scarcity of suitable lodgings, for working men and women, was just part of the massive re-building project awaiting the Labour Government of 1945.