The Squire

Enid Bagnold’s writing in ‘The Squire’ is beautiful and full of power. Sometimes it is haunting. The novel’s strength lies in her writing and characters, as well as the way in which she portrays relationships so well, particularly between the young siblings: an incredibly perceptive author.

There is much that can irk the modern day reader within the pages of ‘The Squire’: the petty worries that fill her otherwise leisurely days are a far cry from the all consuming demands of modern motherhood. However, this shouldn’t detract from the essential power of the novel, which is in its beautiful and sensitive exploration of the emotional and physical connection between mothers and their children.

There is so much detail in ‘The Squire’ that you feel almost claustrophobic within the pages. This is surely intentional, to mirror the building pressure the squire of the title must be feeling in the final days of her pregnancy when she wants everything to be just so. What struck me as particularly interesting is the way the novel approaches the intricacies of household management between the wars.

Despite​ Stephen Dedalus’s assertion in 'Ulysses' that "amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life," motherhood isn’t a particularly common central subject for treatment in fiction. Nevertheless... Enid Bagnold’s 1938 novel THE SQUIRE [] describes the ‘strange, concentrated life, that no man knows, shared with the cat in the stable and the bitch in the straw of the kennel, but lit with the questions of the marvelling human brain’. Bagnold’s book’s most heightened passage is a description of labour, as a pain to be tuned into rather than fought, a flame that does not burn. There isn’t a lot of plot in THE SQUIRE, but plot is only one form of the sense of necessity required to provide a book with a power supply, and there’s nothing much more charged with necessity than a full-term baby’s passage through the birth canal... It seemed to Bagnold that ‘if a man had a child and he was also a writer we should have heard a lot about it.’ She set out to make THE SQUIRE ‘exactly as objective as if a man had had a baby’... Bagnold took notes on motherhood from the time of her first baby’s birth in 1921, and in THE SQUIRE she carefully differentiates the stages of the newborn’s awareness. ‘He fed greedily at one breast, and as his mother passed him over her body in the darkness he snuffled in a passion of impatience, learning already that there was a second meal, seizing the nipple, choking, and sinking to hardworking silence.’ Even the use of the word ‘nipple’ was controversial in 1938; H.G. Wells reported that the book made him feel as though he’d been ‘thrown into a washing basket full of used nursery napkins’, though his tone seems closer to mock outrage than to the real thing. The image of the squire’s baby falling asleep immediately after a feed with ‘his nose bent by the weight of the breast’ has a sharp tenderness. In fact, THE SQUIRE displays an offhand stylistic brilliance page after page: ‘The paddling bodies on the fringe of the incoming tide glittered as they moved. Old women’s pallid faces turned green in the strange aquarium sunlight, and the naked children shone like buttery metal.’ But a number of factors counted against its being considered a classic, among them Bagnold’s silly-sounding name, her comfortable circumstances (she married the chairman of Reuters) and the huge success of the screen version of her 1935 novel 'National Velvet', starring a 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. It sometimes seems that the enthronement of Virginia Woolf in the canon has entailed the demotion of a whole generation and a bit of women, not just Bagnold (born 1889) but Rose Macaulay (born 1881) and Sylvia Townsend Warner (born 1893). This seems especially unjust when one of them successfully addresses, as Bagnold does in THE SQUIRE, the area where Woolf is weakest – engagement with the body, unintellectualised sensual experience. With characteristic insouciance Bagnold outfaced the assumption, lingering nowadays in a phantom form, that addressing specifically female experience makes for minor art.