Life as a single girl in London during the First World War sounds like a lot of fun. Living in cheap, furnished rooms in Bayswater or Hampstead with a bunch of friends, cooking omelettes and drying your hair over the sitting-room fire; working untaxing nine-to-fives in a war office, then heading to Soho for dinner with a soldier on leave where not even the bang of an air-raid warning rocket could spoil the zabaglione and cheap red wine; then off to the Mimosa Club to wrap up the night with tea and gossip and treacle roll, then home to bed to do it all again the next day.
Such is the world that spreads out before you like afternoon tea at the start of the Latchkey Ladies, a newly rediscovered 1921 novel by the little-known Canadian author Marjorie Grant. She wrote seven more (five under the name Caroline Seaford); this one is part of the Classics series from the Bath-based independent publisher Handheld Press.
It starts in 1917 at the Mimosa, a club created by widowed Mrs Templeton to give “simple comforts” to working women (and a brilliant fictional counterpunch to the rich literary heritage of mens’ clubs; step aside, the Drones and the Diogenes).
At the Mimosa we meet the latchkey ladies (a self-appointed term for their means of going in and out of rented rooms at all hours): irrepressible, quick-witted Maquita Gilroy; beautiful, vulgar chorus girl Petunia Garry; and Anne Carey, the slowly-emerging heroine. They live, precariously, in a world that is transforming: the Hon Miss Bridson, who never smiles at anyone who isn’t in Debrett’s, is indignant at being forced to share a dining room with a lady in a wine-red dress (“There was no mistaking her position in her society, or rather out of it”). As the once-granite walls dividing class and gender crumble like so many bombed-out buildings, it’s a good time to be a young woman. Perhaps.
I have a bad tendency to think that fiction that asks whether women might be happier single than married is a recent invention. Wrong (as Jane Austen or Dorothy L Sayers could attest): Latchkey Ladies has neither the insidious misogyny of romantic comedies that elide success with coupledom, nor the false-ringing chipperness of self-help books that celebrate single life as a straight road to self-empowerment.
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Grant gives her characters space to grapple with a choice that never has been straightforward: the omelette-scrambling freedom of being by yourself grates against “the moments when independence seemed the most forlorn ambition on earth. A prolonged struggle for a tram or bus in a sleety wind after a long day in an office induced a state of gloomy self-questioning that was not adequately met by boiled beef.” Even today, such honesty (let alone lightness of touch) is rare in fiction. In 1921, it was surely radical.
Maquita falls in love with her best male friend, but finds that “marriage is held to my head like a pistol”; Petunia concludes that “it’s much easier just to live with someone you love, and then go away when you get tired of it” and is baffled by her lover’s insistence that she marry him. In different ways, every woman in the book seems to chafe against romantic convention, from Anne’s twin aunts, lesbian and asexual respectively (although those words are never used), to a female country doctor who dreams of setting up family planning clinics.
Most uncomfortable of all with the path expected of her is Anne, yearning for security one minute, setting her life on fire the next. It is she, least demonstrably outrageous of the girls, who makes the hardest and most unconventional choices. In these she is unapologetic, refusing to be cast as a femme fatale: “I can’t bear this nonsense of women tempting and men betraying. We meet halfway, I think”. She is a social disruptor, but not a villain — a woman who ditches conventional morality but matches it with a code of her own.
Latchkey Ladies conjures up a gorgeous and forgotten world, where young women had more freedom than we might suppose. “I seemed to know so many people who lived and died in a kind of greyness. That hasn’t happened to me,” Anne muses at the end. But Grant is not in the fairytale business and she makes the reader watch as Anne suffers. In one particularly desperate moment she throws herself on the kindness of a free-thinking aunt and then watches as “the look she had dreaded to see passed instantly over Aunt Minnie’s face, a mingled shock and shrinking.” The world, even in wartime, is not kind to girls who transgress. It is a tragedy, wrapped in a tea cosy.
Latchkey Ladies by Marjorie Grant, Handheld Press, 320pp; £12.99
