Part 2 of The Character Assassination of Alison Uttley

Unnatural Passions?

In my previous post, I looked at the accusation that writer Alison Uttley pursued an obsessive feud with writer Enid Blyton. The important thing about this obviously absurd claim was that it helped to reinforce other claims against Uttley, such as that she hated women and either had no friends or always fell out with them; and still worse, that she nursed an incestuous passion for her son and drove her own husband to suicide. I’ll consider those here.

Uttley Had No Friends

Alison Uttley lived to be 91. She certainly did have fallings out with friends – not surprising, over a long life. She also had prickly relationships with some professional collaborators, such as Margaret Tempest, the illustrator of her Little Grey Rabbit books.

Yet she was also capable of deep and lasting friendships.

Two of these, formed as a young woman, were life-long. She met Gwladys Llewellyn when they were both students at Manchester University, part of the first cohort of young women to study there, and ‘GL’ is a regular reference in Alison’s diary from then on. Gwladys often stayed with Alison, as did Lily Meager or ‘LM’, another friend Alison made as a young woman. Lily encouraged Alison’s writing when her husband James did not, and helped her rework her early manuscripts. Alison’s friendships with both women continued for decades, and when they died, both left her substantial bequests in their wills.

Such long friendships are hard to reconcile with the image of the difficult and prickly egotist painted by her biographer. Other notable friendships included the actress Margaret Rutherford; the elderly Professor Alexander, who liked her enough to offer to pay towards her son’s schooling; Walter de la Mare, who wrote a poem to her; and her editors at Faber. Her professional relationship with Faber lasted over four decades.

All Uttley’s writing is marked by a passionate intensity

None of this means Alison was easy and genial: she clearly was not. I feel she was particularly uncomfortable with her women friends in the Cheshire town of Bowdon after her husband’s suicide in 1930, and resented them; likewise her in-laws. Her personal tragedy – and suicide was a matter for shame as much as sympathy at the time – and straitened circumstances meant a great deal of patronising and cold-shouldering. The comfortably-off women who dished out financial advice or made sure to point out copies of her bad reviews, did not endear themselves.

Nor did her in-laws, who made it clear she was not behaving as a respectable widow should. She was supposed to get on with life, scrimp and save, and act grateful for any hand-outs. At least, this was how Alison saw it, and whatever the wrongs and rights of this perception it led to a virtual breakdown in relations. Alison decided she was better off without the Uttleys, and ultimately forged her own path.

It was surely this need to escape old connections, rather than a wish to pursue some mythical feud with Blyton, that sent her south to a new home in Beaconsfield in 1938.

Uttley had an “unnatural” passion for her son

Alison had one child, John, and after her husband James’ suicide they were essentially a family unit of two. Inevitably Alison focused her love and hopes for the future on her adolescent son. She looked forward to him coming home from boarding school, and felt an enormous wrench every time he returned there. She worried about how to pay his school fees and fund him through university, and later about his job prospects and poor mental health; she undeniably disliked his choice of wife. Most painfully, when he went missing during World War II, she had the agony of weeks fearing him dead.

“After the suicide, Alison’s relationship with her schoolboy son John became closer and then too close”
Penelope Fitzgerald, London Review of Books

The claim that her love for her only child trespassed into the “unnatural” and “apparently incestuous” according to biographer Denis Judd, are based on passages of her diary where she recounts kissing her adolescent son. She describes “long, clinging kisses” which, she says, remind her of her dead husband. Often these occur when John is going back to boarding school. “We had a great hug and a kiss in my bedroom, bless him.” Such passages do read oddly to a twenty-first century ear.

However, it’s doubtful they indicate sexual passion. For one thing, Alison was greatly given to kissing:

“… before he went, I suddenly leant forward and gave him a kiss” (1932)

“ ...we kissed two or three times. I felt I would never see him again. I felt like it’s parting from my father, or James going to the War.” (1938)

The object of her kisses here is her elderly friend and mentor Professor Alexander. There’s no suggestion that Alison and the Professor were ever attracted to each other, and indeed in 1938 he was close to death. The truth is Alison not only regularly recorded kisses with her friends, she even kissed copies of her own books when they arrived from the publisher, and somewhat mysteriously wrote “I welcome the new month, the month I love, with a kiss” (December 1932). In a similar vein, she held “conversations” with pictures she liked or even the stars. There is an almost Anne of Green Gables feel in her sentimental attachment to the world she lives in.

So it’s hardly surprising she would record kisses with her son. There are other differences too with ideas of contemporary parenthood. Alison and John often prayed together, for example, even when he was an adult; unusual to modern eyes but not sinister. A century is a long time: Alison did not grow up under the influence of Freudian ideas about parenthood, but as a late Victorian; and more generally what was taboo and hidden (suicide, sexuality) and open (religious devotion, platonic kisses) were different from now.

The idea that Alison was “too close”, possessive and smothering, doesn’t really fit the facts either. She sent her son away to boarding school, despite the financial strain, and then Cambridge, even though her friend Professor Alexander suggested he could stay closer to home, at Manchester University. As a young man John regularly travelled abroad and drove a car, presumably funded by Alison, though she could not afford either for herself. She supported him in his work and tried to find professional help for his mental health.

I do think she was most likely a dreadful mother-in-law to John’s wife Helen. It was perhaps inevitable there would be a personality clash: from Alison’s perspective, her rather naive son was making a lifelong commitment to a worldly “sophisticated” woman (Helen had been married then widowed in the war) while Helen considered Alison with her high-brow tastes and religious sensibilities a “snob”.

Alison and Helen weren’t the first mother and daughter-in-law not to hit it off, though. And as this post has already gone on too long, I’ll keep for the next post the issue of 1930s attitudes to suicide and mental health and how Alison suffers as a result, and also why, so many years later, her critics have been so determined to use their tragedies to damn her,

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Reading:

The Private Diaries of Alison Uttley 1932 - 1971: edited Denis Judd, introduction Ronald Blythe. 2009

Alison Uttley: Spinner of Tales: The Authorised Biography of the Creator of Little Grey Rabbit by Denis Judd. 2010