Part 3 of The Character Assassination of Alison Uttley

Shame, taboo and family tragedy

In previous posts I looked at how Alison Uttley, author of Little Grey Rabbit, Traveller in Time and many other books, was accused of crimes ranging from an obsessive feud with Enid Blyton to an incestuous passion for her own son. In this final post I’m going to look at why she might have been subject to this barrage of attacks. But first I’ll look at a final claim: that she bears responsibility for the tragic suicides of her husband and son.

“it is impossible not to think of her as a sorceress, a storyteller whose tales were produced only at a mortal cost.”

Penelope Fitzgerald on Alison Uttley, London Review of Books

The quote from reviewer Penelope Fitzgerald is so beautifully expressed, as you would expect from Fitzgerald, that it carries its own conviction: it feels like it must be true. But does it fit the evidence? By “mortal cost” Fitzgerald can only be referring to the tragedies of Alison’s husband’s and son’s suicides. James Uttley drowned himself in 1930, leaving Alison a widow at the age of 45; their son and only child John killed himself in 1974, just two years after Alison’s own death at the age of 91, after decades of mental health struggles.

I will try and be careful in my discussion of these events. I’m no expert in mental health, and these tragedies occurred a long time ago. But I do think it is fair to question the way Alison was made the scapegoat.

Alison and James

Alison married James Uttley, a civil engineer, in 1911 after a long engagement. My impression is of a warm and loving relationship: they shared many interests, joked together and called each other by the affectionate pet names “Bimbo” and “Mimbles”. She was devastated by his suicide from drowning in 1930 and frequently expressed her grief while also harking back to happier times in the pages of her diary (which began in 1932). His death left her with enormous problems, practical and financial as well as emotional. In the midst of the Great Depression she struggled to get her newly launched writing career off the ground, and to support their sixteen year old son, John.

There seems little doubt that James Uttley struggled with poor mental health for much of his adult life. Not only are there many references to his anxious nature in Alison’s diaries and elsewhere, but his family and biographer also agree that he was fragile with a “nervous streak”. He sought medical advice prior to his suicide, but long before that struggled with the stresses of work. Alison wrote later that he was too sensitive for his chosen career. In 1914, when Alison was pregnant, he actually gave up his job, which meant the couple became homeless and had to ask help of relatives. This period was later referred to in her diaries as one of “awful difficulties”. He then served through the entirety of World War I.

“it is plain she expressed her discontent by becoming an overcontrolling and overassertive wife and mother” 
Denis Judd, Alison Uttley’s Biographer

Yet despite this history, it is to Alison that her biographer assigns much of the blame for her husband’s tragic death. She was a “nagging wife”, who put pressure on her husband, with material ambitions beyond what James could provide. This is part of a more general claim that she was “self-pitying” and “singularly overbearing”, and that “few were able to measure up to the demands she made of them”. With regard to her marriage the main source is her in-laws, the Uttleys. They never seem to have got on with Alison and after James’ death relationships deteriorated further, as they found her demanding and difficult and she felt they had abandoned her to financial hardship.

It’s enormously difficult to untangle the truth of any set of family relationships. Alison was a strong character, and could be spiky – she would not have attained her later success otherwise. She chafed against expectations that she would be a docile, invisible widow. Yet “nagging wife” seems an extraordinarily harsh judgement. Whether or not Alison interrupted James when he was working in the evenings, her main initiative in the two years prior to his suicide was to start writing seriously for publication. It’s possible she was aiming to contribute to family finances, as well as revisit her own childhood – in any case, her hours of solitary work did not place additional burdens on James.

Most likely James’ anxieties about money had little to do with objective circumstances. In her diary, Alison recalled how during their engagement she became dangerously weak because she was economising on food – trying to please James who “urged me always to do without”. Her own farming family were horrified. It’s very hard to deal with a family member who has persistently poor mental health, and whether Alison cooperated in his anxieties about money, or countered them, it probably made little difference to the underlying problem.

A Spinner of Tales?

As well as “nagging”, Alison is also accused of propagating a “censored version of her life” which enabled her to avoid facing up to her “guilt and remorse” after James’ death. Her biographer points to her fictionalised memoir The Country Child which reinvents aspects of her childhood – for example, by removing her younger brother; and sees as signficant that she did not refer to the cause of James’s death when interviewed as a successful children’s author. This picture of Alison as a personal and professional fantasist makes it easier to dismiss the version of her life in her diaries.

Yet in fictionalising her life Alison did no differently from other authors – as I’ve previously discussed. It also incredibly naive to think that that any children’s author of the time was likely to publicly share tragic or controversial aspects of their life. It was not a confessional age. Enid Blyton omitted her marriage break up from her fan magazine, shifting seamlessly from references to her first to second husband without ever acknowledging the change; Noel Streatfield invented male love interests for her fictionalized alter-ego “Vicky”, probably to conceal her attachments to women. It would have been astonishing if Alison had chosen to share her husband’s suicide publicly.

In fact, there’s some evidence that Alison was the one who wouldn’t conform by shutting up about James. She wrote in her diary after his death that his relatives often refused to speak his name or reminisce. It was she who – despite their discomfort – insisted in bringing him up in conversation. Of course, there is no right and wrong in grief; people mourn and move on in different ways. But the desire to censor a painful past may not have come solely from Alison.

Alison’s Son

Tragically, John Uttley’s life was to demonstrate many of the same features as his father’s. Like James, John struggled with the stress of work (as a history teacher at various public schools) and then experienced the trauma of serving in a World War. In Alison’s diaries, she refers to his complaints about poor memory, lack of confidence and suspicion of his colleagues; also his unsuccessful attempts to get relief through therapy, writing or moving school. Eventually John retired early, and went to live with his wife Helen in Guernsey. My own tentative impression is that John’s sense of persecution and blame may then have transferred itself from former colleagues to his elderly mother. Certainly when she died he indulged in a frenzy of destruction of her possessions, before taking his own life two years later.

When I read Alison’s diaries my main feeling was sympathy with her pain in witnessing her son’s struggles. Most poignant is when he returned to her after World War II – which included a dreadful period when he was missing in action – and her enormous joy is soon replaced by near despair as his mood plummets on returning to work. Alison’s bewilderment and attempts to help her son seem genuine to me. No doubt she got some things wrong; maybe at times she stuck her nose in too much or not enough. It’s not clear what would have helped, though. There are no easy answers; especially in an era before effective treatment. For her biographer, however, her guilt is taken as read - and with no attempt to consider the cultural context in which she lived.

Taboo, shame and fear

Alison grew up a Victorian in a rural, farming background. A lack of effective treatment was one reason for the taboo around mental health problems (madness, as it would once have been called) and suicide. “Bad blood” could taint families, while the importance of “breeding” was very real to farmers used to raising livestock; the taboo of suicide was also underlined by Christian belief. Ironically Alison’s later scientific education may have reinforced these ideas. Eugenics – the supposed need to breed from healthy individuals (both physically and mentally) in order to prevent disorders – was mainstream idea among scientists and intellectuals before World War II, and both popular and respectable.

Though none of this might be openly discussed, assumptions can be all the more powerful for being unspoken. For the Uttleys, they could have provided an unconscious incentive to blame Alison for James’ difficulties. If Alison was the “nagging wife” that deflected from the likelihood that James’ had inherited a disposition to psychological distress. The same was true of her parenting style of John.

For Alison the implications were more tragic. I believe the fear of her beloved son following in his father’s footsteps must have haunted her. It was her brother, in 1946, on a rare visit who put the fear into words, commenting to a “tired and rather sick” feeling Alison that “if he wants to do a James, you can’t stop him”. Alison fought back, saying John wanted to do no such thing. Twelve years on though, she was writing of her son, “It is most strange this heavy cloud. It reminds me so much of James, alas.” At the time her son was struggling with his teaching work at Stroud school, and was shortly to have a full scale breakdown.

Alison’s Critics

All this seems to have passed her critics by. Perhaps this was because Alison’s biographer was operating within a vaguely Freudian framework (at one point attributing a “clear phallic symbollism” to Alison’s dream about her husband and a tulip – an interpretation which would have horrified Alison, and doesn’t convince me either). This is a perspective from within which it is easy to blame mothers in particular. It’s ironic that in the 2020s, views of mental health have come, if not full circle (thankfully), back towards acknowledging a greater role for the genetic and physiological. John and James Uttley may have been unlucky rather than victims of nagging or bad mothering.

Why didn’t feminists defend Alison? Most reviewers of her biography and diaries were women, yet they connived to condemn her as a “bunny boiler” and “controlling”. I suspect Alison was simply the wrong kind of feminist heroine. She may have graduated in physics and marched with suffragettes, but by the time she was writing her diaries she had become a firm supporter of the traditional, the domestic and the rural. She loved ceremony and Eton College, embraced patriotism, adored the royal family, and was a church-goer and Conservative. She undeniably came out with snobbish and prejudiced remarks at times, and derogatory references to race or background – but these seem poor reasons for allowing a remarkable woman’s legacy to be smeared.

What I actually like most about Alison’s diaries is their authenticity, and the fact that she was such a real person. The pain and challenges of being a middle-aged widow – and not even a respectable war widow – were formidable, and the obstacles to rebuilding her life enormous, even if the backgrounds to her struggle were leafy small towns and day-to-day domestic dullness. It was a lonely path. Like the women once condemned as witches, she was an older woman who often wasn’t wanted. Such women were once vulnerable to witchhunts, and perhaps they still were.

Maybe Fitzgerald, in describing Alison as a “sorceress”, was not so wrong after all.

Further Reading:

The Country Child (1930) by Alison Uttley

The Diaries of Alison Uttley (2011) edited by Denis Judd

Alison Uttley, Spinner of Tales (2010) by Denis Judd