E. B. C. Jones

Biography

Emily Beatrix Coursolles Jones (known as 'Topsy' to her friends) was born on 15 April 1893 in London. She was the youngest of eight children of Major Charles Jones of the Royal Artillery and Mary Jane Ross. She was educated for a time in Paris, where she got to know historian Eileen Power, a college friend of her older sister Margaret — but unlike her sister, she did not go on to college.

Jones's first book was a volume of poetry, Windows (1917). The following year, she edited an anthology of recent poetry, Songs for Sale, which one critic found to be generally unadventurous and too indebted to Britain's poet laureate, Robert Bridges, although one of Jones's own poems was singled out as a happy exception.

Jones's first novel, Quiet Interior, was published in 1920 and praised by such notable contemporary authors as Katherine Mansfield and Rebecca West. She went on to write a handful of other novels: The Singing Captives (1922), The Wedgwood Medallion (1923), Inigo Sandys (1924), Helen and Felicia (1927), and Morning and Cloud (1932). Although they were generally well received, they have fallen into obscurity in the years since.

Jones's novels deal with World War I, its immediate aftermath, and its effects on Britain's educated classes, exploring relationships among the young in the changed wartime and post-war worlds. Quiet Interior is set during the War, the plot revolving around the relationship between two sisters, Claire and Pauline Norris, and their romantic entanglement with a man named Clement. The Singing Captives is set in 1920 and examines the War's destructive consequences for a well-to-do family. The Wedgwood Medallion moves on from the War, focusing on an engaged couple who discover their incompatibility, triggering events that draw in both their families and their friends. Inigo Sandys begins in Cambridge University after the War, where its eponymous protagonist struggles with the first of three doomed relationships. Several characters from Quiet Interior reappear in this novel. Helen and Felicia and Morning and Cloud examine love and marriage among the cultivated middle-class young in the 'liberated' later Twenties. All six novels, to some degree, are studies in compatibility and incompatibility — Jones's central theme.

Jones moved in London's literary circles, associating with the Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf admired "her spruce shining mind") and corresponding with writer Dorothy Richardson and others. She reviewed modern fiction for The Adelphi in the 1920s and '30s, and wrote reviews of crime fiction for The Spectator and of novels by such writers as Mary Butts for other publications.

Jones died of a stroke on 30 June 1966.

Personal life

In 1921, Jones married F.L. Lucas, a classical scholar and literary critic who taught at Cambridge University. Jones's sister Petica was married to classical scholar Donald Robertson, Lucas's former supervisor at Trinity College. Lucas had fallen in love with Jones after reading and admiring her first novel, Quiet Interior. Jones based the characters Hugh Sexton in The Singing Captives (1922) and Oliver in The Wedgwood Medallion (1923) on Lucas, and dedicated two novels to him. In turn, Lucas's semi-autobiographical first novel, The River Flows (1926), includes a character based on Jones, Margaret Osborne. They were married for eight years. Her partner from 1930 to the end of her life was the lawyer Donald Livingstone McIntyre (1905–1981), who was a prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War. Her sister Petica was killed while on air-raid warden duty in 1941, the only civilian casualty in Cambridge of German bombing.

Novels

Quiet Interior (London 1920)

The Singing Captives (London & New York 1922)

The Wedgwood Medallion (London & New York 1923)

Inigo Sandys (London & New York 1924)

Helen and Felicia (London 1927, New York 1928))

Morning and Cloud (London 1932)

Short stories

'The Bathe' (The Nation and Athenaeum, 10 Dec. 1927)

Poetry

Windows, verse by Christopher Johnson and E.B.C. Jones (Oxford 1917)

Criticism

'E. M. Forster', 'Virginia Woolf', two essays in The English Novelists; a survey of the novel by twenty contemporary novelists, ed. Derek Verschoyle (London 1936)

Anthology

Songs for Sale : an anthology of recent poetry, ed. E.B.C. Jones (Oxford 1918)

Quiet Interior (1920)

Set in middle-class Westminster, Bayswater and Berkshire, 1915-16. Unselfishly and secretly, Claire Norris, 21, loves gentle Clement Parsons, who regards her as a true, wise but over-cerebral friend. She confides in her sardonic and whimsical friend Henrietta Lincoln, who gives her D. H. Lawrence's poems and advises her, "Don't be too scrupulous, oh don't! It doesn't pay... You're his friend, and if you want him, for the Lord's sake take him!" Sensing Clement's lack of passion for her, Claire rejects his tentative sexual advances that might have turned his feelings for her into love. She regrets her coldness the more because Clement is off to the Western Front: "She had seen him stand within her grasp, and had not reached out a hand." He is soon back, wounded and invalided out of the army. Claire helps her younger sister Pauline, 19, escape the advances of the cynical Ivor Webb, only to find Clement falling in love with Pauline. Claire unselfishly encourages Clement in his love for Pauline: "Be as impulsive as you feel," she tells him. "Don't check yourself; above all don't be diffident. Oh, Clement, diffidence is the devil!" Their older step-sister Hilary returns from a long stay in Russia, worldly and insensitive; she is struck by Pauline's beauty and immediately starts plotting a 'good' marriage for her. After various false starts Hilary learns that Clement not only has money but is now also the beneficiary of the will of a comrade killed in action. She therefore targets Clement for Pauline. Claire at last, though she has lost Clement, begins to fight back against the scheming Hilary. She is drawn to Henrietta's strong silent brother Lucien ('Lucy'), both being inspired by the happy marriage of Henrietta to a soldier-artist, Bill Osler, who is off to the Front... Claire, her 'quiet interior' and development, are the novel's central focus; she is also the modern middle-class feminist, longing to work at a time when work for middle-class women is scarce (she works as unofficial secretary to her Member-of-Parliament father). The impact of the War on the younger generation, especially on young women, and the clash of generations in their different outlook on the War, are central themes. Visiting Clement in a war-hospital, Claire reflects:

These men were, or had lately been, in pain; they had struggled in hell, and no stillness and peace, comfort and security, flowers or sunlight, could ever quite atone. She felt herself responsible — as is every inhabitant of every land at war — for their suffering and loss of limbs and health, their horrible memories and intolerable nightmares, and her responsibility combined with her immunity made her ashamed.

The Singing Captives (1922)

Set in upper middle-class Kensington and rural Derbyshire in 1920, the novel centers on the family of Sir Harold Peel ('Hal'), who appears stolid and sensible to his children but conceals from them his addiction to risk-taking on the stock-market. Lady Peel (Leila) appears silly and superficial to her children, concealing from them a core of wisdom born of Victorian thwarted love and marital compromise. The four children do not know their parents. Caroline ('Cabs'), 28, has closed in upon herself (apart from a Cathy-Heathcliff type relationship with her brother Roden) since her fiancé, Gerald Sexton, was killed in Mesopotamia in 1917. Detached, she observes life and her family critically and perceptively. Roden, 27, a war veteran, is in rebellion against his family, his class and its values. Stella, early 20s, is a spoilt, superficial flapper; Francis, 18, a carefree public schoolboy lined up for Cambridge. Roden shocks his family — but not Caroline — by going out with and bringing home a 'common' London working girl, Grace Draper. Grace, like Liza Doolittle, has a dignity and self-respect, despite her comic lower-middle gentility, and is immune to the snobbery of the Peels. At the height of the Peels' superiority, and to the children's horror, Hal's financial affairs crash, sending the family plunging economically into the lower middle class. No society marriage and roaring twenties now for Stella: no Cambridge for Francis... The novel centres on Caroline, who, stricken by the War, learns to live and love again thanks to the example of Roden and Grace, to the confession of her mother Leila, who confides to her the story of her youthful suffering, and to the kindliness of her dead fiancé's brother, Hugh Sexton, who was gassed in the trenches. Hugh, however, finds Caroline still too lacking in vitality. "[She] was not steel to his tinder. To smite or to draw him into passion a woman would have to combine Caroline's delicacy of touch and fineness of perception with courage, enthusiasm, and a bolder outlook." Caroline will have to change. Webster's "We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry" is the novel's epigraph: the younger generation, apparently privileged but in reality trapped by the legacy of war and class, were singing captives. The novel ends with a note of liberation: Hal and Roden and Francis, like characters in Chekhov, will now have to do some real work; Stella must marry where she may; Caroline too will have to find work, though trained up to nothing by her upbringing.

The Wedgwood Medallion (1923)

Set in North Cornwall and Chelsea, 1922. Nicholas Watergate, 28, war veteran and son of a famous Victorian artist, is summer-holidaying with his two brothers and a friend, Oliver, 24, near Tintagel, without women. Denis Ash, 25, has invited himself along, so he can keep an eye on Nicholas for Enid. (Enid is Denis's sister. Nicholas and Enid married in haste when he was 21 and she 18. They are now estranged but hide this from the Watergate parents, living out a charade of happily-marrieds.) In Cornwall the young men meet a local family - all women - the Rendels: mother, Fia, and young daughters including cerebral Sophie, 22, and pre-Raphaelite Sheila ('Shelly'), 17. A few days later, Denis and Sophie, moved by the romantic setting, rashly get engaged. They are an "ill-assorted pair": Sophie intellectually honest, open, generous; Denis reserved, complacent, self-deceiving. Meanwhile, Oliver, a Cambridge Classics graduate, has fallen in love with Sophie:

Oliver looked at her and smiled; her hatred of sham pleased him exquisitely; he found that almost every time she spoke, it was to utter his thoughts in her own way.

She likes him more and more and Denis less and less. (The triangle here is similar to the one in F. L. Lucas's River Flows.) The Watergate parents arrive in Cornwall, as does Enid, a smug, hypocritical beauty, with a sporty young man in tow. Nicholas encounters Shelly alone by the sea at sunset and kisses her on impulse (as in A Room with a View). Shelly feels flattered; but the kiss was witnessed by father Watergate, who is outraged. Nicholas has insulted Enid and blighted Miss Sheila's bloom! Enid pretends to be upset, and magnanimously forgives her husband. (Freedom within a broken marriage suits her.) The Watergate brothers, Oliver and the Rendell girls all see through and dislike Enid. Sophie is unable to hide her dislike of Enid from Denis, who is blind to Enid's faults. Denis, realising their incompatibility of outlook, breaks off the engagement. Sophie is shattered; she was still in love with him. Sensing Oliver's love for her, she turns to him... The Wedgwood medallion, a male figure on one side, a female on the other, is a gift from old Mr Watergate to Sophie. To him it means the difference of the sexes; to Sophie the sexes are alike: it's character and values that matter.

Inigo Sandys (1924)

Set in Cambridge, London and Berkshire, 1919-23. At Cambridge, Inigo Sandys, 19, longs for someone to call his own. He doesn't respond to undergraduate-friend Charles Wickham's advances (Charles is gay) — he doesn't understand them — but, sexually ambivalent himself (Jones told her friend George Rylands that Inigo was based on him), longs romantically for friendship with flaxen-haired Ny Crayshaw in the year above. Charles drops Inigo, who is shocked, hurt and puzzled. In London a year after graduating, Inigo, 22, is in a love-tangle: his old school friend Roddy Hirst loves, unrequited, Lydia Laud, who loves, unreciprocated, Inigo, and who hates, reciprocated, her sister Jocelyn. Inigo has had little experience with women; he thinks he is in love with poised, suave, ruthless Jocelyn, 24, a sculptor, and despite Roddy's warning that Jocelyn has never loved anyone, he marries her. Lydia, despairing, later accepts Roddy. After an apparently happy honeymoon, Jocelyn turns out to be unresponsive to Inigo — she's lesbian, as we learn towards the end of the novel. Inigo, still in love with Jocelyn, is miserable about his sexless marriage. "Restraint was laid on him like fetters. Every day was a fresh death for the daily new-born hope that this inexplicable change had been merely a mood". Eventually he gives up on her and goes abroad. A year later, back in England, he is drawn into the circle from Quiet Interior. Claire (née Norris) and 'Lucy' (Lucien) Lincoln are now happily married; Lucy's sister and Claire's best friend, Henrietta, 28, is now a young widow, Bill Osler having being killed in action near the end of the War. Inigo is not attracted at first to Henrietta; he admires Claire. He is gradually drawn to Henrietta by his interest in Bill's paintings, and then by her qualities — courage, good sense, sensitivity, intellectual honesty, humour. Henrietta, half French, is appalled by French havoc in the Ruhr, which is sowing the seeds of another European war. She shows understanding and sympathy when Inigo tells her about Charles and Jocelyn: "An immense relief came to him, as though he were thus made once more a member of a beloved community — exile at an end". Inigo grows to love Henrietta in a way that makes him feel he has never before loved anyone:

Charles needed me, and I didn't know how to manage and respond; and so he was angry and wretched. It was stupid of me, and unkind... "It takes time to acquire the technique of kindness," Henrietta said. How well she puts things.

His feelings are returned. But Henrietta is consumptive. Inigo goes to live with Claire, Lucien and Henrietta in the country. He meets Jocelyn again and finds he is indifferent to the woman he had once loved "in compulsion and blindness, in rapture and pain". Inigo and Henrietta are quietly happy in their last months together, days made poignant by their knowledge of her impending end. She dies of a haemorrhage one winter afternoon with Inigo beside her. Moments later Inigo shoots himself with Bill Osler's service revolver.

Helen and Felicia (1927)

Set in the Home Counties, London and Wiltshire in the mid-1920s. Slim tall fair-haired Felicia Cunningham, 15, is second-youngest in a family of eight children — or rather two families with one father. The house in the country is full of tensions, so Felicia escapes through dreams and long walks. Her favourite sister (only true sister) is the clever, analytical Helen, 18, who is off soon to Newnham, Cambridge. Felicia depends for happiness on Helen's presence and misses her badly when she's away; Helen loves Felicia and sometimes forgets, in their chats, that she's only 15. Helen was a hit at Miss Ffoliot's boarding-school for girls, and now it's Felicia's turn to be sent there. Felicia hates school: Miss Ffoliot is paranoid about over-close relationships between the girls. She does make one friend, bohemian Bridget Sholto, and in the holidays in London meets Bridget's brother James. Helen meanwhile learns that their step-sister Anne, 26, married to a perfectly nice compatible academic, is restless in her marriage (for the first time in Jones, perfect compatibility, a theme of earlier novels, is not enough). This shakes all Helen's beliefs: whom, then, should one marry? What's the point of going to Cambridge and finding suitable male-friends? Their step-brother Cathcart, 30, meanwhile, has become besotted, in society London, with a friend's sister, the beautiful rich Pamela Wake, who won't have him; but in the course of a visit to the Wakes with Cathcart, Helen meets Pamela's brother Conrad Wake, who is impressed by her and invites her to Scotland. There he proposes marriage; Helen accepts him and decides not to go up to Cambridge. Felicia is torn: afraid of losing Helen but struck by Conrad, who is rich, handsome, wise, kind — and who drives a long sleek powerful motor car. Helen and Conrad are happily married, though Helen worries that they are so different — she is endlessly analytical and loves mutual confidences, he is the strong silent country type. When Felicia, now 17, visits them in their big country house in Wiltshire, Conrad notices her grace and her love of riding and the country. At 18 Felicia leaves boarding-school early and joins a dance-school in London where James Sholto is the only male student. In London she attracts the attention of predatory men and is rescued by James. One day, now 19, she is off to visit the Sholtos, when a long sleek powerful motor car passes by in the street. On impulse she takes a train to the country to visit Helen and Conrad, back from their holidays, but finds only Conrad at home (Helen has stayed on with friends). He hosts her with perfect gentlemanly tact and hospitality; indeed he is so wonderful (a sort English Dick Diver) she feels uncomfortable and feels she must leave. Later she confesses to Helen, now 22, that she finds Conrad very attractive. Helen sees that Conrad is also in love with Felicia, though Conrad and Helen are happy with and sure of one another. "It's not natural to be chaste," thinks Helen. "She ought to have love affairs; she's nineteen and a half." Wanting Felicia to live with them and not feel uncomfortable, she lets Felicia know that "nothing could ever come between us" (the two sisters) and that "we must take what pleasure we can". She generously absents herself, and in the interval, in a passage of great beauty and delicate symbolism (the setting is summer), Conrad takes Felicia's virginity. The novel ends with the two sisters and Conrad in a blissful ménage-a-trois.

Morning and Cloud (1932)

Set in London and the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1930. Returning from work, Cedric Benton (ex-Harrow and Cambridge) contemplates his wife's light, spacious, tastefully-decorated house in Hampstead. He had married tall rich cool Bride Palliser, now 28, after a brief holiday romance four years earlier. They have two little boys. Theirs is a marriage of non-communication: Bride avoids talk of feelings. When she and her brother Johnnie were small, their mother Gertrude had walked out and remarried; now, newly widowed, Gertrude returns. In tow she has a niece of her second husband, small crop-headed Anthea Ridley, 22. (Anthea was orphaned early and grew up with cousins in a vicarage in the Yorkshire dales. She studied at the Slade and is now an artist; but she is poor, has no studio and is dependent on infrequent hand-outs from mean Aunt Gertrude, who has purloined her inheritance.) Invited to Cedric and Bride's, Anthea is surprised to find one of her paintings there, bought (by coincidence) by Bride at an exhibition. To help her, Bride commissions Anthea to decorate the children's nursery with murals. Bride's brother Johnnie, 26, falls under Anthea's spell and starts inviting her out, but his proposal of marriage disappoints her: she wants an affair.

The rush of her attraction to him would undoubtedly have carried her eager and unreflecting over the bar of her virginity, had Johnnie not been restrained by fealty to a code which she did not recognise... The warm, quick natural outflow of her sexual nature towards him was checked, thwarted, turned back upon itself.

Cedric and Anthea meanwhile enjoy talking while she paints: her receptiveness reawakens his interest in existence. She is puzzled, however, by Bride, wondering how a person who appears to be so uninteresting can "produce in her surroundings an effect so satisfying: it was strange that dullness and evasion should translate themselves into order, serenity and formal beauty". The murals done, in the summer holidays Anthea visits her cousins in the dales. Johnnie pursues her there. He is now ready for an affair, but she has cooled. She rebuffs him. Experiencing "the blank heavy sickness of loss", he leaves. Feeling guilty and needing someone to talk to, she writes to Cedric, who makes some excuse to Bride, cuts short his holiday in France, and motors to Yorkshire. They walk up into the hills and admit their love for each other. Anthea leads him up a ravine to a waterful with rock-pools and strips naked. Back in London, Anthea leaves her aunt, takes a dingy bedsit, and finds work as a drawing-teacher. She and Cedric are now lovers. He tells Bride he is in love with Anthea; Bride has been expecting the news and receives it in silent distress. Cedric is wrong-footed by her refusal to talk. "When we plan to inflict pain, we know not what we do; and when, coming to the very act, a partial knowledge is forced upon us, it is sometimes the aggressor who is stunned." Her strategy is to give him time to get over his passion. Anthea had expected Cedric to leave Bride; she has over-estimated Cedric's love for her. Under the strain of uncertainty, isolation and poverty — she has not yet received her first salary — she falls ill in her garret. Cedric, socially busy as ever, is slow to visit her. When he finally does, she asks only that he tries to see her from time to time. She awakens next day feeling better and watches, as an artist, another dawn over the London rooftops, a violet scene of morning and cloud.

Overview

Jones's novels were experimental and modernist by virtue of their attitudes and subject-matter rather than their narrative technique or form. She used naturalistic, chronological, 'slanted' third-person narration without intrusive authorial voice. There are, however — the one exception — some stream-of-consciousness passages in Inigo Sandys, using the second person. The novels are notable for their portrayal of the dynamics of large families with grown-up siblings, for their subtle presentation of (often failing) love-relationships among the cultivated middle class, for their frank 'Cambridge-salon' type dialogue, and for their sensitive evocations of English settings. "She has a beautiful visual gift," wrote Rebecca West in the New Statesman, "and a sense of character that can be brilliant or touching," while Katherine Mansfield, reviewing Jones in the Athenaeum, admired her "distinction of style". Jones's gifts, among them her wit, were sometimes likened to those of Jane Austen, but Jones considered Austen narrow and was lukewarm about the comparison. The Cambridge Review found in The Wedgwood Medallion "all the qualities which an earlier generation associates with George Eliot". Her friend Dora Carrington thought her last novel, Morning and Cloud, her finest.