I have photographed my copy of Jane Dunn’s “Antonia White: A Life” with a vase of daffodils not because they reflected my mood whilst reading the book, but because I needed cheering up. A dear friend has been bullying me for years to read White’s classic novel of convent school life Frost in May. I finally acceded and thought it deserving it of its reputation. I can understand why this book was chosen as the very first Virago Modern Classic. Aware that Frost in May is heavily autobiographical, I then jumped feet first and with much speed into its author’s biography.As a cursory glance at this blog will show – I do love a good biography. But sometimes, just sometimes, reading a biography of a writer before one has read most of their work can be a shame. I suppose that the reason for this is that knowledge of the life and demons of a writer can taint the way we see their work. Jane Dunn’s biography of Antonia White is excellent, but I wonder if I should have waited.
Antonia White – the first Virago lady was a remarkable talent. Born in the last year of the 19th century, Antonia’s life changed when her father converted to Catholicism when she was seven years old. Her father’s conversion was the defining spiritual event of Antonia’s life and she would turn it and its implications over in my her mind for many years and in the midst of doubts, rebellions and reconversions. Her father took to his new faith with gusto and Antonia was sent to be educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton. Her account of th
e cruelties and bigotries of convent school life – where children were encouraged to fall asleep with their hands clasped in prayer lest they should die in the night still has the power to shock us today.It was not simply Antonia’s spiritual landscape that was laid out at Roehampton. So too, her identity as a writer was formed. The dramatic events at the end of Frost in May (which I will not spoil for readers who have not read it) left Antonia with a profound, tormenting sense of personal victimhood and an inability to write fiction. Although her writing was outstanding, she would never, even as a grown up woman be able to write purely fictional work. Like another Virago writer of the same period – Barbara Comyns – her writing was cathartic and based on her own life. For Antonia – writing was associated with the greatest injustice of her life and this changed the way she worked forever. She suffered from extended periods of appalling writer’s block. She destroyed huge amounts of her work. This account of her life as a writer has left me wondering what she would have produced if she had been able to tackle fiction. Was it her early experiences at the convent that put the fire into her writing? Or did the convent partly stymie a talent that was always there?
This tussle between pain and creativity speaks of the dominating factor in Antonia White’s life. As was evident from her very early adulthood, Antonia White was severely and brutally bi-polar. She suffered from extended periods of crushing mental illness which sapped years from her life and poisoned most of her relationships with others – even, or rather especially – those closest to her. For me, the most striking part of Jane Dunn’s biography was where she compares the medical reports fro
m Antonia’s most dramatic breakdown, with her own fictionalised rendering of the same event. The clarity of vision and vivid language that White used to describe her darkest moments are staggering and the reader will watch anxiously for the strange interlacing of her depression and her startling creativity throughout this splendid record of her life.The other pictures that I have used here are a publicicty shot of the adult Antonia White - and also a school photograph of one of the Scared Heart's other famous old girls - Vivien Leigh.
