Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

The line of least resistance
Charles Reginald; in Tender and True first Robert North and Mary Lancaster, then
Rose Lancaster, Miles Davenant and Edward Masefield; in Mr Hogarth’s Will, Jane
Melville and Francis Hogarth; Amy Staunton, Lord Darlington and Allan Lindsay in
The Author’s Daughter; Kenneth Oswald and Edith Gray in Gathered In; Liliard Abercrombie
and Hugh Victor Keith in Handfasted: all become romantically entangled,
and each entanglement results in marriage. But there are some extremely unconventional
features about the difficulties placed in the way of the lovers, and sometimes
about the nature of the relationships that they form, which indicate that Spence did
not adopt those plot conventions unthinkingly. Rather, she seems to have engaged
with them, as a realistic framework within which she could depict her characters and
explore the themes which concerned her.
She drew her characters, at least partly, from people she knew. In her autobiography
she said that she shrank from the idea that she was capable of ‘taking off’ her
acquaintances. But she also confessed that Reginald in Clara Morison was her friend
John Taylor, and that Margaret Elliot in the same novel was herself. 51 Her ‘shrinking’
may have had more to do with consideration for the originals of such characters in
that novel as Mr and Mrs Bantam, Miss Withering, Mrs Tubbins and Mr Humberstone
– all of whom are most appropriately named. Jeanne Young noted that entries
in her diary ‘included very precise views on men, on friends, and on associates’, suggesting
that Spence was a close observer 52 or rather, listener. For Spence considered
that both of her sisters and her sister-in-law were ‘more observant of features, dress,
and manners’ than she was. ‘I took in more by the ear. As Sir Walter Scott says,
“Speak that I may know thee”. To my mind, dialogue is more important for a novel
than description; and if you have a firm grasp of your characters, the dialogue will
be true’. 53
Sometimes her dialogue is more than true; it is extremely funny. Here is the
new-comer, Miss Withering, talking with the South Australian-born Minnie Hodges,
in what Kay Daniels has likened to ‘a verbal War of Independence’. 54
‘It would have been a great thing for you, Miss Hodges, if you had been
two or three years in a good boarding-school in England. It would have
made you see things in the same light in which they appear to an Englishwoman
like me’.
‘And I think that a very unpleasant light’, said Minnie. ‘We have gone
with Mrs. Bantam to see five ladies today; I have been quite happy in
53