THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

only takes them as far as Liverpool and their journey is marked by Lily’s dim awareness that ‘while she expected to be
happy she was not and Mr Jones could only think of what they would do in Liverpool’. Lily returns, almost as
arbitrarily as she left, to the routines of her life in Birmingham.
Living was praised in its time for its evocation of the rhythms, repetitions, and deprivations of industrial life. An
equally original, but far wider ranging, representation of working-class life and working-class perception appears in
Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s remarkable trilogy, Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933), and Grey Granite (1934),
known collectively as A Scots Quair (its title is a proletarian echo of King James I of Scotland’s The Kingis Quair of
c. 1423). Gibbon, the pen-name of James Leslie Mitchell (1901-35), uses the thread of the life of Chris Guthrie and
her three marriages to draw his three independently shaped novels together. Chris’s marriages and widowhoods
occasion her movement from a farm in the north-east Lowlands first to a small-town manse and then to a boardinghouse
in a city. She endures the death of her farmer husband in the First World War and watches as the iron enters
the soul of the Scottish working classes during the period of the General Strike, the Depression, and the Hunger
Marches of the 1930s. The novels are distinctive not so much for their attempt to root private and public history in a
Marxist understanding of class struggle as for their return to the matter and the speech of Scotland. For Gibbon, the
assertively Scottish novel of the twentieth century should be expressed in a tempered version of the Scots vernacular
that his characters speak, a language which for them is embedded in ‘the smell of the earth ... and the sweetness of the
Scottish land and skies’. The predominantly rural Sunset Song opens with an evocation of place which is at once
mythical and sub-medieval, legendary and historical: ‘Kinraddie lands had been won by a Norman childe ... in the
days of William the Lyon, when gryphons and such-like beasts still roamed the Scots countryside and folk would
waken in their beds to hear the children screaming, with a great wolf beast, come through the hide window, tearing at
their throats.’ The violence implicit in this opening is reflected not only in the sharp divisions between the possessors
and the dispossessed examined in the subsequent narratives, but also in the death in battle of Chris’s husband Ewan
with which the first volume concludes. The widow at first refuses to recognize that her husband could have been
sacrificed for anything so irrelevant to him as somebody else’s war: ‘He wasn’t dead, he could never have died or been
killed for nothing at all, far away from her over the sea, what matter to him their War and their fighting, their King
and their country? Kinraddie was his land, Blawearie his, he was never dead for those things of no concern, he’d the
crops to put in and the loch to drain and her to come back to.’ Chris’s awareness of her particular place and of her
local identity is reinforced in the ‘Epilude’ to Sunset Song by the inclusion of the music to ‘The Flowers of
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the Forest’ (originally a lament for the fallen Scots in the disastrous battle of Flodden fought against the English in
1513). The melody, played on the pipes as the village’s War Memorial stone is unveiled, had earlier seemed to Chris
to hold in it not simply sadness of mourning but the accumulated history of her nation.
In the latter stages of Grey Granite Chris’s Communist son Ewan is fired by the idea that he is himself History: ‘A
Hell of a thing to be History! — not a student, a historian, a tinkling reformer, but LIVING HISTORY ONESELF …’. In
the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) the pervasive detachment from public events might be said to render
such an idea marginal, illusory, even irrelevant. Nevertheless the eighteen novels she wrote after disowning her first
published work, Dolores (1911), describe an enclosed, circumscribed, and dying historical world, drab in its
consistency. The variations between the novels are relatively small, though none precisely mirrors its predecessors.
Each is concerned with a small upper-middle-class group of characters in the period antecedent to the First World
War. The most common setting is a large if shabby country house, the most common grouping is the late Victorian
extended family. The small society Compton-Burnett observes does not consider itself oppressive or exploited, but in
each novel a complex series of oppressions and exploitations emerge. As a selection of her titles suggest (Pastors and
Masters (1925), Brothers and Sisters (1929), Men and Wives (1931), A House and its Head (1935), Parents and
Children (1941), Manservant and Maidservant (1947), and A Father and his Fate (1957) she concentrates on
relationships which imply power on the one side and submission and humiliation on the other. Power is exercised by
genteel bullies largely for reasons of personal vanity; it is these respectable oppressors who inflict an exquisite and
protracted mental suffering on their equally genteel victims. Men readily take on dictatorial roles while women and,
above all, children, represent an exploited class (though the positions and oppressions are reversible). There is little
room for kindness, warmth, and affection. ‘Dear, dear, the miniature world of the family!’, the eldest daughter in
Parents and Children remarks, ‘All the emotions of mankind seem to find a place in it.’ At the beginning of A Father
and his Fate the father, Miles Mowbray, serenely expounds the principle that his three unmarried daughters have the
life they ought to have: ‘A life in the family home, with the protection and provision that is fit for them. What more
could they want?’ When his nephew questions his judgement, the offended Mowbray insists that he is not a tyrant and
that his house is not a torture chamber. ‘Then it is different from many houses’, his nephew retorts. Compton-
Burnett’s style is as austere as her subjects are, though it often suggests a brittle sense of humour generally denied to
her characters. Her effects are achieved through conversation which is simple, undramatic, and determined by the flat