C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

XLTHE LADIES, THE GWICH'IN, AND THE RATher book did not appear for thirty-five years. Perhaps she had a book rejected;perhaps she did not feel confident about her knowledge of the area and preferredto write about Cornwall for a time. Perhaps her marriage in I929 had a bearingon her interests. There is no definitive answer to this question. The complementaryquestion is why Vyvyan published the book when she did. Given thatArctic Adventure appeared just before Roots and Stars (I962) and Journry up the Years(I966), one wonders if her renewed interest in the North related to her urge towrite an autobiography. The first of the autobiography's two volumes ends withan account of the arctic journey, in which it is seen as "not only the most formidableenterprise but also, in a spiritual sense, the high peak of my life" (Roots175)·Vyvyan did write. Her family was well to do but, as her field notes from thistrip make plain, she felt obliged to manage her funds carefully so that she couldtravel more or less at her own expense, not her parents'. And her six articlesabout the trip, published between 1929 and 1938, must have yielded somefinancial recompense for the costs incurred. This effort at financial independencedoes not mean, however, that her journeys represented a rejection of thevalues that formed her; indeed, it is clear at points in her book that she affirmedher class's attitudes. In the tradition of women's travels, as Maria Frawley hasshown, writing not only justified and helped pay for the travel, but also, underthe guise of personal expression, offered women a forum for political and socialcommentary (33). Vyvyan's own descriptions of northern settlements and theinstitutional representatives and native people who live in them are not withouttheir own politics, despite her primarily aesthetic focus. But the values exhibitedset her within, not apart from, her class and culture. When she expresses surpriseat spotting an unshaven bishop, she offers an implicit comment on the standardsof northern society. When she expresses surprise, but does not repudiate, onenortherner's vehement opposition to mixed marriages, she conveys a tacitapproval of segregation. And when observing cultures other than her own-evenwhite cultures, such as that of nuns at remote missions or of lone prospectorsand trappers "on the toot"-she does not abandon the cultural baggage shebrought with her. When working their way up the Rat, she and Dorrien Smithwere not reading accounts of previous trips; they were reading Macbeth, aloud toone another. Vyvyan's taste in literature was not just of her culture, but of herculture's past, not on the cutting edge of the roaring twenties; her quotations orallusions to the poetry of the Bible, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Henry Van Dyke,