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  • From the Fallen Woman to the Fallen Typist, 1908–1922
  • Lawrence Rainey

Within a relatively narrow band of time, the fifteen years from 1908 to 1922, four British novels were published that share two salient features: the heroine is a female clerical worker (more commonly designated a secretary or typist) and she engages in premarital consensual sex (more commonly designated sex) with another (male) fictional character. Such dry precision skirts parody but also delimits a problem. The female secretary was shorthand for a recognizably modern phenomenon; she indexed a distinctly new occupational category that sprang into existence only after 1880 (in America) or 1885 (in Britain) and was indelibly linked with metropolitan experience (all four novels are set in London). She was the most visible, everyday representative of the modern woman.1 But her fictional sexual activity placed her firmly within the Victorian category of the fallen woman, one that elicited nearly universal opprobrium and in practice entailed social ostracism.2 The category’s very rigidity, on the other hand, had sometimes turned it into a resource for testing the limits of sympathy and compassion within fiction, as the fates of Hetty Sorrel (in George Eliot’s Adam Bede) and Tess Durbeyfield (in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles) remind us. How, then, are we to view these later characters and their fictional fates? Are they an improbable oxymoron, at once Victorian (fallen) and modern (secretaries)? And should our attention focus on their revision of earlier plot conventions or on their rhetoric, the fabric of language in which plots and conventions assume specific form? Or perhaps both?

With one exception, the authors of these novels are largely unknown, and none of the novels has achieved canonical status or received scholarly attention.3 The earliest is Sally Bishop (1908) by Ernest Temple Thurston (1879–1933), his fourth novel in a career that eventually included more than forty. The next is The Questing Beast (1914) by Ivy Low (1890–1977), her second novel. The third is Latchkey Ladies (1921) [End Page 273] by Marjorie Grant, her second book but first novel. The fourth and last is Lilian, issued in 1922 and authored by Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), by far the most well known of these four writers, then and now.4

Sally Bishop takes its title from the novel’s heroine, a twenty-one-year-old secretary working in London. But it also has a subtitle, A Romance, one its author defends in a prefatory letter addressed to Gerald du Maurier (1873–1934), an actor known for playing both Hook and Darling in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in 1904. Conventionally, he says, a romance should end with “the happiness that is ever after,” while the novel to follow is “perhaps the saddest story I shall write.” Yet a work can still be a romance provided it “possesses that quality of dreaming imagination in the mind” of its protagonist, just the trait his fictional Sally has. Hence, although his novel is not a “Romance that remains a Romance until the end,” it still merits that appellation.5 These remarks prepare the ground for later digressions about the theme of romance that recur throughout the novel.

The story line of Sally Bishop is fairly simple, though embellished with much incidental elaboration. Consider its beginning. While working at her office before a window, Sally is observed by Jack Traill, a passerby with time on his hands. Traill is a barrister whose legal practice is exiguous, supplementing his inherited income with freelance journalism. (The narrator calls him “a Bohemian.”) Since it is already near closing time, he waits for Sally to leave the office, follows her to a bus stop, then boards the bus that she takes, and contrives to find the seat located next to hers. He introduces himself, violating the period convention that men and women not speak to one another unless properly introduced. Sally, flattered but alarmed, gets off the bus to wait for the next one to come before continuing her journey homeward to the single room in a boardinghouse that she shares with Janet Hallard, an art student. Girl meets boy, in short, but formulated through baroque incident...

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