Antonia White and Manic-Depressive Illness by Patricia Moran (review)

The undeniably autobiographical fiction of British author Antonia White—a quartet of novels and a slender, fiery short story collection—makes a linked set of female Künstlerromans that are grievously underappreciated. Singular for their stylistic control and psychological incision, they delineate a young woman's faltering search for grace in a rigidly conventional middle-class world—or should I say, a devastatingly conventional middle-class world. White's work takes place in London and its outskirts in the 1910s and 20s, in which its heroine's labor of forging a genuine sense of self is continuously confounded by forces beyond her control. Yet this is not art of explicit protest or critique. Like the work of her contemporary Elizabeth Bowen, who was an admirer, White's novels are political without naming their politics as such, so thoroughly does their heroine seem to have internalized the power structures and social expectations against which she struggles. White's is literature tense with the exertions of working to articulate one's own truth in a world that cannot quite accommodate or recognize that truth as such.

In contrast to her carefully crafted works of fiction, White left behind rafts of often fervid correspondences and journals, which were posthumously published in 1992, as edited by White's daughter Susan Chitty. It should be noted that in 1985 Chitty also published a memoir of life with her mother, a book whose tell-all glee—for this reader at least—casts some doubt on its usefulness as a reliable guide to White's life and work. Many critics have found the temptations of this biographical material too great to resist. Faced with this archive's abundance of suggestive detail—intimations of incest and rape, accounts of mental breakdowns and forced institutionalizations, records of her many failed marriages, incessant writer's block, and years of psychoanalytic treatment—scholars have come to focus much of their analytical energies on the intricacies of White's messy life, instead of on the fictionalized life story White still managed to wrest from the apparent turmoil of her day-to-day. In many ways, this has done more to cement White's reputation as a train wreck of a struggling female writer than it has to illuminate her specific contributions as an author.

From the title alone, Patricia Moran's new study of Antonia White appears to follow this critical pattern exactly. Moran persuasively takes issue with White's real-life diagnosis as a schizophrenic, only to retrospectively replace it with another diagnosis—bipolar disorder—a disease through which, Moran argues, White's life and thus her work might more accurately and fruitfully be read. In this, Moran hews to the well-established habits of biographical-psychoanalytic criticism, for which White's life, to be sure, offers an especially graphic case study. Moran uses both White's earlier misdiagnosis and this new diagnosis as a crib sheet for explaining the author's personal struggles, especially her difficulties coming into her own as an author. She compares White's disordered life to the (purportedly) more stable careers of Virginia Woolf and H. D., those fellow female modernists who suffered too from severe psychiatric disorders—but who, by Moran's telling at least, were fortunate to have a better understanding of and relative control over their own diseases. Through this lens of pathology, Moran also explicates some of the knottier nuances of White's fiction—reading, for example, White's religiosity (she was a Catholic convert twice over), as well as her emotional entanglements with her domineering father, as symptoms of her struggles with mental illness. From her diaries and letters, White appears to have been debilitatingly insecure, paralyzed in her artistic ambitions by near-constant waves of guilt and shame. She burned through affairs and marriages and bungled her maternal duties, and she chastised herself endlessly for these perceived failures. For Moran, manic depression offers an explanation for these erratic emotions and behaviors also described in her...