How to be a Heroine: the works of O Douglas

The Setons  

published 1917

Pink Sugar 

published 1924

both by O Douglas/ Anna Buchan

 

Blogfriend Shay FORCED me to read these books – see this post – and I may not have read everything Douglas wrote, but I have tackled all the ones found in a most unwieldy collection on Kindle, including a memoir of her life. (I had already read Penny Plain, on the blog here). O Douglas was the penname of Anna Buchan: she was the sister of John Buchan, author of Thirty Nine Steps and also the Governor General of Canada (if only that was an ambiguous sentence – in the 1930s it has to have been John with the important job).

She wrote best-selling books in her day – I think now less well-known than her brother, but perhaps I’m wrong. She had a happy and satisfying life, travelled a lot, was very close to her mother (as so many of her heroines are), never married or had children, but was deeply involved in the lives, and offspring, of the friends and family around her. All this seems reflected in her books, which are largely set in the borders area of Scotland.

The works varied a lot in how readable I found them, but most of them had some points of interest, so I will speed through brief descriptions of those I liked…

 

The Setons – is about a family in Glasgow: the widowed father is the minister, his daughter Elizabeth is the heroine. She is bringing up her much younger brother. (this is a common theme in the books: a young boy who is semi-adopted by a single woman). Douglas says, and you would believe her, that people loved this book’s portrayal of the city – she says ‘Some wrote from distant parts of the Empire saying they could never hope to see the "blessed, beastly place" again, but when the longing for it came over them, they could sit down with The Setons and smell the rain in the Glasgow streets.’

There are moments to surprise – Elizabeth is a classic Douglas heroine, wholly wonderful, but her friend says to her: "Ay, Elizabeth," she said, "you sound very humble, but I wouldn't like to buy you at your own valuation, my dear" ie - you are a good person, but you know it and are somewhat full of yourself.

There is a lovely touching moment when a solid, rather difficult young woman suddenly describes her fiance: “he liked me, he wanted to talk to me, he looked at me first when he came into the room. He's three years younger than me, and he's not at all good-looking, but he's mine, and when he looks at me I feel like a queen crowned."

And then – two thirds of the way through, O Douglas tackles the date head on. The book was published in 1917. This is what she says:

You know, of course, Gentle Reader, that there can be no end to this little chronicle? You know that when a story begins in 1913, 1914 will follow, and that in that year certainty came to an end, plans ceased to come to fruition—that, in fact, the lives of all of us cracked across. Personally, I detest tales that end in the air. I like all the strings gathered up tidily in the last chapter and tied neatly into nuptial knots….

… but, she says, she would have liked to be able to give everyone happy endings, but it is 1917 and she can’t say what will happen. Brave and unexpected.

 

Pink Sugar is as light as the name suggests, and deals with a set of people in a small Scottish town. Kirsty  has had a strange unsatisfactory life travelling the world with her stepmother and now wants to settle down and do good works.

This is 1924.

I was intrigued by this description:

‘you don’t look thirty, child. You can stand in that glare of revealing sun and work with spring flowers and fear nothing. You’re rather like a daffodil yourself, now that I come to think of it, with that green frock and cloud of pale yellow hair—your eyes are green too. Did you know that?’

‘Of course,’ said Kirsty, attempting to make a weak-kneed daffodil stand upright, ‘that’s why I’m so fond of jade. . . .’

Because it reminded me of a description from Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women, from 1917:

 

Alwynne had certainly looked out of place at the mistresses' table, on the day of her arrival, with her yellow hair and green gown—"like a daffodil stuck into a bunch of everlastings," as an early adorer had described her. The phrase had appealed and spread, and within a week she was "Daffy" to the school…

Two books could hardly be more different than these two…

Green dress, not very yellow hair but the best I could do, NYPL.

Green dress at the top of the post, also NYPL – this distinctive style of illo from the 1910s

(Green dresses harder to find in pictures than other colours – was it less popular?)

Here is a judgement – in O-Douglas-world you are never in doubt as to which characters are nice and which aren’t. Where do you think someone who thinks books are messy comes…?

Mrs. M’Candlish did not care for many books lying about—nothing, she thought, gave a room such a littered look; so such volumes as the house contained were confined strictly to the study, where smoking was also allowed. The drawing-room was seldom used, except to impress visitors.

 

This same character later:

Mrs. M’Candlish looked at her watch—a quarter to seven. There would just be time to finish a story she was reading in The People’s Friend. She took the paper from a satin-lined work-basket (she did not care to leave it lying about in case any one thought the Friend, as she called it familiarly to herself, frivolous reading for a minister’s wife), and in a second she was absorbed.

Nothing wrong with The People’s Friend – ‘the world’s longest-running women’s weekly magazine’ – of course, and we managed to link it with the French Revolution in this post.

But THIS below is what a heroine should be like, in every respect. This is O Douglas Woman, with the correct surroundings, thoughts and lack of vanity despite being very beautiful:

 

All the windows stood wide open, and the chintz curtains swayed gently in the warm wind. The room was dainty with spotless muslin covers and cushions. A great bowl of roses stood on the dressing-table. Kirsty herself was a vision of delight in a soft white dress and a shady hat trimmed with roses. She was not thinking of what she looked like as she stood there before the mirror. She was smiling reminiscently at something Bill had said, and thinking of the hundred little pleasant things that went to make up her day.

Picture is A Young Woman with Roses by Alexandre-Jacques Chantron  from Wikimedia Commons.

 

In the comments on the bridge coat post, blogfriend Sovay mentioned this description from Carola Oman’s 1940 book Nothing to Report:

She was attired in a well-worn leather jacket, a crocus-coloured head-handkerchief tied under the chin, a brief tweed skirt of startling green and yellow checks, silk stockings, woollen socks, and brogues.

 

So I was intrigued to find this in Pink Sugar – surely they could have been best friends:

In the country Lady Carruthers affected somewhat bizarre raiment. This afternoon she wore a very short skirt of many colours, a jumper of a single violent hue, checked stockings and shoes so exaggerated in the way of tongues and heavy soles that they made her seem feather-footed. As she never walked a step if she could help it, there seemed little reason for such sporting attire.

Deep regrets that I can’t find illos for either of these…

So that’s ticked some O Douglas boxes – there will be more to come…