LETTICE COOPER: Life

Lettice Ulpha Cooper (1897-1994) in the 1930s

Lettice Cooper was born in Eccles but grew up in Leeds where her father worked at a steel-works in Hunslet.    This gave her the background that was translated into her Yorkshire novels.  Her life is similar to those of Winifred Holtby and Phyllis Bentley.  None married and all led lives informed by a variety of feminist and socialist concerns.   They lived in a time when Feud’s discoveries were being assimilated by a novel-reading public and democracy was being threatened by totalitarian forces of the Right and the Left.  For all three writers the emergence of a totalitarian Marxist Leninist Left threatened the democratic versions of socialism that they preferred and much of the work of Bentley and Cooper in the 1930s-40s was preoccupied with the psychology underlying fanaticism.    However, unlike many eminent people of the day, they did not regard Mussolini and Hitler men who protected their nation from Communism but as equal and opposite threats.   Even Churchill adopted the view of Mussolini as a bulwark against Bolshevism at some points of the 1920s. https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour-extras/the-creeds-of-the-devil-churchill-between-the-two-totalitarianisms-1917-1945-2-of-3/

For Bentley, Cooper and Holtby, as for Woolf, the extremes of Left or Right distorted or destroyed the humanity of those who supported such creeds.  

Intellectually and politically Cooper has more resemblances to Holtby than Bentley.   Like Holtby she was one of the first generations of women to go to Oxbridge.   Even though the current regulations prevented her from taking a degree, she read classics at Lady Margaret Hall.  Like Holtby, she worked as a journalist, reviewing for The Yorkshire Post from 1947 and 1957 and, for a year, was the editor of Time and Tide.

Working for The Yorkshire Post looks anomalous considering its 1866 credo:

the political principles of this journal are Conservative; while supporting every practical improvement, it will resist organic changes ... It will be at once conservative and progressive, a foe to democracy and revolution, but the firm friend of all constitutional reform.

— Yorkshire Post, 2 July 1866

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yorkshire_Post#cite_note-6

Time and Tide might seem a more natural home as it was described as ‘the mouthpiece of the feminist Six Point Group’:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_Tide_(magazine) .

Wikipedia conveniently summarises these points as:

• 1. Satisfactory legislation on child assault;

  2. Satisfactory legislation for the widowed mother;

  3. Satisfactory legislation for the unmarried mother and her child;

  4. Equal rights of guardianship for married parents;

  5. Equal pay for teachers

  6. Equal opportunities for men and women in the civil service.

These later evolved into six general points of equality for women: political, occupational, moral, social, economic and legal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Point_Group   confirmed by https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612029600200102

No doubt both Holtby and Cooper would agree with the objectives set out in the Six Points; but neither try to structure their novels around these aims.  Instead their socialist concerns are more general and filtered through their interests as a novelist.  Both wrote as Social Realists, not as Stalinist Socialist Realists.  People who are without a Socialist vocation are as important in their novels as those who have strong political convictions.   This is especially true of the women in their novels.    Holtby’s The Crowded Street shows the vital partnership that is formed between the apolitical heroine (Muriel Hammond) and her committed friend (Delia Vaughan); a similar contrast is evident in Cooper’s The New House between the sister chained to domestic duties (Rhoda) and the liberated sister (Delia).   The novels do not simply provide role models, instead they show equal feminist concern for those left behind in the fight for feminism and depict many women for whom ‘sisterhood’ is irrelevant, especially the dominant mothers of The Crowded Street and The New House. 

Despite this, Cooper’s background and personal experiences of the West Riding align her just as strongly with Bentley.  It was Cooper, not Bentley, who was asked to write The County Book’s Yorkshire West Riding volume (1950).  No doubt Bentley would have produced an equally accurate and affectionate account of the ‘dark, interlocking hills of millstone grit,’ (p3) and would have appreciated Cooper’s metaphor of ‘weaving’ that runs through the book; indeed Bentley has more claim to the metaphor, having produced so many books about the wool trade of the West Riding.  Both had difficulty asserting independence from dominant mothers.   Both worked for Government ministries during the world wars.  However, these shared interests produced friendship not rivalry.    We Have Come to a Country (1935) is dedicated ‘To Phyllis Bentley with love’ and Bentley’s autobiography “O Dreams, O Destinations’ (1962) contains a photograph of the ‘Yorkshire Novelists’ Brains Trust’.    The photo shows Bentley, Leo Walmsley and Cooper but mentions ‘”the friendship and support of Lettice Cooper”’ in the caption (opposite p192).

 ‘dark, interlocking hills of millstone grit,’ West Nab showing part of the Pennine Way

A significant thread in Coper’s life, unmatched by Holtby and Bentley, is her affection for Italy that informs novels like Fenny (1953).   The worlds of Yorkshire, Oxford and Italy are brought together in Snow and Roses (1976).

The forwards to Cooper’s novels and obituaries to Cooper each see a different facet of her as being most important. 

The Wikipedia article focuses on her friendship with George Orwell’s wife Eileen Blair, who she put into her novel Black Bethlehem (1947). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettice_Cooper

Her niece-in-law, Jilly Cooper, sees the most crucial experience of Cooper’s life as conflict with Cooper’s mother, fictionalised in The New Room (forward to the Persephone edition, v-xvi 2003).  In Jilly’s account Lettice’s mother sounds capable of moods of violent irrationality, similar to those Bentley observed in her mother:

Jilly Cooper:

      Their mother, Mrs Cooper, like Nathalie the mother in The New House, was a self-centred bitch,

       who evidently tried to stab her kind husband when she learnt she was pregnant and who, once 

       widowed, annexed the sweet, biddable, Lettice to look after her and cater to her every whim,’

        (The New House, ix).

Phyllis Bentley:

         My mother, thirty-five years old and having already three lively sons, desired no more, and

         rebelled with the customary impatience, against the unwanted inconveniences of her

         pregnancy.  (“O Dreams, O Destinations”, I.II.12)

Bentley’s tone is more forgiving than Jilly’s but behind both descriptions are Victorian women frustrated by being given control of everything in the domestic sphere, except their own bodies.    This leads to a paradox.  As an upper-middle class woman the mothers of Bentley and Cooper expect service and deference; as wives and womb-men they are victims of their fertility.  

Francis King’s Independent obituary concentrates on her relationship with Lionel Fielden in Florence: ‘a charming, intelligent, Rolls-Royce-owning’ ‘English’ ‘homosexual’, though does not mention that this gets relationship fictionalised in Snow and Roses.   https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-lettice-cooper-1416496.html  It is well-disguised.  The main male gay in the book is Martin Croft, an Oxford lecturer, who sends the heroine Flora to his sister Miranda in Italy.   Flora and Miranda spend a night together; it’s unclear how sexual the embrace they share is; the text cuts to another scene after this exchange: 

          Miranda murmured,

         “Flora darling.  Come to me”

          With a feeling of going right back to some pace where she belonged Flora let herself be drawn

         closely into Miranda’s arms.  Snow and Roses, London, Gollanz, 1976, III.159).

The text hovers uneasily in tone and subject between being a feminist novel of sexual choice and a romance.

 However, as the investigation of her Yorkshire books shows, concentrating on the social conditions of Yorkshire led to writing that emerged from the autobiographical to engage with the State of England as rigorously as her Victorian predecessors or her contemporaries.     

https://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/lettice-cooper/

   View of Leeds from Turner’s vantage point on Beeston Hill 

(the hill next to Middleton: ‘Netherton’ in National Provincial )

Turner picture can be seen at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Leeds