The Bohemian Girl Read Free

always saw a lot of her, and did what I could. It is a terrible illness. My sister suffered from depression, she died of heart trouble and had other physical problems, but she said to me once that depression was much the worst thing she’d suffered.
    MICHAEL MARTEN: For any outing Frances had to prepare herself, two or three days in advance – psychologically she’d have to work herself up into a state she could deal with. The travel would be difficult – the prospect rather than the actuality. Eventually she decided she ought to overcome her fear of travel and have a holiday. She took herself off to the Lofoten Islands off the coast of Norway, organised it herself. Why she chose those islands I’m not quite sure, they’re pretty dour. She certainly didn’t enjoy herself, or the food. But she did it, it was an accomplishment for her.
    As her illness got worse towards the last years, she found going places very trying – having to call a taxi then worrying if it would be late, or come at all, and once it came, worrying that it would get lost. She could become distraught over things that would seem minor to anyone else, it would all get too much veryquickly – and this was a tendency that got much worse. As a child she’d had terrible tantrums, which she learned to control, but nonetheless the desperation behind them was always there. Sheila and John were, I think, very concerned about her.
    Over some years she expressed to me a wish to die. She’d say, ‘I wish I was dead,’ or, ‘I don’t know if I can stand it any more.’ There is nothing you can say to that … you don’t dismiss it, but I didn’t feel it was something that ordinary advice or listening could really resolve. I’m sure I wasn’t as helpful as I could have been. But in reality I don’t know what I could have done.
    What would be Frances’s final novel,
The Fall of Doctor Onslow
– originally entitled ‘A School Story’ – was inspired by her reading of the memoirs of the writer and homosexual John Addington Symonds, wherein he exposed the commonplace incidence of homosexuality at Harrow School in the1850s, among pupils and indeed between boys and senior staff.
    MICHAEL MARTEN:
Onslow
was based on a true story about a headmaster at Harrow, who was effectively blackmailed or bludgeoned by the father of a pupil into leaving the school and wasn’t allowed to accept any preferment in the Church, such that when he tried to a few years later he got set back. It was a very powerful story and Frances managed to convey it very well. It seemed to me her first novels were very good but of a certain type, novels of manners and mores, but they didn’t really go further than that. Whereas I felt that
Onslow
had more depth.
    SHEILA VERNON: Frances’s sense of humour wasn’t commented on. But it’s there in
Onslow
, especially in Doctor Onslow’s wife Louisa, who is a great character, I think. Nothing’s explained to her but she knows quite a lot. When she speaks of Onslow’s devotion to his pupils and then realises what she’s said … And when Onslow says he’s ‘upset over a boy’, she does know there’s something hidden. Or when they go together to a hotel and she comments on their lack of luggage, to which he replies, ‘A clergyman is always respectable …’ Even he has a joke at himself. Frances was very succinct in her writing, including her humour.
    MICHAEL MARTEN: Gollancz, who published
Westmarch
, turned down the first version of
Onslow
. It was a huge blow to Frances, and she was reluctant to rewrite it, but she did, quite considerably. She must have finished it not long before she died. And it was almost as though she had decided it was the work she had to finish, she had no ideas beyond that – and by finishing it, I think she felt released.
    Frances died by her own hand on 11 July 1991 after what
The Times
obituarist would describe as her ‘long struggle with depressive illness’. Having promised her