146. Jane White — Quarry with Helen Hughes

KIM ASKEW: Hi everyone. Welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to championing forgotten classics by women writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my co-host Amy Helmes

AMY HELMES: Today we're back with another lost classic that absolutely deserves a spot on your nightstand. Or maybe in your freezer.

KIM: All right, Amy is referring to a couple months back when I mentioned this Friends episode where Joey puts scary books in his freezer. I think this definitely qualifies because Jane White's, Quarry is unsettling. It's a gripping read and it ranks right up there with some of the most frightening and disturbing books we've discussed on this podcast.

AMY: Yes, it's quite a psychological thriller. When Quarry was first published in 1967, a review in The Scotsman called it The most frightening novel of the year, and it was written by a mother and housewife, which was shocking to some reviewers. We'll talk about that later on in the episode.

KIM: Suffice to say we can't stop thinking about this book, so we are thrilled to have with us today Jane White's daughter-in-law, Dr. Helen Hughes, who wrote the afterword to the new edition of Quarry. We can't wait to discuss this book with her, so let's read the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

AMY: Our guest today, Dr. Helen Hughes of the University of Surrey, wrote the afterword to the new Boiler House press edition of Quarry, which just came out about a month ago. Helen's husband, Martin, is Jane White's son, and he illustrated the cover, so this is really a family affair to be sure. Both Helen and Martin teach German and film studies and are experts on Kafka adaptations, by the way. Helen, we are so grateful to you for joining us for this discussion, welcome to the show.

HELEN HUGHES: Thank you. I'm really pleased to be here and really interested to hear your questions and, uh, what you think about the book.

AMY: Oh, we have questions.

KIM: Yes. Oh, we do. We have a lot to say. Um, and we'd also want to credit past guest Brad Bigelow's Neglected Books site. He posted the biographical info that was included, I believe, on the dust jacket of the first edition of Quarry. Brad also connected us with Helen. So thank you, Brad.

AMY: So first Jane White was born in Cambridge in 1934, and soon after the family moved to a farmhouse in the countryside. She was educated at home by a governess through the age of nine before attending a convent boarding school. She then won a scholarship to Girton College, cambridge. And after graduating, she was employed for about five years at BBC World Service as a news clerk.

KIM: In 1961, white married a lecturer in German at Birkbeck College, London University, and they had one child, Martin. White wrote prolifically in her youth. In fact, she completed her first novel at age nine, which I think is about two years before Jane Austin's first juvenilia. So precocious. Helen, what else can you tell us about your mother-in-law's early years? 

HELEN: Well, she wrote about her early years herself in a memoir called Norfolk Child. She writes particularly about her father, that she had a very special charm about him, he was able to tell lots of stories, because he was a historian and he wrote historical novels and was also very interested in children's literature. 

So she writes about her feeling of security with her parents. And then she describes what it was like to move from a relatively urban place, Cambridge to a relatively remote farmhouse. So her parents didn't actually run the farm. I think it was a tenant farmer who ran the actual farm, but they were surrounded by the farm, and she just describes in her memoir how magical it was to show up there one day and start to live a completely different life. She makes it sound quite isolated. They didn't have too much contact with people in the outside world, and so she just describes being very free, playing with her brother and with her sister. And she turns it into a generally quite magical story,

AMY: This is how I would like to live on a farm. Not actually having to do any of the work. That sounds right up my alley.

KIM: Yeah, absolutely. I did read The Norfolk Child and you explained it perfectly. It sounds so magical and she and her siblings just ran wild. It seems like just living fully this life there on the farm.

HELEN: Yeah, I wouldn't describe it so much as running wild because her mother was obviously quite a self-conscious person. and so kept them in good order. And the governess, too, made sure that they used the right vocabulary when they spoke, and they were very conscious of being middle class children. And so in the memoir, she does also talk about seeing other children, but feeling that they were in a different world to the world that she was living in, so that there was no possibility, for example, that she might go to a school with those other children. She would have to go away to a boarding school.

KIM: Yeah, really poignant at the end of that. I highly recommend reading that memoir.

AMY: And so not quite so feral.

KIM: There was lots of falling in ponds and 

HELEN: It's a strange mix, isn't it, of, freedom and, sort of self-government almost.

KIM: Mm-hmm. That's a good description. Yeah. 

AMY: And that's actually a real good leap into our discussion of this book, which was Jane White's debut novel. So first off, Helen, what did you make of Quarry the first time you read it, and when did you first read it?

HELEN: I guess I had two goes at it. Um, when I first got to know Martin he told me that he had a mother who was a novelist and obviously I was curious. And I started to read Quarry. But for some reason at that time I just didn't get into it. But then, more recently, I think it was just a little bit before we went into the pandemic period, actually, I thought I would, uh, give it another go. And then I just got hooked immediately and I couldn't understand why I hadn't got hooked the first time around.

AMY: That's what I'm thinking. How could you not get drawn into this book? I, I'm shocked to hear you say that you didn't get drawn in the first time. You were in love.

KIM: You had other distractions, yeah. 

AMY: So do you wanna give our listeners a quick, kind of spoiler free summary of the book?

HELEN: Yes. Okay. So, the world has changed in which Jane White exists. So she's no longer in this remote farm in Norfolk. She's in what we call a commuter town in Surrey in England. And the story she sets in this small town is a story of three teenage boys who are at a grammar school, and they form a friendship. And the friendship is somewhat unlikely in the sense that they are almost programmatically from different parts of society. But they form this kind of alliance, which is a little bit sinister. At the very beginning of the book, they decide to carry out something which they've discussed, amongst themselves. It involves kidnapping a small child who's younger than them. They spot a child, and they take him to a disused quarry where they found, a, a cave, a hidden cave, and then the story unfolds from there. We gradually learn a little bit more about each of the characters. Just builds to this climax that takes place during a heat wave in a small commuter town in Surrey, which is probably one of the most verdant counties . It has the highest number of trees of all the counties in England, so what you notice is a person who's describing this sort of verdant landscape in a way that turns it into something like a jungle. And it's a little bit threatening, partly because of the heat that's there throughout the novel, but also because there's just too much of it. It's too rampant. and it sort of infects the characters, the boys with its verdant nature in some way.

AMY: Mm-hmm. I would say it's a lot threatening, not a little. 

KIM: Yeah. You're making me think of, um, well, Lord of the Flies, which we'll talk about I think a little bit later. But also Heart of Darkness and everything too, just the verdant jungle like, atmosphere and how it impacts what happens with the characters.

AMY: Yeah. Closing in on you. Yeah. 

KIM: So the quarry ends up being this physical manifestation of that dark side that we're talking about. It makes me think of the cemetery underneath the suburban housing track in, um, Spielberg's Poltergeist. I mean, 

HELEN: Right. 

AMY: Like a force that's drawing you to it. 

KIM: That's perfect. Of course. Exactly.

AMY: And it's kind of simmering with temptation and danger, as we said. And the action takes place during this epic heat wave, which adds to the tension. So Kim, I think that you were maybe gonna read a passage from Quarry to give listeners a feel of all this.

Right.

KIM: Yeah. And, um, I'm gonna read a few pages so we might end up cutting it down later if it ends up being too long. But I'll go ahead and read it.

 It was five o'clock in the afternoon and the sun still seemed as high and hot as midday. The air hummed with flies and butterflies hung like motionless shreds of colored paper over the gorse bushes below them.

The boy stood motionless in the glare. Todd said “He'll do.” The others did not answer him. They went on looking down the slope of sun at the boy. Todd said again, “He'll do.” He shifted his feet in the hot grass and looked over his shoulder at Randy and Carter. “Well?” he said. Carter gave his little high pitched giggle.

“Okay, if you say so. Call him.” “You call him, Todd,” said Randy. He too shifted his weight and looked obliquely at the others. He had his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and now he clenched them into fists so that they looked like two balls resting against his size. The material stretched tight and then ran away into little creases as he flexed and unflexed his fingers.

“You call him, Todd,” he repeated. Todd looked away from the other two. He stood still for a little while longer, slightly in advance of them as if smelling the air. They could hear nothing except the flies and the distant drone as an airplane cruised through the hot sky. Todd stiffened his neck and they saw the muscles bulge as he opened his mouth and called softly to the boy.

“Hi, you.” There was no response. The boy went on standing quite still as if he had not heard, Randy said, with an edge of malice, “Speak up. What are you afraid of, Todd?” Todd tightened himself again and called more loudly. “Hi, you. Can't you hear me?” His voice was still soft, but it seemed to carry down the slope.

The boy turned towards them without lifting his head, merely swiveled his feet that had seemed rooted in the grass and faced towards them without actually looking up. “Can't you hear me? I'm calling you. Come on up.” The boy did not move. Randy said, “Come up. There are three of us. You'd better come up.” Still without lifting his face the boy began to walk up the slope towards them. He moved his feet slowly and carefully through the tough grass, pushing the brambles out of his way with his hands. When he was about six feet away from Todd, he stopped walking and stood again in exactly the same posture as before. The three of them looked at him.

He was smaller than they had thought, yet Todd, at least, felt that, seen at close quarters, he was older than he had seemed at first. Eleven, perhaps, or 12, not more. Carter who was 15, was infinitely weightier. There were years between Todd and Randy and this seeming child. Yet now he was standing there. He contrived to confuse them by his silence, his hidden face, his lack of resistance.

There seemed to be nothing in his appearance that they could grasp and make use of, certainly not fear. Todd said, “You're coming with us. If you don't want to, and if you try to fight or run away, we shall knock you out and carry you.” The threat uttered in a voice tentative with nervousness was incongruous, but he was too intent to notice it.

“Are you coming?” Behind him, Randy said, “Better knock him out, anyway. He looks as if he could run if he tried.” For some reason he was breathing faster. He moved forward nearer to the boy. “We'd better knock him out.” Todd put out a hand as if to ward him off, a gesture at once protective and angry.

The boy looked up at them and said, “I'll come.” 

AMY: I feel just listening to that, when a storm's brewing and you can feel the electricity in the air and it's sort of like crackles, right? That's how I feel when I hear that. And there's so much also in just that passage that you read that I kept thinking, Lord of the Flies, Lord of the Flies. The airplane, the droning of the flies. She even says that. The positioning of the sun, which always comes up in Lord of the Flies. And so I cannot wait till we get to that part of the discussion. And sorry, listeners, we keep teasing this, but um, let's wait for a second and talk about this book, first.

KIM: Yeah. This is a great place to talk about the writing style of the novel. So let's talk about that and then we'll get to the other stuff. Um, Helen, you were able to actually refer to White's intentions as far as her writing style. Can you talk a little bit about that?

HELEN: Yeah, I think that's for me one of the most interesting things about, going after this book. Uh, wondering where it came from, and how she could have written it. We've got several boxes of papers, um, manuscripts, photographs, um, some notebooks. She was a great collector of scrapbooks as well. But with respect to Quarry, what I found was actually I guess the original manuscript. It's not the final version, so when you talk about the crackle of electricity in the air and things like that, there are aspects of the earlier version which is more like a fantasy novel. And so there is some discussion about whether it's a literary novel or a fantasy novel. And whether this cave is another world type of place , as part of a fantasy, or if it's real. So there's that ambiguity there already. There's an aspect about the style that has to do with sort of being between a popular genre of book and a piece of literary fiction. And then the other thing that was important was, uh, this notebook, which is quite a thin notebook and it has all sorts of things in it. And there's some of her lecture notes from her time at Cambridge. Um, uh, but there's also, um, the very, very beginning of her thinking about this book, when it kind of came to her. She's got notes about Plato. Plato's Republic is obviously about education and class. She's talking about a suburban area and she's describing the characters. So it was very interesting to see these early notes and then to see how then she translated those into a narrative, that's so realistic. So there's a contrast, um, between the ordinary lives at home and the dream life with the boy is what she writes. And then she has "therefore two styles, one flat realistic, one tight, heightened." And then she has it in capital letters, "difficult" exclamation mark, exclamation mark. So I think all of her energy in the writing was trying to get these two to marry so that you did realize that you were transitioning into a different space, but not that you'd left reality somehow. So it always retains that kind of slightly ambiguous aspect to it.

AMY: There's like that tension, that push and pull, where you're in the real world, you're at the boys' homes, household life and it feels very realistic. And then you have this other side every time they go to the quarry, especially, that feels so otherworldly. Like it's, it's pulling you into this different dimension that's philosophic, that's, you know, psychological, you know, something's brewing and there's turmoil and then suddenly she'll drop you back into suburbia. The back and forthness almost adds to the tension for me. So when she was saying it was difficult, and I'm sure that was difficult to achieve, but she did it really well.

KIM: Yeah. She pulled it off, for sure.

AMY: And there's also so much mystery. 

KIM: Completely,

AMY: What am I supposed to be thinking?

KIM: What's real, what isn't, and there's just enough fantasy to make you wonder, like you said, what if this is fantasy? What if this is real? What are we supposed to think?

AMY: Yeah. So much of the mystery revolves around this younger boy, the victim. He submits to the kidnappers so willingly and he has this sort of disconcerting way of looking at them. He sort of deflects any questions about who he is or where he's from. We don't get any information about being concerned about his whereabouts or anything like that. So not only did I keep wondering who he really was, these three teenage boys that kidnapped him, they're wondering the same thing. Like, wait a second, what? This kid is weird.

KIM: Right. Is he supposed to be a Christlike character? Is he an alien? Is he even real? I mean, all those things and more literally were crossing my mind while I was reading this book. So what are we supposed to make of this child, Helen? Do you have the answer?

HELEN: Of course I don't have the answer. And obviously part of the point of the novel in that you are wondering about the boy and of course, I formed my theory as everyone else will form their own theory. So I have him down as a kind of composite. But a key element in there besides the Christ-like elements of the boy and his kind of rational way of being, is a sense of this boy as being an English literary child, particularly a Peter Pan type of child. Jane was, very, very , keen on the Victorian era. She loved Victoriana. And if you look at some of that literature in the raw as opposed to the expedited versions that we get via Disney or, or even in the sort of abridged versions that one reads as a child, if you look at the actual originals, some of the child figures in there are truly freaky, and Peter Pan is one of those. So modern Peter Pans retained some of that, but nowhere near as much as the original. So I see this child as being this kind of odd, unexpectedly potentially negative character. Um, so we can see the three teenagers as being delinquents in that, you know, late sixties, seventies way, but we don't expect the child to be like that as well, or potentially like that as well. So the turning of the tables that goes on at various twists in the story, you know, really adds to the novel, its tension I think, because you have a feeling you don't know what this child is gonna do next.

AMY: When you in the afterword made the Peter Pan connection, my mind was blown. That was almost my favorite revelation about all of this. And it all made complete sense. Because there's times in the cave where the boy winds up having them play pirate ship, you know? And there's like real references to that. But yeah, at first. I was like, Oh, he's so clearly a Christ figure, you know? And then I'd be like, no, he's pure evil. You know, that kind of troublemaking, puckish, he's supposed to be the victim, but maybe he's the one leading them to their doom sort of thing. It's fascinating.

HELEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah,

KIM: I was thinking about how you are an expert on Kafka adaptations, which I think is so interesting, and it got me wondering if there's any way it could help us understand the character of the boy. So, are there any connections to make maybe between Gregor and The Metamorphosis and the boy and Quarry? I don't know.

HELEN: Yeah, so I actually, I discussed this with Martin, because I was very skeptical about this idea in relation to Quarry. But she wrote another novel in which I would say yes, it's very strongly there. This one, which is called Beatrice Falling, um, has a character, who is called something like Ques, but she gives him just the letter Q and so in the same way that Kafka in The Castle gives the character just, uh, a letter at the beginning of his name. And also the way in which that novel is organized is very like a Kafka novel. Um, so I was wondering, could you also say that there are Kafkaesque elements in Quarry, and I guess you could say the way that she tends towards allegory in all of her stories, so that you can always interpret them on two different levels. I guess that that is very like Kafka and Kafka was a great realist, so everything is recognizable in Kafka, but at the same time it's odd. So I think, yes, I can see what you're saying about, um, the ways in which some of the characters are kind of, you could turn them into insects or something else. So particularly Randy, I think you could turn him into an animal in the way that Kafka turns his characters into animals in order to bring out their particular human characteristics. Yeah. Yeah, I can see that for sure.

KIM: Well, thanks for going there with me on that.

AMY: Kim, did you have a theory about this?

KIM: Well, I was just thinking about the scapegoat thing because talking about the boy as possibly being a scapegoat, that's one of the theories, and then thinking about, in The Metamorphosis, Gregor being the scapegoat of society also. So that was the parallel I was thinking of, but 

HELEN: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. it's interesting because there was a great discussion going on at the time that Jane was writing, and time she was studying English literature at Cambridge around the problem of the scapegoat and the problem of scapegoating as a kind of social mechanism to try to relieve, um, society of the burden of guilt. We have to remember that, you know, this is not so long after World War II and it's not so far away from all the debates around the Holocaust. Um, people are still worried about the atom bomb. One thing that Martin told me about Jane she told him the story of when he was born, because he was born in the same week as the Cuban Missile Crisis. And she describes, you know, holding him in her arms and saying that she didn't know if he would live a week. So that kind of anxiety is very much still there in debates and, and literature is definitely there in order to bring those anxieties out into the open, uh, into the public sphere so that people could work them through.

KIM: I had some great context about the time to help us sort of figure out more about the puzzle of these characters.

HELEN: Yeah.

AMY: Why it is so anxiety inducing, the book.

KIM: Yeah. And there's also even a, I don't wanna say too much, but even a Judas character feel, at one point. And there are also three tests, as there are in fairy tales. So each of the kidnappers meets with the boy privately and has a unique interaction with him that tests and reveals something about their character. Helen, you wanna talk a little bit more about what's going on here? What do you think White was trying to say with the relationships between the captors and the child, the victim?

HELEN: Yeah. So again, it's there to be experienced and interpreted for each reader. Um, for me, I guess I see the central character as Randy. A very sort of high libido, a libidinous person. 

AMY: I mean his name is Randy.

KIM: Yeah.

HELEN: I think from that we can see that there's a lot of humor there, right? 

KIM: Mm-hmm.

AMY: Yeah. 

HELEN: One can switch out of the anxiety, the weirdness, the unsettled feeling, into straight social satire in this novel as well. And each of the boys represents a type and the mums represent types and the way in which we see this town, which is Godalming, really, where Jane lived. We can see this town through her very, very satirical eyes. Martin describes her as having quite a caustic sense of humor, of really enjoying Jane Austen as a writer. and really being a sort of Jane Austen plus the history of women's crime fiction, if you like, we're all put together.

AMY: That's a good mashup. yeah. 

HELEN: Uh, but the satire is there because it's small town life, right? Not far from London. So it's a place where during the day all of the men have gone into the city of London to work and the ones who remained there are the housewives and the children. So you can see that these teenage boys are in this environment, but they're growing out of it, right? And they're thinking about what's coming next, who they're gonna be next. We just come at them at a particular moment in life where one transitions from being a, uh, a child, who's not responsible to being an adult, who is responsible. And there's some thinking there about, well, what has this life actually turned them into? What kind of adults are they, are they going to be? And some of the answers to that are quite funny. So the question is there about, you know, who are these people who are going to be the future of England? 

AMY: It's clear that the book is an allegory about the process of adolescence, right. And that it's sort of like a crucible moment, like the phoenix, like it has to burn to the ground before it can rise up, and you have a child on one side of the story, this kidnapped victim, and then you have all these kind of lame adults on the other side of the story. And it's what lies between-- these three boys and, you know, the intensity of these few days where they're, committing a crime. It all stands for like the, the turmoil and the trauma of, of growing up, 

KIM: Yeah. Yeah, And you related that in your afterword to White's own childhood abruptly ending as well and going through that process.

HELEN: Yeah, definitely. So I've kind of been looking across all of her novels and I think it's a theme she keeps coming back to, this theme of adolescents plus the transference of, of guilt or the taking on of guilt, and I think it is a little bit mysterious to be honest, in, in the way that the whole scapegoat idea is mysterious. So it's a kind of a movement from childhood into accepting an adult world, which is much more complicated and along the way, something is lost. And I think she mourns that loss of something. And it isn't quite innocence. It's much more complicated than that. It's, it's more, um, I don't know, atavistic or something than that. But she captures it. Whatever it is, she captures it in the book and in her other novels as well. And so I think that's why they're kind of worth reading because they give you something more complex than simply lost innocence or something like that.

KIM: Right.

AMY: In the introduction to this book, Anne Bilson says that “the story functions on multiple levels and that it's up to the reader to draw their own conclusions.”

KIM: Yeah, conclusions plural, because you can walk away and feel like there are many conclusions and they could all be right. 

AMY: Maybe all books are like this to a degree, but I feel like, you, Helen, me and Kim, we were each given the same box with a jigsaw puzzle in it, and we each solved the puzzle, but we each get a completely different picture, you know, and, every solution is the right solution, whatever you come up with. Because it is such a psychological novel, so how, how would you not bring your own psyche to what you're reading? 

KIM: Really good point.

HELEN: Yeah.

KIM: So, do you know much about the critical reception for Quarry when it was first published? I think some critics were perplexed that a wife and mother wrote it. I'm thinking of that headline: “Surrey Housewife Writes Unhousewifely Novel.” 

HELEN: Yeah, that's a really fun headline, but it was imagined by Jane herself when being interviewed by a journalist about having written a novel. Um, I particularly liked that article because it's a kind of more of a feature article where the journalists went to their house and, so, um, Martin's father, Philip, describes reading the novel the first time and getting grit in the way that we did, and, uh, reading it through the night and coming down very pale the next morning, a bit shocked that his wife has written such a novel. 

AMY: I can see that. It's like a sleep with one eye open sort of moment. 

KIM: Yeah. 

HELEN: Yeah. And she explains how she wrote it with a small child in short bursts in the evening on the dining room table sort of thing. So yeah, I guess the reception is thinking about this new novelist, because it's her first novel. It's a debut novel. Um, it's asking all the same questions that we are asking about, what the hell is this about? The reactions kind of divide through those who think it's just a lot of effects, you know, a skill in manipulating the reader through various suspenseful scenes but ultimately not about anything substantial, and then those on the other hand, who think it does have something to say about society and that there's, um, actually nothing wrong with the fact it draws on all of these techniques to do what it's doing. It got a lot of attention, I think, for a first novel. All the broadsheets included it in their lists of new books and commentaries. And it also got into the, you know, the tabloids, so The Sun and newspapers like that, too. So it managed to cross the divide of the literary and the popular, which is something quite remarkable, I would say.

AMY: I can imagine that there must have been comparisons drawn between this book and Lord of the Flies, which had come out, what, like 13 years earlier. That came out in 1954. They're both very allegorical. I actually just finished reading Lord of the Flies again because I was reading it to my 11 year old son, which I don't know if that's appropriate, but, uh, it's not really a kid's book, but we did read it. So I have it fresh in my memory and it's very interesting to have read these both kind of side by side, as companions to one another. So I'm very excited to discuss this a little bit. You know, we see the similarities to Golding's work. In this one we have more interaction with kids and adults, it's not, you know, set on this secluded island. And I, I don't think it's as allegorical. We do have the realistic elements in it as well, the everyday, you know, moments of life. So you point out, I think in the afterword that White actually had included a reference to Lord of the Flies in her original manuscript, right?

HELEN: Yeah. Yeah. I was very excited when I found that in the original manuscript. There's a whole scene in which Todd and Randy are in a classroom and they're discussing The Lord of the Flies. I mean, they're there giving an interpretation of it in the novel. Randy starts to talk about violence and the meaning of violence in The Lord of the Flies. So I was a bit outraged that this had been taken out of the book because I thought, well, surely this is a kind of a key in understanding it. 

AMY: Yes. Yes. It goes from making this book appear maybe derivative or like a ripoff, when the fact that she references it makes it so clear that that's not what it is, that she's acknowledging the book in her book. I wanna have a conversation with this book. It's a, it's either like an answer to it or a follow up on it. I think it's crazy that they removed that. And I wonder what she, well, first of all, do you know why they asked her to remove it?

HELEN: So it's taken out on the grounds that it's too self-conscious, right? I mean, we can't get our heads around that now because authors are so self-conscious now that they are, you know, there are layers of self-consciousness in novels that we read now. But at that time, maybe she was just pushing a little bit too much into what would eventually become the postmodern novel, and they couldn't cope with that level of awareness and felt that it would break the spell of the novel if that was, was, suddenly there. So in some way, I can understand what they're saying, and maybe it's the case that the tautness of the novel is maintained because there isn't that stepping outside and thinking, Oh, this is a novel. That doesn't really happen. You remain gripped by it as a narrative. So maybe they did have a point and maybe it does work better without it. 

AMY: I'm of two minds. Maybe it is a little too on the nose to call the book out in the book, but at the same time, I wouldn't want people to have read this and been like, Oh, well, she was just doing what he already did, you know?

HELEN: Yeah. No, but I think she like takes it on further. I looked a little bit into The Lord of the Flies and discovered that there'd been a lot of intervention into that novel, as well, to create that kind of allegorical seamlessness, um, which I guess must have been the fashionable way to write in the 1950s, even more so. But I think she must have objected, or she must have raised questions about it because it is so present then in the promotion of the book. So they must have said to her, We'll make sure that readers and reviewers are aware that it's being written in the context of what had already by that point become a classic and was already on the school curriculum.

KIM: So White went on to write several more books and the memoir we talked about Norfolk Child, which I loved, uh, highly recommend it. She also taught English at a girls school in Surrey, and it was a very feminist school, which matched Jane White's beliefs as well. Sadly, she contracted multiple sclerosis in her forties, and as an adult, she had to stop teaching and writing. She died in 1985 at the age of 51. But I'm so glad that Boilerhouse Press decided to do this reissue and that it's being newly appreciated. 

AMY: Any other anecdotes about her that you'd like to share? You never met her, correct?

HELEN: I never met her, no. I just know that she was obviously quite a force to be reckoned with.She left a mark, as it were, on the world. 

AMY: We should also add, listeners, that Helen was kind enough to put together a few audio snippets of Jane from many years ago reading from “Romeo and Juliet.” So if you'd like to actually hear from Jane herself, we are going to be posting that on our Facebook forum, which many of you already are part of. So jump over there and you can listen to Jane. And also Helen's gonna take a few snapshots of her journals and her, her scrapbooks maybe. We'll post that over there as well.

KIM: Helen, it was so great to have you on, and really an honor to get to speak with you about your mother-in-law. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I have really enjoyed this discussion.

HELEN: Great. I've, I've really enjoyed talking to you about how you've understood Quarry. Um, and yeah, it's just great. Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of it. .

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Thanks for supporting us and consider doing so more publicly by recommending us to a friend or leaving us a five star review wherever you listen. We love those reviews,

KIM: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.