The Captive Reader

“Siesta” by Ruskin Spear

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a woman full of good advice.  Over the past few months, I’ve shared a few excerpts from The Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner (wishes for a friend’s newborn daughter; musings on how each Austen hero would handle wrapping a present; and some just delightfully random thoughts) and I couldn’t resist sharing this letter too.  Written from STW to a friend struggling with a wilful daughter, it’s sympathetic, revealing, and provides just the right amount of perspective tinged with humour:

…I remember my mother feeling much as you do about her growing daughter.  She had no son to compare me with, or no doubt she would have felt even more strongly.  I certainly deserved all her disillusionment.  I used to get up a 7 a.m. to play the piano, and refused to do a hand’s turn about the house.  I also insisted on wearing black and looking like a femme fatale; with horn-rimmed spectacles.  But yours will wear through it, and come out quite as charming as you or me.  Meanwhile, you must keep your heart up and in your blackest hours say to yourself that Simone de Beauvoir was worse.  Or you might call to mind Mrs Bishop Moberly of Salisbury.  She had twelve.  Besides a Bishop.  You’ve not had a Bishop, and I trust you never will.  Not that I don’t esteem and enjoy Simone de B. (as an autobiographer; her novels bore me).  But her estimable, well-founded, impermeable French self-righteousness leaves her strikingly unaware of what a headache she must have been to her parents. (22 March 1963)