Monica Dickens

A very re-readable 20th-century novelist.

Zest for life, colourful characters, memorable story-lines and a sense of life as quest and adventure –  words that describe her great-grandfather also describe this most good-humoured of twentieth-century writers.

My first Monica Dickens, years ago, borrowed from Limerick City Library, was Mariana (1940), which I re-read more recently in a Persephone edition.  Mary lives in London with her glamorous (and hard-working) widowed mother, spending holidays at her paternal grandparents’ house in Devon. She wastes time at an exclusive girls’ school, and  at drama school, and eventually goes to France, to learn French and dressmaking, and she falls in love with a posh Frenchman, Jacques.  In Mariana, as in all Monica Dickens’ books, there are fabulous, textured descriptions of clothes and houses and food – the lobby of their apartment house in London smells of the electric lift, the doorman’s cigar, and brussel sprouts  – that kind of thing. Persephone has also republished The Winds of Heaven (1955), which is about a kind of hidden female homelessness – Louise, left penniless by a selfish and tyrannical husband, goes from one adult daughter to the next for different parts of the year. The daughters, who take after their father, are at best exasperated with their mother and at worst, nasty.  Without understating in any way the hardships of Louise’s life, Dickens manages to keep her narrative lively, so this isn’t a depressing read at all. And, spoiler alert, Louise gets her happy ending, which her daughters grudgingly accept.

Not long after reading Mariana as a teenager,  I came across a second-hand orange Penguin paperback of Joy and Josephine (1948) in the subterranean Treaty Bookshop in Limerick (a cavern of delights on Thomas St/Little Catherine St that no longer exists), and I read and re-read it till it fell apart. I found it again about twenty years ago in a Foyle’s Book Club hardback and re-read it again.  (There are a few horrible stage-Irish bits in it, but like the pains of childbirth, I always forget about these until the next time.)Joy and Josephine – and this is no spoiler, because it is signalled from the very start  – is about the confusion of two babies in a temporary children’s home in the early days of the Second World War.  Josephine is adopted by a childless couple who have a grocery shop on Portobello Road in London and here again, the texture of everyday life is vividly conveyed.  Like Patricia Lynch’s The Bookshop on the Quay which I read at a much younger age, this book reinforced my lifelong love of lively and slightly down-at-heel urban streets  – a love I could indulge to the full living in Limerick city in the 1970s. Portobello Road is now a crowded tourist trap, but in 1982 when I lived in London, it was almost exactly as Monica Dickens described it. The food and furnishings of Josephine’s adoptive parents, the Abingers,  are described in detail:  ’the round table with the bobbled green cloth and the drawers shaped like wedges of cheese……bosky wallpaper, sunless photographs in overpowering frames, and…pot-bellied curtains looped on either side of the window.’  The Abingers’ most faithful customers are the Moores, who inhabit ‘the last outpost of Kensington before it degenerated into North Kensington’; posher than the Abingers, their children run wild and their small back garden smells of cats.

And then there are the autobiographical/reportage books, which explain how someone from an upper-middle-class background, presented at court as a debutante,  gained an understanding and appreciation of life in all its forms and textures. I devoured these from the library when I was quite young so they are very familiar to me, although I had to go on the internet to buy second-hand 1980s paperback copies of two of them.  One Pair of Hands (1939) is about Monica’s work as a ‘daily’ (non-live-in domestic servant) in the late 1930s, and One Pair of Feet (1942), about her year as a hospital nurse during the Second World War.   I have lent or recommended One Pair of Feet to a wide variety of people of all ages and everybody loves it. The hierarchies and hardships of nursing life are vividly conveyed, as are the regular barrackings and minute, impossible-to-keep regulations:

Chris and I got into a spot of trouble. I am not clear to this day what it was all about, but it culminated in each of us visiting Sarah P.Churchman [Matron’s office] to receive the information that we would never make a nurse, Nurse.

But it isn’t all comic. Elizabeth Bowen’s comments on the back of my 1987 paperback betray the kind of mind that is unable to understand that anybody could be a nurse for anything other than a laugh.(Many female novelists of that era – our own Kate O’Brien among them – looked down on nurses, just as they looked down on ‘shopgirls’. I’ll explore those prejudices in a later blog.)  Although she extracts humour from every situation, Monica takes very seriously her duty to make people comfortable and ease their pain. Of course she cannot resist caricaturing some working-class people a little. But like her great-grandfather, she is an equal-opportunities caricaturist  who spares no social class and she reserves her greatest scorn for the wealthy and entitled. The third of her autobiographical novels, My Turn To Make The Tea (1951) is a fictionalized account of her time as a cub reporter on a provincial newspaper.  Detailed descriptions of the squalor of her lodgings almost put me off this book  (her lurid corporeality reminds me of Maura Laverty) but I persevered and I’m glad I did  – this is  a funny and very informative read.

A Monica Dickens novel which I’d never heard of until I came across a second-hand copy is No More Meadows (1953). Christine is a single woman of 33,  living with her beloved aunt and father, working in the book department of a large London department store. In a park one day she meets an American naval officer, Vinson Gaegler. He is handsome and respectful and generous and good to her family, and a change from the lunging, superannuated men she meets at dances and other social occasions.  She is tired of being talked down to by younger married women (many married women really did treat single women like that, in living memory – a power relationship that is under-explored in fiction). So, it isn’t a spoiler to say she marries him – this outcome is more or less set up from the start.  However,  to say any more about what happens after that would be a spoiler. Some might find the ending bleak and abrupt, but  I found it hopeful and happy in its own way.  

Monica Dickens is one of the most satisfying authors I have ever read, and I have only scratched the surface of her work, here. She wrote for children and teenagers too (the Follyfoot series), she wrote lots of other novels, and in the 1960s she had a regular column on Woman’s Own. Yet she never seems to feature in lists of ‘great female novelists of the 20th century’ – except at wonderful Persephone Books of course.

Monica Dickens, Mariana (London: Michael Joseph 1940: Persephone 1999)

________________Joy and Josephine(London: Michael Joseph 1948: Book Club Ed 1949).

_________________The Winds of Heaven (London: Michael Joseph 1955: Persephone 2010)

________________One Pair of Hands(London: Michael Joseph 1939: Penguin 1976)

________________One Pair of Feet(London: Michael Joseph 1942: Penguin 1987)

_________________My Turn To Make The Tea(London: Michael Joseph  1951: Virago 2022).

_________________No More Meadows(London: Michael Joseph 1953).

A WORD ABOUT CLEAR CLASSICS.

I’m Caitriona Clear, a lifelong reader and a sometime historian. My latest book, A Concise History of Ireland, will be published by Cambridge University Press in March 2026.

MODERN CLASSICS.

Deirdre Madden, Molly Fox’s Birthday (London: Faber 2008).

Caitriona Lally, Eggshells (Dublin: Liberties Press 2015 and London: Borough Press 2018).

The un-named narrator of Molly Fox’s Birthday is a playwright and a friend of Molly Fox, a celebrated actor. The book’s theme – for me anyway – is how art is brought into being, but there are also themes of loneliness and loyalty, regret and confusion, as the narrator looks back on her life, and Fox’s role in it. She’s staying in Fox’s small terraced house in Dublin, while its owner is away, and the action – such as it is – unfolds over Midsummer’s Day. I’ve read this book numerous times and I’ve come to a different conclusion about what it means, every time. It is a delicious read, too, if you like sunny hallways and saffron quilts and cups of tea in summer backyards.

The setting of Eggshells is not as delightful. Vivian is living in a depressing and decrepit old house in Dublin that used to belong to her great-aunt. To her, the house and city are full of magic (portals to another world) and menace (colours and smells and threats). The words Obsessive Compulsive Disorder come to mind but the reader soon realizes that Vivian is no ‘madder’ than most of us, making our various ways through life, with rules and habits, likes and dislikes. That said, her friendlessness and fear make her unhappy – she is no ‘manic pixie dream girl’, and the story is about how she arrives at some kind of peace while retaining her redeeming sense of the transcendent.