Rose Collis

Nancy Spain was a journalist, broadcaster, media personality and socialite in England, from the 1940s until her death in a plane crash at the age of 47. Her varied work included interviews, book reviewing and features for various publications but especially the Express.

She also published a number of books, including a series of satirical crime novels, several memoirs, children's books, two biographies (one of her ancestor Mrs Beeton) and a cookery book. Virago Modern Classics has recently republished 4 of her series crime novels featuring Natasha Nevkorina and Miriam Birdseye, two women who repeatedly find themselves investigating murder in various settings. Two of her memoirs have also come back into print courtesy of Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

She lived with her female partner, Joan 'Jonny' Werner Laurie, also a woman of letters from a publishing dynasty and a journalist, who founded the women's magazine She. They were fairly widely known to be and accepted as a lesbian couple, without it generally being said, and brought up two sons together in a manner common among upper middle class people who were more interested in life outside than domesticity. The children were packed off to various boarding schools and sent on holiday with servants to take care of them.
Nancy Spain also preferred trousers, but also, mostly wore clothes still considered in her times to be mens' attire. She does not seem to have felt there was any contradiction between living her life as she wanted to and her upbringing in a conservative middle class family in Newcastle. She was a lifelong Tory voter like her father and many (not all) of her friends and the newspaper she worked for. Collis reflects that if she had not died in 1964, she might not have been particularly comfortable with the different values of the 1960s, that she was quite happy just living life her own way in the apparently much more conservative 1950s.

I found this very thoroughly researched biography an interesting read into a character whose books are enjoying a revival of interest. It was published back in 1997 and is sadly long out of print but I was able to borrow a copy from a library's reserve stock.… (mere)

Average

This is a biography of Valerie Lilias Arhelt Smith who, as “Colonel Victor Barker” was arrested and sent to jail for falsifying records (a marriage certificate) to marry Elfrida Hayward in St Peters Church, Brighton. A scandalous trial with lots of coverage in the tabloids led to a life of notoriety. The central story is supplemented with examples from history of other cross dressing females. There is a good book in here but sadly there are a few problems. Firstly, and this may just be my issue, Collis drops the historical info, in very long (sometimes several pages) stretches of prose in italics. Seemingly with little thought as to breaking up the story and then will continue as though there had been no insertion at all. Drove me to distraction and a couple of chapters in I was reading the main biography and skipping the italics, which I then went through at the end. A little editorial control would have helped here. The other problem was a usual biographical one, she was working from minimal records, Barker for obvious reasons not writing much down, and extrapolating and surmising. This is Ok as far as it goes but sometimes, where the records are scant, there did seem to be an element of the author just making it up. However I’m glad I read this book even though it didn’t quite deliver and there are plenty of interesting episodes. Including the fact that Barker joined the British Fascists in the inter-war years and we see that many of the suffragettes went on to join the fascists & the fact that there were lots of fascist movements in Britain, which is a bit of history I know virtually nothing about. I’m aware of Mosely of course but not the other movements, who seemed to be formed to oppose the communists.

Overall – A little muddled but an interesting story for a biography… (mere)