Madeleine St John’s The Essence of the Thing (1997) and The Women in Black (1993)
A clever girl is the most wonderful thing in all Creation
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The name of this Substack is stolen from a novel by Madeleine St John. She is worth a Google – and there’s a biography of her by Helen Trinca (which is in my pile of books to read).
I remember the literary grumbles when The Essence of the Thing was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize: who was St John, and how could a short novel about a breakup in the hermetic world of middle-class Notting Hill and Clapham make the grade?
The Essence is the balance between the sweet and the bitter, and the depiction of a woman’s incipient independence and a man’s regret is funny and unspeakably sad. St John’s London, which really doesn’t seem so old, has now vanished entirely – people visit a place called the NFT, smoke in cafés (that aren’t Pret a Mangers), write letters to each other.
When I read it, it reminded me of certain plays by Harold Pinter, and of Jane Austen, and I love it – though not quite as much as I love St John’s life-affirming first novel, The Women in Black (aka Ladies in Black thanks to Bruce Beresford’s film and the musical by Carolyn Burns and Tim Finn).
It’s about a group of women coming of age and individuating while they work in Ladies’ Frocks at a David Jones-type department store in 1950s Sydney, and it wonderfully out-sparks Muriel Spark. But don’t take my word for its elegant brilliance, take Hilary Mantel’s, or take the essence of the thing itself:
A clever girl is the most wonderful thing in all Creation you know: you must never forget that. People expect men to be clever. They except girls to be stupid or at least silly, which very few girls really are, but most girls oblige them by acting like it. So you just go away and be as clever as you ever can: put their noses out of joint for them. It’s the best thing you could possibly do, you and all the clever girls in this city and the world. Now, then. We’d better get on and sell some Cocktail Frocks, hadn’t we? Yes indeed.1
Madeleine St John, The Women in Black (London: André Deutsch, 1993; repr. London: Abacus, 2014), p. 172.