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E.B.C. Jones
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E.B.C Jones
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She's really deep. If she's at all as good as we hope that she might be (and she may be just another hack with good connections, who knows?) then there's some serious criminality involved here. Two links for those who'd enter the dark chambers for to see ::abe has 5 listings for her (one of them is even a real book!) ::
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/Searc...
If you are on the correct continent, you might find something in a library somewhere, but it may require a road trip ::
http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3...
Boston, MA is a pretty smart town :: within 272 miles, you'll find 6 copies of Inigo Sandys.
btw, "Emily Beatrix Coursolles Jones" may be the better library entry for her here on gr.
Not sure how "experimental" she is, to be honest, but the complete absence of anything about her anywhere makes me want to find out more. I have been trawling the internet for information for the last few days and, after managing to get access to the Orlando site, have put together the following:
Poetry
EBCJ began writing poetry as a seven-year-old child.
A Volume
By 8 May 1917 EBCJ's first slim volume of poetry was Windows, issued jointly with Christopher Jonson.
Five of the dozen poems modernist by Jones which make up the second half of this booklet are translations from the French of Albert Victor Samain. In the others, the speaker often assumes, less or more overtly, a masculine persona. Several poems, like "London: Pre-War", compose a near-Imagist picture from cumulative detail: "the sudden hoot / Of taxis round quiet corners after dark . . . the piled-up fruit / On coster-barrows; and the golden light / Spilled on wet pavements by the lamps at night." In "Forests" the poet wonders, "do we burn on our suburban hearth / Fragments of fabulous trees that roofed a younger earth / When men were still inferior apes . . . ?" "Middle Age" invokes, only to reject, her favourite image of the failure of desire.
An Anthology
September 1918 EBCJ followed her own single poetry publication with Songs for Sale (a slim anthology of poems by her contemporaries) in a series entitled Adventurers All.
Her contributors included Jane Barlow, Frank Betts, Elizabeth Bridges (later Daryush), M. St Clare Byrne, Elsa L. Duff, A. P. Herbert, Aldous Huxley, E. H. W. Meyerstein, Dorothy and Max Plowman, Elizabeth Rendall, Dorothy L. Sayers, Osbert and Edith Sitwell, E. Wyndham Tennant, Sherard Vines, and Willoughby Weaving. She included three of her own poems. A closing colophon reveals that printing was completed in August. The little book is handsomely presented, with a black-and-white decorative cover.
Virginia Woolf, reviewing the anthology along with the rest of the Adventurers All series, and supposing that Jones was a man, found it insufficiently adventurous and rather conventional, with nothing to surprise or shock. However, she had some approval for EBCJ's poems. "Mr Jones has an imagination which is trying to express itself," she wrote.
Journalism and Reviewing.
EBCJ wrote the review for the Cambridge Magazine of Virginia Woolf's Night and Day, 1919. According to Woolf, EBCJ did not like the novel's characters, but found Woolf to be "in the forefront of contemporary literature." She continued to publish occasional reviews and essays after the appearance of her final novel.
Novels
Quiet Interior
By 19 November 1920 The year before her marriage, EBCJ published her first novel, Quiet Interior, which Katherine Mansfield welcomed as "remarkably well constructed" for a debut.
Mansfield further praised its "distinction of style". Rebecca West found in it "a sense of character that can be brilliant or touching." Her slightly acerbic account of characters and their milieu—"the tone of life as it is lived among pretty young people with enough money to give them power to amuse themselves"—perhaps responds to something in the novel itself.
EBCJ's second novel, The Singing Captives, 1921, is sometimes wrongly listed (in the Feminist Companion, for instance) as a book of verse.
The Wedgwood Medallion
By October 1922 EBCJ published her third novel, The Wedgwood Medallion, dedicated to someone named 'Lucas', who may be her husband.
This is a story of the difficult or tormented love-affairs of sensitive young people trying to construct their new and modern world. (Intellectually, they seek to reach back past the nineteenth century towards the eighteenth: during the opening scene one character reads Congreve and several sing numbers from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera.) Denis Ash has grown up close to his cousins Nicholas, Gervaise, and Hob Watergate. With his parents abroad (his father died abroad and his mother married again just as he had formed a relationship with her) Denis has admired his cousins but worshipped his elder sister Enid. When Enid marries the eldest cousin, Nicholas, he is dismayed, and when the marriage flounders in mutual recrimination it becomes essential to him to support Enid and to see the Watergates as the enemy. The simple narrative opens with Denis, all three cousins, and Oliver (a friend of Gervaise) travelling by train together from London to Cornwall. In Cornwall Denis meets and Sophie Rendel, and they fall in love. Their love means the induction of Sophie into the wealthy and cultivated Watergate family (in the central one of the book's five sections the father gives her one of his Wedgwood medallions as a kind of welcome present). This in turn means that Sophie gets to know Enid as a daughter-in-law in the family, and does not like or support her sufficiently for Denis's hyperactive sense of loyalty to his sister. As Denis explains to her at the end of the penultimate section, he feels sure their love, even though it is still strong and mutual, cannot in the long run survive such difference of opinion. They part, with anguish on both sides. The story ends with Sophie, now working in London, tentatively embarking on a new emotional tie with the serious, penniless, would-be writer Oliver.
EBCJ's next novel after this was Inigo Sandys, 1924.
Helen & Felicia
By 8 November 1927 EBCJ published another novel, Helen & Felicia, dedicating it to her husband by his name and initials, with four lines from Edna St Vincent Millay.
In the prefatory quotation the speaker bids a lover remember "How first you knew me in a book I wrote, / How first you loved me for a written line."
These sister heroines are only two among a large, upper-middle-class family, the Cunninghams: two of the children of the second wife, Mrs Cunningham. Irene, the eldest daughter, reflects how "queer" it is of her stepmother "to prefer the girls to the boys, even among her step-children." These two are the modern ones among their siblings, "introspective, keenly aware of their own inner lives, and detached from themselves in a way of which those who looked only outwards were quite incapable"—and inalienably attached to each other. They make their life-choices very differently. Helen rejects the idea of university, seeing it as merely a means to develop her personality. Instead of going to Newnham, she decides, she will become "the Newnham sort of person" by marrying the worldly, sophisticated Conrad Lake. She loves him deeply, and is delighted that—quietly and with careful avoidance of 'fuss'—he loves her, but before their baby is born she comes to feel disturbed at how different from each other they are. (Conrad, who seems able to read her mind, rejoins, "Why shouldn't we agree to be quite different, and yet live happy ever after?") Felicia, meanwhile, feeling bereft at Helen's marriage, tries to make "some sort of life of my own" through a job teaching at a children's dancing school. A colleague there proposes marriage to her, but she does not feel "properly in love" with him. As soon as a reason or excuse presents itself she gives up her job to stay with Helen (who, at first, needs her support because a friend has died), although she dislikes the Lakes' crowded social life and Conrad's lack of sympathy with her desire to be independent. Gradually she settles with the married couple; gradually they become a menage à trois, emotionally if not sexually. The closing impression left on the reader is that the sisters are more important to each other than Conrad is to either.
The book positions itself in relation to cultural, social and emotional markers that are not those of a majority in later times. Helen and Felicia read Northanger Abbey aloud, and Helen admits it to be, to some small extent, an exception to her dislike of Jane Austen. She feels suspicious of the "chorus of exaggerated praise" heaped on Austen by men—because, she feels sure, "men like women writing what they consider feminine books, and not trying to poach on their ground." Helen finds Austen (whom she contrasts with Sappho or Emily Brontë) "so awfully limited, so much on the surface, leaving so many things comfortably alone." Again, Helen seems to have no physical connection at all with her baby. She wishes babies could be as attractive as cats, and feels that she loves her Richard in spite of his appearance, and has begun to do so only "since he became a normal colour." She is pained by the thought of women "who bury their noses in babies," because "[e]ven Richard, who is as clean as any baby could be, used sometimes to smell a little of sick."
Cyril Connolly called this novel a "moving and conscientious study of fondness written with sobriety and grace."
Morning and Cloud
By 5 January 1932 EBCJ dedicated her final novel, Morning and Cloud, to Phyllis Hamerton, with quotations fromEdwin Muir and William Blake.
It took her some time to find a publisher who wanted to bring out this novel.
In this novel Cedric Benton has married Bride because he fell in love with her on holiday, in the dazzle, scent, and brightness of a seaside fortnight. He realises only later how calm and still she is, how unwilling to talk of her feelings. She has some money, which enables them to live in a beautiful house and buy modern paintings occasionally. He feels "the extraordinary good fortune which had attended him almost since birth," but feels, too, that this "made his discontent, his bad moods, disgusting, ungrateful, unjustifiable." The story gently and gradually unfolds his dissatisfaction and boredom, until he falls in love with a vivid girl named Anthea, who is trying to be an artist and has a part-time teaching job and lives in an inelegant bed-sitter. Cedric sets events in train for leaving Bride, trusting that she will divorce him and that he will be able to marry Anthea. Then Bride begins to suffer (though she will not speak of it); Cedric's fragile happiness dissolves. Anthea, with, surprising, self-sacrificing goodness (or perhaps with some obscure, not understood destructive impulse) wonders if it might be better if he did not leave Bride after all but continued to see her, Anthea, clandestinely. Cedric is struck with admiration of her goodness, feeling that she loves with a generosity he cannot even understand. Left alone she lies sleepless, trying to grasp the moment. "Cedric could not be different from what he is . . . . But shall we be divided?" As often in EBCJ's fiction, it seems that love cannot rise to the occasion, that it is not and cannot be enough.
Among her friends one or two (including Dora Carrington) thought this her best novel. It is not clear if EBCJ published no more books because of a sense that her style of writing was no longer popular, or because of other factors in her personal life