Antonia White
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Antonia White (born Eirene Adeline Botting; 31 March 1899 – 10 April 1980) was a
British British may refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies. ** Britishness, the British identity and common culture * British English, ...
writer and translator, known primarily for ''
Frost in May ''Frost in May'' is a 1933 novel by the British author Antonia White that was reissued in 1978 as the first book in Virago Press's Modern Classics series of books by neglected women authors. Background ''Frost in May'', first published in 1933 ...
'', a semi-autobiographical novel set in a convent school. It was the first book reissued by
Virago Press Virago is a British publisher of women's writing and books on Feminism, feminist topics. Started and run by women in the 1970s and bolstered by the success of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), Virago has been credited as one of several Briti ...
in 1978, as part of their Modern Classics series of books by previously neglected women authors.


Early life

White was born in London to parents Cecil and Christine Botting. She later took her mother's maiden name, White. Her father taught
Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
and
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
at St. Paul's School. She was baptized in the
Protestant Protestantism is a Christian denomination, branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Reformation, Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century agai ...
Church of England The Church of England (C of E) is the established Christian church in England and the mother church of the international Anglican Communion. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britain ...
but converted to
Roman Catholicism The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwide . It is am ...
at the age of 9 when her father converted. She struggled with religion and did not feel that she fitted in with the other girls at her school, many of whom were from upper-class Catholic families. She attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart,
Roehampton Roehampton is an area in southwest London, in the Putney SW15 postal district, and takes up a far western strip running north to south of the London Borough of Wandsworth. It contains a number of large council house estates and is home to the U ...
(later
Woldingham School Woldingham School is an independent school for girls, located in the former Marden Park of outside the village of Woldingham, Surrey, in South East England. It is a Roman Catholic school and a member of the global Network of Sacred Heart Schoo ...
,
Surrey Surrey () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South East England, bordering Greater London to the south west. Surrey has a large rural area, and several significant urban areas which form part of the Greater London Built-up Area. ...
). Although she is remembered as a modernist writer, she developed a terrible fear of writing after a misunderstanding when she was 15. She had been working on what was going to be her first novel, which was to be a present for her father. She wanted to surprise him with a book about wicked people whose lives are changed as they discover religion. She attempted to give a detailed description of the evil characters, but, because of her lack of experience, she was unable to describe their wickedness except to say that they "Indulged in nameless vices". The story was found unfinished by officials at her Catholic school and she was then expelled from the school without being given the opportunity to explain her book. She describes this incident as being her most vivid and tragic memory. "My superb gift to my father was absolutely my undoing" she remarked in an interview. She did not begin writing novels again until 20 years later, when her father died. After she was expelled from the convent at Roehampton, she attended
St Paul's Girls' School St Paul's Girls' School is an independent day school for girls, aged 11 to 18, located in Brook Green, Hammersmith, in West London, England. History St Paul's Girls' School was founded by the Worshipful Company of Mercers in 1904, using part o ...
(the sister school to St Paul's School where her father taught), but did not fit in there either. When she left school she attempted to become an actress, but was unsuccessful. She wrote for magazines and then in advertising, where she earned £250 a year promoting Mercolized wax. She spent nine years working as a copywriter in London and also worked for the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
as a translator. Antonia White's translations of
Colette Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (; 28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954), known mononymously as Colette, was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her ...
's ''
Claudine Claudine may refer to: Name * Claudine (given name), a feminine given name of French origin Culture * ''Claudine'' (film), a 1974 American film by John Berry ** ''Claudine'' (soundtrack), its soundtrack album. Music by Curtis Mayfield and Gladis ...
'' novels were recognised for their elegance and erudition and remain the standard texts today.


Relationships

In 1921 she was married to the first of her three husbands. The marriage was annulled only two years later, and reportedly was never consummated. She immediately fell in love again with a man named Robert, who was an
officer An officer is a person who has a position of authority in a hierarchical organization. The term derives from Old French ''oficier'' "officer, official" (early 14c., Modern French ''officier''), from Medieval Latin ''officiarius'' "an officer," f ...
in the
Scots Guards The Scots Guards (SG) is one of the five Foot Guards regiments of the British Army. Its origins are as the personal bodyguard of King Charles I of England and Scotland. Its lineage can be traced back to 1642, although it was only placed on the ...
. They never married, and their relationship was brief but intense, which led to her experiencing a severe mental breakdown. She was committed to Bethlem, a public asylum, where she spent the next year of her life. She described her breakdown as a period of "mania". After she left the hospital, she spent four years participating in Freudian studies. She struggled the rest of her life with mental illness which she referred to as "The Beast". Her second marriage was to a man named Eric Earnshaw Smith, but this marriage ended in divorce. By the age of 30, she had been married three times. During her second marriage, she had fallen in love with two men. One was Rudolph 'Silas' Glossop, described as "a tall handsome young man with a slightly melancholy charm". The other was
Tom Hopkinson Sir Henry Thomas Hopkinson (19 April 1905 – 20 June 1990) was a British journalist, picture magazine editor, author, and teacher. Early life Born in Manchester, his father was a Church of England clergyman and a scholar, and his mother had ...
, then a copywriter. She had trouble deciding whom she should marry following her divorce, and she married Hopkinson in 1930. She had two daughters, Lyndall Hopkinson and
Susan Chitty Lady Susan Chitty (18 August 1929 – 13 July 2021) was an English novelist and a writer of biographies. Her memoir on her mother, which was viewed as a "literary assassination", caused an uproar with writers and family. Early life Her mother was ...
, who have both written autobiographical books about their difficult relationship with their mother.


Writing career and personal life

By 1931, White was married to Tom Hopkinson and was friends with novelist
Djuna Barnes Djuna Barnes (, June 12, 1892 – June 18, 1982) was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel ''Nightwood'' (1936), a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist litera ...
, and she was with Barnes when the latter wrote her now famous novel depicting a
lesbian A lesbian is a Homosexuality, homosexual woman.Zimmerman, p. 453. The word is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate n ...
affair gone bad, ''Nightwood''. This novel was based on Barnes's relationship with Thelma Wood. In 1933, White completed her first novel, ''Frost in May'', which fictionalised her experiences at Catholic boarding school and her expulsion. She also began writing a second novel, but a failed marriage and mental illness hindered its completion. Fifteen years later, she completed her second novel ''The Lost Traveller'', which was published in 1950. In the subsequent five years, after undergoing treatment for mental illness and reconverting to Catholicism, she completed the Clara Batchelor trilogy, which includes ''The Lost Traveller'', about her relationship with her mother and father, ''The Sugar House'', about her first unconsummated marriage, and ''Beyond the Glass'', about an intense love-affair followed by a breakdown, which is vividly described. As with her previous work, the trilogy was fictional, but mainly autobiographical. The four novels together narrate her life from ages 9 to 23. In 1966, she published a collection of letters entitled ''The Hound and the Falcon: The Story of a Reconversion to the Catholic Faith''. She wrote ''Three in a Room'', a three-act comedy, as well as many short stories, poems and juvenile fiction. Her career as a writer seems to have been driven by the desire to cope with a sense of failure, resulting initially from her first attempt at writing, and with mental illness. She is quoted as saying,
The old terrors always return and often, with them, a feeling of such paralyzing lack of self-confidence that I have to take earlier books of mine off their shelf just to prove to myself that I actually wrote them and they were actually printed, bound, and read. I find that numbers of writers experience these same miseries over their work and do not, as is so often supposed, enjoy the process. "Creative joy" is something I haven't felt since I was fourteen and don't expect to feel again.
With regard to the content of her writing, White remarked, "My novels and short stories are mainly about ordinary people who become involved in rather extraordinary situations. I do not mean in sensational adventures but in rather odd and difficult personal relationships largely due to their family background and their incomplete understanding of their own natures. I use both Catholic and non-Catholic characters and am particularly interested in the conflicts that arise between them and in the influences they have on each other." Two of the main themes in White's novels are her relationship with her father and her Catholic faith.


Legacy

In the introduction to ''
Frost in May ''Frost in May'' is a 1933 novel by the British author Antonia White that was reissued in 1978 as the first book in Virago Press's Modern Classics series of books by neglected women authors. Background ''Frost in May'', first published in 1933 ...
'',
Elizabeth Bowen Elizabeth Bowen CBE (; 7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an Irish-British novelist and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction about life in wartime London. Life ...
describes the novel as a school story. She comments that the novel is written for adult readers, but that the language is comprehensible to an intelligent child of twelve. She writes, "We have Nanda’s arrival at Lippington, first impressions, subsequent adaptations, apparent success and, finally, head-on crash." This plot deviates from what Bowen refers to as the normal school story only in that it does not have a happy ending. ''Frost in May'' was written during the rise of anti-school school stories after
World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
. Regarding White's writing style, Bowen wrote: "Antonia White’s style as a story-teller is as precise, clear and unweighty as
Jane Austen Jane Austen (; 16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots of ...
's. Without a lapse from this style Antonia White traverses passages of which the only analogy is to be found in
James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...
's ''
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'' is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce. A ''Künstlerroman'' written in a modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's fictional alter ...
''." This comparison suggests that White's writing is both reminiscent of 19th century realism and indicative of modernist tendencies. ''Frost in May'' was reissued in 1978 by
Virago Press Virago is a British publisher of women's writing and books on Feminism, feminist topics. Started and run by women in the 1970s and bolstered by the success of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), Virago has been credited as one of several Briti ...
as the first book in its Modern Classics series of new editions of out-of-print books by neglected women authors.


Works

* ''
Frost in May ''Frost in May'' is a 1933 novel by the British author Antonia White that was reissued in 1978 as the first book in Virago Press's Modern Classics series of books by neglected women authors. Background ''Frost in May'', first published in 1933 ...
'' (D. Harmsworth, 1933;
Virago A virago is a woman who demonstrates abundant masculine virtues. The word comes from the Latin word ''virāgō'' ( genitive virāginis) meaning vigorous' from ''vir'' meaning "man" or "man-like" (cf. virile and virtue) to which the suffix ''-ā ...
, 1978) *''Three in a Room: Comedy in 3 Acts'' (French's Acting Edition, 1947) * ''The Lost Traveller'' (
Eyre and Spottiswoode Eyre & Spottiswoode was the London-based printing firm that was the King's Printer, and subsequently, a publisher prior to being incorporated; it once went by the name of Spottiswoode, Ballantyne & co. ltd. In April 1929, it was incorporated as E ...
, 1950; Virago, 1979) * ''The Sugar House'' (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1952; Virago, 1979) * ''Beyond the Glass'' (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1954; Virago, 1979) * ''Strangers'' (Harvill Press, 1954; Virago, 1981). Short stories. * ''The Hound and the Falcon: The Story of a Reconversion to Catholic Faith'' (
Longmans Longman, also known as Pearson Longman, is a publishing company founded in London, England, in 1724 and is owned by Pearson PLC. Since 1968, Longman has been used primarily as an imprint by Pearson's Schools business. The Longman brand is also ...
, 1965; Virago, 1980) *''As Once in May'' (1983). Autobiography edited by her daughter,
Susan Chitty Lady Susan Chitty (18 August 1929 – 13 July 2021) was an English novelist and a writer of biographies. Her memoir on her mother, which was viewed as a "literary assassination", caused an uproar with writers and family. Early life Her mother was ...
, as well as unfinished novels ''Julian Tye'' and ''Clara IV.''Bibliographical detail taken from a copy of ''As Once in May'' published by Virago
London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
in 1983 *''Diaries'', Volume One, 1926-1957, edited by Susan Chitty (1991) *''Diaries'', Volume Two, 1958-1979, edited by Susan Chitty (1992)


Children's books

* ''Minka and Curdy'' ( Harvill, 1957) * ''Living with Minka and Curdy'' (Harvill, 1970)


Selected translations

*
Guy de Maupassant Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (, ; ; 5 August 1850 – 6 July 1893) was a 19th-century French author, remembered as a master of the short story form, as well as a representative of the Naturalist school, who depicted human lives, destin ...
: ''A Woman's Life'' (1949). Translation awarded the 1950
Denyse Clairouin Denyse Henriette Léonie Clairouin (27 August 1900 in Paris – 12 March 1945 in Mauthausen) was a French translator and French Resistance, Resistance fighter. During the Second World War, she was part of the Resistance (group Secret Army). She ...
Memorial Award. * Henri Bordeaux: ''A Pathway to Heaven'' (1952) *
Alexis Carrel Alexis Carrel (; 28 June 1873 – 5 November 1944) was a French surgeon and biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques. He invented the first perfusion pump with Charle ...
: ''Reflections on Life'' (1952) *
Marguerite Duras Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu (, 4 April 1914 – 3 March 1996), known as Marguerite Duras (), was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film ''Hiroshima mon amour'' (1959) ea ...
: ''A Sea of Troubles'' (1953) *
Serge Groussard Serge Groussard (18 January 1921 – 2 January 2016) was a French journalist and writer, the son of colonel Georges Groussard and Véra Bernstein-Woolbrunn. Biography Serge Groussard studied at the Calvin Institute in Montauban, at the La Roc ...
: ''A German Officer'' (1955) * Christine Arnothy: ''I Am Fifteen and I Do Not Want to Die'' (1955) *
Colette Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (; 28 January 1873 – 3 August 1954), known mononymously as Colette, was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her ...
: ''
Claudine at School ''Claudine at School'' (french: Claudine à l'école) is a 1900 novel by the French writer Colette. The narrative recounts the final year of secondary school of 15-year-old Claudine, her brazen confrontations with her headmistress, Mlle Sergent, a ...
'' (1956). Translation of ''Claudine à l'école'' (1900) *Christine Arnothy: ''Those Who Wait'' (1957) *Colette: ''Claudine in Paris'' (1958). Translation of ''Claudine à Paris'' (1901) *''The Stories of Colette'' (1958). Translations of Colette's short stories *Christine Arnothy: ''It Is Not So Easy to Live'' (1958) *Christine Arnothy: ''The Charlatan'' (1959) *Eveline Mahyère: ''I Will Not Serve'' (1959) *Loys Masson: ''The Tortoises'' (1959) * Colette: ''Claudine Married'' (1960). Translation of ''Claudine en ménage'' (1902) *Christine Arnothy: ''The Serpent's Bite'' (1961) * Colette: ''Claudine and Annie'' (1962). Translation of ''Claudine s'en va'' (1903) *
Georges Simenon Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (; 13 February 1903 – 4 September 1989) was a Belgian writer. He published nearly 500 novels and numerous short works, and was the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret. Early life and education ...
: ''The Glass Cage'' (1973)


Further reading

*
Susan Chitty Lady Susan Chitty (18 August 1929 – 13 July 2021) was an English novelist and a writer of biographies. Her memoir on her mother, which was viewed as a "literary assassination", caused an uproar with writers and family. Early life Her mother was ...
: ''Now to My Mother: A Very Personal Memoir of Antonia White'' (1985) *Lyndall Hopkinson: ''Nothing to Forgive: A Daughter's Life of Antonia White'' (1988)


References


External links


Susan Chitty

Lyndall Hopkinson

Lyndall Hopkinson
{{DEFAULTSORT:White, Antonia 1899 births 1980 deaths 20th-century English novelists 20th-century English women writers 20th-century British short story writers British women short story writers Converts to Roman Catholicism English short story writers English women novelists People educated at Woldingham School