I’ve been reading a lot of 1930s novels lately, and I have been surprised by how funny they are. Not slapstick-funny or raised-eyebrow-funny, but properly laugh-out-loud funny. And oh so clever, too. They all feature women constrained by money, class, family expectations or simply other people’s low estimation of them. And then, without ever becoming dull or preachy, they show these women finding ways to change their circumstances. Here are five I’ve loved this year, all published between 1930 and 1938.

The Diary of a Provincial Lady — E. M. Delafield, 1930

Written in diary form, the novel follows an unnamed woman attempting to keep up appearances in a country village on little money and less time. Yes, she has a cook and a governess, so her circumstances aren’t entirely relatable, but so much of her experience is. If you are a harried woman constantly trying to muddle through life as best you can, you will read this with amusement and a pang of sympathy. The children show her up, she has little time to herself, and the Lady of the Manor turns up unexpectedly for tea and offers unsolicited advice about her hyacinths.

The novel ends with one of the most perfect lines I have ever read. When her husband suggests she may be wasting her time writing her diary, she decides she will have to leave that question to posterity. Nearly a century later, with the book still in print, I think posterity has answered him!

Favourite quote

‘January 22nd Robert startles me at breakfast by asking if my cold— which he has hitherto ignored— is better. I reply that it has gone. Then why, he asks, do I look like that? ... Feel that life is wholly unendurable, and decide madly to get a new hat.’

Miss Buncle’s Book — D. E. Stevenson, 1934

Miss Buncle is having money troubles. The income from her dividends is no longer enough to sustain her. Having ruled out keeping chickens, she decides that writing a book is the solution. Unfortunately, Miss Buncle has ‘no imagination’, so she is forced to find inspiration in the people around her.

When the book becomes a bestseller, everyone in the village suspects everyone else, and a determination to find the author and horsewhip him takes hold. Miss Buncle is understandably concerned, but no one suspects her because she is considered dull, plain and a little bit dim. Hilariously, life begins to imitate art, and as the villagers start to mirror their characters, even Miss Buncle begins to change.

Miss Buncle’s Book is great fun: gossipy, with a hint of farce, but also clever, with a deeply satisfying ending.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day — Winifred Watson, 1938

Miss Pettigrew is a governess who is always being dismissed from her posts. Her life is becoming more precarious with each ‘failure’. As the book opens, she is sent by the job agency to a new address. But instead of a nursery full of children, she finds the beautiful Delysia LaFosse, a man in the bedroom and a crisis in progress. Within minutes of arriving, she has averted the crisis, managing everything, much to Delysia’s delight.

A day in the life of Delysia is like nothing Miss Pettigrew has ever experienced. What makes it so touching is how naturally Miss Pettigrew rises to every occasion. A woman who has spent her life being told she is incompetent suddenly finds herself in a world where she is not merely useful but wanted. The only anxiety is what will happen when the day ends.

Favourite quote

‘How lovely!’ she thought sentimentally. ‘Is there anything more beautiful? Woman to woman. And they say we don’t trust each other!’

The Brontës Went to Woolworths — Rachel Ferguson, 1931

This book is like nothing I have ever read before, and be warned, it can be a bit disorientating at the beginning. But once you let yourself go and relax into it, it becomes a delight.

The book follows the three Carne sisters and their mother who live half their lives in a world of imagination. They take people they have seen on the stage, or even an ugly doll, invent whole personas for them and gradually weave these characters into their family life. Then they get the chance to meet one of their inventions — well, two in fact — Judge Toddington and his wife, Lady Mildred. They say you should never meet your heroes because they will, of course, be nothing like you expected. Will the Toddingtons be a disappointment, or will they exceed the Carnes’ expectations?

This book is funny in a different way from the others. There’s more poignancy here. The sisters have lost their father and seem to be trying to fill a gap with their invented characters. And while the characters are modern, independent and intelligent — Katrine wants to go on the stage and Deirdre is a journalist — there is a streak of class snobbery in the novel, which I dislike. They are dismissive of the youngest daughter’s governess and they can’t imagine Katrine marrying a working-class actor and introducing him to the family.

I do, however, love the dialogue in the book. Ferguson writes a wide range of characters and captures them so exactly that you feel you’re eavesdropping rather than reading.

Cold Comfort Farm — Stella Gibbons, 1932

I have, in my opinion, saved the best for last. If you find Wuthering Heights melodramatic, then you will love this! If you think Hardy is a genius, but honestly a bit depressing, then pick this up instead. Cold Comfort Farm is a satire of a gloomy rural novel — all doom and gloom, rot and ruin. The characters are helpless and hopeless: Aunt Ada Doom, the matriarch, won’t let them leave because there have always been ‘Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm’, and besides, ‘she saw something nasty in the woodshed.’

Into this stagnant atmosphere comes Flora Poste — bright, practical, no-nonsense and ready to set them all to rights, beginning with getting her curtains washed. Flora works through the family like a to-do list, with each solution more briskly absurd than the last. Amos is set off to preach from the back of a Ford van, and one by one the others are prised from their misery and out of Aunt Ada’s grip.

Favourite quote

‘’Tes wickedness! ’Tes flying in the face of Nature!’ she burst out fearfully at last.

‘Nonsense!’ said Flora. ‘Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy.’

What I love about this collection is how quirky and individual each book is. They’re comic but rarely silly. They tease without being condescending and are warm without being sentimental. Their humour comes from close observation of the absurdities of life.

But these novels offer a deeper satisfaction than comedy alone. There is real difficulty in these characters’ lives: financial insecurity, loneliness, grief, domestic drudgery and the narrowness of the lives available to women. The writers don’t make light of those things so much as find the comedy alongside them. By making these lives funny, they also expose some of the absurdities of the world that has made them so difficult.

But their social vision has its limits. These novels are very much of their time. In four of the five, the focus is firmly on the middle and upper classes — servants and governesses are treated like background props and a working-class suitor is unthinkable. Miss Pettigrew is the exception, and perhaps that’s why it’s the one that makes me the most emotional: it takes a woman who has consistently been found wanting and gives her a whole day of being appreciated and admired.

Some of these novels were underrated for a long time, much like their protagonists. Cold Comfort Farm won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize in 1933. Neither Cold Comfort Farm nor The Diary of a Provincial Lady has ever been out of print. But Miss Pettigrew was a hit in 1938 and then disappeared for sixty years, until a reader walked into Persephone Books with her mother’s battered copy and asked them to reprint it. Miss Buncle’s Book was brought back by Persephone in 2008, and The Brontës Went to Woolworths by Bloomsbury the following year.

So, if you want one more book before the summer ends — something fun that will also gently start your brain up again — any of these will do it.

The War was over, Clarissa Dalloway thinks in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, The war was over, Laura thinks in Mollie Panter-Downes’s One Fine Day. Two wars, two women and two novels set in the aftermath.

One Fine Day and Mrs Dalloway have frequently been compared to one another, partly because they follow a married woman through the events of a single day. Each woman sifts through the events of the past, making sense of them, reliving decisions and coming to conclusions. Clocks tick and chime, reminding us of the passage of time in these two diurnal novels. And towards the end, each woman has an epiphany that alters the way she sees her life.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf was published in 1925. It is set just after the First World War and follows Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party at her house in Westminster. One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes was published in 1947. It is set a year after the end of the Second World War and follows Laura Marshall through a summer’s day in her home of Wealding, on the border of Surrey and Sussex.

Woolf’s stream of consciousness immerses us in the minds of several characters and lays their souls bare. We are presented with these differing characters’ hopes and regrets, their love and hate, their despair and madness. But more than that, we see their evaluation of their own lives, their mistakes and failings. They see themselves all too clearly, and it is quite a ride. Clarissa Dalloway is the main character of the novel, and apart from a visit to the flower shop, we see her almost entirely at home. She has conversations with others, but a good part of her day is spent reminiscing, considering her past, the choices she made and where they have led her. It is a mind-led book in many ways: thoughts, memories and opinions predominate. However, it is also sensual, with descriptions of flowers and gardens, the bustle of London, the chill, sharp air of a morning at Bourton. Big Ben strikes throughout the day, and Woolf writes ‘The leaden circles dissolved in the air,’ which I think is incredibly beautiful.

Panter-Downes’s novel has a more conventional structure. It is mainly told from the point of view of Laura Marshall, with brief dips into the heads of her husband, Stephen, and ten-year-old daughter, Victoria. There is still plenty of Laura’s inner life in the novel, though. She reminisces about the early years of her marriage and her reasons for choosing Stephen, but overall the novel feels more outwardly focused and sensation-based. Her descriptions of the day, the people and the countryside are really outstanding: ‘The country was tumbled out before her like the contents of a lady’s workbox, spools of green and silver and pale yellow, ribbed squares of brown stuff, a thread of crimson, a stab of silver, a round, polished gleam of mother of pearl’ (p. 130).

These two women’s lives are very different. Clarissa lives in London, while Laura is in the countryside. Clarissa, now in her fifties, has a daughter of seventeen; Laura is younger, in her late thirties. Clarissa has an army of servants to help, leaving her free to choose the flowers for her party, a favour she takes on to relieve her already busy maid. Laura struggles through the household tasks of the day: shopping, feeding the ducks and hens, preparing food, picking gooseberries and searching for her errant dog, Stuffy. But many of the things they struggle with are the same — the memories they relive, the choices they have made, the realities of marriage, the changes they have seen and the purpose of their lives.

Both novels are set in the aftermath of war; however, in Mrs Dalloway this thread is carried by the character of Septimus Warren Smith, who is suffering from shell shock. Clarissa and the other characters barely mention the war at all, even Rezia, who lived through it in Italy. It’s as if the whole world is shell-shocked, but most people manage to put it out of their minds. For Septimus, though, it keeps leaking in, with tragic consequences. Clarissa is relieved that the war is over, but we do not know how much it really affected her. She has plenty of food and servants, and there is no mention of her husband, a politician, having to go away to fight. In many ways, life for Clarissa Dalloway is much as it was before the war. Only the shell-shocked Septimus is there to remind us of its horror. In fact, Clarissa spends much of her day in the distant past, well before the war, jumping back to her young womanhood at Bourton, where she had relationships with Peter Walsh and Sally Seton before marrying Richard Dalloway.

In One Fine Day we see more evidence of the war, in fortifications and barbed wire, but also in the effect it has had on people’s lives, such as food shortages and the impossibility of finding servants. Laura’s whole life has changed. She is battling to keep on top of a large house with little domestic help while her husband faces a similar struggle with the garden. Family dinners are interrupted because she must keep jumping up and down to do something in the kitchen. For the characters in One Fine Day, England is changed irrevocably. Old houses are shut up, impossible to keep with the financial aftermath of the war and the lack of servants. Young people move away to find new opportunities in towns and cities.

The sense of all that has been lost pervades the novel from its first pages: the flower-filled rooms in London that have been bombed out of existence and the merry maids enjoying their ‘bread and cheese elevenses’. One can’t help but think of Clarissa’s Westminster home as one of those flower-filled rooms. Laura and Stephen dip back in their minds to a golden peacetime summer before the war, and Laura remembers the wartime house full of women. But unlike Clarissa, who reminisces in the quiet of her attic room and the rest she takes after lunch, Laura’s memories occur as she completes the tasks of the day: waiting in line, taking the bus or visiting the Porters.

Both novels show their characters considering the marriage choices they made. Clarissa refused Peter Walsh and chose Richard Dalloway, ‘the foundation of everything’, for his solidity and his status. She took the safe, respectable option, but in some ways it seems this was the right choice for her. Perhaps she needed this solidity and space to be herself. Laura, by contrast, refused the steady man people thought she should marry, even though her life might have been easier if she had. She turned down the man who called her an ‘idiotic child’ and wanted to change her vague and scatterbrained nature. She may occasionally fear that Stephen does care about the mess and forgotten tasks, but she doesn’t regret her decision.

Clarissa thinks she has failed her husband with some coldness or lack of passion, and Laura thinks she fails hers with her forgetfulness and mess. And while they have been distressing themselves over their failings, we see Richard Dalloway trying to say “I love you,” and managing only to bring roses, and Stephen Marshall, so thankful that Laura chose him, able to express it only in the promise of a new hat.

One thing that troubles Clarissa is that her parties are considered frivolous and pointless. Peter Walsh accuses Clarissa of being a mere hostess. But Clarissa sees her parties as an offering, a way to bring people together. Yet her generosity does not extend to Miss Kilman or Ellie Henderson, who are socially beneath her. Her attitudes to class are even clearer when she applauds herself for letting her maids stay out late if they want to go to the theatre. But this says something of her opinion of the working class: they should not be allowed complete freedom but must be guided by their superiors. Understandably, after the freedoms of the Second World War, many domestic servants chose not to return to service.

Laura has a much more rounded view of the working-class people around her. She appreciates the statuesque beauty and tenderness of George, the bawdy, Elizabethan Mrs Prout. The working class seem closer to nature, more fecund, carefree and joyful, less constrained by the rules of society or the morals of the church: ‘Life and death, for Mrs Prout, were mingled in one vast, satisfying draught which she gulped in a mouthful and found good’ (p. 89). The Porters’ cottage is surrounded by lush flowers nourished with a few tea leaves and little boys ‘making water’ on them. Laura comments on Mrs Porter’s son and ‘the astonishing tenderness of George’s sort of man for their young. Stephen and his sort do not know it’ (p. 50). She is aware of the freedom of the gypsy on the hill and even the ‘careless maternity’ of her dog Stuffy, comparing all this to her ‘turned-back fresh linen, the polished wood reflecting civilized candlelight, the hot water running into the shining bath’ (p. 138). But she is not sentimental about these things: ‘there was nothing to be done’ (p. 139), she thinks, and though the cottages of Wealding may look charming from the outside, she describes them as insanitary hovels.

By the end of the novel, both women let go of the past and embrace life as it meets them now. For Clarissa, it comes during her party, when she learns of Septimus’s death. In the midst of the bustle, she takes herself to a quiet room and contemplates this. She believes that Septimus took his own life to preserve his soul from society’s corrupting forces. She sees her own desire for success and considers that she ‘was never wholly admirable’ (p. 199), and this acknowledgement seems to free her from the past and allow her to be happy. She stops weighing the choices she made and accepts things as they are. She then notices the old lady in the house opposite preparing alone for bed, and she is deeply moved. She has spent the day musing on whether she made the right choices; perhaps this solitary woman has shown her that she was right to keep some part of herself for herself, uncorrupted by society.

Laura’s epiphany is gentler. It comes when she walks to the top of Barrow Down in the evening. For the first time, she seems to sink into the full knowledge that the war is over. She settles into the beautiful landscape of England and rests in its arms. She lets go of what doesn’t really matter, and surely what doesn’t really matter includes the standards of a vanished world she has spent the day failing to meet. She stops measuring herself against the wife she was supposed to be and begins to make plans for the future in this new world she now inhabits. She and Stephen have come through the war, and ‘the feeling of thankfulness was so overwhelming that the view suddenly misted, gathered, and hung shining’ (p. 143).

A male van driver got furious with me the other day because I went to turn right out of a side road as he was turning right into it. No harm was done. I stopped in good time. I immediately apologised. The sun was bright; I hadn’t seen his indicator. Despite my apology, he was incandescent with rage. Why was he so mad at me for a simple mistake? Because I got in his way, and middle-aged women aren’t supposed to do that?

The funny thing is I kind of get it. I’m menopausal; rage hits me at the most inconvenient times. But the difference is I don’t take it out on every human being that doesn’t meet my expectations. Of course, I have been angry in my life. Of course I have behaved badly. But I would never rage so violently at someone for a small mistake.

Anyway, this essay isn’t about angry van drivers. It’s about the menopause, though I can see why you wouldn’t have necessarily realised that yet. In fact, it’s about hormones more generally, I guess - about whose hormones are acceptable and whose aren’t. The van driver may have been a victim of testosterone, as is the door-slamming, wall-punching teenage boy, but he’s had a whole lifetime to adjust to this hormone; he’s not a teenager any more.

But female hormones are more changeable. Ask any preteen girl, whose joy bubbles like the Trevi fountain at one moment and whose rage rolls in like a tsunami the next. Teenage girls, according to some cultural myths, are so full of dark energy that poltergeists are said to prey on them. I think poltergeists must be wimps- there are bigger hormonal surges to ride if they dared. Menopause is puberty’s delinquent twin. It’s the second great hormonal upheaval of a woman’s life, every bit as seismic, but we are supposed to hide it, apologise for it, and keep making everyone tea.

I’m sure I lost my cool with my teenage kids on a few occasions. But I was largely sympathetic. I know how confusing those years can be. Okay, so the door has been broken by your expensively Nike-shod foot. I’ll teach you how to fix it. Okay, so you just slapped your brother for no apparent reason, but honestly - hormones will do that to you. I know because I’ve been there; what I didn’t know was that this wasn’t my last visit to the hormonal rodeo!

Teenagers are, of course, easier to forgive because youth and beauty buy indulgence. But I am not young, and I am not ‘beautiful’, so I get forgiven for nothing. I’m an angry old hag if I object to someone pushing past me in the supermarket, stroppy if I walk out of a room the moment someone shuts the window I asked them to leave open. What should I have done? Stayed and discreetly wiped my inconveniently sweating face?

Of course, I have felt and expressed my rage before. As a woman, I know the rage that comes when the vulnerable are threatened; we’ve all felt that powerful fury for something or someone that needs our protection. But have we ever turned that protective instinct on ourselves? I know I haven’t done this often enough, and I wonder why. Was it because I thought my job was always to keep the peace? Do I not deserve to be defended or defend myself?

Perhaps that’s what menopause rage is for, for getting angry on our own behalf for a change. So, when someone tells me I am ‘getting aggressive’, or I need to ‘tone it down’, or implies that my sexuality or my body is ‘gross’, I might do better for myself than a whimper of apology or a quiet cry in the toilets. I might need to roar.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is Barbara Comyns’s third novel, first published in 1954. Comyns (1909–1992) was raised in Warwickshire, one of a brood of children largely left to governesses and allowed to run wild. She trained as a painter, and I think this shows in this novel, which presents the ghastly and the gorgeous with the same detailed but objective glance.

Though published in 1954, the novel is set some twenty years earlier, in a small Warwickshire village around the coronation of George VI. The title comes from 1 Corinthians, and is used in the Anglican burial service ‘we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed’.

The novel follows the Willoweed family — widower Ebin; his three children, Emma, Dennis and Hattie; his tyrannical mother, Grandmother Willoweed, who rules from behind her ear-trumpet; the maids, sisters Norah and Eunice; and the gardener, Old Ives. It opens mid-flood with ‘The ducks swam through the drawing-room windows’ (p. 5), a sentence that should be alarming, but that is told with the serene matter-of-factness of a fairy tale.

The water subsides, but something worse begins. One villager after another is overtaken by a strange and often fatal madness, and the local paper starts asking who will be smitten next.

The events of this book are undoubtedly strange; however, it is the voice I find most hypnotic. Comyns’s prose has the flat, declarative tone of a myth — things simply are. ‘Swans were there’ (p. 5). ‘There was a great smell of mud, and it was the first of June’ (p. 6). The surreal is delivered in matter-of-fact language, as if it were a weather forecast. Even the inner life comes in this odd, direct register: Ebin, thinking of his children, sounds less like a man musing privately than one confiding to an unseen listener — ‘Emma’s strange, damn queer like her mother; but Hattie is so jolly, much the best of the lot. Of course she isn’t my child’ (p. 13). It is exposition delivered almost to the reader’s face, and by rights it shouldn’t work — yet it does. And that is what makes this novel so compelling. The weird, the wonderful and the genuinely gruesome are told in the same objective tone, refusing, eerily, to flinch.

The young people are given no protection from any of it. They are surrounded by horror, spite and indolence, and left to make what sense of it they can. Meanwhile they want what young people want. Emma dreams of a real evening dress and a dance, of being civilised. Norah, the maid, scrubs out a filthy cottage in the hope of making a home and a life with Fig. One girl dreams of the future arriving; the other scours to make it so. But neither is quite in charge of what happens next.

Which brings me back to that strange title. It sorts the villagers into two groups — the changed and the dead — and these two outcomes are knotted through the novel. For those who survive, change tends to arrive through the catastrophe rather than in spite of it. Even the happiest turn of luck, when you follow it back, has a death at the root of it. St Paul promised the dead would rise and the living be transfigured into something glorious. Comyns delivers something more worldly: a village where the living are changed by the deaths that happen around them, and where the gift can never quite be untangled from what it cost.

This is a novel with a great deal going on — weird events, strange characters, biblical echoes, and dark themes. At times it is an uncomfortable read; there’s a house-fire scene that is chilling, but it pulls you along like a fairy tale. If you like your comedy dark and strange, pick up a copy. If your tastes run to the gentler and more realistic, this one might not be for you.

I’ve never read anything quite like it.

A few months ago, I was reading The Enchanted April on the train when a fellow passenger said, ‘That’s such a great book, you’re going to love it.’ I smiled and thanked her, but I already knew I loved the book; I was just wondering how I would love it differently this time.

I don’t re-read books as often as I would like. There are so many new books I long to read that it takes an effort to lay them aside for a little longer and prioritise a re-read. My mind calls out for the new, the ‘novel’. What if this next book is brilliant and life-changing? If I put it on hold, I postpone this new version of me further into the future. I want to read it now, experience it now, be changed by it now.

But a novel is a new experience each time you read it, and it can change you over and over again, in unexpected and deeper ways. In some ways, we never re-read a book. The text may be the same, but the mind that experiences it has changed.

When I think about a book I have only read once, I can remember whether I loved it or was disappointed, but as for the specifics, well, I can usually remember only a few scenes or moments. It’s like remembering a distant relative’s wedding or a mediocre school trip. For example, I have read The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood once, and, while I can recall the depth of the feelings I had when I read the book — the horror, the sadness, the sheer astonishment — only a few scenes have stuck in my mind. I don’t remember the main character’s name, or how it felt to be her.

However, if I think about a book I have read twice or more, a whole world fills my imagination in an instant. I have a deep reaction: visceral, sensual, a moment of stepping out of this time, this place, to a different place, but one that is part of me, like the memory of falling in love or eating real Italian pasta for the first time! (They amount to the same thing). The characters in these books are not mere acquaintances; they are people I know well. I feel their joy and pain. I understand their motivations. I don’t just know them; I’ve been them!

Often we turn to well-loved books for comfort. When our lives are in flux, they offer something familiar. I’ve read The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim maybe four times. I always find it comforting and joyous, but it also offers me new wisdom at each stage of my life. Once upon a time I read it for the sense of escape it offered: the freedom from the stress of everyday life. I immersed myself in Italian sunshine and the heady scent of wisteria. However, on my last reading, I found a new insight that resonated at this time of my life — the idea that being set in our ways, guarded and afraid, can limit the potential for love and joy in our lives. The book may be the same, but I have changed.

When I first read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett as a child, Colin’s father seemed nothing but a monster. Why had he locked the garden and buried the key? Why had he absented himself from his son’s life? Re-reading it as an adult, a parent, and a person who has experienced loss, I have a better understanding of his grief and fear. I have more experience to bring to the text now. And in addition to this lived experience, I can also draw on the encounters I have had with the books I have read in the interim. I have seen loss in novels too, the many ways it manifests and the ways we find to bear it. When I re-read, the old familiar characters are in conversation with the new. Themes echo from one novel to the next, across space and time, and with differing contexts.

With each re-read I also bring my increased understanding of how books work and writers achieve their effects. Re-reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, after many, many years, I realised how little I had understood the first time round. This time, I noticed the menacing imagery of nature, the ‘tortured elms’ and the ‘monster shrubs’. I noticed the rhododendrons that were ‘slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic’ and I thought about why those choices had been made. I still had sympathy for the second Mrs de Winter, but now I was much more focused on Rebecca.

And once more, links with other books came to my mind to add to this reading. Was Rebecca another maligned female character like Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason, her sexuality an inconvenience that must be destroyed to protect the patriarchal line? And speaking of Bertha Mason, I must re-read Jean Rhys’s story of Bertha Mason in Wide Sargasso Sea, and Sally Beauman has done a similar thing with Rebecca’s Tale, which I have yet to read.

These links crop up all the time. I recently read Miss Mole by E. H. Young and noticed similarities between Hannah Mole and Jane Eyre. Miss Mole handles the restrictions of being a genteel servant very differently to the way Jane Eyre does. Jane’s morality is guided by her strong faith in the God of the Bible. Miss Mole’s religious milieu is more fluid, and so she finds it necessary to create her own moral compass. Different times call for different responses in writing and in reading.

I keep thinking about the woman on the train. She said I was going to love The Enchanted April, and she was right — but which love did she mean? My young giddy escape into wisteria and sunshine, or my realisation that my fears have been getting in the way of my joy? But of course she meant neither. She was offering her own experience of The Enchanted April, whoever she was when she read it. Or perhaps the several people she had been at different times.

Perhaps I can hold all of these reading selves together. I don’t need to discard the person I once was. Younger me had a way of looking at the world that I sometimes need reminding of. She was naive, of course, and she believed everything the narrator told her. She missed the blood-red rhododendrons on the drive at Manderley; she couldn’t relate to Mrs Fisher’s obsession with dead poets in The Enchanted April; she saw the joy of the walled garden untinged by grief. She saw things in black and white, where I see shades of grey — but all that grey can tip into deliberation and overthinking. Perhaps now and then I can step back into her confidence and clarity. And I can still be full of wonder, and love wisteria and walled gardens, and dream of a half-haunted house by the sea.

This piece contains spoilers, so if you haven’t read the wonderful Miss Mole, go and read it right now and come back soon.

The back copy on my version of Miss Mole begins, “Miss Mole is a quiet, penetrating novel of a young woman’s moral awakening”. I don’t agree. In my opinion, Hannah Mole was always a highly moral character; it’s just that her morals don’t match those of the society around her. I think this back copy makes the mistake so many characters in the novel also make. It entirely fails to recognise Miss Mole and her value.

Also, Miss Mole is nearly forty.

Miss Mole is the story of a woman who makes her living taking care of others, as a governess, a companion or a housekeeper. Hannah Mole spends her days, from early morning until late at night, ensuring the well-being of those she is employed to care for. She rarely gets a day off and even needs her employer’s permission to socialise with others.

However, it is not the exhausting amount of effort Hannah Mole puts into the work that gets her down and causes her to rebel. It is that she is treated as if she were inferior to her various employers. She is a 1930s Jane Eyre in some ways. She is poor and plain, and she knows it, just as Jane Eyre did. Like Jane, Hannah struggles with the fact that her wit, intelligence, ingenuity, hard work and emotional intelligence are all invisible to the people in her life who have the power to support her or throw her onto the streets. Robert Corder, her current employer, does not want to consider her as a person in her own right with opinions and ideas of her own, declaring, ‘If she had to be plain and thin, she should also have been meek’ (p. 106). Sometimes, Hannah gets tired of playing this subordinate role and says something that unsettles those who consider her beneath them. ‘Her tongue was always Hannah’s danger and its readiness had sometimes been her undoing’ (p. 39).

E. H. Young uses a third-person narrator, predominantly focalised through the character of Hannah Mole, to allow us intimate access to Hannah’s mind, her emotional landscape and, significantly, her imagination. In lines such as ‘Who could imagine that Miss Mole had pictured herself, at different times, as an explorer in strange lands, as a lady wrapped in luxury and delicate garments, as the mother of adorably naughty children and the inspiringly elusive mistress of a poet’ (p. 25), we see the richness of the imagination that sustains her through the restrictions and difficulties of her life. We see her imagining her future, ‘She must be within shouting distance of the rich old gentleman who was going to leave her a fortune’ (p. 17), and contemplating her lot in life with an optimism that often seems heroic ‘She was grateful to Fortune who, in making her a servant, had remembered to give her freedom and happiness in herself’ (p. 60).

The reader is given full access to Hannah’s inner life. We are aware of her losses and disappointments, her hopes and her fears as well as her almost endless optimism. We are shown her actions, too. She is a fully rounded character who struggles with her own desires and is aware of her own flaws and limitations, but is also acutely aware of the hand life has dealt her. What she can’t bear is, ‘the bullying of people uncertain of their authority, and the heartlessness of those who saw her as a machine set going at their order and unable to stop without another’ (p. 8).

Hannah Mole abides by her own moral compass, even under outside pressure, just as Jane Eyre did. The difference is that her moral compass is grounded in thought and experience rather than a received wisdom based on religion, social norms or status. Miss Mole is conscious that her morality is not the same as others. She has a ‘conviction that the power which controlled her life was not hampered by man’s conventional morality’ (p. 5). We see her kindness towards Ruth, her employer, Robert Corder’s younger daughter, but also her swapping mattresses for her own comfort. We see her take pleasure in deceiving others. She ‘took threepence from the housekeeping money to put in the plate on Sunday,’ because ‘why should she pay for listening to sermons she could hear for nothing from Robert Corder on any other day of the week?’ (pp. 60–61). She knows her cousin Lilla is ashamed of her and uses this knowledge to persuade Lilla to help her find a domestic position when she is out of work. She admits that ‘it was always pleasant to deceive Lilla and to tease her’ (p. 17). But the reader knows that the reason Hannah is out of work is that she was late ‘home’ after stopping to save Mr Ridding’s life.

With our full, rounded picture of Hannah, we see her clearly and recognise her value. For her, taking the best mattress because she is the hardest worker in the house meets her moral code. Her small deceptions are the mischief of a clever woman getting her own back on people who, unjustly, hold power over her. In serious matters, such as saving a life, and her eventual honesty about her past for Ethel’s sake, she does what she knows is right, even though it causes her harm.

When she betrays her own inner values, she regrets it, such as when she tells Robert Corder that his late wife used to visit Mr Samson, something she describes as ‘the first deliberately unkind thing she had ever done’ (p. 121).

Hannah Mole has moral views on sexuality that are, perhaps, unusual for a woman of her time. Several reviews of the novel say that she is ashamed and fearful about her secret past being found out. Afraid, yes, ashamed - I don’t think so. Hannah does not see anything wrong with sexuality. She has a ‘frank knowledge of sexual processes, acquired by living on a farm’. While her cousin Lilla is ‘disgusted by physical details,’ Hannah was ‘disgusted that anyone should consider them unclean’ (p. 46).

The reason Miss Mole is considered a book about morals is that Hannah had a past relationship that did not meet the morals of the time: ‘She had loved her lover and expected to marry him, but she did not make that expectation an excuse. She did not need an excuse’ (p. 149). Young presents this relationship as nuanced. It’s not the case that Hannah had done wrong and should be ashamed of her past. She admits she was a fool, but she says ‘The folly had had its sweetness and she remembered the folly and the sweetness together’ (p. 60). For Hannah, the affair was certainly not just physical, though she sees nothing wrong in that, but had a ‘spiritual value’ (p. 151). She compares her actions to those of Mr Pilgrim, who appears about to reveal her secret, saying ‘Mr Pilgrim, who had spared a little time from his exhortations to the troops encamped near Hannah’s cottage, for reproaching a woman for her care of a man broken in doing what Mr. Pilgrim had no intention of doing himself’ (p. 171).

As a counterpoint to what we learn of Hannah from her own musings, we also get to know her through her interactions with other characters, some who adore her and some who are frustrated by, or dismissive of her. Occasionally, Young allows us to dip into the minds of other characters and what we see there is revealing. These viewpoints often tell us more about the interpreter than they do about Miss Mole and, sometimes, they are damning. These characters believe they are behaving morally and that it is acceptable to judge Miss Mole on her status. They fail to recognise Hannah Mole’s inherent value.

Hannah’s employer, Robert Corder, is a minister who is well thought of by his parishioners. However, his family life is less happy. His two daughters, Ethel and Ruth, his son, Howard and nephew, Wilfrid, are unable to talk to him openly, but have to agree with him because he meets any opinion that is not his own with disdain or anger. He thinks of himself as moral but is in fact egotistical and obsessed with status. He is even jealous that his own son is receiving the privilege of a college education that was denied to him. Robert is obsessed with what is owed to him by his children and by Hannah, but never thinks that others deserve the same respect and consideration from him.

In a section that is focalised through Robert’s point of view, we see his thoughts and feelings about Hannah. Robert believes he has power over Hannah because she is poor and dependent on him for her security. Her feelings about him are irrelevant to him because they do not affect his status. He sees her as ‘an unfortunate woman, undesired by any man, and he had despised her accordingly’ (p. 106). When he finds out that she owns property, his opinion changes. ‘In a few moments time, Robert Corder had to rearrange all his ideas about Miss Mole. He had seen her as a poor, homeless woman who must be glad of the shelter of his house, and now he learnt that she had property of her own: he had wondered at her independence of spirit and this was now explained: he had resented her manner of speech which was better than his own’ (p. 127). This proves that all his judgements were made on his perception of her status rather than what he could see in her as a person if only he had cared to look.

Robert Corder cannot see Hannah’s value and he is disturbed that others can, especially those he admires, such as Mr Blenkinsop, but also his neighbour Mr Samson and his own nephew and daughters. ‘Mr. Corder, who was a follower though he thought himself a leader, had been influenced, against his will, by the old man’s high praise of Miss Mole which fell into line with Samuel Blenkinsop’s attentions ... with Wilfrid’s and Ruth’s affection and Ethel’s dependence on her judgment, and with the little property in Somerset’ (p. 130).

Lilla Spenser-Smith is another character who underestimates Hannah because of her status in society. Lilla is a distant cousin of Hannah’s, and they went to school together. However, Lilla considers herself to be superior to her cousin. Hannah often comments on the kind of person who does things for appearances’ sake alone. On one occasion, when she is having dinner with Mrs Gibson, the landlady of Mr Blenkinsop and the Riddings, and is served chicken, she observes ‘You’re a lady, Mrs. Gibson, if ever there was one … if Mrs. Spenser-Smith had asked me out to supper, she would have given me yesterday’s mutton hashed. Quite good enough for Miss Mole! She’d keep her chickens for the people who could afford them’ (p. 82).

Lilla’s gifts are also tailored to their recipients, with Hannah receiving a Christmas gift of a homemade bag, while Robert’s study contains a ‘luxurious armchair’ (p. 53). Hannah can tell the status of the guests at Lilla’s Christmas party by the warmth of Lilla’s greeting of them. These incidents show that Lilla does not act out of kindness, but seeks only to impress and maintain her status. Cleverly, Young does not make this a class issue but a moral one. Lilla’s husband Ernest is much kinder and more generous. He scoots past the poor old ladies in church with the collection plate before they can put their pennies in and treats Hannah in a cousinly way.

Some characters do recognise Hannah, most notably the aforementioned Mrs Gibson who ‘admired everything Hannah did’ (p. 26). Robert Corder’s nephew Wilfrid obviously likes Hannah Mole very much, much to the annoyance of his cousin Ethel who cannot see why he finds Miss Mole so fascinating. Out of all the Corders, Wilfrid is the only one who ‘flatteringly suspected something of her quality’ (p. 42).

Mr Blenkinsop is a character who is set in his ways and initially resents Hannah Mole’s intrusion into his life. She saves Mr Ridding’s life, but when she comments, provocatively, that she hasn’t been thanked, Mr Blenkinsop’s response is startling. “Thanked!” Mr Blenkinsop exclaimed, staring at her malignantly. “What I want to know is why on earth you wanted to do it. And as for thanks, whose did you expect?” he demanded, and with those words he marched away’ (p. 7).

However, Mr Blenkinsop finds himself increasingly drawn to Hannah Mole. She makes him smile and brings him out of himself, encouraging him to expand his horizons beyond the ‘gilded cage’ of the bank. He starts to do little things to please Hannah, such as taking Mr Ridding for a walk in the country, having his dinner early when she visits Mrs Gibson, and walking Hannah home. He also starts to seek her out, coming to the Corders in the evening when he knows Robert will be out so he can talk to her and inviting her out for tea. His opinion about Hannah saving Mr Ridding’s life changes. He sends her books for Christmas presents and attends Lilla Spenser-Smith’s party because he knows she will be there. He begins to seek her advice about Mr and Mrs Ridding. Hannah believes he has fallen in love with Mrs Ridding, but actually he is taking care of her just to please Hannah.

When Mr Blenkinsop finds out about Hannah’s past, she believes she has lost him. But in fact, through her actions and conversation, humour and goodwill, she has earned his respect, admiration and love.

Hannah’s past is, in the end, revealed to Robert Corder by Ethel Corder. Hannah has the opportunity to say that Mr Pilgrim is a liar, but Ethel has said she won’t marry a liar so Hannah confesses. ‘You can go on loving him,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t told you any lies, not about me, anyhow’ (p. 186). She chooses Ethel’s happiness over her own concealment. Ethel tells Hannah she has to tell her father, failing to see how much harm this will cause Miss Mole. ‘“I’m sorry Miss Mole, I really am. It seems mean, I know, and I’ve always liked you, but you see, don’t you?” What Hannah saw most clearly was her own shabby, homeless figure, and it amazed her that Ethel did not see it too’ (p. 187). Ethel feared ruining Mr Pilgrim by keeping the secret, but she never considered that she was ruining Miss Mole by exposing it.

In Miss Mole, Young has presented several characters and a myriad of events. It’s not a didactic book. It does not tell us what to think. But we can see it laid out in front of us and come to our own conclusion. That anyone concludes that this is a story of Hannah Mole’s moral awakening astonishes me. I have fallen in love with Miss Mole, and I am glad she gets her happy ending. She is rewarded for her optimism and her care of others. She tries to do good, but she is imperfect, as we all are. I’m glad she didn’t have a moral awakening — she didn’t need one. But those around her could have done with reassessing their morals; Robert Corder could have been less self-obsessed; Lilla could have seen people’s value in something other than their status; Ethel could have been kinder. After all, ‘unkindness is the worst sin of all’ in Hannah’s opinion.

Thanks to for recommending Miss Mole in the comments of my middlebrow piece.

P.S The back copy of the Virago edition is much better!!

Lotty Wilkins reads an advertisement for a small Mediterranean castle to rent, addressed “To Those Who Appreciate Wisteria and Sunshine.” Clarissa Dalloway remembers flinging open the French windows at Bourton in her youth— “What a lark! What a plunge!” The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford, opens, “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” None of these is the sort of opening that announces a book about marriage. But there we are.

Literature has always portrayed marriage. We see it from Chaucer to Richardson, Austen, the Brontës and Eliot. In the early twentieth century, for many reasons— including greater economic freedom and changing ideas about women’s place in the world— ideas about marriage began to evolve. As the old reasons for marrying— money, security, and power— loosened their grip, expectations of marriage changed. A wedding was no longer the end of the story. Marriage was no longer its own reward. This meant that the way writers wrote about marriage also changed.

In early twentieth-century novels, we begin to see characters who think about what they want from marriage and take action to get it. Clarissa Dalloway knew she wanted space in her marriage, and though she may have regretted what it cost, she did get it. In The Enchanted April, Rose and Lotty take themselves off to Italy for a month and have the time and space to reflect on their marriages, which reinvigorates them. Not all twentieth-century characters are so introspective, though. In The Good Soldier, John Dowell seems determined not to see what is happening in his own marriage.

Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf, follows a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares to host a party. The stream-of-consciousness form lets us follow her mind as it darts between the practical business of the day— the doors being taken off their hinges, the flowers she means to buy— and her past as a young woman at Bourton. She thinks back to her early loves, Peter Walsh and Sally Seton, and to the choices she made then that have shaped everything since.

Resting in her narrow attic bed, she turns the past over in her mind: the choices she made and where they have left her. She sees them clearly. She let Peter go because, much as she loved him, he was too much. “For in a marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be… which Richard gave her.” With Peter, “everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable.” Richard gave her security, love and, above all, space. But that same need for space and privacy cost her something, perhaps her ability to give herself wholly to anyone. Somewhere along the way, she feels she has “failed” her husband, and her life is narrower as a result. But she had to choose, and every choice is a loss as much as a gain.

It is striking that, at a moment when women had more freedom than ever about whom to marry, Clarissa makes exactly the safe choice her mother might have made for her. Perhaps the new freedom is an abstract rather than an embodied idea. She wants a home life that is free of conflict, unlike Sally Seton’s parents, who do not get on: “how that shocked her— that one’s parents should quarrel!” Her model of marriage was clearly calm and decorous, stability rather than passion. Society can change faster than the people inside it, and what has been thoroughly absorbed is hard to shrug off.

And then there is the choice she could never make at all. As a young woman, she loved Sally Seton; the moment Sally kissed her was “the most exquisite moment of her whole life.” But for all the freedoms of the period, Sally was never a real possibility for Clarissa. Such a relationship might, just, have been possible, but the cost in respectability was more than she could contemplate.

In The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim, two women, Lotty Wilkins and Rose Arbuthnot, are married and unhappy. They take themselves off to live in the aforementioned wisteria-bedecked castle in Italy for a month. Lotty’s transformation is sudden, swift and joyous: “Now she had taken off all her goodness and left it behind her like a heap of rain-sodden clothes, and she only felt joy.” For Rose, it is slow and painful.

Rose feels lonely and unloved. She and her husband, Frederick, had once been happy, until he made a successful career out of writing about the mistresses of famous men. This does not sit well with Rose, a low-church rector’s daughter: “No one,” she tells him, “should ever write a book God wouldn’t like to read.” Her steady disapproval drives him away, until they are all but living separate lives. She buries her loneliness and rejection in good works.

At the castle, she begins to think her “obstinate strait-lacedness about his books and her austere absorption in good works had been foolish and perhaps even wrong.” She believes she bores him and wretchedly thinks he no longer cares. Even so, she writes to invite him out, only half expecting him to come.

He comes, though not because of her invitation, and not for the reason she imagines. She interprets his arrival as a declaration of love and, seeing she has been given a second chance at a happy marriage, responds in kind. Their marriage is transformed: the coldness melts and affection returns.

Lotty had worked hard at being a ‘good’ wife, and Rose a ‘godly’ one. These expectations came from outside the marriage, and only when these wives let go of them and considered how they wanted their marriages to be could they change. Clarissa wanted respectability from her marriage. Had she been influenced differently, would her choice have been the same? It’s only by looking that they can begin to contemplate their actions.

Of course, sometimes we deliberately, or perhaps subconsciously, choose to look the other way. All through the twelve years of John Dowell’s marriage, his wife Florence and his friends Leonora and Edward are deceiving him, and he sees nothing— indeed, he insists he was never happier than in their company. His contentment was real enough to him, but it rested on nothing, and it held only as long as his ignorance did. Would he have been better off knowing? Perhaps not. He was happy precisely because he did not know, but it is this knowledge, when it finally arrives, that destroys him. Dowell describes this as the saddest story he has ever heard. It’s his own story, but he didn’t see it for himself; he heard it through the accounts of others. We experience the grief of a man realising a vast part of his life was unknown to him.

What these novels share is not a verdict on marriage but a willingness to examine what it can be. Marriage became open to consideration, not just before a choice was made, but throughout the years that followed. Marriage was no longer a fixed arrangement to be entered into and endured, for better or for worse, but a state that could be interrogated, influenced, or — where it couldn't be changed — knowingly accepted, by anyone willing to look.

When I was in my 20s, living with my husband and two children in a shabby council flat on a bleak council estate, I often had visitors. My family, my husband‘s family, friends and neighbours. I saw it as both a duty and a pleasure to host. Our friends and family sat on hand-me-down sofas and ate from charity-shop plates at cheap IKEA tables. Grey vinyl flooring was prettied up with rugs, and wallpaper borders added interest to featureless rooms.

I wish I had that confidence now.

We soon moved to an ex-council house on a slightly nicer council estate, and our social life expanded. I made friends at the school gates. The kids brought their friends home for tea. Sometimes this square, solid three-bedroom house was chaotic, filled with our friends and their children. The garden was an oasis for kids, cats and dogs, space for a huge inflatable paddling pool and painting on rolls of lining paper. Children were plonked two by two into a pink 70s bath at the end of a busy day. Perhaps I view it through rose-coloured glasses because at times it was certainly hard, but there’s no doubt that we had fun.

Now, to be honest, there are only a few people I feel comfortable opening my home to.

I thought the reason I gradually stopped inviting so many people round was exhaustion and overwhelm when life got busy and hard. But I think the overwhelm was at least in part caused by a new feeling that all was not quite what it should be in my home. At first, I would bustle industriously for days before visitors arrived, painting and polishing, buying garden chairs or wine glasses that matched. Eventually, the effort of making my house match the standards I felt it needed to achieve for me to feel comfortable sharing it became too much.

Perhaps the same forces that have done a number on my body image also did a number on my home image. My sagging boobs and my sagging sofa are all evidence that I have let myself go. The same mechanism that sells me a better body sells me a better home, and neither is ever finished. Intellectually, I know this is true, but knowing it and feeling it are different things, and I still can’t shake the feeling that my home is something to hide away from the world.

We still live in that house. The pink bathroom has been replaced with a modern white one, and the blue melamine kitchen cupboards have been switched to shaker-style oak ones. We sanded floors and painted walls. Objectively, it is a nicer home, yet I am more ashamed. The standards I am measuring against have changed. I am embarrassed by the same rooms I used to fill with people.

It would be easy to blame Instagram reels and Pinterest boards and that is definitely part of it. I choose to look at homes on these sites for inspiration. More fool me, perhaps? But even without my scrolling habit, I am still constantly exposed to perfect homes. One of the weirdest, perhaps, is cleaning adverts. Every time I sit down to watch TV, I am bombarded with images of floors you could eat your dinner off, tiles shiny enough to do your make-up in and weirdly, beds, placed outdoors on green lawns, that smell so fresh people refuse to get out of them. Have I imbued an idea that my home must be spotless and fragrant before I allow anyone in? What do I believe it would mean about me if I let others see the dirty cups, dog beds and washing piles that are evidence of a home that is lived in?

Perhaps TV shows had something to do with it, too. I’ve gone from watching programs like Only Fools and Horses, set in a shabby council flat in Peckham, or The Royle Family’s ordinary living room in Manchester, to programs like Friends, set in a trendy loft apartment and Modern Family with its aspirational mansions. Unlike the cleaning adverts, with their bright colours and cheery fakeness, I can relate to the characters in these stories, so perhaps that’s why these homes affect me more deeply. I know these are just sets, but if I suspend my disbelief to see the characters as real, then surely I have to do the same for the places they live - and there they are with their fancy homes, clean and perfectly decorated, with ne’er a mop nor a cracked floor tile in sight.

But I think it’s the real houses shown on TV that get me most. Programmes like Cash In The Attic or Eat Well For Less, where the cameras go into real homes. And these seem perfect, too. I inspect their skirting boards for dust and their sofas for signs of wear. Anything to show that I am not failing, as others sail breezily through life. Perhaps that’s why I have a soft spot for Stacey Solomon’s Sort Your Life Out. Finally, I feel I am not the only one struggling to meet the standards I see every time I switch on a screen. When I see Iwan scrape up fluff from behind the sofa, I can feel my nervous system relax. I’m not judging. I just feel I’m not so far behind.

And I can’t help thinking about what I have lost in this anxiety about my home. I definitely feel a loss of community. I have worked hard to create calm in my life, but sometimes I miss the chaos. I think my relationships have suffered, too. My ‘home’ self and my ‘out’ self have become two different people. This makes it feel like my relationships with those I don’t choose to share my home with have become weakened. Most people only know the ‘out’ me. Self-protection or shame? I can’t tell.

I remember the woman I was the day I moved into this house. She watched the kids unpack their toys in the bedrooms they had chosen. She tidied their craft stuff in a top cupboard, out of reach, she spread fresh sheets across the bed and then stepped into the January air of her own garden for the first time. Later, her friends were coming round to help her finish unpacking. She was so excited. She was home.

I want to find that joy in my home again.

It began when I fell in love with Elizabeth von Arnim's The Enchanted April (1922). Or perhaps it was even earlier when I slipped under the spell of Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons. From there, I dipped my toe into Barbara Pym, starting with Excellent Women (1952), then dove into Lolly Willowes (1926) by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and realised I was sunk.

It felt like a guilty pleasure. What were these books I was reading? Was I escaping into nostalgia and refusing to face the modern world? That was part of it, for sure. But there was more to it. I was intrigued by how these writers focused on domestic details and the comedy of the everyday. The way they honoured and elevated women’s lives. The way they allowed their characters to have a deep inner life hidden between the rituals of afternoon tea and a cup of cocoa before bed. How they used these details to make observations on societal attitudes toward women.

I did some research and discovered that all these books are examples of the ‘Middlebrow Novel’. Middlebrow was a term — often used dismissively — for fiction that sat somewhere between literary experimentation and popular entertainment. This kind of fiction emerged in the early twentieth century to meet the needs of an expanding reading public, particularly of women readers with more leisure time and access to libraries and book clubs. These novels were well-crafted, emotionally engaging and dealt with a recognisable domestic and social life. They weren’t trying to reinvent the form like Woolf or Joyce.

Writers like E.M. Delafield, Barbara Pym, and Stella Gibbons were enormously popular in their time. Still, critics dismissed them because their concerns — home, relationships, the details of domestic life — were seen as trivial. My English Lit degree certainly never touched on these writers. But since the 1970s, scholars have been looking at the middlebrow novel with fresh eyes. Many of them argue that these novels were doing serious cultural work, reflecting women’s lives and quietly questioning the constraints they lived under.

Reading these middlebrow novels, I am captivated by the way the characters found a way to outmanoeuvre the constraints placed on them in the early twentieth-century society in which they lived. And I could relate to them in many ways. While the problem of servants is not one I have encountered, their discussion of womanhood and what it entails and what we should do with it, are still questions many of us grapple with today.

Reading them, I recognise Austen’s influence. They focus on the domestic space and make wry comments about the way women are treated in society, but these women are asking a different question. Austen’s novels end in a wedding. These novels ask, among many other things, whether a wedding really is a happy ending. They ask what happens after the wedding, or when there is no wedding, or when the marriage goes awry, or when marriage and motherhood are not enough for a woman’s intelligence, creativity and soul.

There are two unsatisfactory marriages at the heart of The Enchanted April. Two women who escape a grey, boring life in a grey, boring winter in London to the spring and warmth of Italy. Perhaps what I am drawn to most in this book is that the women have time away from life’s obligations and duties. They gain distance from the social conventions that hem them in and an opportunity to see these restrictions clearly and ask who they serve. The women in the novel have time to think, to form deep friendships and to simply sit in the sun. It’s a book where the characters find healing through pleasure rather than ‘working on themselves.’ The Italian spring rejuvenates their lives and their marriages. The ending of the book may not promise a ‘happy ever after’, but it shows a new way forward. And it inspires me to find pleasure in life rather than always trying to ‘improve’ myself.

In Excellent Women, we meet a protagonist who is ambivalent about the reality of marriage. Mildred Lathbury is unmarried, observant and invisible in the way that useful women often are. The novel follows her as she watches other people’s dramas unfold and becomes drawn into their lives while her own remains small and contained. Mildred’s independence is real and hard-won. But it has its costs — the loneliness, the invisibility, being everyone’s useful friend rather than anyone’s beloved. What I find most compelling is Pym’s refusal to resolve this neatly. She holds both things at once, with an irony so subtle it’s easy to miss. It makes me think that those who dismissed this form of women’s fiction never really got it at all! The question the novel leaves you with is whether Mildred’s life is a quiet triumph or a quiet loss, and I think many women can relate to that! How do we find that balance between serving others and pleasing ourselves?

Cold Comfort Farm is a hilarious satire of the gloomy rural novels. It pokes fun at the earnest, doom-laden fiction of Thomas Hardy, Mary Webb and D.H. Lawrence with its earthy passions and primal forces. In this novel, Flora Poste, orphaned and sensible, descends on her melodramatic relatives at Cold Comfort Farm. The Starkadders are all doomed passions and dark secrets, “I saw something nasty in the woodshed”. Flora applies brisk common sense and sorts them all out. It’s funny and sharp and the opposite of earnest. How did the commentators miss how clever this is?

Lolly Willowes also taps into the primordial forces of fiction based in nature. It’s about a woman finding the freedom to live life on her own terms rather than as a useful helper to her brother and his family. In some ways, this book doesn’t quite fit into the middlebrow genre. It’s wilder, more overtly feminist and involves fantasy elements. It’s more strange, dense and poetic than other middlebrow examples. It also received more critical acclaim. But it was still forgotten and never made it into the male-dominated canon, which suggests that it wasn’t the literary worth of these novels that caused them to be dismissed as much as the fact that women wrote them.

These writers might have stayed forgotten if not for a quiet revolution in publishing. In 1973, Carmen Callil founded Virago Press to publish books by and about women. Five years later, Virago launched its Modern Classics series, and those distinctive green spines that began appearing in bookshops, signalling that here was a woman writer worth rediscovering. May Sinclair, Cicely Hamilton, Elizabeth Taylor, Dorothy Whipple — name after name was brought back into print. In 1999, Nicola Beauman (author of A Very Great Profession, a study of interwar women’s fiction) founded Persephone Books, with its elegant grey covers and endpapers printed from period fabrics, devoted specifically to overlooked mid-century writing. The work continues: NYRB Classics in America, the British Library Women Writers series, small presses and passionate readers and reviewers spreading the word.

Books that are popular with women readers, deal with domestic and emotional life, and are readable rather than experimental, still get dismissed. “Middlebrow” became “women’s fiction” became “book club fiction.” Things have definitely changed. But the prizes still seem to fall into the hands of male writers more often than women. Does the suspicion of popularity, especially female popularity, persist? The big literary prizes suggest it does.

I wonder what kinds of novels are being dismissed today. What might we be rediscovering in 70 or 100 years? Joanna Trollope, who was called the “Queen of the Aga Saga” (a term invented by a man, which she called “patronising”), despite her insight into complex human relationships? Marian Keyes, who writes about addiction, depression, domestic violence and bereavement, but because she always delivers a happy ending, and sells in the millions, gets shelved as “chick lit” and dismissed accordingly? Nina Stibbe, who has won comedy prizes but been overlooked for more prestigious awards? Even Maggie O’Farrell, who writes about loss, motherhood, family dynamics and the hidden lives of women throughout history, and has won the Women's Prize, has never been Booker-nominated.

Reading these novels has made me appreciate the progress we have made in opportunity, acceptance and acclaim, but also pointed out that we have a long way to go. I’ve got plenty more ‘middlebrow’ novels to tackle from the early 20th century to today. I’m looking forward to seeing what these women writers have to say about being a woman. At a time when women's autonomy is under pressure again, it seems more important than ever to keep examining women’s lives, sharing our stories and questioning what we want our lives, as women, to look like.

Let me know your favourite middlebrow novels. And who of today’s writers do you think is undervalued?

When I was very young, my cousins and I would play endless imaginative games. We would create whole worlds to inhabit. We embodied characters ranging from queens to warriors, to our own soft toys. At one point, we became a family of squirrels for an entire summer holiday. It came so easily to us. And it was so much fun.

I couldn’t be that creative now if I tried. I can’t let go of rational thinking. I can’t believe in fairies or myths or gods. It’s been taught out of me.

Being told to stop daydreaming in the classroom started it. But then, years of maths and science that taught me that only what could be seen could be believed compounded it. Even in art classes, I was told to copy from the masters or draw from life — there was no room for imagination in the subjects I chose.

In one small rebellion, in my Art G.C.S.E., I had to choose from three boring subjects, one of which was washing up. I chose to paint my crockery and cutlery tumbling in a mountain stream. If I’m honest, the only reason I chose this was that I was more confident painting landscapes than still life. I got an A. Yet, I was never guided to do something like this. It was creativity of a kind, but more cunning than imaginative.

But this lack of creativity frustrates me now, especially when I’m trying to write fiction, or express myself through art, or even embrace a more spiritual or intuitive way of being. I don’t know how to let my imagination get involved in the process. I’m all logic and rules. I envy our ancient ancestors who saw spirits in nature and Gods in the stars.

I’m not alone in this loss of imagination. Since the 1960s, researchers have been measuring divergent thinking — the ability to generate new possibilities — using the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. The pattern they find is consistent: creativity peaks in early childhood and declines throughout our time at school. By adulthood, only a fraction of us retain the imaginative fluency we had at five. The sharpest drops come in the early school years, exactly when we learn to sit still, give the ‘right’ answer and stop daydreaming. We don’t grow out of creativity. We are trained out of it. And according to researcher Kyung Hee Kim, it’s getting worse — creative thinking scores have declined significantly since 1990.

But this isn’t just found in schools — it runs through Western culture as a whole. Somewhere along the way, we decided that only what could be measured was real. The Enlightenment gave us science and reason — genuine gifts — but also a clockwork universe where everything that mattered could be measured, explained and pinned down. We learned to break things into their constituent parts, to analyse and dissect, never considering that the whole might be greater than the sum of its parts. Imagination got filed under ‘entertainment’ at best—a waste of time at worst. Strange, really — we’ll happily consume it, losing ourselves in novels and films and art. But making it? Letting ourselves drift into it? That feels like skiving. Like we should be doing something productive instead.

But how do we reactivate our wasted imagination muscle? Is a mind trained on rationality ever able to go back to the creativity of childhood?

Well, yes. Our brains have a dedicated system for mind-wandering called the default mode network. It lights up when you’re not focused on a task. When you’re staring out of a window, walking without a destination, letting your thoughts drift. This network is where creativity, self-reflection and future planning happen. It consumes nearly as much energy as focused thinking.

The problem is, we rarely let it switch on. We keep feeding the brain with constant input so it never has to generate anything for itself. The imagination muscle isn’t gone. It’s just never given any space.

Not only that, but imagination isn’t one thing. It’s several distinct mental capacities, and each one can be exercised. Drawing on research into how the brain imagines, I’ve put together something like an imagination gym. Six workouts for a neglected muscle.

Imagined sensations

Try to imagine a sensation that doesn’t exist, such as the feeling of touching cold fire, or the weight of silence as a physical thing in your palm. In attempting this, your sensory brain has to construct something new without a clear reference point.

Memory switching

Recall a significant memory, but deliberately imagine feeling the opposite emotion during it. Sadness during a joyful occasion. Boredom at an exciting one. This decouples events from their emotional signatures and loosens the grip of fixed narratives.

Social imagination

Pick someone you glimpsed briefly today. A person on a bus, perhaps or a cashier who served you. Spend a few moments imagining how they feel at this exact moment. Not their backstory but simply what it feels like to be them, right now.

Temporal imagination

Look at any object and imagine the precise instant before it existed. The actual threshold between non-existence and existence. It feels very strange, but this discomfort is the imagination stretching.

Synesthetic recombination

Take one sense and translate it into another. What does blue smell like? What does this piece of music feel like as texture against skin? What colour is this particular person’s voice? This is the root of metaphor, and metaphor is how new ideas are born.

Default mode activation

Sit for ten minutes. A blank wall. No phone, no book, no task. This feels unbearable at first. But give it time, and you might start to sense your imagination waking up. The default mode network only activates when you stop feeding it input.

These exercises feel strange at first. But no stranger than becoming a family of squirrels. We knew how to do this once. Maybe we still do.

Summer seems suddenly to have arrived, and with it, new energy and ambition. It’s a dangerous time for me. My enthusiasm can easily outrun my capacity. I make big plans. I bite off more than I can chew. I set myself up to fail.

Often these big new ideas come to me when I am away from my desk, walking in the lush May woods or strolling by the sea, my eyes on a distant horizon. The ideas are juicy and colourful, exotic as a tropical garden, with intoxicating scents, and the hum of insects: alive, buzzing.

In the cold light of a Monday morning at my desk, they fade and fall flat, the energy leached out of them by doubt and overwhelm.

The gardening analogy has probably been overused in the creative world. But it’s such a good one. A garden needs planning and tending in the same way our creative dreams do. They have seasonal rhythms we have to lean into. They can’t be forced into bloom ahead of their time. And the results can never be entirely predicted.

I have turned over a new leaf more times than a cabbage white butterfly. I can’t count the number of times I have said ‘I’m going to get out of this rut and write the book, start the course, overhaul my lifestyle’. But I know that change rarely happens in big leaps or gestures. One seed at a time makes a garden. And a hell of a lot of patience.

When the vision of the tropical garden hits my mind’s eye, I see it in full bloom. Big and bold, bright and lush, sensuous and stimulating. My mind conveniently skips over the muddy boots, frozen fingers, aching back and bramble scratches. It doesn’t consider the shrub that died, the weeds that threatened to overwhelm my plot, or the weeks when it just rained and rained and rained.

When I sit at my desk, my job is working out how to bring the garden to life. The end vision is just one part of that. So many things need to happen before that vision can become a reality. I need to know what I actually want to grow and why. What seeds and tools will I need to create my vision? How much time and patience will it take? What might need to be pruned back to give my garden space to grow? What will I do when the aphids come, or when I lose interest in July, or when someone asks why I’m bothering?

But once I know these things, and have prepared for them, I can begin to sow. One plant at a time. One packet of seeds, scattered in the soil. Day after day, planting and tending, tending and planting. And in the end, I will have a garden. It might not be exactly like the one in the vision. But that doesn’t matter. A vision is ethereal. What I create will be imperfect. But it will be the real thing.

What visions do you have for the coming summer? Can you get there one seed at a time?

‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,’ says the White Queen to Alice.

When I first read this, it made as little sense to me as it did to Alice. But when I think of it in terms of what I believe about myself, I realise there might be something to it. What do I believe is possible for me? How does this limit me? What would happen if I tried to believe something that I previously thought was impossible for me?

The Alice books are unusual in many ways. They ask us to inhabit a world that doesn’t make any logical sense, and this is powerful. They open us up to a different way of perceiving things: intuitive, imaginative, expansive. Fairytales do the same. But this is the exception rather than the norm in much of modern culture. Many of our modern Western stories are linear and logical. We may have grown up with stories that encouraged curiosity, but as we reached adulthood, we were encouraged to put away childish things and be sensible instead.

A few (Hmmm, forty) years and a whole lot of stories later, and I’ve started thinking about the stories that moulded me throughout my teenage years and into adulthood. I had hit the menopause and suddenly nothing quite fit — my habits and hobbies, my ideas and beliefs, my clothes (literally) and the stories I’d been living by, with their emphasis on action and productivity rather than joy and simply being.

I looked at the stories I had encountered in T.V., film, books and even the news. Everything from Anne of Green Gables to Star Wars, from Bart Simpson to Kate Adie’s war reports. These stories were, as a whole, wide-ranging, but each individual story was a container too narrow for all that a woman can be.

So I started looking at other stories, analysing them more carefully — in literature, in psychology and in other cultural traditions. What I found gave me a lot to think about.

For example, Joseph Campbell postulates in The Hero with a Thousand Faces that all great stories follow the structure of departure, initiation and return. The lone protagonist faces conflict, conquers it, and comes home transformed. It’s the backbone of much of Western narrative. And I don’t think it was built for me.

Campbell was a serious scholar who spent his life mapping the structures of human storytelling. But when Maureen Murdock, one of his students, asked him about women and the hero’s journey, his answer was revealing. Women don’t need to make the journey, he told her. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realise that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.

This matters because the stories we absorb shape what we think is possible. There is a mechanism in the brain called the reticular activating system, which filters reality according to what we already believe. If the only stories available to us position women as a destination or prize, we will unconsciously filter out evidence that contradicts that. We will literally not see the other possibilities.

And so we are left with two uncomfortable options. We can accept the role of destination and be the one who waits, who tends and who exists in relation to someone else’s journey. Or we can attempt the hero’s quest ourselves, forcing ourselves into a character whose skin doesn’t quite fit and abandoning much of what makes us whole.

Women have always had ambitions and dreams. The problem is not a lack of desire. It’s just that the structures available to us cannot hold everything a woman’s life actually contains. And much of what it contains doesn’t register as valuable in a culture that only recognises what can be measured and monetised. So much of women’s lives — the caring, the emotional labour, the holding of families and communities together — produce nothing visible. The child who grew up well, the relationship that lasted, the elderly relative who never had to take the bus to the hospital —none of it counts as a journey in the story our culture tells about a life worth living.

Did anyone ever call a woman who left her family behind a hero?

Murdock’s response to Campbell was to write The Heroine’s Journey in 1990. She argued that women’s stories follow a different structure. She saw them as an inward descent rather than an outward conquest. She believed that we initially have to disconnect from the feminine in favour of the masculine, and then begin a gradual process of reconnection and integration.

It was an important book. But I admit that when I tried to read it I found it spoke more to my mother’s or grandmother’s generation than mine. The restrictions Murdock described were structural and explicit. The limitations my generation inherited were more subtly reinforced, which in some ways made them harder to name and resist. I didn’t want to reject the feminine or embrace the masculine. I felt that this was just another framework into which the vastness of female experience was being squashed.

I put it down after a while. If you’ve read it and think I should persevere, tell me why, and I’ll give it another go. But, fundamentally, neither the Hero’s nor the Heroine’s Journey seemed to offer a structure capacious enough to hold the full complexity of a woman’s life.

I had lost my sense of my own story and couldn’t seem to find a narrative structure that reflected who I was. I had spent a long time trying to fit into the available narrative of success and achievement while still holding on to the parts of me that were important, like the joy I find in homemaking, nurturing my loved ones, my deep inner life, and my creativity. I enjoyed being a supporting cast member in my loved ones’ journeys, and I loved being on a quest of my own. But things got too much. I couldn’t do both. I experienced burnout, grief, and illness — because the story didn’t fit. It was both too narrow and too broad. There was too much I felt expected to be, but at the same time, there was no room for grief and falling apart. No room for asking for help. No time to find the new version of myself I was ready to grow into.

So, I did what I always do when I need to think. I read.

Other cultures had already approached this differently. Japanese, Chinese and Korean narrative traditions use a four-act structure called Kishōtenketsu. It doesn’t use conflict to drive the story forward but rather a change in perspective, a moment where something is seen differently, and everything changes as a result. It’s a structure that leads to a genuine shift in thinking.

Indian narrative traditions follow a branching, non-linear structure and are comfortable with holding multiple perspectives simultaneously. Central African storytelling traditions tend to be thematic and relational rather than driven by an individual. These types of stories can contain so much more than an individual quest. They can comfortably hold complexity, community, and the understanding that life can hold more than one truth at a time.

But I also turned to stories from my own culture. Stories by women who had faced the same problem as I did. Women whose lives were too large for the structures available to them. Fanny Price refusing Henry Crawford and allowing her own values to guide her rather than following the plan outlined by the powerful characters around her. Jane Eyre, building a life on her own terms that she could live with psychologically, even when it cost her security and comfort. Laura in Lolly Willowes, escaping the role of useful aunt and choosing to belong to herself rather than to others. Mrs Wilkins in The Enchanted April, allowing herself to imagine something more.

And it really helped. Literature had been holding these alternative stories all along. None of these characters is a hero in Campbell’s sense. None of them go on a quest, fight a villain and return triumphant. Their journeys are internal, relational. Somehow, they find a way to create a life of meaning on their own terms. Through reading their stories, I could begin to sketch out a new path, too.

The brain is not fixed. Neuroscientists call this neuroplasticity — the brain's ability to build new pathways in response to repeated thoughts and experiences. The story we’ve been living is well-worn, easy to travel. A new one takes effort and repetition to establish. But it can be done.

There’s something writers know about this that I find useful. Before we begin to write a story, we make choices about our characters. And the actions in that story have to be believable for the character we have created. If they’re not, the reader loses faith. So if we’re trying to make our character do something that doesn’t quite fit, we have two options. We change the action. Or we change the character first.

I think this is true of real lives, too. We can’t simply decide to live differently if the character we believe ourselves to be makes those actions unthinkable. The belief has to come first.

I’m not going to tell you what your story should look like. But I’d suggest starting with the stories you’ve already been drawn to. The characters who stayed with you long after you closed the book or turned off the T.V. Ask yourself why. Ask yourself what they chose and what it cost them, and whether it was worth it. Ask yourself whether the story they were living was large enough for who they were.

And then ask yourself the same question about your own life.

I love opening a new novel. I am always excited to plunge into a world I have never been to before. It is a privilege to slip beneath the skin of another human being, who I could never be without the imagination of writers. It is exciting to travel to places, far away in space and even time, and live there for a while.

I rarely do any research when choosing a new book, beyond reading the blurb or taking recommendations from a friend. I want to go into this new world, these new lives, with an open mind, unclouded by other readers’ opinions. But sometimes I feel some context is needed for me to get the most out of a novel. This is especially true if the novel is set in a time or culture that I am unfamiliar with.

In the past, I have made assumptions about a work without considering the context. This has meant I haven’t engaged with the work as deeply as I could have. For example, when I first read Austen’s Mansfield Park, I was annoyed by Fanny’s timidity and acquiescence. I failed to consider how fragile her position in society was and what she might suffer if she rebelled too openly. At the time, I didn’t recognise how her refusal of Henry Crawford was an act of great courage that put her at risk of exile and poverty.

So I think asking a few contextual questions before we begin a novel set in an unfamiliar time or place is a good idea. Context allows us to set aside our modern viewpoint long enough to see that a small act of rebellion for a woman in the 1800s, which to our eyes seems tame, is in fact incredibly brave.

This application of context allows us to experience the novels we read more deeply and become immersed in lives we can never know firsthand. With context, we can understand that, while we would never consider a back street abortion, we might feel differently if we were in the position of Brenda in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe. Context allows us to see the shame she would bring on herself and her family if she were to become an unwed mother. It is only by understanding that homosexuality in Edwardian England could result in shame, ruin and a prison sentence that we can understand the actions of E.M. Forster’s Maurice. Context allows us to see things from this character’s point of view and to understand his limitations and options.

Sometimes the cultural shift we have to make is even greater. How might we open our minds enough to understand a character contemplating infanticide? In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, we are given a window into a culture with deeply held beliefs about twins being a bad omen. When we feel the fear of these characters, for their family, for their community, we are offered an insight into minds moulded by very different experiences than our own.

Finding context is not always easy. Yes, we can look up the options for work available to Victorian middle or upper-class women, or when homosexuality was legalised in the U.K. But sometimes the culture is more nuanced. How can we comprehend the struggles of Connell in Normal People without knowing that seeking therapy is still not as normal in many cultures as it is in the U.S? How might we misread this novel if we aren’t open to understanding his character as a result of a particular masculine culture?

Of course, the beauty of reading literature from different times and cultures is that they can, themselves, teach us these things. They can place us in these minds and bodies and let us experience these worlds for a few hours, deepening our understanding of the complexities that affect every life. But to experience this, we need to begin with a mind not so firmly anchored in our own experience that it is unable to fly through time and space and inhabit a different world.

As a writer, I know how important context is, too. When I write a story set in another time period, I can research the details easily. What type of food did these people eat, and what kinds of clothes did they wear? But I have to try to understand the character’s inner landscape, too. What might their political beliefs be, or religious ideas? How did their upbringing or class mould them? This knowledge informs the action. It tells me why they choose one particular action over another. It makes sense of their choices.

I’ve read novels set in the Victorian period, in which the physical details of the world are accurate and immersive, but the female protagonist has ideas that are too modern for her time. Ideas that could not have been dreamed of for decades, even by the most progressive of minds. The description of the house she lives in might be faultless, but if the landscape of her mind is inescapably 21st Century, the illusion disintegrates.

It is hard to put our modern sensibilities aside, but if we fail to do so, we miss out on one of the greatest gifts of literature: the ability to inhabit a life totally different from our own. And when we manage this, it allows us to see our own lives more clearly, too. Stepping outside our own unexamined assumptions untethers us from them so that, when we return, we can question them too. We can look at the norms, values and expectations that guide our own actions and decide whether they are still true for us.

Literature makes travel in time and space possible; it allows us to look from the inside out – but only if we are willing to question what we think we know.

Recently, I have been writing down lines from novels that really strike me and using them as a prompt, either for journaling or for short fiction.

Currently, I am reading Writers and Lovers by Lily King. There is a scene in which the protagonist is invited to meet her boyfriend’s friends. They eat a salad, fresh from the garden, at a table made from an old door. The main protagonist says,

‘They were the kind of people who were only inside when they had to be’.

The line resonated with me. I imagined myself as such a person. Always outside, full of nature-wisdom, sun-bronzed and toned. Then I remembered. I live in England. I hate being too cold. I hate being too hot. I hate being damp. I hate being uncomfortable. I hate being near ants or wasps. I don’t even really like eating outside because of the bugs and the potential of animal excrement in my vicinity.

Inside, it is warm and cosy in winter and, except for a rare heatwave, cool and comfortable in summer. There are sofas to lounge on, and the insects are rarely more annoying than the occasional bluebottle banging against a window.

So I guess I want to want to be the kind of person who is only inside when I have to be.

I am, in fact, the kind of person who is only inside when it’s not 20-24 degrees Celsius outside, sunny and dry, and I have a comfortable lounger to lie in, or at least a sandy beach or a smooth sun-warmed rock, and it’s definitely not flying ant day.

So perhaps I am not really an outdoor person. But there are some things that I really do want to be. A novelist, an artist. Yet still, I don’t regularly do the things required to achieve these goals either. Does this mean I only want to want to be a writer? I don’t think so. I think it’s different, but also the same. The reason I don’t want to be outside is the weather and the insects and the prospect of minor discomfort. The reason I don’t write my novel is sheer terror.

The terror that I’m not actually good enough and that I will never be good enough. The terror that I am wasting my time and making a fool of myself.

I’d rather face a swarm of wasps than that.

I once read about a woman who, on completing her latest novel, said that her family would be pleased that they would stop getting beans on toast for dinner every night. How did she get that courage? How did she sit down at her desk and actually write her novel, when she could have excused herself and chosen the simpler task of making dinner with its clear steps and guaranteed outcome? Was she born with this courage and conviction, or did she grow it slowly over time? Did she stay outside even when a wasp kept buzzing around her head until, eventually, she could bear the sun and the rain and the uncomfortable sensation of damp creeping into her clothes?

Perhaps I could start with a smaller goal, a minor discomfort.

‘She was the kind of person who always did a writing exercise before she started dinner.’

or

‘She was the kind of person who spent Sunday afternoons painting.’

Can I do this? It won’t be too hot or too cold. There won’t be wasps or ants. It may be uncomfortable, but it won’t be terrifying. Fifteen minutes, perhaps, before I slice the onions. Then, maybe, one day I can just open a tin of beans instead.

If you are as old as me, you might just remember going to the cinema in the late 70s, perhaps to see Star Wars or Grease. Back then, the cinema always smelled sickly sweet and smoked tinged and the carpet was tacky from spilt sugary drinks. When the lights dimmed and the projector turned on, its beam was a triangle of light above your head, lighting up dust motes and tobacco smoke. For a moment, you felt crowded, suffocated by the mass of bodies packed close, and the dark. And then the film began and you were transported into another world. At the end of the film, you awoke, blinking, back into the faded grandeur of the cinema. The curtains rolled across the screen and everyone flooded out onto the High Street, into crowds of cinema goers and shoppers, to wait at the bus stop before being jostled and crammed once more. It was sometimes uncomfortable. It was always electric.

Cinemas today smell of nothing at all.

Modern life is convenient. A flick of a switch turns the heating on, music plays on your command, food is chosen from a screen and delivered in minutes. When I was a small child, each of these tasks would’ve taken time. The grate had to be cleaned in the morning, old newspapers, twist-fold-twist, kindling laid on top, ready for evening and a lighted match, a flare of light settling into a warm glow. Regular attention, a poke here, a few more precious coals.

Few people have the time for such tasks now, of course. The hypnotic dance of the fire is for camping trips rather than everyday life. I wouldn’t have it any other way. The house is already warm when I get home. The digital film never judders or snaps. The smooth leather recliner keeps me safely away from the brush of a stranger’s arm.

But bliss arrives as a result of friction, not comfort. Look back on your happiest memories. Were they convenient and comfortable? Or was there effort and resistance there?

The silken touch of seawater over skin sun-blushed from the hike to the beach. The scream of fireworks through air so sharp it numbed your fingertips. The prickle of bus seats on bare legs, echoing the prickle of excitement at the adventure ahead. The sharp green scent of a long-tended tomato fresh from the greenhouse. The rumbling belly as you waited in the queue, appetite whetted by the smell of frying fish and chips. The pride of a gold star. A magic kiss on a grazed knee.

Perhaps in making everything so convenient, we removed the effort that made the experience magical. The fire’s first flames produced light but not heat. You watched the flare, anticipating the warmth to come and so, when it came, it was blissful, exquisite. The discomfort was inseparable from the delight. The journey made the arrival electric. When we smoothed out the friction, we lost the magic that came along with it. Something was lost in this transaction, and mostly we haven’t noticed the absence.

It’s hard to describe or explain, it’s more of a feeling. Have you ever been out walking at night and seen the moon look so beautiful that something primeval welled up inside you? Did you take a photograph and show someone later? It’s not the same, is it? That’s it. That’s what I mean.

I’ve been rereading Persuasion this week. I love revisiting a well-loved novel as I always find something new to ponder with each reading. This time, I noticed the other female characters much more. I saw how they influenced Anne and her choices — and how Austen uses them to shape her heroine’s journey towards self-knowledge and confidence.

Persuasion is often talked about as a second-chance romance, and it is that. But on this reading, what struck me most was how much Anne’s story is also about her learning to know herself better. And the way she does this is largely through the women around her — some of whom show her who she doesn’t want to be, and some of whom offer her a glimpse of something she might want for herself. From her cold, status-obsessed sister Elizabeth to the warm and independent Mrs Croft, each woman holds up a mirror to Anne. What she sees in those reflections gradually changes her.

Anne Elliot is Jane Austen’s most mature heroine. We find her not as a teenager entering society, but as a mature woman of 27, reflecting on the choices she made in the past, but also attempting to build the best life she can for herself within the constraints of her sex and class. At the age of 19, she was persuaded to break off her engagement to Captain Wentworth. Now, eight years later, he comes back into her life.

In the opening chapters of Persuasion, Anne’s main female companions are her elder sister Elizabeth and her late mother’s friend Lady Russell. Elizabeth is proud, selfish, vain and cold. She does not like Anne and when a move to Bath is planned, says of Anne that “nobody will want her in Bath”. Anne doesn’t like Elizabeth either, describing her as ‘repulsive and unsisterly’ later in the novel.

Considering the lack of esteem and affection Anne receives from her father and elder sister, it is surprising that Anne has any confidence in herself. The fact that she does is largely due to her relationship with Lady Russell. Lady Russell both esteems Anne and provides her with the affection and companionship lacking in her family home. As a result, Anne does value her own good traits; at various times during the novel, she notes her own good sense and intellect.

The respect and gratitude Anne feels towards Lady Russell for this care and attention is why Anne was persuaded by her to break off her engagement to Captain Wentworth. But even Lady Russell sometimes gives too much merit to status, as we see later in her judgment of Mr Elliot. Anne needs to see other models of womanhood before she can decide what kind of woman she wants to be. The opportunity to expand her social horizons comes when her father and sister decamp from Kellynch Hall to Bath because of their debts. Anne is sent to stay with her younger sister, Mary, who has married into the Musgrove family.

Mary is selfish, peevish and perpetually thinks herself unwell. She is prone to feeling snubbed and ill-treated, demonstrating an excess of Elliot pride. She lacks any personal resources, such as the ability to amuse herself or bear hardship, boredom or difficulty. Anne is important to Mary only in terms of her usefulness in keeping her company, taking her side in disagreements and helping out with the children.

Elizabeth and Mary show two paths Anne could have taken. She could have become self-centred and obsessed with status, like her sister Elizabeth, or she could have chosen security and status in a less than happy marriage, as did her sister Mary (We find out later that Charles did, in fact, ask Anne to marry him, but she refused). In looking at her sisters, Anne can see what she doesn’t want. Neither the vain, cold pride of her sister Elizabeth nor the self-obsessed pettiness and unfulfilling marriage of Mary.

However, the move has widened Anne’s social circle and she begins to find others who value her and offer examples of an alternative way to see herself and her place in society. In the Musgroves, Anne finds a family full of warmth and cheerfulness, very different from her own. She finds family affection that is not based on pride and status, such as the family’s respect for their cousin Charles Hayter even though he is of a lower rank than the Musgroves. Anne enjoys this family life, especially the closeness of the Musgrove sisters, Henrietta and Louisa, which contrasts so much with her own relationship with her sisters. She finds them ‘fashionable, happy and merry’; however, she notes that she ‘would not have given up her own more elegant and cultivated mind for all their enjoyments.’

The Musgroves treat Anne with kindness, if not the deep affection of a daughter. Her piano playing is not valued in the same ways as Henrietta's or Louisa’s, but rather for providing refreshment for others or music for dancing. But Anne earns the true affection of the Musgroves in time, commenting, when she meets them later in Bath, that, ‘Mrs Musgrove’s real affection had been won by her usefulness when they were in distress.’

The company at the Musgroves is enlarged further when Captain and Mrs Croft move into the Elliot family home and become part of the Musgrove’s circle. This also brings Captain Wentworth, Mrs Croft’s brother, back into Anne’s life. It is clear that Captain Wentworth has not forgiven Anne for breaking the engagement and he now seems determined to attach himself only to someone with a strong will. When Louisa Musgrove demonstrates such a will, he ‘honours’ her for it.

Mrs Croft offers a different example of womanhood than Anne has seen before. She says to her brother, Captain Wentworth, ‘I hate to hear you talking so, like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures.’ Even more importantly, Mrs Croft provides a model for marriage that appeals to Anne. The Crofts’ marriage is warm and affectionate, but Mrs Croft also retains her sense of self and ability to speak her mind within it. She is an equal partner who keeps the couple out of trouble by giving the reins ‘a better direction’ when necessary. Here, perhaps, Anne is given a glimpse of the kind of life and marriage she might desire for herself.

When the family visit Lyme, Anne is admired by various men, but it is her own actions that boost her confidence further. When Louisa falls, Anne attends to the whole group ‘with all the strength and zeal, and thought, which instinct supplied.’ She stays calm and organises effective help. Louisa’s fall is precipitated by her strong will, which gives Captain Wentworth reason to think that being open to persuasion is not always a bad thing. Either way, he observes that there would be ‘no one so proper, so capable as Anne’ to nurse Louisa.

After the visit to Lyme, Anne spends some time supporting the Musgroves in their distress and then stays with Lady Russell for a while before going to take her place with her father and sister in Bath. Once there, Anne meets the handsome stranger, who turns out to be Mr Elliot, her cousin and heir of Kellynch Hall. When he shows an interest in her, Lady Russell is delighted, and Anne, when contemplating the prospect of becoming mistress of Kellynch Hall, finds ‘her imagination and her heart were bewitched’. But these thoughts are fleeting, and she is not taken in by him. She still prizes warmth and open-heartedness and wonders ‘who could answer for the true sentiments of a clever, cautious man’.

Lady Russell, though still respected, does not have the same influence as she once had, and Anne has found that ‘she and her excellent friend could sometimes think differently.’ When Anne discovers Mr Elliot’s true feelings, she shudders at the possibility that she ‘might have been persuaded by Lady Russell to accept him’.

By the end of the novel, Anne accepts Captain Wentworth’s proposal. This time, she goes into the agreement with a mature understanding of what it will mean for her, as well as the confidence to stand by her decision no matter what others might think. Over the course of the novel, she has built confidence in her own capabilities and desires for her future. This confidence has largely grown from her own actions, but her new perspective also comes from watching and learning from the other women in the novel.

In addition, what she has learned over the course of the novel sets the couple up for a happy marriage. As the narrator notes, they are now ‘more tender, more tried, more fixed in a knowledge of each other’s character, truth, and attachment, more equal to act, more justified in acting.’ And much of that is because of what Anne has learned from the various women she has encountered, all of whom have had something to teach her, be it good or bad, about the kind of woman she wants to be and the kind of life she will choose for herself.

What strikes me, coming back to Persuasion, is how true these themes still feel. The women in our lives shape us in ways we don’t always recognise at the time; sometimes through their wisdom and warmth, sometimes by showing us a life we know isn’t right for us. We absorb lessons we don’t even realise we’re learning until much later, when we look back and recognise the people who quietly changed how we see ourselves.

And I think that’s why Persuasion feels so much richer on each reread. The love story is wonderful, but alongside it is this quiet story of Anne becoming a ‘rational creature’ — clear-eyed, self-knowing and ready to choose her own life. And she couldn’t have done it alone.

We live in a goal-focused world: likes, praise, ticked off to-dos, weekly date nights, pounds lost on the scales and pounds gained in the bank account. And while checking off these targets and goals does give us a sense of progress, it also feels pretty exhausting. There is always another goal to reach. We can never rest on our laurels.

But what might be the alternative? After all, if we stop setting goals and trying to achieve them, we would stagnate, right?

Well, I recently discovered there is another way. We can focus on the process rather than the end product. I’m not the first person to discover this, of course; there are research papers and books dedicated to the topic. But the idea really sank in for me when I started learning watercolour painting. I think having a concrete example of how this worked in practice really helped.

When I painted a picture, it was either ‘good’ and I could proudly put it on the shelf, or ‘bad’ and it got hidden away in a drawer or thrown in the bin. If I painted a ‘good’ picture, I was happy. If I painted a ‘bad’ picture, I was disappointed. Of course, I learned some skills along the way, but I didn’t learn as much as I could have if I had focused on the process of learning to use watercolours rather than the goal of producing a painting I was happy with. I also didn’t have as much fun along the way, because anxiety about the outcome sometimes spoiled my enjoyment of the process. I couldn’t be happy until I had finished the painting and could pronounce it ‘good’. And if it wasn’t good, the whole session was wasted. No wonder I failed to sit down and paint as often as I wanted to!

When we create a goal, we often define an end product that we want to achieve. The report finished, the money earned, the abs toned, or the novel written. With this kind of goal, there is a clear result. We either achieved it, or we didn’t. There’s not much nuance. If we achieved the goal, we succeeded. If we didn’t, we failed. This approach misses out on so much, such as how we felt, what we learned and what skills we developed along the way. Failure means we wasted our time. This can be terrible for our confidence and resilience.

Research suggests that outcome-oriented goals aren’t necessarily bad; in fact, they can be essential for working out where we want to get to in life. Setting a goal or deadline can motivate us to get the work done. The problem is that too often, goals become our only way of motivating ourselves and moving forward. Goals are great for setting the destination, but are less helpful in getting us there. A process-oriented framework can help us be more successful, happier and more fulfilled as we do the daily work of heading towards our destination.

Process-orientation is a completely different mindset that can impact how we live our day-to-day lives. Working in this way can improve our happiness, connection, creativity, health and well-being. It can redefine our relationship with failure and help us feel less anxious. It can foster deeper work and a more fulfilling life.

Process-orientation changes things in ways that go well beyond productivity.

Motivation

The most obvious difference between process-driven and outcome-driven goals is whether the rewards we gain from the work are intrinsic or extrinsic. So, for example, do we enjoy writing an article for Substack because it allows us to express ourselves, or because thinking on paper helps us formulate our ideas and opinions — intrinsic goals? Or are we writing for praise, likes or money — extrinsic goals? There’s nothing wrong with extrinsic goals. Sometimes we do a job just for the paycheck. And we all need appreciation and connection. But when everything we do is for extrinsic reasons, our lives become less satisfying. It can begin to feel as if we are always responding to outside demands and have no space in our own lives.

Flow

One way process-driven work can be helpful is in achieving a state of flow. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defined ‘flow’ as a state of complete absorption in what we are doing, where time seems to dissolve, and the work feels almost effortless. Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying this state and found that it emerges most reliably when we are fully engaged in the process of an activity rather than anxiously monitoring our progress towards a goal.

I’ve experienced this occasionally with painting. I sometimes have sessions where I stop thinking about whether the painting is going well and simply follow what the paint is doing — how it bleeds into wet paper, how the paint colours blend and merge, how a colour fades as it dries. In those moments, I lose track of time entirely. The inner critic goes quiet. These are, not coincidentally, the sessions that produce my best work.

Physical experience

When we work with the process, we also become more attuned to our bodily sensations. For example, when painting, I often notice I am holding the brush too tightly and, when I loosen my grip, my brushstrokes become more fluid. Or when writing, I stop to check a reference or the word count, pulling myself out of the ‘flow’.

Working with the process creates a more sensory experience where we work with all our senses and our physicality rather than being stuck in our heads with only reason and logic for company. This way of working also allows for our intuition to find a way into our work.

Meaning

When we are focused on a goal, meaning becomes something that only happens if we succeed. The whole experience is held hostage to the result. If the painting is bad, then the afternoon was wasted. If the project fails, the months of work count for nothing.

When we engage with the work itself, meaning is less a destination and becomes woven into the process. I find this with painting. Even a session that produces nothing I would want to keep has given me something — a passage that worked beautifully, a dreamy colour combination, a quiet hour to myself. None of that disappears because the painting wasn’t good enough.

This might be one of the most important mental shifts of process-orientation. Meaning is always available, on any ordinary working day, rather than being something we have to wait and hope for. Life becomes fuller and richer, open with possibilities rather than limited by judgment and metrics.

Learning

Process-oriented work also encourages deeper learning. When working towards a goal, we often learn only what is needed to hit the target. We take the most direct route and ignore anything that doesn’t serve the immediate objective. There is no time for curiosity or detours.

Working with the process is different because we are not racing towards a fixed endpoint and are therefore free to follow our interests wherever they lead. I find this with writing personal essays. When I sit down with the sole aim of quickly producing something to publish, I tend to stay on safe ground. I already know what I think, I write it down, I’m done. But when I approach writing as a process of discovery, I often follow an unexpected thought down a side road, realise it leads somewhere more interesting than where I was originally headed, and come away understanding something more about myself or my subject.

Creativity

Working with the process can also increase our creativity. Without the fear of failure, we can be innovative and brave, trying new techniques or ideas without fear. When we are focused on a goal, our fear of failure can inhibit our creativity. We just want to get the job done effectively and not take unnecessary risks.

With painting, this might mean trying a technique I've never used before, even when I am not sure it will work. Sometimes it doesn't work — but occasionally it produces something I would never have arrived at by playing it safe. That kind of creative accident is only possible when you aren't too attached to the result.

Presence/Relationship to time

When we are working towards a goal, we often feel pressured and rushed, as if time is running out. We are constantly looking at the clock, wondering where the day went and feeling tense and anxious if we think we should be further along than we are. When we focus on the process, especially if we slip into ‘flow’, time seems to expand. We no longer feel rushed and can lose ourselves in the process. Of course, time doesn’t literally expand, but we may find that we actually get more high-quality work done when we are in this state than by bullying ourselves and clock-watching all day.

Sense of self

The way we work also affects our sense of self. When we focus on the process, we discover our likes and dislikes, our strengths and weaknesses. Our choice to get curious leads us to uncover where our true interests lie and what is most meaningful to us. This approach can also help us appreciate ourselves, our unique abilities and our particular way of seeing the world. Instead of shrinking to focus on a goal, we expand into those things that light us up: the sparks of joy and the breadcrumbs of meaning that lead us toward a more fulfilling life.

Resilience

Process-oriented work can boost our resilience because it is filled with curiosity, creativity, sensory experience and meaning, and so is self-sustaining. This kind of work fuels us at a deep level, reducing the likelihood of depletion and burnout. The work is its own reward, so we are not entirely reliant on the outcome for a sense of achievement. In contrast, our resilience can suffer when we are outcome-oriented. A failure feels like a dramatic setback rather than an opportunity to learn. Everything has been lost, and nothing gained.

Becoming comfortable with uncertainty

Often, we chase results because we find it uncomfortable to sit with the uncertainty of not knowing the outcome. So we rush to achieve the goal and assess whether we failed or succeeded, because even failure feels more comfortable than uncertainty. Being more process-oriented can help us through this anxiety and redefine our relationship to the work, reducing stress and helping us live in the moment.

Using this process-oriented approach has been very helpful for me. I am much more likely to spend an hour on my watercolour painting now that I am less worried about the result. I also find I am more open to taking risks in my painting. My finished paintings now express my personal style and creativity more than my previous goal-driven pieces. And my writing… well, this piece started with a brainstorm in which I gave my curiosity full rein. I’m happy with what I learned along the way. I’ll let you judge the result.

2025 was a challenging year for me, and even though things are better in many ways this year, I’ve still been feeling a bit low. To lift my spirits, I decided to watch some light-hearted films this month. Turns out the universe had other ideas!

The first film I watched was The Perks of Being a Wallflower. The key art for this film made it look light-hearted. It was not. The synopsis mentioned music, writing and love. It did not mention abuse, suicide and a mental health crisis. I went in blind and the film shook me. When the main character, Charlie, ends up in a mental health facility, he tells the doctor, ‘There is so much pain…and I don’t know how to not notice it.’

I’ve been in that place in the past. After a difficult year, I could feel this thinking nudging at the edges of my consciousness once more. We all go through seasons of loss and pain, and sometimes these engulf us. Our despair can begin to colour everything. Luckily, art, as well as breaking us open, can heal.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower cracked something open inside of me. I had wanted to distract myself from pain. This film forced me to confront it.

I went in for a second attempt at a light-hearted film. This time, I chose A Man Called Otto. The synopsis for this film is, ‘Otto, a crochety, and fiercely strict widower, lives a lonely life, judging everyone he sees. When he forms an unlikely friendship with his new neighbour, Otto begins to change.’

Well, I guess the first lesson I’ve learned in my choice of films this month is not to judge a film by its synopsis. Although it has comic moments, this film is, at times, devastating. Otto, played by Tom Hanks, is not a “crotchety widower” but a recently bereaved husband who has promised his wife he will come to her as soon as he can. A Man called Otto is a beautiful portrayal of love, loss and learning to live again.

The film balanced the grief of bereavement with flashbacks to a young Otto, played by Truman Hanks, and the beautiful life he’d had with his wife Sonya, played by Rachel Keller. We watch them fall in love, get married and move to a home of their own before tragedy strikes. We hear of the impact Sonya has on Otto after this tragedy and of the legacy she leaves behind in her students' lives.

The flashbacks were beautiful and important, but with these alone, my feelings would have been of bittersweet nostalgia. The past was beautiful indeed, but now, there is only loss. What saves the film from this is Otto’s neighbours, who offer him understanding, forbearance and forgiveness. Otto’s new neighbour, Marisol, played by Mariana Treviño, reels Otto into her chaotic life and Otto, against his will, is drawn back into the land of the living with all its joys, sorrows and complexities.

This film opened me once more to a fuller range of emotions. I saw that my focus had been on ending the distress. But this was the wrong approach. Instead, I learned to see that even in the midst of pain, I must try to stay open to life, so that even when the seasons of loss and grief come, they don’t entirely blot out the joy and love. The pain must be allowed to stay; however, it cannot be permitted to be everything.

With my third choice, I finally hit on the lighthearted film I’d been looking for and gave the tissue box a break. However, this film also made me think about the common human desire to avoid distress at all costs. The film was The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In this love story, Clementine, played by Kate Winslett, decides that to avoid the pain of a broken relationship, she will have her mind wiped clean of all her memories of Joel, played by Jim Carrey. In retaliation, he does the same. When they meet again and start a new relationship, they are sent tapes of all the memories they had wiped away. Now they have a choice: abandon the relationship they knew had failed, or try again. They decide to give it another go.

Though the subject matter of this film was very different to that of A Man Called Otto, there are similarities. Clementine wanted to wipe her mind clean of the memories that were causing her pain. Otto saw annihilating himself as the only way to do that. Both felt that their anguish was something that could not be borne.

It is easy to think, when we are in the midst of heartache, that we would like to wipe our minds clear and rid ourselves of all these painful reminders, or in some cases, to cease living to avoid the distress altogether. But if we wipe away the memory of the devastating argument, we have to wipe with it the memory of lying blissfully under the night sky on a frozen lake. If the pain of loss is preventing us from living now, we can abandon ourselves and life, or we can reach out to life and let it back in. These choices are not easy. But these films offer an example of how it may be done.

Both films show a way to hold the joy and difficulty together. To be present with loss, grief and distress while not allowing it to annihilate every other aspect of life.

Even though I wanted light-hearted films this month, I’m glad I didn’t get them. I can still see the pain around me, but I’m consciously seeking out the joy and wonder too. I can hold the two things together—with joy as a life raft, keeping me afloat and carrying me onward into life.

Remember when things used to end? You turned the last page of the newspaper. The shops closed at 5:30. The TV programming shut down at midnight.

Now nothing ends. The feed refreshes forever. There’s always another episode, another article, another must-have purchase. You can’t finish the internet. You can’t complete Netflix. The scroll has no bottom.

Maybe that’s why we are reaching for vinyl records, film cameras and notebooks. Not because they’re prettier but because they are finite.

Of course, the algorithm is one step ahead of us. That’s why our feeds are full of notebook flat-lays, film cameras and record players. It looks like a way out of the endless scroll. Analogue. Slow living. So we click. We browse. We add to cart.

They got us again.

I don’t think this is a reason to abandon analogue, though. It just means not getting sucked into consumerism along the way. It means resisting the urge for the quick dopamine hit and retraining ourselves to seek a deeper satisfaction.

When I sit with a physical book, I read it. I don’t check my phone halfway through a sentence because the book isn’t connected to anything. It’s just there, being a book. When I write by hand, I remember what I wrote. When I play a record, I listen to the whole side because getting up to skip a track isn’t worth it.

This isn’t just an aesthetic choice. Research backs it up. Writing by hand improves retention. Uninterrupted focus changes how we think. Less stimulation calms our nervous systems.

The problem is that we took things with edges and we made them infinite again. We longed for the simplicity of a finite roll of film, but we warped it into a rabbit hole of finding the perfect film type. The quiet afternoon listening to an album turned into a hunt to complete the discography.

We took these beautiful, finite objects that held the promise of calm simplicity and we made them complicated. We saw the promise of writing a letter with a fountain pen, but we postponed it until we found the perfect pen, the exact shade of ink and paper smooth enough to contain it.

Somewhere along the way, we forgot that we are not overwhelmed because we lack beautiful objects. We’re overwhelmed because nothing stops.

What actually helps is the restriction the analogue item provides. Reading one book at a time, not a dozen samples on a Kindle. A recipe from a book, not ten versions online with pop-up ads. A roll of 36 photos that makes you pause before you click the shutter, because you can’t take three hundred and sort them later.

The boundary is a gift.

When analogue becomes about collecting and consuming, that gift disappears. If we’re spending hours researching pens, comparing lenses, tracking down limited editions — we’ve just replaced one infinite scroll with another.

I’m not against aesthetics. I love fountain pens. I like the weight of a hardback notebook. I’m not here to tell you that enjoying objects is wrong.

But I think it’s worth asking what we’re actually seeking when we reach for analogue. If the answer is relief from the infinite, then more stuff isn’t the solution. The solution is less. Fewer options. Things that end.

I recently designed my first personal curriculum course. I wanted to refresh my memory on the literary criticism skills I learned years ago. It was a great success and a lot of fun.

My key takeaways from this mini course were

• I am glad I started small

I was so tempted to create a huge year-long course that would have taken me weeks to plan. I’m glad I started with a short 6 week course. This helped me to test out the personal curriculum concept, learn some skills that would set me up for success with future courses and work out how my personal curriculum was going to fit in with my lifestyle.

This worked really well. I completed the course and that has boosted my confidence.

• I wish I had started with something more fun

While I really enjoyed this course, I think it would have been better to start with something more fun. I was really longing to read some new books and this course had me re-reading old ones. I learned so much, but I think starting with a course that is fun about a subject you are passionate about would be a great way to start a personal curriculum and help you get into a routine without it feeling like work.

How I am planning my next course

Taking what I’ve learned from my first course, I created a set of questions to help me design my next course. There’s also a blank template at the end in case you feel like designing your own course in this way.

1. What do I feel drawn to right now

I think starting with something I feel passionate and excited about is the key to creating an in depth personal curriculum I will actually complete?

2. What’s my motivation?

I want my main motivation to be passion and curiosity, but I also think having a secondary motivation helped me make time for my curriculum.

For me that is still to brush up on my literary criticism skills, reduce my doomscrolling, use my time wisely and stop brain rot. Other good motivations might include: feel more energetic, start a new analogue hobby, speak Spanish for a trip, or have a grounding in a particular subject.

Tip: your motivation will help you keep going if things get difficult. Write it at the front of a notebook, in a folder on your computer, or on a post-it note where you can easily see it.

3. Narrow it down

This is where we get into the specifics of what we will learn. Don’t be too broad — not ‘literature’ but ‘an introduction to mid-century gothic’, not ‘ learn Spanish’ but “‘complete a beginner’s Spanish course’.

How long will your course be? A quick one-month course, a semester, or a whole year? I really recommend starting with a short course as I think this allows you to pivot as you go depending on what sparks your interest. It also saves you from putting off beginning the course because you spend a month planning it!

I’m choosing ‘an introduction to mid-century english literature’ as my course title.

4. Find a syllabus or fundamental resource

Pick a syllabus from online to copy or adapt, or find a fundamental resource such as an introductory guide— the further reading will be useful too. Just creating a curriculum will teach you a lot about the field.

You might choose a university reading list, a beginner running plan or a YouTube series. You could also do a workbook like The Artists’ Way by Julia Cameron

I couldn’t find a course on my proposed subject so I did some googling, looked on Goodreads and checked out Reddit for some suggestions. I found a reader on my subject and plenty of ideas for mid-century novels to investigate further. Now I just need to narrow down my choices - which is tough - cos I wanna read them all!

5. Write a short description

What will the course cover? What are its aims? What do you want to achieve by the end?

For me this will be to read four mid century novels to understand the literary lansdscape of the time and some of the themes. I then want to write an essay about these four books and how they compare and contrast to one another.

6. Time and place

Choosing a time and place to complete your curriculum is key to its success. You need to set aside the time and mark it in your calender. I prefer to do a little each day, but you may find it easier to spend a whole day at the weekend on your curriculum.

Where will I do it? For example: at my desk, at the gym, on my commute.

What does a typical week look like? Map it out.

Don’t overschedule. Getting behind can put you off the whole thing. Start gently if it’s an unfamiliar skill or subject.

7. Units

Break your subject down into chunks — by theme, by skill level, by chronology, or by whatever structure makes sense. Each unit should feel like a manageable focus for a week or two.

For example, for mid-century gothic, you might have units on The Haunted House, Domestic Horror, Ghosts and Memory. To build fitness, you might choose: Foundation, Building Endurance, or Adding Strength.

8. Required reading or resources

Write a list of the books, videos, courses, equipment or materials you’ll actually use. You may not need to buy all of this to start with, just pick up what you need to get started.

For example: textbooks, novels, weights, an exercise mat, a running app, art supplies, or a library card.

9. Assignments or projects (optional)

Assignments are optional, but they can be a good way to consolidate your learning.

For example: running 3K, writing an essay on your subject, giving a presentation to a friend, completing a craft projec

t, or cooking a meal from scratch.

10. Practices and habits

Plan some regular rituals that support your learning.

For example: weekly reflection, keeping a journal, taking notes, reviewing what you’ve learned before starting something new.

11. Final reflections

At the end of the course: What did I learn? What surprised me? Where do I want to go next?

Personal Curriculum: Planning Template

1. What do I want to explore, learn, or get better at?

2. What’s my motivation?

3. Narrow it down

4. Find a syllabus or fundamental resource

5. Write a short description

6. Time and place

When:

Where:

7. Units

Week 1:

Week 2:

Week 3:

Week 4:

Week 5:

Week 6:

8. Required reading or resources

9. Assignments or projects (optional)

10. Practices and habits

11. Final reflections