Malachi Whitaker — And So Did I with Valerie Waterhouse

Likened to a fresh Yorkshire breeze, Malachi Whitaker’s year-in-the-life memoir And So Did I, published in 1939, is a quirky spirit-quest juxtaposing wry humor and contemplative observations amidst the impending threat of global conflict. Valerie Waterhouse, a PhD researcher and executor of Whitaker’s literary estate, joins us to discuss the author’s life and work, as well as her own quest to keep Whitaker’s legacy alive, including securing a commemorative blue plaque for her birthplace and writing a forthcoming biography.

Mentioned in this episode:

And So Did I by Malachi Whitaker

The Journey Home and Other Stories by Malachi Whitker

The Oxford Book of English Short Stories edited by A.S. Byatt

“Landlord of the Crystal Fountain” by Malachi Whitaker

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

Stevie Smith

Elizabeth Bowen

Kathleen Raine

Gay Taylor

“What I Believe” by E.M. Forster

“Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 3 on E.M. Delafield

Lost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 166 on Alba de Céspedes

Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated and may contain typos.

AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit. For access to all of our bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers, join our Patreon community. Visit lost ladies of lit.com and click Become a Patron To find out more. Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off the works of forgotten women writers. I'm Amy Helmes here with my co-host, Kim Askew.

KIM ASKEW: Hey, everyone.

AMY: So Kim, if I had to pair a song with today's book, Malachi Whitaker’s And So Did I, it would probably be that song that goes, “You made me love you, I didn't wanna do it. I didn't wanna do it.”

KIM: Okay, Amy, you're gonna need to explain. 

AMY: Well, so this book is kind of hard to explain, and I think that's the point, really. It's a year in the life account of the writer's daily existence in the late 1930s in England (so her observations, speculations and daydreams) as she wonders about big questions like “Does God exist?” And “What is the meaning of life?” So, right off the bat, I wasn't sure I wanted to tackle somebody's profound journaling exercise, which is what I thought this would be.

KIM: Right, and well, it sounds like this book fell victim to the curse of being difficult to categorize. The premise sounds heavy, maybe even a little banal, but this book is actually the complete opposite of that. It is light, it's charming, it's funny.

AMY: It's kind of like dessert, right?

KIM: Yeah, okay, let's go with desserts. I'll say it's like a pavlova. On the outside, it seems like it might be overly sweet or dense, but then in reality it's airy, crispy, it's soft and a little surprising once you take a bite.

AMY: I read this book in about two days. It's really easy to get through, which I wasn't expecting when I was hearing about all these intense questions that she's tackling. So as I finished it, I was sitting outside in the backyard, it was a sunny morning and I closed the book and I just felt this pure contentment wash over me. And didn't have any expectations that we were gonna feature it on the podcast; I was really just reading it out of curiosity. But when I had that moment as I closed the book, I thought, “How can we not feature this?” It's just a perfect little book.

KIM: Completely. So we can't begin to tackle these big metaphysical questions posed in Whitaker's book (and she actually couldn't either). But let's get to the bottom of why this book is so delightful and maybe a little ahead of its time. We've got a guest today who knows a lot about this author who may be able to help. So let's read the decks and get started!

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today is Valerie Waterhouse, a PhD researcher at the University of Salford near Manchester, England. In addition to being the executor of Malachi Whitaker's literary estate, she's also currently working on a forthcoming biography of the author. Valerie was the inaugural winner of the Biography International Organization's Kitty Kelly Dissertation Fellowship for this project. She also wrote the afterword to the new Boiler House Press edition of Whitaker's unusual memoir And So Did I. Valerie, welcome to the show. We're so glad to have you.

VALERIE WHITAKER: Thank you. Hi, Kim. Hi Amy. And thank you for having me on to speak on one of my favorite subjects, Malachi Whitaker.

AMY: I mentioned in that intro that I was a little skeptical of this book until I sat down and started to read it, at which point I was completely charmed. But in 1939 when this book was first published, some critics really resisted it. So tell us about that. What was the book's reception like, Valerie?

VALERIE: Well, when it came out in January, 1939, I'd say that actually, the vast majority of the reviews were fairly positive. And she also had some quite big name writers, critics, writing about the book. So for example, Leonara Eyles, in The Times, in The London Times, that is, um, she started off saying, “Oh, this book begins badly.” But you know, she ended up kind of loving the book and saying, Oh, you know, “this is a perfect book for everybody's bedside table.” And, it's a bit like meeting somebody on a long train journey and they just tell you a bit about themselves and they remain a bit mysterious, you know. That was her reaction. And then Hugh Walpole also had a reaction a bit like yours, again, because he also started off going, “Oh, I felt a bit languid about this book when I first started it”. And the first few pages hadn’t really drawn me in, but then it really drew me in, and now, Malachi Whitaker is my companion and friend for life. 

KIM: I mean … Wow! 

VALERIE: Yeah. And they corresponded afterwards because she was so thrilled she contacted him. He actually, in a private letter, said that it had been for him a bit like the experience of reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando or Marcel Proust, you know, he was like making these kind of comparisons. Then there's another really beautiful review from LP Hartley, and I've gotta just read you a tiny bit of this 'cause it's so good. He said “The book And So Did I, is dry, sparkling and aerated.” And “it's a bit as if the breezes of rural Yorkshire are blowing through it.” He was quite a funny man himself, so he got the humor and he said that “contact with the author's mind is like being in a slightly under heated room on a fresh May morning with the windows open.”

KIM: How wonderful.

AMY: Which is exactly how I felt when I said I was sitting in my backyard there. He's describing that, right?

VALERIE: Exactly. It's that feeling of this kind of freshness of the voice kind of coming into your head and the intimacy of it as well. Just kind of waking you up a little bit.

AMY: Yeah. And also that like, um, “sparkling, but dry and aerated.” That's like champagne. 

KIM: Yes. Yes. 

VALERIE: That's that's great. Yeah, it's a bit kind of frizzante, yes. A bit fizzy. And then the most exciting review of all, and I don't even know if she knew who wrote it, but I know she was really thrilled with it when it came out and The Listener, anonymously. And while I was doing the research for my afterword I contacted the BBC Archive, and they take ages to respond, but finally this lovely archivist answered and she went and looked up and she went, “It’s Elizabeth Bowen!” 

AMY: Oh wow.

KIM: Oh my God.

VALERIE: Elizabeth Bowen had written like this big, two-page review. She says all kinds of things, which I do go into in the afterward, but I mean, she defined And So Did I as “a work of art.”

KIM: It makes me so happy for her that she got these glowing reviews.

VALERIE: I know, because of course there were also the horrible reviews, which are the kind of the ones that get the most talked about in a way. So one of them was in the Manchester Garden, obviously by somebody rather snooty, saying, “Most of the general reflections strike one as being neither worth making or worth reading.” Imagine reading that about your book? And then there's this famous horrible one in The Spectator, which unfortunately is the first one that pops up when anybody Googles And So Did I. This reviewer said it was “a dangerous attempt to make new ground.” And again, “Malachi's thoughts and feelings are dull.” Then he sort of compared her unfavorably to Virginia Woolf and Stevie Smith, saying, you know, um, “She's on a lower plane to Virginia Woolf, but even Miss Stevie Smith has great literary talents.” Anyway, I can't prove there's a connection, but I think there probably was a connection because just a few months later, Stevie Smith wrote this seven-stanza poem about Malachi Whitaker’s And So Did I, which was published in the periodical Now and Then, and she was like really raving and positive about the book. 

AMY: Oh, I love that.

KIM: Take that. Yeah. 

VALERIE: I can just read you a little snippet. It's like seven short stanzas in very Stevie Smith, quirky style. Of course, they were both very quirky writers, so you know, I think they kind of got each other. I don't think they knew each other. So the poem is called “And So Did I” reviewed by Stevie Smith and [reads a bit from poem]

KIM: Oh, I love it. So before we get into the specifics of this book, let's get to know the woman who wrote it a little bit better. Marjorie Whitaker (Malachi was her pen name) was born in 1895 in Bradford, England, which is in West Yorkshire. Valerie, this is the same area where you grew up. How did you first discover Whitaker?

VALERIE: Yes, it is the same area where I grew up, and I first discovered her, actually, in The Oxford Book of English Short Stories I think it's called, which is edited by A.S. Byatt, who actually also grew up in North Yorkshire. I happened to read it in 2015, something like that. And the story “Landlord of the Crystal Fountain” is in it. And I read this book and, again, it was like being  in a room with the windows open and the Yorkshire breeze just running through . I was actually sitting on a train in Italy where I live, going up the side of Lake Como. I was reading this really Yorkshire story that reminded me of my own family, who were very, very northern kind of working-class family. And I was so excited that I ordered all her books off the internet. And at that time you could find them all fairly cheaply. Now they all cost a bomb, their first editions. And I read everything. And then at the time, both my parents were ill and I was looking after them a lot. And I discovered that Malachi's son, Michael, lived like a 15-minute drive from my parents' house. So I contacted him to see if I could write an article because I was a journalist, and then from there, it just became a complete obsession. And every minute I could I was back doing research in the archives or with Michael having another cup of tea and another chat.

KIM: How wonderful. 

AMY: What was his reaction to having somebody take such an interest? Had he felt at that point, that she was kind of a bygone name that nobody was honoring?

VALERIE: Yes, because there'd been this revival in the 1980s when And So Did I was last republished, and there'd been this little volume of short stories then [The Landlord of the Crystal Fountain] and other stories, and then it had all kind of died off, you know? And he was getting old. He was in his eighties, and he kind of felt he'd let her down. And other people had kind of shown an interest, but he'd never found anybody that he really was convinced by, let's say. And we just really hit it off. So it just went from there really. And then I got to know his sister, Valerie, who has got my same name. And she was really, really helpful, as well. And then I got to know some of the grandchildren. They got on board, too.

AMY: So these are the son and the daughter in the book, then?

VALERIE: They are. So it's Michael and Valerie who in the book appear as Nick and Jane. And of course they were adopted, which Malachi goes into in the book, which is also very interesting in itself and unusual, isn't it? Because you don't come across that a lot in the 1930s with people having been so open about adoption.  And then the book's dedicated to Michael and Valerie as well, in the new edition, the Boilerhouse edition.

AMY: Okay. So in this book, Whitaker recounts brief memories from her own childhood. So Valerie, fill in the blanks for us on what you know about her early years and upbringing. What should we know?

VALERIE: Okay, so her birth name was Olive Marjorie Taylor, and she was known to her family as Marjorie, and she chose the name Malachi in the 1920s when she first started to send out work. She said she went through the book of Malachi in the Bible three times, and there was nothing to say if it was a man or a woman.So it was a sort of gender-neutral name, a bit like the Brontes [used]. The Brontes were also born in Bradford, where she was. So yeah, she was the eighth of 11 children of a book binder. Her dad had a book bindery in Bradford. Bradford, of course, was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, one of the first industrialized cities in the world, and was very famous for its wool trade. She went to local schools, so not private schools, but she hated school and she left at 13.And that was the end of her formal education. She went to help her mother in the house 'cause they couldn't afford servants at that time. And then when she was 14, she went to work for her dad in his book bindery, but her dad went bankrupt at the start of the first World War. And, um, she had to go out and find a job, probably in the local office. She said she worked 12 hours a day from between 10 and 12 shillings a week, which was a pittance, but it helped her family to survive and keep their house. Because they did have quite a, you know, not a fancy house, but a nice house, which was unusual for a sort of upper-working-class family, let's say. I should also say that during the war in 1917, she married her soldier husband, Leonard Whitaker. The couple then built up this new life, living in leaky tents and rented farmhouses before finally, in 1934, being able to rent, but move into this beautiful Yorkshire manse, which was actually at the end of the street where she was born in Bradford. She says in And So Did I that, um, that it was renovated in 1627, so it was quite an old house, a beautiful old house. It's still there. So her background was really incredibly different from the vast majority of the successful interwar women writers of the day. And of course when she wrote And So Did I, she's in quite a different situation.

AMY: So it's not quite rags to riches, but kind of close, because you know, by the time she's writing And So Did I, she's living quite comfortably, right?

KIM: Yeah. And what sort of work had she written previously before? She was already an established writer, right? 

VALERIE: She was. She'd already published four volumes of short stories. They didn't sell brilliantly well, but they were very, very well received critically. Vita Sackville-West, for example, wrote a really beautiful review of her first book. And women from two more vastly different backgrounds you couldn't possibly meet, you know. But she recognized the talent.  The stories mainly dealt with working-class characters from Bradford. Not always, but quite often. She had freely admitted they were based on her neighbors or friends. Some of them were also autofictional, I mean, when you know the biography you can sort of see these things, although she herself didn't necessarily admit that. So the money they lived on wasn't really from her writing, although it did help initially. But her husband by then had  become the co-owner of a textile factory. So that's kind of where the money came from. And obviously they had their two adopted children. They'd adopted Michael (Nick in the book) in 1931, and Valerie (Jane in the book) in 1935. And by then, of course, they were wealthy enough to have a couple of servants. But you can see in the book she’s a little too familiar with the servants, so she's actually quite happy when they go off and allow her to cook for a while. So again, you can see the big difference here between other women writers of the period who had grown up with servants and didn't necessarily know how to cook terribly well and couldn't really manage when “cook” wasn't there. This is 1937 to 1938. She's already been through one extremely traumatic war, as had all the other writers of the period. They were all kind of traumatized. But seeing the possibility of conflict again creeping up on the horizon and feeling incredibly threatened by that. So, as you know, in And So Did I, she does talk a bit about fascism and communism, and she herself was a pacifist. And yeah, so this beautiful life which she knows might not last forever, might be a phase.

KIM: Right. She's basically living a, I guess you could say, a routine life of an English wife and mother in West Yorkshire. And it doesn't necessarily seem like it would be this fodder for a gripping read, but yet all three of us were sucked in when we read it. So explain the magic, Valerie. What is the secret sauce here?

VALERIE: Yeah, I'd like to know what you think the magic is as well, but, I mean, I think it's just the voice. It's the wits, the humor, the quickness. She's kind of fresh. She's funny. She's feisty, She's not afraid. She manages to create this feeling that she's talking to you from just the other side of the room and she's sharing all these kinds of sometimes quite intimate things, but also keeping a lot back. What else is she gonna tell me? You know? And it's literally like talking to a person on a train who's kind of telling you all these confidences and you are sort of filling in the blanks. So yeah, I think it's that. What, what do you think?

AMY: A lot of this book reminded me of E.M. Delafield’s The Diary of a Provincial Lady, which that was the second episode we ever did for this show. I was just getting a lot of similar vibes because there's the humor, uh, she's just being totally forthright and her observations about her life and the world are so sharp and, you know, she's self-deprecating at times. I think this book is a little more deep than the provincial lady was, but you just walk away really liking her.

KIM: She talks about her relationship with her husband and I. I think at one point he even tells her, “Maybe we don't want everyone to read this.” And she is like, well, you know, it's okay. Too bad.” Yeah. I don't know how to describe it. You described it beautifully, but she sees both sides of the coin and expresses it in just such a beautiful way. 

AMY: So I'll share the moment that I was sucked in. Pretty early on she mentions having read a Noel Coward biography. It's just totally run of the mill, like, what are you reading? But she says, “I keep on thinking of the small Noel Coward who was asked to sing and stood up and did. Like that. I prefer a small forgotten girl of seven I once saw egged on to recite by her mother. This child lifted her dress over the back of her head in a kind of trance, put her foot through the glass door of a bookcase, was suddenly filled with intense pity for the listening world, shouted “No!” in a tremendous voice and fled. She may never amount to anything, but she had one moment of understanding in this life.” I was like, “Sold. I want to know everything else you have to say to me.” Like at that moment I'm in, girl. 

KIM: I will never forget that. There are so many memorable snippets from the book. There's the time she sends the maids away, like we were talking about, her sister visits and they basically end up having this idyllic time doing everything themselves. Things don't go perfectly. It's summer and her son and his cousin, they end up playing with liquid tar and getting it all over themselves and have to get it cleaned up. But she seems to love it all. I wanted to read this one little passage. “And though the world may be sinking to ruin around, I cannot help it. I'm drunk with being glad to be alive. The real miracle of summer sunshine, the trees waving their leaves in the immemorial way though kingdoms fall, the grass having the same smell as ever. The sight of new fire leaping through wood and coal. The direct glance from the children's eyes, all this mixes before me and makes a peculiar joy. I know that there is suffering all around me, but can I not be free?” She goes on to say she hates the evil and injustice in the world as well, but she also sees this beautiful side of it too. 

AMY: I love the juxtaposition of the comedy with these like, just really profound moments. I think that's my favorite thing about it. So she says, If I were a fetish worshiper, the object of my worship would be trousers. but probably it is the men within the trousers that I like, yet I stare at trousers with the warmest curiosity. They're also different. I know my friends by their trousers. Hang up the trousers and I think I could say there's Tom or Dick or Harry. 

So that's hilarious but then there's another passage where she gets really deep. I think she's talking about a bird that fell out of the tree. And she says, “And this is where I am quite certain there is no God of the kind I was told about when I was young. No God who sees the sparrow fall, because he could not see a helpless sparrow fall without having his celestial heart broken.”

VALERIE: I've got two little snippets like that too. One of which is really funny. And the other one, which is really profound, and they're actually, there's overlap with what you just said because the first one, which is the funny one, uh, to me, it's funny anyway, it's also got a bird in it. And she's looking out the window. It's autumn, the first day of autumn, and she's looking out at the farm yard, which of course is attached to the hall. And she says, I looked out the window to see the cows standing motionless in the farm yard while the first fallen leaves drifted around their hooves. There was a faint smell of smoke blown downwards, and a migrating bird was hopping foolishly, round and round a patch of earth. Foolishly because it did not know about the cunning farm cat, and I did. I wish it would get on with its migrating.

It's really visual. You can see it. And then she just has that really funny throwaway line. You can just imagine her laughing and saying that. And the other one that's profound … This is one of those moments for me that kind of went, “yes, yes,” you know, this is really my thing. And it's actually connected to religion. She said “I once went into Cologne Cathedral, just as a service was starting and saw a beautiful colored show. The faces around me were moved by some deep feeling, and I stood alone, frowningly curious, but quite cold.

I mean, she was an agnostic as I think it's fairly clear. I'm probably more on the atheistic side, but I know that feeling so well and yet I don't think I've ever seen it articulated so well. I remember going (because I live in Italy) I remember going into the San Marco basilica in Venice the night my auntie was dying, to Mass, and it was so beautiful, but what was said, what everybody else seemed to be feeling, just didn't touch me. And this just articulated that for me and I was just like, you know, it's so profound.

AMY: Yeah. And throughout the book, that's what she's questioning because she doesn't understand why she feels that way. So, you know, we're following her through her daily life but there's this throughline of her search for meaning, specifically an understanding of a God that she can't really bring herself to believe in. And she's very blunt about her inability to fully buy into the Christian faith. I love the moment where she jokes about how jealous she is of St. Paul, that he had his Eureka moment on the road to Damascus, because not everybody gets that. She says “Lucky, lucky Saul, (which is Paul's name before this moment) Lucky, lucky Saul, to have all the responsibility taken from him. All that was left for him was to do as he was told, then he could be sure of eternal salvation. I can only sigh and pass on because the hounds of heaven and me seem to keep about the same distance apart, both lolloping along with our tongues out downhill and stopping at the same time for meals and so forth. I have never even felt his warm breath on my shoulder. 

So it's like anybody can believe if you're knocked off a horse by a bolt of lightning, you know? But I'm just sitting here on my farm looking around and trying to find the answer, and it's not here. How do you think readers in her day would've responded to this sort of flippant … I guess it's not flippant because she is taking it seriously, but this kind of attitude about religion and God, which wouldn't have been necessarily common for people to talk outright about?

VALERIE: Yeah, it made me think quite a lot about this, because I think there was a lot going on between the wars in the wake of the first World War and the devastation that people had been through, and the husbands and sons and brothers that had been lost. There was this whole sort of move to sort of spiritualism and, um, sort of psychic connection with the other world so people like Arthur Conan Doyle and Kathleen Raine, who was a close friend of Malachi's best friend Gay Taylor, who was an author from Yorkshire originally. And also was on this big spiritual quest, but much more of a believer in these kind of alternative ways of believing than Malachi was. So she was in quite close contact with that, but she just couldn't really believe it. She just couldn't feel it.  She herself grew up in, um, a non-conformist Christian background, which is very common for northern working class people. But yet her dad didn't go to church. He seems to have been a bit of a skeptic. And that wasn't terribly uncommon in, at least in terms of my own personal experience, my family.  And then of course you've got the kind of writers and bohemians and artists and like the Bloomsbury sat and Virginia Woolf, and people who were skeptics. So I would say that probably the reaction to her being all out there was mixed. She wasn't the only one. Uh, I mean, I think E.M. Forster wrote an essay about belief, which he published in something like 1938. And I think the first sentence is something like, “I don't believe in belief.” So I would say the reaction was probably a bit mixed.

AMY: Got it.

KIM: So let's go back to the title of this book, And So Did I, it comes from a line in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s, “Rime of The Ancient Mariner.” Can you talk a little bit about what you think the significance is there, Valerie?

VALERIE: I can, yeah. Brad Bigelow, the editor of course, of the Boiler House “Recovered Book” series and the Neglected Books website founder has an interesting essay about And So Did I, which he wrote quite a number of years ago on the Neglected Books website. And he says, you should have a look at the context of that line, which is “Alone, alone, all alone on a wide, wide sea, and never a saint took pity on my soul in agony. The many men so beautiful, and they all dead did lie, and a thousand, thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I.” 

And Brad relates that to Malachi's, um, spiritual sense of aloneness, which I think relates back to that quote that I mentioned previously about how she felt in Cologne Cathedral. To me, also, the “many men so beautiful and they all dead did lie” … I think that would've had great resonance for her because of the First World War because the young men of her age of Bradford were some of the first over the trenches on the first day of the battle of the Somme, and many, many many hundreds of them lost their lives or were wounded on the first day of The Somme. A huge, huge wound for the city, which even today is still alive, you know, that that wound is still felt in some families. And so I think, you know, “A thousand, thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I…” She's kind of saying, well, you know, am I worth life after death? Am I worth being remembered? And then, in And So Did I, she actually says at some point, “I don't really care whether anyone remembers me or not” So there's actually a line that says that, and yet the fact is that she's called it And So Did I, “a thousand, thousand slimy things lived on and so did I,” which she uses the epitaph, so there is a feeling there that maybe she did want to be remembered after all, you know, but she felt ambiguous about it.

KIM: That's beautifully put.

AMY: Yeah, she's ambiguous about a lot of things, really. And I, I think, you know, as you get to the end of the book and you realize she never really finds answers to any of the questions that she's asking about life. but yet meaning, and poignancy slowly unfold indirectly in her writing. And it's not in a cliche, “we should stop and smell the roses.” It's more subtle than that. She's able to find the divine in these little day-to-day moments. And I think we now are living in this era of needing constant dopamine hits and we're constantly looking for the rush. We can all use that little reminder, I think, of you can find it if you're really looking for it.

VALERIE: Yeah, I mean there are some specific moments where she kind of does say, “Remember to smell the roses,” but at the same time she kind of maybe punctures it. So like, for example, when she says, “I'm glad to see young creatures and leaves and pattern beetles and snowflakes,” and kind of talks about things that she notices and that do give her a moment of joy.But then straight after that, she says, “but life itself is difficult, filled with unfinished ends and unfinished thoughts.” 

KIM: Yeah. You feel like she's seeing it clearly. The bad and the good, and it all means just as much to her, I guess. 

VALERIE: Yeah, it's like joy can coexist – DOES coexist with pain. One doesn’t nullify the other.

KIM: Absolutely. And as we said, she's always being pulled away from things. So she's pulled away from her typewriter, and you can feel this tension in the book between her interior self and the demands of reality. It does remind me, Amy, of E.M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady, like you said, but also it reminds me of The Forbidden Notebook. That was an episode we did on Alba de Cespedes’s book. And in all these cases, you can see how an ordinary woman writing about her ordinary life can almost be a microcosm for what's happening in the wider world. Valerie, what are your thoughts on that?

VALERIE: I think it kind of goes back to the “Room of One’s Own” syndrome in a way. You know, the way that Delfafield and de Cespedes and also Malachi Whitaker are constantly being pulled away from their work by their domestic responsibilities, their family and so on. And in fact there was a big break in this book. I dunno if you noticed it, between Bhapter 14 and 15, there's like a seven-month break. There's a gap. Because her dad died in the middle, her father died in the middle of all of that. So, you know, there's a demonstration, I think, of that tension that you mentioned, Kim, between the interior self and the demands of reality.

AMY: Yeah. Speaking of Virginia Woolf, whom you brought up, she was a contemporary of Malachi Whitaker's. Can you draw any comparisons between the two authors? They're quite different in what they were doing, but…

VALERIE: Yeah, very different. I do think and I've said this in my afterward as well, I do think that the structure of And So Did I, which is along this continuum of a year, literally a year, but sort of flickering backwards and forwards in time, particularly backwards, but in a non chronological way, in a memory-driven way has a kind of similarity instruction to Mrs. Dalloway, and I think even more to that of Dorothy Richardson, which she read Pointed Roofs when it first came out, and she was one of the first, I think, to apply that kind of structure to a memoir. So it is a very modernist kind of structure. And she certainly had some of Virginia Woolf's work on her bookshelves, but she never met Virginia Woolf, as far as I can see. And Virginia Woolf, I don't think ever mentioned Malachi Whitaker in any way, shape or form. Although I presume she would've been aware of her, she would've seen reviews of her work and so on. But they were just from such different worlds. They really were, you know, in private writing, Malachi said that she felt Virginia Woolf's superiority in social standing and talent led critics to make contemptuous comparisons between her and Virginia Woolf, which she found difficult. But, you know, just think about the way Malachi would've spoken. You know, she would've had aYorkshire accent, and Virginia Woolf. I mean, I don’t know if any of you have ever heard the only recording of Virginia Woolf, but she had such a posh accent and, you know, immediately that would've been like a gulf really at that time. I mean, it still is to some extent in Britain because class consciousness is just, you know, then it was so rife, and class prejudice.

AMY: She wasn't physically in the circle. I mean, Virginia Woolf is in Bloomsbury and she's on a farm in Yorkshire. I mean, just that remove is necessarily gonna be an obstacle.

VALERIE: Although as she says in And So Did I, she was also renting a flat in Bloomsbury at the time, right opposite the British Museum. 

AMY: Oh, that's right. She would go in and visit. I forgot. Yeah.

VALERIE: She actually hung out around the progressive bookshop on Red Lion Street, which was run by Charles and Esther Lahr, which was like an alternative circle. And it had people like H.E. Bates and Gay Taylor, and a whole range of other writers who were more provincial, working-class Irish, and sort of also some African and Indian writers hung out there. So that was a whole different scene, you know, where she was more comfortable.

KIM: Oh, that's so interesting. 

AMY: Yeah. We don't even hear of that group, right?

VALERIE: It's a very interesting group to look into. 

AMY: And I also need to now Google the voice of Virginia Woolf, because I didn't know that was a thing. I'm gonna do that as soon as this finishes.

VALERIE: Yeah, I mean, you know, that's just the way she was. Virginia Woolf was Virginia Woolf. And Malachi herself recognized that she was probably the greatest woman writer of the age, you know? I think one of the differences between her and Delafield is obviously Delafield is from a much, much more, uh, upper-class background and is used to having servants around and so on, you know, and her poverty. Um, when she's thinking about selling her granny's diamond ring or whatever, you know, she still expects to have a son in a private school, her daughter with a French governess, you know, um, that whole lifestyle. Um, and I think Malachi, on the one hand, her book is kind of keeping up with the Joneses a bit, saying, look, here I am. They're very nouveau riche. I'm sure Virginia Wolf, with the MG sticking out of the garage and everything … they're very, very nouveau riche. And she also points that out. So, for example, um, now I've gotta find the quote. Um, she says at one point: I'm descended from people who scratch their bare living farming on the moors. And it surprises me that I write at all. And through my research, I believe that there, she's talking about the fact that her great grandfather, who was a farmer who scratched a bare living on the moors and a wool combber, which was not a very nice occupation, died in a workhouse.

AMY: Mm. 

VALERIE: Also both of her grandmothers were illiterate on marriage. 

AMY: Wow. 

VALERIE: Her grandmother who she knew very, very well, her mother's mother, then learned to read later on and would read little novels and things like that. But this is a million miles from Virginia Woolf, 

KIM: So Whitaker died in 1976 at the age of 80. Valerie, you were instrumental in helping get a blue plaque historic marker to commemorate Whitaker's birthplace. Can you talk about your endeavors to keep her legacy alive and to complete a biography about her?

VALERIE: Yeah. So, as I mentioned before, I first met Michael, her son in 2015. And then, um, between us we kind of decided it would be great to do an event to celebrate 120 years of her birth, which was in 2015. So I did an event at Ilkley Literature Festival, which is a big festival that just happens to be in my hometown. And from there I got invited by, Nicola Beauman of Persephone Books and Philip Hench the novelist, to write the afterward for the only volume of Malachi's short stories, which is currently in print, which is called The Journey Home and Other Stories, which came out with Persephone books in 2017.And then in 2019 I approached Bradford Civic Society, who were looking to put up some plaques dedicated to Bradford women. They'd not heard of Malachi Whitaker, but they were on board. And then Bradford Council got on board. So in like October, 2019, a blue plaque was installed at Malachi's birthplace house on Clara Road in Wrose, Bradford. Then the pandemic came and I was able to do a little bit more online research. And then I just thought, you know, this thing is just so big, I've got to formalize it. So I ended up starting a PhD and really getting down to trying to write the biography.

AMY: That's so amazing. Yeah. Like it, it really became an obsession for you.

KIM: Yeah. 

VALERIE: Oh, totally. Totally obsessed.

KIM: That’s wonderful. wonderful. 

VALERIE: Just recently, a really personal thing happened to me because my great-grandfather, William Waterhouse, was killed in World War I and he was a Yorkshire book binder, and we don't even have a photograph of him. We don't have anything about him. So researching all the book bindery part of her history in particular, Malachi's history is sort of filling in a gap in my own personal knowledge and experience and history. And just recently, like two weeks ago, I found out that two of her, coworkers from her father's book Bindery, Gladys Butterfield, who was a really close friend of hers when she was a young woman and her husband, Frank Duchs, who'd worked with Malone, the bindery as well, moved to Huddersfield, which is where my family's from. And Frank Duchs, after the First World War, was working in the same book bindery as my grandmother in 1921. 

KIM: Oh my gosh, you're connected! That is so cool.

VALERIE: And it’s also where my great-grandfather had worked for 20 years before he was killed in the war because he'd started work at the age of 12. 

AMY: I mean, you think about like the threads of fate that brought your stories together somehow. That's really, that is an amazing coincidence. 

KIM: Yes, I love it. Yep. 

AMY: So Whitaker wrote in And So did I: Nothing can last in this transient world much longer than a plume of smoke. But listeners, I think we need to try to make her the exception. Let's follow Valerie's lead here. Check out a copy of this book. It's, like we said, a quick and really sublime read.

KIM: And Valerie, we want to wish you the best of luck on your biography of Whitaker. We can't wait to read it, and listeners will be sure to let you know when it's available. Thank you so much for joining us today to talk about her, Valerie.

VALERIE: Thank you for inviting me and i'm just 

so happy that you enjoyed Malachi as much as I did, and I hope many other people do too!

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. We'll be back with an all new episode in two weeks, but if you hate waiting that long, consider becoming a member of our Patreon community for a nominal monthly fee. You'll get access to our twice monthly bonus episodes, or you can purchase any bonus episodes and pay as you go.

KIM: Don't forget also to give us a rating and review wherever you listen.

AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.