Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton Read online

  This novel, The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion, 1764–5, made an astonishing and unexpected impact, and would remain King-Hall’s most successful work until Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton two decades later. It is a playful but convincing recreation of the intimate diary of a young Anglo-Irish woman called Cleone Knox, purportedly written during her travels around various European countries in the mid-eighteenth century. The prefatory material to the diaries claimed that they had been discovered and edited by Knox’s descendent, the equally fictional Mr Alexander Blacker-Kerr. King-Hall’s publisher, Thornton Butterworth, was responsible for the book’s careful marketing and publicity. King-Hall’s name was not attached to the book, so that it appeared, at first glance at least, to be a genuine diary. It was taken as such by a number of reviewers, including Lord Darling in The Sunday Times, who hailed it as an important literary discovery. After these enthusiastic pre-publication reviews appeared in the autumn of 1925, the canny Butterworth postponed its release while more copies were printed, and when it finally went on sale in December it became a bestseller. Experts in eighteenth-century literature quickly questioned its provenance, however, and over the next six months speculation turned to the true authorship of this literary ‘hoax’. On 24 June 1926, a headline on the front page of The Daily Express declared it the ‘Cleverest Hoax of the Century’, while the front page of The New York Times read: ‘Girl Tricks the World with Literary Hoax, Intended as a Joke’. King-Hall – who had never intended any such deception when she wrote the book, and had relied only on her own general knowledge, and what she could glean from Hove Public Library – found herself propelled into a brief period of literary celebrity.

  King-Hall capitalised in a modest manner upon this small degree of fame, working as a journalist during the next few years, and producing several more novels which did not garner the same degree of attention. In 1929, she married Patrick Perceval Maxwell, actually a distant cousin, who was working for the Sudan Cotton Plantation Syndicate. For the next three years, King-Hall spent winters in the Sudan and (wives being forbidden from remaining during the hot season) split her summers between London and Ireland, where her husband’s family lived. When not in the Sudan, she continued to write, both novels and journalism, and when a family inheritance allowed Patrick to quit his job, they returned to live in Chelsea. Her first son, Richard, had been born in 1930; her second son was born seven years later, and a daughter three years after that. In 1938, the family moved again, this time to County Down in Northern Ireland, to run a farm close to the Perceval Maxwell family home. It was here, after producing only three modestly successful novels during the 1930s, that King-Hall entered her most prolific period of authorship, and that she wrote Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton – the novel for which she is most often remembered today.

  During the 1940s, packages of books would regularly arrive at their Irish home from the London Library, which supplemented her own library to form the basis of her research. According to her son, Richard, her method of composition was remarkably relaxed: she did not insist on scholarly isolation, instead writing longhand, in pencil, while sitting in the company of her family, if they were at home. However, the children were looked after by an Austrian nanny, and later sent away to boarding school, so she did have time to herself to devote to writing.

  In 1953, the family relocated again, to County Waterford in Ireland, where King-Hall continued to write quite prolifically. In the late 1950s, however, she began to manifest signs of Parkinson’s Disease, and the last of her twenty books (seventeen novels and three non-fiction works) was published in 1962. Following the death of her husband Patrick in 1968, Magdalen King-Hall spent the final three years of her life living with her son Richard’s family in King’s Langley, Hertfordshire, and she died in Hemel Hempstead hospital on 1 January 1971.

  King-Hall’s works were always historical novels, though there was ostensibly little consistency or pattern to her choice of subject matter – unlike her friend and contemporary Margaret Irwin, for example, best known for her Young Bess trilogy of novels about Queen Elizabeth I. Like Irwin, however, her attention was inevitably caught by stories of women – the character of Barbara Skelton has a forerunner, for instance, in her novel Lady Sarah (1939), which fictionalises the life of the notorious eighteenth-century aristocrat, Lady Sarah Lennox. King-Hall was inspired partly by locations with which she was familiar – several of her novels have an Irish setting – but more commonly she would read widely in history and folklore and keep her eyes peeled for interesting stories which she might embroider into fiction. At the time she wrote Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton, King-Hall had no direct knowledge or association with Hertfordshire, though she would end her life there. Indeed, she transplants her protagonist’s home from Markyate in Hertfordshire to the fictional Maiden Worthy in Buckinghamshire, just across the border.

  Her facility at embellishing the kernel of a good idea can be seen in Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton. The account of the Wicked Lady legend in Hole’s book is only one page long, summarising the version of Ferrers’ life drawn from Cussans. The considerable flesh which she attached to these bare bones emerged almost entirely from the imagination of King-Hall, and the endurance of the legend into the twenty-first century owes much to the richness of her invention.

  The success of Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton was perhaps no surprise, as King-Hall was by this stage of her career an experienced and skilled popular historical novelist. The genre in which she worked has not always been afforded the critical respect or attention that it deserves, but in recent years feminist critics have recognised that King-Hall and her contemporary writers of women’s historical fiction provided a crucial reflection of, and outlet for, the desires, hopes and anxieties of their largely female audience. The marketplace was relatively crowded. Some of the bestselling books of the years immediately before, during and after the Second World War were historical novels written by women: among them were Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936); Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn (1936), Frenchman’s Creek (1941) and The King’s General (1946); Kathleen Winsor’s controversial Forever Amber (1944); and Margaret Irwin’s Young Bess (1944).

  The popularity of historical fiction at this time can be explained in a number of ways. As Diana Wallace has pointed out, the appeal of historical fiction ‘can be situated within a wider popular appetite for history, especially social history’: G.M. Trevelyan’s English Social History (1942), for instance, was also a best seller.12 Such interest in the English past was clearly a response to the pressure of wartime, as many readers turned to the past to establish or renew their sense of English identity and values, for which they were fighting. Many readers picked up historical novels out of a desire to learn about the period in which they were set, and an easy means of dismissing much ‘popular’ historical fiction was to focus on its ‘inaccuracy’; du Maurier, for example, was so eager to avoid this pitfall that she collaborated with the eminent historian A.L. Rowse when researching her Civil War novel The King’s General. Although her research was much more informal and less exhaustive, King-Hall also demonstrates a high level of historical knowledge, conjuring a vivid sense of the seventeenth-century setting not merely by dropping the names of significant historical characters, but by depicting the rhythms, patterns and rituals of day-to-day life. The novel is rich in detail about seventeenth-century traditions and practices: wedding customs, music, dances, card games, recipes for perfumes and folk remedies.

  And yet, as Wallace notes, traditional non-fictional history writing had tended to exclude women, who, with a few exceptions, tended to feature only as the wives or daughters of ‘great men’ who shaped major historical events. In the hands of many women writers, the historical novel offered an opportunity to produce an alternative version of history more reflective of the everyday life and experience of women. However, in Wallace’s words, ‘any historical novel always has as much, or perhaps more, to sa
y about the time in which it was written’ as about the period in which it was set – indeed, even the choice of period setting can often tell us much about the meaning of a novel.13 The Restoration period in which Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton takes place is notable for perhaps two important factors. Firstly, it was a notoriously licentious age, when the ‘Merry Monarch’, King Charles II, presided over a court in which decadent behaviour and sexual promiscuity were the norm. The novel abounds with passing references to this – and it is notable that many of the real historical personages who fleetingly intersect with the fictional characters are women, such as the two mistresses of King Charles, Lady Castlemaine and the Duchess of Portsmouth, who are said to have been former victims of the highwayman Jerry Jackson. Barbara Skelton’s frustration at the grinding tedium of life at Maryiot Cells is heightened, one feels, by the tantalising proximity of a more glamorous, luxuriant life at court, which yet remains inaccessible to her. For a novel concerned with rampant female sexuality, the Restoration world is the ideal stage.

  Secondly, Restoration England was a society in which the memory of a relatively recent war – the English Civil War – remained strong. The story of Barbara Skelton commences in 1678, three decades after the end of this devastating conflict, but there had been other major catastrophes in more recent times – the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666 – which haunt the text, imbuing it with a sense of the fragility of life and happiness, just as Barbara’s ghost haunts the house itself. This ‘haunting’ is often subtly, almost invisibly embedded in the text by intertextual quotation and allusion, as when the effects of a devastating cold snap in the 1680s are evoked using the diarist John Evelyn’s description of the plague.

  For a readership living through another devastating war, the sense that the characters inhabit a vibrant world that has survived conflict and catastrophe may have been additionally appealing. King-Hall emphasises the historical continuum between the past and the present with a series of framing narratives at the beginning of the novel. The history of Maryiot Cells is linked to a contemporary context by a preface, ironically titled ‘Finis?’, describing the destruction of the house by a German bomb in 1942. We then travel back through time, in a series of ‘flashbacks’, each of them focusing on earlier female inhabitants of the house from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Though each of them struggles to come to terms with the spectral presence of Barbara Skelton, these chapters suggest that the past is not entirely segregated from the present; we can trace our current identity as individuals and as a nation back to the past which is described in the book. Moreover, these framing narratives privilege the experiences and authority of women, suggesting an alternative model of social and domestic history.

  Despite King-Hall’s determination to make her readers aware of an historical continuum between the seventeenth-century and the present-day, many of her readers would have picked up the novel looking for a temporary escape from the bleak reality of a world at war, rather than a reminder. There is much in the text to satisfy this desire, and King-Hall’s Restoration world is mostly rather glamorised and sterilised. The depictions of Barbara’s wedding festivities, or of her performance as Diana in a ballet before the King, would seem utterly fantastic and luxurious to readers for whom both food and clothes were rationed. This type of historical novel became known, for good reason, as ‘costume fiction’ (just as the many film adaptations were known as costume melodramas), and King-Hall shows an expert knowledge of fashion, and a fascination for what her characters – both men and women – are wearing.

  This focus on outward display, however, should not be taken as a mark of frivolity; it allows King-Hall to temper her escapism with gender politics. Historical fiction provided a ‘safe space’ for many writers, particularly women, to explore subjects that were taboo in any other context. The immorality of Barbara Skelton – robber, murderess, and adulterer – was shocking enough in its historical setting, but it was safely contained and distanced in the past. To explore such transgressive behaviour in a contemporary setting would have been difficult, almost unacceptable, for a woman writer; as Wallace puts it, ‘the historical novel has allowed women writers a license which they have not been allowed in other forms’.14 Barbara’s rebellious, subversive exploits, her rejection of the pre-ordained path that a patriarchal society has laid out for her, had a vicarious appeal for women readers in particular.

  Women in the 1940s were also testing the boundaries of their prescribed gender roles. The war had required many women to take on roles that had once been the preserve of men, to become factory workers or agricultural labourers – jobs that required them to dress like men, too, in trousers rather than elegant dresses. Moreover, as Maroula Joannou has suggested, ‘[t]he day-to-day disruption of their lives as well as the loss of their loved ones made it impossible for women to plan for the future and expedient to live for the moment. Many took sexual risks that they would not have done in more settled times…’.15 For many women, extramarital affairs were more conceivable and achievable during wartime than they had ever been before; but the end of the war led to a resurgence of conservative ideology, as men resumed their customary place in both the workplace and the household, and women were expected to return to their domestic confinement. The refusal of Barbara Skelton to toe this line is both a reflection of changing patterns of female behaviour during wartime; and, for readers after the war, a reminder of a type of freedom that has suddenly vanished. Barbara’s sense of stifled frustration, if not her cold-hearted self-interest, would have struck a chord with many of her readers.

  That such identification occurs between reader and protagonist is remarkable, given the litany of crimes she commits. Clearly, though, she is no conventional heroine, and the character of Barbara Skelton crystallises the fears and anxieties of conservative society about the consequences of affording women more freedom, particularly sexual freedom. One of the paradoxes of the war years, as Joannou notes, was that while the war effort meant that many established forms of gendered behaviour were broken down and reordered, ‘the importance of beauty in lifting individual women’s spirits and enhancing their self-esteem was heavily accentuated in advertising and in newspapers and magazines.’16 Propaganda demanded that women should retain their ‘womanliness’ (“Keep your beauty on duty!”, as an advert for Ivory soap put it) in order to protect not only their own morale, but that of their absent husbands, brothers and sons. However, though women were encouraged to continue making themselves beautiful (cosmetics were never rationed, though they were highly taxed), such propaganda tried to strike a balance, so that female beauty was presented as wholesome and domestic, rather than alluring.

  In this context, it seems particularly significant that it is not only female clothing which is fetishized by the novel; in fact, it is the act of cross-dressing, of donning her ‘suit of men’s riding clothes, boots, hat, belt, pistols, all the cherished accoutrements’ of Barbara’s alter-ego, which give her the greatest thrill, for these have become ‘the symbol of her partial emancipation from the dragging reality of life’. In a memorable moment, Barbara gazes adoringly at herself as she puts on her highwayman’s outfit:

  With the impatient but deft movements characteristic of her, she stripped off her Indian gown and silk nightrail, smiling down at her beautiful naked body, before clothing herself in her man’s attire. When she was ready, the long heavy boots pulled on, the over-large belt girded round her elegant waist, her wide-brimmed hat set jauntily on her head, she sat down at the table and gazed at herself in the mirror.

  She loved her face in all its moods, but never better than in this strange, bizarre aspect; the green eyes wide and wild with excitement, the curious nostrils poised – you might almost say! – for flight. Her face looked back at her, daring her to bold and dangerous deeds, and it was then that she resolved to try her luck on Watling Street. (p. 122)

  What is striking about this passage is that it manages to eroticise Bar
bara without objectifying her; the gaze which admires her naked body is her own, and conveys her self-sufficiency and independence. She does not need the approbation of a man to enjoy the possession of her own body. Barbara’s beauty, here and throughout the novel, is marked by an oddness – her unsettling feline gaze, her quirky, flaring nostrils – which problematizes stereotypical associations of femininity with submission and weakness. These features have an uncanny quality which attracts and repulses simultaneously; they are contrasted quite markedly with the more conventional prettiness of her hated cousin, Henrietta Kingsclere. Even when Barbara does take a lover, the highwayman Jerry Jackson, she retains control. Barbara’s appraising eye evaluates Jackson for his physical appearance much as a woman would normally be measured: ‘a handsome enough, lively-looking man’ with ‘all the self-complacency of the fine male animal in his expression’ (p. 133). Later, as Jackson tears open her coat to reveal ‘her lovely woman’s body to his ravished gaze’, King-Hall’s phrasing empowers Barbara (p. 136). She is not being ravished; rather, it is Jackson’s helpless gaze which is victimized by her powerful sexuality. And it is Barbara who sets the rules for the conduct of their affair, insisting on Jackson’s local fidelity to her, and punishing him mercilessly for what she perceives to be his betrayal, in an inversion of typical patriarchal paranoia about female sexual incontinence. For all of her narcissism and self-interest, then, I would argue that it is Barbara’s willingness to embrace and relish her sexual power that lies at the heart of her – and hence the novel’s – appeal.