If I google Diana Gardner the following appears…Buy The Lady Novelist and Other Short Stories and maybe a seller pops up for her only novel The Indian Woman. Sadly Diana Gardner didn’t write much.
Her books are very female-centric, the sort that a man would pick up and quickly put down again. She writes for other women. She writes about things a woman would recognise yet would pass by most men. She doesn’t produce a typical male-centric plot. Most men wouldn’t ‘get her’ – so why would they (in other words the mid twentieth century publishing industry) promote her?
For a woman writing in the 1940s and ‘50s and particularly importantly – for a woman without the contacts that du Maurier had to start and help her career – or the knack of a quick, punchy plot like Christie – Gardner wouldn’t appear marketable and therefore worth publishing. Please don’t think that I’m criticising du Maurier or Christie, I’m not. They had their own battles. My next comment is aimed at the swath of male writers. After all, publishers are far more interested in making money than promoting good writing. Let alone listening to a distinctive voice if it appears atypical.
I’m going to digress as I can hear you asking – but what about Muriel Spark? And you’d be right. She’s a pithy (ever so slightly later) contemporary of Diana Gardner’s and not unlike her in the ability to nail the psychology of a character. Regardless of how unsavoury they may be. But I’m going to leave her to one side for today. I’m not dismissing her as she’s one of my favourite writers, but she had to work hard within literary circles to get her voice heard before she could even begin to think she could get one of her novels published and that was after Diana Gardner had published her last piece of writing.
When I looked online trying to find any analysis of Diana Gardner’s writing, I found none. There is the odd review which explains half the plot of whatever it claims to be reviewing, but so far I’ve found no papers or discussions. Why? Because I have the feeling that she’s been largely forgotten – apart from by Persephone Books who thankfully publish her short stories. Yet her tales are modern and invariably quite gripping. When I read her novel I genuinely sat up into the early hours of the morning because I wanted to know what was going to happen. I really, really did.
Diana Gardner has an acute eye in managing to pin down whole characters even in the shortest of her short stories. She also pushes the reader. And it’s this that makes her so fresh, so compelling. At times I find myself almost wincing as I read. I can’t relax because I soon learnt that things are often not as they seem.
Gardner’s short story The Land Girl – shows us the deeply spiteful nature of someone. It’s one of those tales that while you’re reading it you’re thinking that surely not, no!…And yet they really do. You’re left wondering if there really is a person like that? Sadly I believe so.
Halfway Down The Cliff addresses another unsettling question about our psyches… And in The Couple From London there are definite hints of Edgar Allan Poe. It’s the way Gardner plays with the very real consequences of social etiquette which makes the tale so effective.
In Mrs Lumley – a story that again watches as we peel back the layers in the protagonist ‘s mind and the twist which turns against our expectation, playing on prejudice and realisation.
The sickening question about the husband in The Woman Novelist – there’s an acute awareness that many of us may not admit fully to ourselves, let alone to those closest to us. Yet Gardner takes it onto the next level (like Muriel Spark) so the question becomes elevated, almost but not quite, metatheatrical.
I find myself wanting to use words like ‘revealed’ and ‘realisation’ when discussing Gardner’s writing. She has a way of unwrapping what makes her character’s tick, of exposing their core often with a sharp poignancy.
And on this note I’m going to turn my attention now to her only novel The Indian Woman.
Gardner uses a trauma received by Sybil’s husband while he’s in the army in India. This trauma is not dealt with and from it the seeds of repression grow in him. As his subconscious struggles he then starts psychologically attacking his wife. Not wanting to be found out he then lies to everyone around him. Manipulation, deceit and gaslighting? Definitely.
Gardner’s portrayal of how the human mind works is nuanced. This is a person who has either known or experienced the effects of repression and their dire consequences. We live in an age where so many T.V. dramas and books are filled with the almost lavish depiction of outstanding cruelty against women and children – the worse the better. Gardner could have taken the same voyeuristic sensationalist route. But she’s not lazy or sensationalist like so much fiction is today. She doesn’t need to be. She has no problems with using the reality of a psychological state to challenge the reader.
Several times in the novel characters dismiss the concept that if someone doesn’t physically hurt someone else then the damage caused cannot be as severe. In other words, why is Sybil suffering? That what the husband is asking, demanding, forcing Sybil, to do isn’t actually harmful. Gardner is challenging this idea head on, forcing us, alongside Sybil to see him suppress her, as he strips away that quintessential essence of self away from her.
It raises the question we’ve all had in relationships. How far do you go in compromising? How far do you go disclosing the truth about what’s really happening?
I know barely anything about Diana Gardner’s life and I’m happy with that. What I do know from her stories is that she saw through people and she wrote with dry honesty.
I wish she’d written more.
Yet, as I said earlier I doubt there were men who valued what she produced; not recognising the questions raised in the very fibres of marriage or relationships and, as a result, they dismissed her. As for her short stories they would be seen as being filled with characters outside the norm. So why publish her? Why encourage an independent woman’s voice they didn’t understand? Especially when it had no problem in articulating the truth.
