Frost In May

Book 431: Virago Modern Classics

by Antonia White, Tessa Hadley, Elizabeth Bowen

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Coming of Age; Religious & Inspirational; Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

'Frost in May is the unsurpassed novel of convent school life. This story of a clash between a determined young girl and an authoritarian regime is both perceptive and painfully emotional, convincing in every detail' - Hermione Lee, Observer With a new introduction by Tessa Hadley Nanda Gray, the daughter of a Catholic convert, is nine when she is sent to the Convent of Five Wounds. Quick-witted, resilient and eager to please, she accepts this closed world where, with all the enthusiasm of the outsider, her desires and passions become only those the school permits. Her only deviation from total obedience is the passionate friendships she makes. Convent life is perfectly captured - the smell of beeswax and incense; the petty cruelties of the nuns; the eccentricities of Nanda's school friends. Books in the VMC 40th anniversary series include: Frost in May by Antonia White; The Collected Stories of Grace Paley; Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault; The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann; Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Heartburn by Nora Ephron; The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy; Memento Mori by Muriel Spark; A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame

Release date: April 30, 2019

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 224

Sample

Frost in May is a girls’ school story. It is not the only school story to be a classic; but I can think of no other that is a work of
art. What, it may be wondered, is the distinction? A major classic is necessarily also a work of art. But a book may come
to be recognised as a minor classic by right of virtues making for durability – vigour, wideness, kindness, manifest truth
to life. Such a book gathers something more, as the years go on, from the affection that has attached to it – no question
of its aesthetic value need be raised. A work of art, on the other hand, may and sometimes does show deficiency in some of
the qualities of the minor classic – most often kindness. As against this, it brings into being unprecedented moments; it
sets up sensation of a unique and troubling kind.


School stories may be divided and subdivided. There is the school story proper, written for school-age children; and the school
novel, written for the grown-up. There is the pro-school school story and the anti-school – recently almost all school novels
have fallen into the latter class. Tom Brown’s Schooldays has a host of dimmer descendants, all written to inculcate manliness and show that virtue pays. Stalky and Co. fits into no classification: one might call it an early gangster tale in a school setting. The Edwardian novelist’s talent for glamorising any kind of society was turned by
E. F. Benson and H. A. Vachell on two of the greater English public schools. The anti-school school novel emerged when, after
the First World War, intellectuals captured, and continued to hold, key positions along the front of fiction. A few, too few,
show a sublime disinfectedness that makes for comedy, or at least satire. In the main, though, the hero of the anti-school
novel is the sombre dissentient and the sufferer. He is in the right: the school, and the system behind it, is wrong. From
the point of view of art, which should be imperturbable, such novels are marred by a fractious or plangent note. Stephen Spender’s
The Backward Son, not thus marred, is a work of art; but I should not call it strictly a school novel – primarily it is a study of temperament.


To return to the school story proper (written for young people), those for boys are infinitely better than those for girls.
The curl-tossing tomboys of the Fourth at St Dithering’s are manifestly and insultingly unreal to any girl child who has left
the nursery; as against this, almost all young schoolgirls devour boys’ school books, and young boys, apparently, do not scorn
them. For my own part, I can think of only one girls’ school story I read with pleasure when young, and can re-read now –
Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did at School. As a girls’ school novel (other than Frost in May) I can only think of Colette’s Claudine à l’École.


I began by calling Frost in May a school story. By subsequent definition it is a school novel – that is to say, it is written for grown-ups. But – which
is interesting – Antonia White has adopted the form and sublimated, without complicating, the language of the school story
proper. Frost in May could be read with relish, interest and excitement by an intelligent child of twelve years old. The heroine, Nanda Grey, is nine when she goes to Lippington, thirteen when, catastrophically, she leaves.
She is in no way the born ‘victim’ type – she is quick-witted, pleasing, resilient, normally rather than morbidly sensitive.
Call her the high-average ‘ordinary’ little girl. She is not even, and is not intended to be, outstandingly sympathetic to
the reader: the scales are not weighted on her behalf. We have Nanda’s arrival at Lippington, first impressions, subsequent
adaptations, apparent success and, finally, head-on crash. Frost in May deviates from the school-story formula only in not having a happy ending. We are shown the school only through Nanda’s eyes
– there is no scene from which she is off stage. At the same time there is no impressionistic blurring, none of the distortions
of subjectivity: Lippington is presented with cool exactness. Antonia White’s style as a story-teller is as precise, clear
and unweighty as Jane Austen’s. Without a lapse from this style Antonia White traverses passages of which the only analogy
is to be found in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.


The subject of this novel is in its title – Frost in May. Nanda shows, at the start, the prim, hardy pink-and-white of a young bud. What is to happen to her – and how, or why?


Of the two other girls’ school books named, one is American and the other French. Frost in May is English – but English by right only of its author’s birth and its geographic setting. Lippington is at the edge of London.
But it is a convent school – of a Roman Catholic Order which Antonia White calls ‘the Five Wounds’. Its climate is its own;
its atmosphere is, in our parlance, international. Or, more properly, as one of the girls put it, ‘Catholicism isn’t a religion,
it’s a nationality.’ A Lippington girl is a Child of the Five Wounds; she may by birth be French, German, Spanish or English,
but that is secondary. Also the girls here show a sort of family likeness: they are the daughters of old, great Catholic families, the frontierless aristocracy of Europe; they have in common breeding as well as
faith. From Spanish Rosario, Irish Hilary and French-German Léonie the rawness of English Protestant middle-class youth is
missing. Initially, Nanda is at a twofold disadvantage, never quite overcome. Her father is a convert; she herself was received
into the Catholic Church only a year before her arrival at Lippington. And, she is middle-class, her home is in Earl’s Court.
There is one Protestant here, but she is aristocratic; there are two other middle-class girls, but they come of Catholic stock.


Lippington is a world in itself – hermetic to a degree possible for no lay school. It contains, is contained in, and represents
absolute, and absolutely conclusive, authority. Towards what aim is that authority exercised? On the eve of the holiday that
is to celebrate the canonisation of the foundress of the Order, the Mistress of Discipline addresses the school. ‘“Some of that severity which to the world seems harshness is bound up in the school rule which you are privileged to follow
… We work today to turn out, not accomplished young women, nor agreeable wives, but soldiers of Christ, accustomed to hardship
and ridicule and ingratitude.”’ What are the methods? ‘As in the Jesuit Order every child was under constant observation, and the results of this observation were made known by secret
weekly reports to Mother Radcliffe and the Superior …’ How did one child, Nanda, react to this? ‘Nanda’s rebelliousness, such as it was, was directed entirely against the Lippington methods. Her faith in the Catholic Church
was not affected in the least. If anything, it became more robust.’ None the less, when, at thirteen, Nanda is faced by her father with the suggestion that she should leave Lippington to
receive a more workaday education elsewhere, her reaction is this: ‘She was overwhelmed … Even now, in the shock of the revelation of her dependence, she did not realise how thoroughly Lippington had done its work. But she felt blindly she could only live in that
rare, intense element; the bluff, breezy air of that “really good High School” would kill her.’ And, elsewhere: ‘In its [Lippington’s] cold, clear atmosphere everything had a sharper outline than in the comfortable, shapeless, scrambling life outside.’


That atmosphere and that outline, their nature, and the nature of their power over one being, Nanda, are at once the stuff
and the study of Frost in May. They are shown and felt. The result has been something intense, sensuous, troubling, semi-miraculous – a work of art. In
the biting crystal air of the book the children and the nuns stand out like early morning mountains. In this frigid, authoritarian,
anti-romantic Catholic climate every romantic vibration from ‘character’ is, in effect, trebled. Frost in May could, for instance, go down to time on the strength, alone, of Léonie de Wesseldorf – introduced, in parenthesis almost,
but living from the first phrase, on page 66. Momentum gathers round each sequence of happenings and each event – the First
Communion, the retreat, the canonisation holiday, Mother Frances’s death, the play for the cardinal, the measles idyll … Lyricism
– pagan in the bonfire scene, sombre on the funeral morning – gains in its pure force from the very infrequency of its play
… Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft: in Frost in May the author’s handling of time is a technical triumph – but, too, a poetic one.


The interest of the book is strong, though secondary; it is so strong that that it should be secondary is amazing. If you care for controversy,
the matter of Frost in May is controversial. There exists in the mind of a number of English readers an inherited dormant violence of anti-Popery: to
one type of mind Frost in May may seem a gift too good to be true – it is. Some passages are written with an effrontery that will make the Protestant blink – we are very naïve. As a school Lippington does, of course, run counter to the whole trend of English liberal
education: to the detached mind this is in itself fascinating. The child-psychologist will be outraged by the Lippington attitude
to sex and class. Nanda’s fate – one might almost feel, Nanda’s doom – raises questions that cannot be disposed of easily,
or perhaps at all. This book is intimidating. Like all classics, it acquires further meaning with the passage of time. It
was first published in 1933: between then and now our values, subconscious as well as conscious, have been profoundly changed.
I think it not unlikely that Frost in May may be more comprehensible now than it was at first.


Elizabeth Bowen

Nanda was on her way to the Convent of the Five Wounds. She sat very upright on the slippery seat of the one-horse bus, her
tightly-gaitered legs dangling in the straw, and her cold hands squeezed into an opossum muff. A fog screened every window,
clouding the yellow light that shone on the faces of the three passengers as they jolted slowly along invisible streets.


After several sociable but unheeded coughs, the third occupant could bear the silence no longer and began to speak to Nanda’s
father. She wore a dusty velvet tam o’ shanter and a man’s tweed coat, and Nanda could tell from her voice that she was Irish.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ she asked, ‘but could you tell me if we are anywhere near Lippington village yet?’


‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you,’ Mr Grey answered in his rich, pleasant voice, ‘all I do know is that we haven’t got to the Convent yet, because the driver is putting us down there. The village is further on up
the lane.’


‘The Convent?’ exclaimed the Irishwoman, ‘would that be the Convent of the Five Wounds now?’

‘Yes,’ said Nanda’s father. ‘I’m just taking my little daughter to school there.’

The Irishwoman beamed.


‘Now isn’t that beautiful?’ she said, ‘you’re a Catholic, then, sir?’ She pronounced it ‘Cartholic’.

‘I am indeed,’ Mr Grey assented.

‘Isn’t that wonderful now? To think of the three of us in this omnibus in a Protestant country and everyone of us Catholics.’

‘I’m a convert,’ Mr Grey explained. ‘I was only received into the Church a year ago.’

‘To think of that!’ said the Irishwoman. ‘The grace of God is a glorious thing. Indeed it is. I wonder if the little lady
knows what a grace has been given to her to have a father that’s been called to the Faith?’


She leant over and put her face close to Nanda’s.

‘And so you’re going to the holy nuns at the Five Wounds, my dear? Isn’t it the lucky young lady you are? The saints must
have watched over your cradle. There’s no holier religious anywhere in the world than the nuns of the Five Wounds. I’ve a
cousin meself … Mary Cassidy … that’s one of their lay-sisters in Armagh. She’ll be taking her final vows in February … the
Feast of the Purification. Do you know when that is, my dear?’


‘The second of February,’ Nanda risked shyly.

The Irishwoman rolled her eyes in admiration.

‘Glory be to God, did you ever hear the like?’ she asked Mr Grey. ‘Are you telling me that young lady’s not born and bred
a Catholic?’


Nanda’s father looked pleased.

‘No. She was received only last year, when she was eight. But she’s been having instruction and learning her catechism.’

‘It’s wonderful, so it is,’ the Irishwoman assured him, ‘and it’s a sign of special grace, I’ll be bound. Perhaps she’ll be
called on to do great things in the service of God, who knows? I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a vocation later on.’


‘Oh, it’s early days to think of that,’ smiled Mr Grey.


Nanda began to feel a little uncomfortable. She had heard a good deal about vocations and she wasn’t at all sure that she
wanted one.


‘They say God speaks to them very early,’ said the Irishwoman mysteriously, ‘and that they hear Him best in the innocence
of their hearts. Look at St Aloysius now. And St Stanislas Kostka. And St Theresa herself that would have been a martyr for
the love of God when she was but three years old. And wouldn’t it be a beautiful thing now if she was to offer her life to
God as a thanksgiving for the great blessing of your own conversion, sir?’


Nanda began to like the conversation less and less. She was an only child and she had taken to her new religion with a rather
precocious fervour. Already she had absorbed enough of the Catholic point of view to see how very appropriate such a sacrifice
would be. But although she had already privately dedicated herself to perpetual virginity, and had seriously considered devoting
her life to the lepers at Molokai, she did not entirely relish the idea of cutting off her hair and living in a cell and never
seeing her home again. She was relieved when the bus stopped and the driver came round and tapped at the window.


‘This must be the Convent,’ said Mr Grey. ‘We get down here. Lippington village is a little way further on.’

‘God bless you both,’ said the Irishwoman. ‘Goodbye, little lady. Say a prayer every morning to thank God and his saints for
bringing you to the holy faith. And say a prayer sometimes for poor old Bridget Mulligan, for the prayers of children have
great power with the Almighty. I’ll say five decades for you this very night that you may grow up a good Catholic and a comfort
to your father.’


As they passed out of the omnibus, Mr Grey pressed something into the ragged woman’s hand.

‘God bless you, sir,’ she called after them. ‘It was the holy mother of God sent you to me today. St Bridget and all the saints
guard you and watch over you and your family.’


After the omnibus had lurched away into the fog, Nanda and her father waited several minutes on the Convent doorstep before
the flap behind the grill blinked up and down. After much rattling of chains and bolts the door was opened and a lay-sister
portress beckoned them in.


‘Will you wait in the lodge, Mr Grey?’ she said in a very quiet voice. ‘I’ll go and fetch Mother Radcliffe.’

While they waited for Mother Radcliffe, Nanda took in her surroundings. Her smarting eyes were soothed by a long stretch of
white-washed walls and red-tiled floor. At the end of the corridor stood a statue of Our Lord in white robes wearing a red,
thorn-circled heart on his breast like an order. The bent head with its pale brown hair and beard was girlish and gentle;
the brass halo had been polished till it winked and reflected each flicker of the little glass lamp that burned on the pedestal.
Never in her life had Nanda seen anything so clean and bare as that corridor. It smelt of yellow soap and beeswax, mixed with
a faint, sweetish scent that she recognised as incense.


Outside the portress’ little room, which bore the notice ‘No admittance for seculars’, hung a printed card, punched with a
double row of holes and adorned with two cribbage pegs. Over the top was written ‘Mother Radcliffe’; the left-hand row of
holes was headed ‘Is’ and the right-hand one ‘Is wanted’. In the middle was a list of all the places where Mother Radcliffe
might conceivably be or be wanted, such as ‘at meditation’, ‘in the garden’, ‘in the school’, ‘with the novices’, ‘at the
farm’, ‘in the parlour’, and ‘at recreation’. When Nanda drew her father’s attention to this, he was much pleased at the ingenuity
of the device.


‘They’re wonderfully business-like, nuns,’ he told her. ‘It’s all nonsense about their being dreamy and unpractical and out
of touch with the world. Every minute of their day is filled up with something useful. If you only learnt one thing from them,
Nanda, I should be satisfied.’


‘What one thing, Daddy?’

‘Never to waste time, my dear.’

In spite of the ingenious card, it seemed to take the lay-sister a very long time to find Mother Radcliffe. But at last she
appeared round the angle of the corridor. She came towards them with the step Nanda was to come to know so well, the characteristic
walk of all the nuns of the Five Wounds, smooth and sliding, never slow, never hurried. She advanced smiling, but never quickening
her pace, her hands folded in her black sleeves. Her pale face was so narrow that her goffered white bonnet sloped to a point
under her chin. This bonnet scratched Nanda’s face when Mother Radcliffe bent down to kiss her.


‘So this is Fernanda,’ she said in a kind voice. ‘I am so glad to see you, dear child. Will you say goodbye to your father
now, or would you like to go to the parlour for a little first?’


Nanda hesitated, but Mr Grey looked at his watch.

‘What do you think, Nanda? It’s late and Mother will be waiting. But I’ll stay if you like.’

‘It’s all right, Daddy,’ said Nanda mechanically. She suddenly felt lonely and frightened. A great longing came over her for
small shabby rooms and . . .