Sun of My Life - Gillian Mary Edwards

At a local second-hand bookshop recently I found a copy of Sun of My Life (Gryphon Books, 1951) by Gillian Mary Edwards. I was attracted at first by the neo-Romantic dustwrapper design.  This proved to be by Ley Kenyon, an artist who used his design skills in a P-O-W camp in WW2 to forge identity and other papers: he is one of the characters portrayed in the film The Great Escape (1963).

The description on the back panel of the dustwrapper was also intriguing: ‘The hero of this book is a dead man. It is a study of detection, and yet there is no crime. Rupert Quarles saves an acquaintance, a young poet, from suicide only to see him die of pneumonia.’ There was, however, no biographical information about the author, for the flap merely said, ‘Written with delicacy, imagination and a delightful understanding of her fellow men, this first novel introduces a new writer of unusual promise’. This might be thought somewhat bland. The bookseller had written in pencil on the front free endpaper, ‘None on line’. There are (or were) in fact one or two, but under 'Gillian M Edwards', not the full name.

The narrator, Quarles, is an urbane, prosperous man-of-the-world in his thirties who gives shelter to Peregrine Latimer, a former college acquaintance, a poet in penury who is starving and ill. A proud, temperamental character, Latimer objects to this help. He does not want charity. To his surprise, Quarles finds later that the poet has bequeathed him a tidy sum ‘in the confident knowledge that he will understand what to do with it.’ But Quarles does not understand this enigmatic message, nor, at first, why Latimer had not used (most of) the money himself when he was so obviously in need.

The legacy sends Quarles off on a quest to find out just what his friend meant. He follows up clues from the poet’s few possessions and, in a succession of encounters, meets those who knew him: his estranged father (a military man who despised his son’s conscientious objection during the war); a half-sister who admired him but did not know him well; a Cambridge don who could discern that he seemed a doomed figure; another college friend, now a successful detective novelist, who wants to help with the quest, but finds it is much messier than fiction; an aristocratic Parisian mistress, and others. The structure is quite like A J A Symons’ The Quest for Corvo (1934), the gradual piecing-together of a biography from many disparate sources, often with unexpected revelations and discoveries.

The different angles and perspectives on the poet create varying, sometimes contrasting portraits, and the book invites the reader to decide which of them hold the most truth. There is a sense of a subtle allegory in play, and the book almost begins to achieve a mythic quality. The haughty tragedy of the poet, with his fierce integrity and fine arrogance, is haunting and compelling. The author even dares to offer one or two examples of his work, which is traditional in style but modern in content, and convincing enough. However, she opts for an over-neat, conventionally romantic ending, rather against the grain of the rest of the book. Some readers will enjoy its gladdening symmetry, others may feel rather wistfully that what promised to be a rare and elusive work of literature, has suddenly reverted to a popular formula.

I have found out virtually nothing about Gillian Mary Edwards, other than incompletes dates of ‘1918—', according to University of Oxford Libraries. She has a namesake, a historian and politician, the wife of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, too young to be this author. A Gillian Edwards, without the middle ‘Mary’, was the author of one novel, The Road to Hell (1967), and three books in the Seventies on the folklore and history of unusual words, and of fairies: all four were from the same publisher, Bles. Whether these are by the author of Sun of My Life is unclear, though there is some word-play, including an acrostic, in the book.

The only other possible clue about the author is that two scenes in the book are set in Suffolk: one at Bury St Edmunds, the other at Dunwich, in the remote, huddled village that is all that is left of the medieval city seized by the sea. This is described evocatively, in all its lonely melancholy, suggesting the author knew it well.  

Quite why there are so few copies of the book around is itself a bit of a mystery. Gryphon Books were a provincial press, not among the major houses, but they published P C Wren, Conan Doyle, Osbert Lancaster, Stanley Weyman, and the Pembrokeshire thriller writer L A Knight. The Edwards book was thus rather out of their usual line, and, as it was also a first novel, perhaps they did not venture a large print run. But this is a confident, unusual, well-crafted novel, a thoughtful mystery, with a theme that will appeal to enthusiasts of recondite literature and bookish fiction, and with a cast of interesting and picturesque characters. 

Addendum: Many thanks to Scott at the wonderful Furrowed Middlebrow blog, dedicated to early and mid 20th century women writers, who speedily found the full dates for Gillian Mary Edwards: born Newmarket, Suffolk, 7 October 1918, died 20 March 1994. He also uncovered a local press report (from the Diss Express of 14 September, 1951) that gives very useful information about her. She was the daughter of the postmaster at Harleston, Norfolk, then moved with her parents to Cambridge. She went to Reading University, 'where she read a great deal of poetry' and, since she was small in stature, coxed boats. 

She was successively a war-time civil servant, the secretary to a psychiatric clinic, worked in a 'famous school' in Scotland (one of the scenes in her novel is set at a remote, rather seedy Scottish school), then as an assistant almoner, then in a bookshop, and finally, in the report, for a Cambridgeshire local authority. The cutting adds that she had won a literary competition and also sold short stories. Those should be worth seeking out.

(Mark Valentine)