Book Review by George Simmers: A while ago I reviewed Naomi Royde-Smith’s Skin-Deep a 1927 novel that moves disturbingly from satire to body-horror. I was intrigued, so wanted to learn more about the author.
Naomi Royde-Smith
This post will eventually be a review of her very funny and clever 1925 novel,, The Tortoiseshell Cat, but before that I’ll explain some things I’ve discovered about her previous career, and especially about the other book that I spoke about at our meeting this month, the book of ‘problems’ from the Westminster Gazette, compiled by Naomi Royde-Smith in 1907.
The Westminster Gazette was a London evening paper – Liberal in politics; founded in 1893, it was printed on distinctive green paper – for easier reading, apparently. Naomi Royde-Smith (born in Halifax in 1875, was recruited as a secretarial assistant.by the pioneering woman journalist, Hulda Friedrichs, who was in charge of the Saturday Westminster, a special twopenny weekend edition with an emphasis on things literary.
Hulda Friedrichs
Naomi Royde-Smith began the Saturday Westminster’s Problems Page, which was a collection of literary competitions. The tasks set could be formidable; here is an example of the tasks set one week in 1912:
Demans for readers’ translations into Latin and Greek are unthinkable in a modern newspaper, however literate the readership, but a century ago they seem to have been popular. Presumably the response came from those were those (men mostly?) who had spent much of their schooldays in composition in the ancient languages, and had few other outlets for their talent. In other weeks, competitors were asked to translate French or German poems into English verse. Other competitions were more like the exercises in fun and wit later featured in the Weekend Review, and the New Statesman. This kind of competition still happily survives in the Spectator.
The Westminster problems became a fashion in literary London. So much so that two books of selected competition entries were published. The Westminster Problems Book: Prose and Verse of 1908 (which can be found in full in the Internet Archive) and The Second Problems Book; Prizes and Proximes From the Westminster Gazette, 1908-1909
They attracted ambitious young writers. Rupert Brooke and Rose Macaulay both made their first appearances in print there, both have several entries in the first of the problems books. Brooke, for example, provides a rewrite of ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’ in the style of Ben Jonson:
Shepherdess of one fair sheep,
Who, beside thee still abiding,
Heeds not ways both long and steep,
Scholar’s laughter, teacher’s chiding ;
Say, what magic spell doth keep
By thy side thy one fair sheep?Leave unbarred stall and fold,
Love requireth no constraining.
Bring nor crook nor sheep-dog bold,
Love, all servile aids disdaining.
At thy side will ever keep.
Shepherdess, thy one fair sheep.
E.R. Macaulay, as Rose Macaulay then styled herself, offered more conventional poems.here is her alliterative poem on the theme of ‘October’:
Strong the prince’s hands are, yet wondrous in tenderness ;
Strong to drag their souls from the trees,
To boom among the pines and make their waters musical,
As the humming moan of windy seas ;
Strong to stir to harshness the sibilant hoarse whispering
Wherewith the raucous oaks complain,
To set the light-foot aspens dancing and chattering,
And pattering, like glancing rain.
Tender his hands are : they take from his crucible
The year’s tears and hopes turned to gold ;
Gently he drops them, the grave old memories,
And Earth shall them for always hold.
Other competitions famous names that were famous or would become so.. Walter de la Mare ( a close friend of Naomi Royde-Smith) and G.K. Chesterton make an appearance in the second Problems Book. A.A. Milne provides a parody of Kipling; Henry Head the pioneering neurologist, offers a ghost story written as a pastiche of Daniel Defoe.
Sometimes, as often in the later New Statesman and Spectator competitions, the demand was simply for jokes, like misleading translations of French phrases: (‘Pas de deux’ – ;father of twins; ‘Hors d’oeuvre – out of work). Lord Curzon, on the other hand, provides serious (and rather good) translations of French poetry. Identities of many competitors are shrouded by pseudonyms, but the most surprising people joined in the game. F.R. Leavis, according to his biographer Ian Mckillop, apparently, once submitted a translation from Heine.
I noted another competitor, Guy Kendall,who has several pieces printed in the collections:. He gained some note as a poet during the Great War, was a regular competitor in the Weekend Review and the New Statesman, and in the nineteen-fifties himself became a judge of not-dissimilar competitions in the Spectator. The is a tradition of these things.
On the strength of her Problems success, Naomi Royde-Smith became literary editor of the Westminster Gazette, the first woman literary editor on Britain. She therefore held a position of considerable power in the literary world, and was a stern arbiter of both prose and verse.
She does not, however, seem to have written much poetry herself. I can only find one poem attributed to her, and it is only two lines long:
I know two things about a horse,
And one of them is rather coarse.
In the twenties Naomi shared a flat with Rose Macaulay for some time, and they were famous for their literary parties. Virginia Woolf came to at least one, and described Naomi Royde-Smith:
… dressed à la 1860; swinging earrings, skirt in balloons … sat in complete command. Here she had her world round her. It was a queer mixture of the intelligent & the respectable.
Storm Jameson, then a newcomer to literary London, just arrived from Whitby, immediately took to Rose Macaulay, but
Naomi I found more formidable with her air of a younger more affable Queen Victoria.
Elizabeth Bowen, another newcomer to the literary scene, whose first story was published in the Saturday Westminster, was impressed by the parties:
Inconceivably I found myself in the same tom as Edith Sitwell, Walter de la Mare, Aldous Huxley.
At the parties she ruled, Naomi Royde-Smith was gossipy, and it was gossip that caused the break between her and Rose Macaulay. The precise details are unclear, but Naomi seems to have said something about Rose’s relationship with (married) Gerald O’Donovan. Rose Macaulay responded by making Naomi recognisable in the character of the gossipy novelist Evelyn Gresham in Crewe Train.
But a talent for gossip can be a useful quality for a novelist, Naomi Royde-Smith was fifty years old by the time she came to write The Tortoiseshell Cat, her first novel.
In 1924, having left the Westminster Gazette, she had been appointed editor of Queen magazine, a paper aimed at London’s female social elite.
On appointment she had banned knitting patterns, reduced the number of photographs of brides and debutantes, increased the number and quality of the book pages, and introduced fiction by modernist writers like Dorothy Richardson. She was sacked after a few months in the job. She became a novelist.
The Tortoiseshell Cat is rather an odd novel. In the first chapter, ‘Vowel Sounds’, we meet Gillian Armstrong, the heroine, a teacher at a girl’s school. She teaches poetry, and the head, Miss Lysaght is the first in the novel’s gallery of grotesque dominant women (the men by contrast are mostly ineffective and pliable) objects to some of the poems she has been teaching. Naomi Royde-Smith presents Miss Lysacht’s speech brilliantly, hopping from topic to topic, and imperiously expecting the listener to understand what she is saying.She is horrified by some of the poems Gillian has chosen recitation (for their vowel-sounds rather than their meaning.) Parents have complained. Miss Lysacht is only too aware of their sexual connotations, of which Gillian is innocent. Gillian is sacked, which upsets the Jane Bird, a brilliant pupil who has a crush on her.
In the second chapter, Gillian has moved to London and is living in a Women’s Club in Chelsea, together with her sister Lilac and a talented parrot called William. (There is a whole menagerie of strange animals in this novel – almost as strange as the humans.) She needs to get a job, and takes a secretarial position with Lady Bottomley, the millionaire widow of a bicycle manufacturer. This is another monster, though mostly a well-intentioned one. She is a woman of iron will and indomitable routine. She insists that Gillian is called Macfarlane, because all her secretaries are called Macfarlane. Lady Bottomley is unaware that her son is engaged to Lilac, but comes to accept this. The son, like several males in the novel, is something of a non-character. Lilac, a practical girl does not seem to love him particularly, but he is rich and has social position.
Jane reappears, and though brilliant, has decided not to go to university. Instead, she has become and artist. Through her Gillian meets tall blond, handsome Larry, also an artist. In a more conventional novel, Gillian would be heading towards marriage with Larry. She also meets his diminutive faun-like companion, Heinrich, a violinist with a flock of sparrows. But one day, Gillian finds a tortoiseshell cat -a repulsive creature, and feeds it.
Gillian had never seen a less attractive cat. It was not so very young, not so disarmingly small {…} It was almost not a kitten any longer, and Tortoiseshell, a brand she didn’t admire, and Manx, a thing she had never been able to bear […] it smelled of indescribable things as well as stale fish. And it mewed – oh how it mewed!
Soon she discovers that someone else is also feeding the cat. Meeting this woman is a shock:
Gillian […] knew, with a thrill of recognition so strange, so new to her experience that the shock of it took away all sense of any other consideration, thatshe beheld in the flesh the very image of perfection wrought by her own imaginings in the secret places of her dreaming mind.
This is Victoria, whose friends call her Victor, and who seems to have a large group of female friends, all with masculine names. Soon the novel becomes intense. Victoria, usually referred to as VV, stirs up all sorts of feelings in Gillian, especially when she kisses her. Yet she repels almost as much as she attracts.
Naomi Royde-Smith leaves a lot ambiguous – the reading public of 1925 would only take so much of explicit Sapphism. Even so, one critic, Sylvia Lynd, wrote:
Miss Royde-Smith has courageously tackled here a problem which this reviewer’s personal prejudices prefer to see ignored.
The titular cat plays a marginal role in the novel, but is presented in much the same way as VV – as at once attractive and repulsive.
The cat is not allowed in the club, and so Gillian and VV take it to and Heinrich, where at first it lives amicably with the sparrows. VV exerts her charm on Heinrich, and he falls deeply for her. Hers is a powerful but irresponsible sexuality, and quite amoral. Gillian, who is something of an innocent, finds herself in deep emotional waters.,
Nothing in Gillian’s life has prepared her for a woman like VV. Her love of poetry had been for its vowel-sounds, and she had quoted Swinburne and others without really realising what they were saying. She had been brought up by her father, an academic, who had encouraged her to read everything, but had been reticent in telling her what it meant.
When she had asked him what ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ meant, he had given her Madame Bovary tto read. and had adored her for the comment with which she returned the book to him: ‘I suppose that the French of those days were even more dfferent from us than they are now.’
An innocent, Gillian is unprepared for the power and strangeness of passion; the book traces her education in the difficulties of the world, and and there will be tragedies before the end.
I have been reading a new edition of the novel (Squirrel Street Publishing, 2026). the editorial matter presents it as an early example of Lesbian fiction and suggests that it was a brave exploration of the subject like Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.
Radclyffe Hall
Naomi Royde-Smith was certainly attracted to women, but the anonymous essays appended at the end of this volume don’t convince me that this book is particularly pioneering in its use of Lesbianism. VV is presented as exciting but irresponsible – ultimately a force for evil; Gillian is presented as naïve. Jane, the most sensible character in the novel, is proud of growing out of her schoolgirl crush phase; it is she who gets to marry handsome Larry.The book presents the temptation to Lesbianism as dangerous and destructive. But it is of course possible that her sophisticated readers received a subtler message from the book and thrilled to its naughty presentation of the forbidden, whatever lip-service was paid to conventional morality. Perhaps they were just thrilled that the subject was even mentioned.The afterwords make the good point that thing can be implied obliquely in comedy that would get you banned if you said them straight out – as would happen to The Well of Loneliness.
So how definitely Lesbian was Naomi Royde-Smith? in 1936 she married the actor Ernest Milton.
Ernest Milton as the epicene poet Rupert Cadell in ‘Rope’.
/But his most celebrated performance was as Rupert Cadell, the make-up-wearing (and implicitly homosexual) war poet in Patrick Hamilton’s pay, Rope. So what kind of marriage was it? Well, it’s none of our business.
