Book Review: The Friendly Young Ladies

[osprey_archer]

You guys. You guys. You guys. I finished Mary Renault’s The Friendly Young Ladies, and you guys, what IS this book?

So the plot is as follows: when teenaged Elsie falls ill, the attending doctor is Peter, who I complained about last week as the doctor thinks it’s therapeutic to make his patients fall in love with him. Young Elsie falls hard and, longing to impress him (and also to get away from her perennially bickering parents), runs away from home to live with her sister Leo, who ran away from home long ago.

Leo, it turns out, lives on a houseboat with her friend Helen. (Leo and Helen are lovers but Elsie never quite figures this out.) Elsie, enchanted by this bohemian life, writes to Peter in hopes of impressing him. Peter comes to visit and is even more impressed than Elsie hoped! But mostly because he instantly figures out that Leo and Helen are lovers and goes “Ooooh, an interesting psychological case. Obviously if I can convince them to make out with me, they will be Cured of their Complexes!”

Impressively, Peter did not end up being the most distressing aspect of this book.



I am happy to report that my prognostications were inaccurate and neither Leo nor Helen end up with Peter. (Neither does Elsie. Elsie does figure out he never really loved her and concludes, crushed, that she is unlovable and Will Never Be Loved. It’s hard to be seventeen.)

I am much less happy to report that Leo gets together with her friend Joe. Until this actually happened I thought he was a preferable alternative to Peter; Leo and Joe are both writers (Leo writes potboiler westerns, Joe literary novels, but they’re both respectful of each others work) and also enjoy canoeing, mountain-climbing, etc., and generally have a lot in common…

But then they get together and Joe suddenly develops a gigantic streak of possessiveness - he writes her a letter where he’s like “If we get together, I will destroy your independence! That would be terrible! We should still get together though.” Like… he feels bad but not bad enough not to do it? What. What is this, Joe.

However, apparently this note is catnip for Leo, because at the end of the book she’s packing up her possessions to leave the houseboat and go join Joe. The last we see of her, she’s sobbing over her clothes.

As the book ends before she actually leaves the houseboat, I have decided that within the next half hour or so, after a good cry, Leo realizes that she doesn’t want to throw away her happy life with Helen for Joe. He was a good friend, but now that they’ve slept together he’s gone off, and it’s sad to lose him but it would be SADDER to lose herself, so… she stays in the houseboat with Helen and they are very happy together.

Within a few weeks or at most months, Joe will undoubtedly see that this decision was for the best. Possibly eventually he will get over himself and they can be friends again? His loss if he can’t.

While I’m fixing the ending, I’ve also decided that Elsie will eventually get over her disappointment with Peter, possibly by joining the war effort in some way? The book is set in 1937; the poor girl would have to wait a few years if I make her wait for the war. She gets over him through the natural healing resilience of youth, and joins the war effort to get away from her bickering parents for good. In her war job, her confidence blossoms and she meets a nice young man and after the war they are very happy together.

And Peter… what is a good fate for Peter? Peter falls madly in love with a girl who doesn’t like him back. Possibly a girl who pretends to like him back out of pity for his god complex? Anyway, when he realizes that she does not and never will return his feelings, he collapses in despair. He comes out of it a chastened and better man who never tries to make his patients fall in love with him again.

Alternately, he gets hit by a truck. That works too!

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

RIGHT??? It's just..... so weird.

My vote is for the truck.

[osprey_archer]

As nice as it would be to see Peter hoist on his own petard, suffering the way that he has made other people suffer, the truck would be faster.

And also, honestly, there is no way to know that having his heart broken would in any way dent his self-regard. It's just so vast and impenetrable, he might just end up deciding that his lady love decided she wasn't good enough for him, or something.

[aurumcalendula]

As the book ends before she actually leaves the houseboat, I have decided that within the next half hour or so, after a good cry, Leo realizes that she doesn’t want to throw away her happy life with Helen for Joe.

Same here!

[osprey_archer]

It makes so much more sense! She felt a brief mad temptation that swiftly passed away, and settled again into the happy routine of her houseboat life.

[lokifan]

100%, that sounds extremely plausible and for the best.

[ancientreader]

I like your rewrite very much. Also, it made me laugh on a day that I began in a foul temper because the latest phone update is almost as bad as Renault's original ending.

[osprey_archer]

Even Renault didn't like Renault's original ending! The edition I have has an afterword that she wrote forty years later, and she's like, Leo and Joe would be a terrible match, the book should never have ended with them getting together. So that's something?

She also reminiscences about going into fits of laughter at the over the top misery in Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, recommends Compton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women as a more accurate and less bathetic rendering of lesbian life from the same time period, and complains about the modern gay liberation movement (of the 1970s and 80s). The afterword's got a lot going on.

[ancientreader]

Sometimes I think I see a strange commonality between Mary Renault and Patricia Highsmith: both lesbian, both prickly and contrarian (though -- not that I know much about her -- Highsmith seems to have been a genuinely nasty person & a serious anti-Semite, whereas Renault and her lover were both opposed to apartheid), both sort of mesmerizing as novelists (Highsmith being much the more unsettling of the two and also much the less explicitly queer). Oh, and both expats.

But then, maybe the commonality is only in my head, because I first read them at about the same time in my life.

[osprey_archer]

I too have a sense that there's a commonality between Renault and Highsmith (although I've never read Highsmith), possibly just because they're two queer women writers who wrote book with queer themes whose careers overlapped in time? It's not like that's a big club in the middle of the twentieth century.

[isis]

I have started this book many times and never got very far.

[osprey_archer]

Probably good for your blood pressure tbh.

[skygiants]

May I also add as a suggestion to this vastly improved ending that Elsie, maybe, possibly, learns and understands something true about her sister as opposed to being sent back on her way with zero personal growth or connection? She can make it! I believe it!

[osprey_archer]

I think we are meant to believe that Elsie would fall down dead of shock if she understood Leo & Helen's relationship, but maybe... she would not? I mean, Renault carefully establishes that Elsie had a crush on a female teacher at one point, so clearly the idea is not entirely foreign to her. Maybe this could actually lead the way to true sisterly bonding?

[kore]

Peter comes to visit and is even more impressed than Elsie hoped! But mostly because he instantly figures out that Leo and Helen are lovers and goes “Ooooh, an interesting psychological case. Obviously if I can convince them to make out with me, they will be Cured of their Complexes!”

Y HLO THAR D H LAWRENCE Ugh that was bad enough in The Fox. I've read a bunch of literary novels about doctors "curing" female patients by falling in love with them, too, it's in Tender is the Night for one. Double ugh.

[osprey_archer]

I bet Tender is the Night was a foundational text in Peter's life and he rereads it whenever he wants to remind himself how good and right it is to cure patients by falling in love with them.

Does the doctor in Tender is the Night at least actually fall in love with his patient, or is he pretending to fall in love too?

[kore]

Oh no, he does, but it's also referred to all through the book as the "cure" and the family approves of it because well the daughter who went psycho will always have her own doctor on hand!....as it were.

[asakiyume]

However, apparently this note is catnip for Leo Oh Leo. Leo, Leo, Leo.

I approve and endorse your post-story improvements.

[osprey_archer]

Perhaps, like a cat with catnip, Leo will be only temporarily deranged by the note? Soon she will return to her senses, have a good nap, and get on with her life on the houseboat.

[asakiyume]

WE CAN BUT HOPE

[sovay]

I am much less happy to report that Leo gets together with her friend Joe.

I have never re-read this novel because of the get-together with Joe and how immediately it goes south for reasons of stupid heteronormativity YES MARY RENAULT I AGREE WITH YOU THAT HETERONORMATIVITY IS STUPID SO JUST HAVE YOUR QUEER CHARACTERS GET ON WITH THEIR LIVES BESIDES I ALWAYS LIKE HETEROSEXUAL FRIENDSHIPS COULDN'T WE JUST HAVE STUCK WITH THIS ONE.

[osprey_archer]

It's terrifying how the get-together unleashes this new, unexpected, distressingly possessive side of Joe, too. If he had remained more or less the same it could have been okay but instead he's like GETTING IN TOUCH WITH MY INNER 1930s CAVEMAN and... oh my God. Run, Leo!

[landofnowhere]

...maybe Elsie can go hang out with Cassandra Mortmain from I Capture the Castle?

[osprey_archer]

I feel that Elsie would find Cassandra Mortmain a little overwhelming. She's so clever and witty and well-spoken! Elsie would have trouble keeping up her end of the conversation.

[littlerhymes]

Your version sounds superior in every way.

Peter, you're a terrible doctor and I dislike you very much.

[osprey_archer]

Peter is the Worst and I am baffled and appalled that the book ended without him at least falling in the river. There is at least the scene where Leo flirts shamelessly with his girlfriend, so that's something, but... God, how I wanted his poor trampled girlfriend to dump his sorry ass.

[asakiyume]

Or debarred. Wait, that's law. Well, de-medical-licensed

[osprey_archer]

It might be hard to prove malpractice in order to de-medical-license him, though. Maybe one of his jilted patients should just stab him.

[asakiyume]

That would be *much* more exciting than revoking a medical license. Yes--I would settle for a stabbing.

[osprey_archer]

Alternately: Leo could drown him! I bet she could make it looks like an accident, too, so no one would go to jail for it.

[sovay]

There is at least the scene where Leo flirts shamelessly with his girlfriend, so that's something, but...

Returning to suggest Josephine Tey's To Love and Be Wise (1950), if you have not read it, for relevant reasons.

[staranise]

I am fascinated by what possible creative, commercial, or editorial forces could have brought this novel into being.

[osprey_archer]

I wondered if the editors pushed Renault to come up with a straight ending to the story, but my edition has an afterward that Renault wrote forty years later and she doesn't mention it, so... who knows, really. WHO KNOWS.