Regarding The Real Miss 1938 by Frank Swinnerton, Peters, Fraser and Dunlop have generously given permission to reprint this article. I also thank my friend Jamie Sturgeon, who brought it to my attention. It appeared in ‘John Bull’. on New Year’s Day 1938, the penultimate in a series called ‘My Favourite Heroine’.
Frank Swinnerton was the second of Margery Allingham’s ‘friends and associates’ in the occasional series I launched in the ‘Gazette’ ages ago. He was a man of letters, publisher and editor, novelist and critic, writing into his nineties, prolific and popular. He was particularly well-qualified to write The Georgian Literary Scene, his comprehensive survey of British literature in the first third of the twentieth century. This appeared in 1935. He was a great fan of Margery Allingham and wrote repeatedly to tell her so.
He also befriended her, so far as he was able, entertaining her to lunch in Soho, where she met H. C. Bailey and Freeman Wills Crofts. Here, he gives the young Lady Amanda her due:
It takes all sorts of heroine to make a novelist’s galaxy; and one man’s joy is another man’s horror. For example, a friend of mine said the other day that, on the whole, he preferred the hard-luck heroine, the Tess or Esther Waters, who is wronged early in life and never recovers from a bad start.
I do not care for such heroines. I can pity them, but I do not like them. Another man has a taste for the statuesque or Meredithian heroine, who “swims” across rooms, and is so lady-like that I should be tongue-tied in her company. No statuesque heroine could be a favourite with me.
Nor could I love the dumb heroine, the Lummox of Fannie Hurst’s fine novel, who placidly accepts the blows of fate and hardly ever seems to know what she is doing. Nor the tomboy, or Paddy-the-next-best-Thing type, who is all smiles and tears and accidents and affections. I imagine her in my own home and know that for me she would be a terrible domestic affliction.
Nor the moody, self-analytical woman beloved of women novelists, who is one-half a novelist herself, and the other half nothing but chewed string. I long to cure her moodiness with a dose of senna, some fresh air, and a useful task. No, the heroine for me must have a sense of fun. She must be independent, spirited, brave (and as quiet about her courage as a hero), and she must be a lady. And by lady I do not mean a fine lady, or a girl of title, or a girl with a super-fine accent whom one suspects of mincing her words and saying “rahlah” for “really” or “dernt” for “don’t.”
None of these things; but a young woman free from spitefulness, affectedness, and self-righteousness, who is neither a prude nor a hussy, who keeps her fingernails short and clean, and, although unaware of her own charm, has a proper self-respect.
That is to say, I like in a heroine the characteristics I like in a real person. Elizabeth, in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, is my favourite old-fashioned heroine. She laughs at follies and nonsense, makes up her mind quickly (and wrongly), and falls in love without suffering from the vapours. She has no superior as a heroine.
But among really modern girls the heroine I prefer to all others is Amanda Fitton, in Margery Allingham’s Sweet Danger. If you do not know that book, or that author’s work, you will here raise your eyebrows. You will think to yourself: “What about Joan, Margaret, Isobel, Elspeth, Dora-?” But, if you are familiar with Amanda or with Miss Allingham’s work, you will understand almost everything about my taste in heroines.
Must be Pretty
You are right. In the books of other men I like them romantic, and I like them young-not middle-aged. They must be healthy, prompt-witted, and ready, not for sentiment, but for the next event, even though it involves dangerous adventure.
And they must be pretty. “Amanda Fitton,” says Miss Allingham, “eighteen next month, was at a stage of physical perfection seldom attained at any age. She was not very tall, slender almost to skinniness, with big honey-brown eyes, and an extraordinary mop of hair so red that it was remarkable in itself.”
Never mind the red hair. “Her smile turned her mouth into a triangle, and revealed very small, white, even teeth.” And “her costume consisted of a white print dress with little green flowers on it, a species of curtaining sold at many village shops. It was cut severely, and was rather long in the skirt.”
That was Amanda in her best. But for ordinary wear she had what she called her working clothes, in which she looked ten years younger than her age. In that costume “her slender figure was covered by an old brown jersey and skirt which had shrunk with much washing until they clung to her like a skin.” And she really worked.
She lived, with brother, sister, and aunt, in an ancient Suffolk mill-house. After darkening the room, so as to minimise its shabbiness, Amanda interviewed – only partly realising that they were heroes, and that one of them was the celebrated Albert Campion, a private detective second only in whimsy to Lord Peter himself – two young men who had come in search of lodgings.
She did not simper or ogle the young men. She was not “sweet.” No, she spoke up as if she knew all the needs of heroes. “The food is good,” she said. “Home-cooked and – er – liberal. If you are delicate, the water is very good here. You can have as much milk and butter and eggs as you can eat….All the rooms want doing up a bit, but the beds really are good. And the food really could be absolutely marvellous if you did pay three guineas a week.
“Wait! You’ll have to find out sooner or later…. Of course, this is very awkward, but then you can always have one of those flat round ones, and I don’t mind fetching water. We could have the copper alight all day. And if you wanted one when you came in – in the evening or anything – we could just get it out of the copper in a pail….”
But letting is only a sideline of Amanda’s. Besides being resolute in danger, she is nimble-witted, capable, and an electrician of genius. She runs the mill, charges batteries for the neighbourhood, adorns the house with inventive gadgets, and, when it is needed, contrives a superb wireless relay which solves a great mystery and achieves the book’s thrilling climax.
You cannot wonder that after she has praised Mr. Campion’s plan of campaign with the words: “It’s good! Very hot!” and heard his complacent endorsement of her praise, she should add: “I’m conceited, too. But I wish you luck.”
Please note that it is to Amanda alone that Mr. Campion confides his secrets. It is to her aid that he owes the success of his fight with evildoers. And it is due to her heroic swiftness that he escapes at last with his life. Amanda herself is shot, and faints: but she quickly rallies and, as sentiment rears up, falls fast asleep. This, I contend, is the way a heroine should behave.
Waste of Time
I have given you the author’s description of her outward appearance; but I have not been able to show, as the book shows, how fresh and original Amanda’s mind is.
She is aware of its quality. As she lies wounded, well knowing that with the rescue of her brother’s heritage there will be no more milling and battery-charging for her in the future, she offers herself to Mr. Campion as a business partner. “I don’t want to go to a finishing school, you know,” she says. “Get that well into your head. No higher education for me.”
It would be a waste. Amanda deserves a life fit for the exercise of her exceptional talent. As Mr. Campion’s partner she would be invaluable, and would drive every foolish look from his face. Indeed, as Sweet Danger was published in 1933, and as Mr. Campion is now nearly thirty-eight years of age I consider the partnership overdue.
Amanda cannot possibly be still living in Suffolk. She must long since have been carried into the mainstream of life. Where is she? What is she doing? If Miss Allingham ever writes a “straight” novel, in which there is no mystery, but a conflict of wills and character, she should remember Amanda.
For Amanda is, at present, only a girl in a delightful tale of adventure, in which old rhymes and gnomic scratchings hide the titles of an heir to his property. But if she were drawn at full length with her fun, her outspokenness, and all the truthful candour in which she outshines heroines more ambitious, she might be a favourite for the whole of the world. It is a fair prospect; but no more than her due.At the head of Frank Swinnerton’s tribute to Amanda is a photo of the ‘young Paramount star’ Eleanore Whitney. She is his avatar of Amanda; she ‘typifies this most modern of Miss Moderns’. I’m sure I’m not the only member of the Society who had not previously heard of her. It seems that she and Amanda were much of an age, Amanda 17 when she saved the day in Pontisbright, Eleanore 18 when she entered films
Source: IMDb
In the four years between 1935 and l938, Eleanore was making films at the rate of knots, and she would surely have been known to the readers of ‘John Bull’. She had a most unusual Hollywood career. She began to train as a dancer at the age of ten in 1927 and established herself professionally as a tap-dancer in vaudeville. This must have been in her teens, because she was still only 18 when she made her first film in 1935, a short called ‘Oh, Evaline!’
Between 1935 and 1938, she appeared in a dozen unpretentious films, designed for a wide audience. She was Cheers in Rose Bowl, Bubbles in Millions in the Air, Skippy in Three Cheers for Love – we get the picture. In her last film, ‘Campus Confessions’ in 1938, she co-starred with Betty Grable, who cannot then have known she was about to become a great star. Eleanore Whitney never became a great star because her career ended with that film. She married and withdrew into private life, living on into her sixties and dying in 1983. Frank Swinnerton died in his nineties the year before her.
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