on the forgotten Olive Moore

And one of the strangest books I have ever read

Hi friend,

Today, I’m writing to you about one of the most confounding reading experiences I have ever had: closely reading an experimental and deeply problematic modernist novel, called Spleen.

As a content warning, this essay grapples with the writings of a woman who was downright misogynistic and deeply problematic throughout her writing career and who, despite that, was embraced by the Bloomsbury group for her modernist aesthetic and compelling adoption of stream-of-consciousness writing.

Part of my hope in writing this essay is to share my own thoughts on why it can be instructive to read works that we vehemently disagree with, if only to better understand perspectives so opposed to our own.

A pile of my dissertation research

---

When I began my PhD program in the fall of 2015, I had never heard of Constance Vaughan, the acclaimed yet forgotten modernist English author who published under the name Olive Moore.

It has long been estimated that she was born in 1904 and died around 1970. According to literary critics and historians, Olive Moore suddenly disappeared from the London literary scene in the mid-1930s. New academic research by Sophie Cavey suggests, however, that her professional writing career continued for decades beyond this time. Cavey’s meticulous archival work provides us with more definitive dates and a more detailed picture of Moore’s life, including more accurate dates for her birth and death: 1901-1979.

Moore was the author of three novels, including her best-known and most-studied work, Spleen (1930), and two others: Celestial Seraglio (1929), and Fugue (1932). I have read all three, but only remember Spleen, perhaps because it is the only one I read more than once and was the one that I felt nearest to understanding. (To be honest, it took me three full re-reads even start to understand the plot. That’s modernist writing for you.) In addition to her novels, Moore worked as a journalist for much of her life, contributing regular articles at the London Daily Sketch. In 1934, her final literary work, a collection of truly bizarre short stories and truncated aphorisms called The Apple is Bitten Again, was published.

In literary criticism these days, there’s a slow-growing interest in Olive Moore’s enigmatic life and experimentalist modern works. But reading her novels is not always a rewarding experience.

Moore’s writings are complicated and, at times shockingly misogynistic. “Women are not born with creative souls. They are born with values and emotion,” Moore states bluntly in her essay, “Woman as Uncreative Artist,” in which she argues that only men are capable of creating truly new and interesting arts. Women, she argues, are bogged down with our uteruses and ovaries; women are biologically determined to reproduce and create copies (as in, literal babies) rather than to produce ideas or work.

It is, unfortunately, often unclear whether Moore herself holds the bluntly ableist and antifeminist views she writes about or if she is satirizing those who do hold those views. I’ve read many well-evidenced articles arguing either side of the coin. In my own encounters with Moore’s work, I came away feeling that she means every single word she says — even as she, herself, creates modernist works of literary art that challenge the very views she espouses.

Despite her complicated views, Moore’s novels—particularly Spleen—were met with critical acclaim at the time they were published, and Moore was esteemed within the renowned Bloomsbury group for her fragmented and experimental approach to storytelling. It’s hard not to understand why: Moore’s distinct writing style is dense and bitingly witty. Her style is both reminiscent of and meaningfully builds upon that of Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes. Her stream-of-consciousness prose flows with strange imagery and painful remembrances; her work is truly experimental, using an overwhelmingly effective collage technique to embed us within the mind and experiences of her characters, and rendering Impressionistic memories in prose that manages to be both sparse and lush simultaneously.

In Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer, she famously wonders, “what do we do with the art of monstrous men?” I would not consider myself a fan of Olive Moore’s work, nor would I deem her a “monster.” But the question — what do we do with the art, or the writing, or the novels, of people (including women) with unforgiving and ableist viewpoints in stories that are gorgeously rendered explorations of those very views? — echoes in my mind as I write this.

On her very strange novel, Spleen

Spleen, which appeared under the title Repentance at Leisure. during its first print run in the United States, tells the story of a woman named Ruth who exiles herself on an island following the birth of her son, who is both physically and psychologically disabled in ways that require nearly constant supervision.

The title page from my first edition of the novel

While pregnant, Ruth has fantastical ideas about what she’s gestating:

“Woman was a witch filled with a great and terrible power over mankind….Woman’s thunderbolt. Miniature gods with life and death in their hands for the dealing….And they did not know it. They denied their terrible power because they ignored it. But she was going to use her power. If I am to create, she told the eager creature in her mirror, I will create. Only of course something new. Something different. Something beyond and above it all. Something worth having.”

Even as Ruth recognizes the “great and terrible power” of reproduction, she places herself in a unique and special category in opposition to other women. Ruth, to put it in today’s parlance, is a total pick-me girl.

She assumes and claims that all the other women ignore and deny their potential for creative power, suggesting that she alone is intelligent and special enough to take control over her reproductive power by controlling its end result toward “something beyond and above it all.” A human child is simply not enough; Ruth, like other modernists at the time, is hellbent on “making it new.”

In this way, the novel grapples with a central modernist aesthetic endeavor: to become a conduit for pure artistic energy. Artists, like writers, were exploring forms—like the style of stream of consciousness—that would not impede a seemingly “pure” flow of ideas, thoughts, and imagery onto the page or canvas. In their attempts to “make it new,” many modernists were attempting to break with old patterns and traditions by embracing new formal approaches to writing, including Woolf’s stream of consciousness.

But when her son Richard is born with physical and intellectual disabilities, Ruth considers both her artistic future and Richard’s life failures. And so she exiles herself and her son on an island where she leaves him to the care of nurses as she convalesces in what seems, at times, to be a deeply accurate and even compassionate portrayal of postpartum depression and, at other times, a cruel stereotype of female mental fragility.

(See why Moore’s work is not always fun to read?)

About halfway through the novel, Ruth asks Uller, a German abstract painter, to paint her a romantic scene of men drinking wine and playing cards under dramatic shadows, “a sight of which she never tired.” But rather than take up her request, he accuses her of “upholding the barbarous and insanitary customs of her ancestors,” of perpetuating a heedless repetition of the past.

He accuses her, in other words, of being an Uncreative Artist—that category defined by Moore as a woman doomed to imitate men and never to create anything new, herself.

Uller, in stark contrast to Ruth, “had cursed the whole damned School,” and pursues an eclectic, modernist style that confuses and bothers Ruth, but delights Richard, her son, whose attention is rapt near Uller’s canvas.

It’s tricky work: at times, in the novel, Moore provokes the idea that Richard is more intelligent and in-tune with the modernist aesthetic and ideals than his mother—a fascinating thread that is, unfortunately, woven with another: that Ruth is a pathetic, unsuccessful creative who will never achieve anything meaningful (not just in art, but also in motherhood). It is unclear, for me, if Moore intends for me to “side” with Uller or to side-eye him as much as Ruth.

At the end of the novel, Ruth leaves Richard behind—seeking freedom by abandoning him on the island. But Ruth’s original exile and lasting shame—the way she relegates Richard to a life of isolation—continue to haunt her.

Spleen binds both Richard and Ruth to yet another rule of Moore’s unforgiving modernist universe: both are victims of her failed artistry, in which she cannot throw off the past, even as she longs for a more modern future. Instead, she revels in well-worn Romantic arts, the dusky views off her terrace, and her desire for old scenes. All this, even as she claims to loathe boring human cycles of repetition and reproduction.

Spleen, then, to use scholar Maren Linett’s phrasing, stages “women’s aspirations to transcend biology and step into the shoes of the artist” across Ruth’s many conflicting desires. But Moore, ever the biological essentialist, ultimately dooms Ruth’s desires to fall back into painful, unforgiving repetition. Even Ruth’s own thoughts contain the circular, repetitive patterns that cannot break in favor of newness or novelty. She both longs for and doubts the validity of artistic novelty; in her cycles of shame and stubbornness, she perpetuates only more repetition and not the newness she longed to find in herself or in Richard. 

• Can Ruth escape the gender binary that Moore upholds in her essays?

• Does Moore even design the novel, or her characters, to allow them such an escape?

• Can people change? Does Moore think so?

Moore leverages the most limiting aspects of modernist thinking to entrap Ruth and Richard inside a world where they will play out the rules of an unforgiving and Uncreative universe, as Moore herself interpreted and wrote those rules—with virtually no movement or space for questioning those laws. While Moore may indeed stage the question of a woman’s ability to create modern art or to transcend what Moore believes is sincere biological limitation by writing Spleen in the first place, she does so in a way that feels like a cruel tease. After all, the story feels determined and defined rather than open to novelty or possibility.

This tease, for me, makes the novel purely shocking — a slap in the face of so many modernist works that champion newness and novelty.

It also makes it critical reading for anyone invested in modernist studies.

We’ve done our best to romanticize that literary moment—as we so often do with beloved time periods: salon culture and expatriates, valiant war narratives, Jazz clubs, and flappers. We quote Zelda’s love letters to Scott, pretending she wasn’t alone and institutionalized when she wrote most of them; we revere the art of men who wrote manifestos that would’ve been sheer hell to live by.

So, I suppose, we’d do well to remember that this same romantic, vibrant, energetic time period was rampant with fascistic impulses, the weaponizing of biological arguments, and championing of essentialist arguments about what people are capable of based on their gender, their reproductive organs, their physical abilities.

We’d do well to remember, in other words, that that time was not so unlike our time. That all moments in history are filled with oppositions and contradictions.

While it was certainly one of the most uncomfortable and confounding reading experiences I’ve ever had, reading and re-reading Spleen during my PhD was also deeply instructive, teaching me so much about the views underlying one of my very favorite artistic movements in history — and perhaps also teaching me how to love it, and teach it, more honestly.

---

Thank you for reading

Real talk: this was a tricky essay to write! It’s never exactly “fun” to write about authors who championed ideas like Moore’s. And yet, as I write in the conclusion, I believe my experience of reading and re-reading and then writing about Moore was deeply educational, and helped me form a more holistic, and more accurate, understanding of the time period I love to study so much.

This essay also gave me a chance to get back into my dissertation research and revisit some of the writing I did in my chapter on Moore’s (deeply flawed) invocation of electrical language and science to back her deterministic arguments about biology and gender. If you’d like to read more from my dissertation, I’m always happy to share chapters from it. Just let me know!

‘Til next time.

If you enjoyed the more academic-bend to this essay, you may also enjoy this essay, from my archive:

---

Further reading on Moore:

Sophie Cavey (2021) Olive Moore: a new biography, Feminist Modernist Studies, DOI: 10.1080/24692921.2021.1964056

Linett, Maren Tova. “Deformity and Modernist Form.” Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature. University of Michigan Press, 2017.

Garrity, Jane. "Olive Moore’s Headless Woman." Modern Fiction Studies vol. 59, no. 2, 2013, pp 288-316.