A Green Equinox: Elizabeth Mavor
A Rediscovered Lesbian Classic that Didn't Need To Be
First, if you want to read Elizabeth Mavor’s A Green Equinox (1973), do not read the blurb. It gives away the entire plot of the book. As do most reviews (not mine here though!).
This book is not bad or anything, it’s just…meh. It’s a reflection on a certain British class, witty, sharp, satirical observations that gently poke fun rather than eviscerate. The heroine, named Hero Kinoull, is also sharp and witty and very much in line for unwed, smart heroines of the midcentury, a bit like Lynn in In Thrall grown up, the sort of spunky heroine who’d make great conversation at dinner if she felt you were intelligent enough for her to want to engage with you. “Friends have, of course, tried to persuade me that if such a passion is not a sickness then it’s a sin, like hubris or tristitia or worse of all accidie, that devilish torpor, that restless sadness, which of all them perhaps most nearly resembles what I suffer from, and they have advised me to stop squandering my vivacity and intelligence and, instead, discipline myself by bringing up a child, or doing social work” (4). In this case, she’s referring to antique book-binding. She’s also having an affair with a married man (Hugh, sometimes Hughie) who is obsessed with and considered the greatest expert on Rococo furniture, impractical dying arts, their (and their class’) way of living in the past. She starts to spend time with Hugh’s wife, one of those 1970s housewives that’s discovering herself through social activism. Hugh’s mother is an intriguing witty, non-feminine woman who is so capable that he feels inferior to her, and puts her down as too masculine. She gets closer to his family, there’s definitely love of the enmeshed variety around. Then there’s an odd series of events that feels like forced allegory that weakens the plot.
As for the lesbian bit, that comes in slowly. The book is clever in that I don’t recall the word lesbian or anything similar being used, nothing is direct. There’s some exploration of gender and gender identity, presentation, and behaviors, especially through Hugh’s wife and mother, and through some of their conversations. Hero also narrates her thoughts on gender and relationships, of the friendly and more-than-friendly variety alike, between women, and what makes being around women feel better to her than the male partners she previously lived with and loved. The narrator explores thoughts on sexuality, romance without sexuality, closeness without either, and variations on these themes. The narrative style in disclosing the information feels a bit as if Mavor thrust her personal philosophical ramblings into the book, the information is told rather than shown. It’s a style that may have worked better when her mentor, Iris Murdoch, used it, but it reads as if it’s forced in rather than smoothly part of story. To a reader who wasn’t reading all the lesbian-focused literature they could find, these explorations might seem more ground-breaking, but for me….well, most authors writing of women-loving-women relationships explore relationship between women and the permeations thereof, and of course, gender, both identity and presentation are common themes. Mavor, as far as I know, wasn’t a lesbian (she was married to a man with whom she had two sons), and there isn’t any information indicating that she had affairs with women. That might explain why, for me, the book falls flat; in that Mavor does not have the lived experience to say anything new about women-loving-women relationships because she’s read and researched them, but that means she’s building off what’s already been said rather than adding her own takes.
For me, well, it started off promising before growing dull, and I wouldn’t have finished it had I not been so determined to catalog lesbian literature. After a promising start, there’s a lot about this book that feels as if ideas and thoughts are added in ways that feel unrealistic to the plot, do not flow, and remove the reader from the immersive experience of getting lost in a story. Your mileage with it may vary.
