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I haven't read a Mary Renault book since I was a very young teenager who thought Greek mythology was cool, but I was feeling in the mood for mid-century prose and ended up reading The Friendly Young Ladies on the plane a few weeks ago and. Hmm. Well, I mean, I was expecting a lot of queerness and some conflicted feelings about its portrayal, and indeed that was what I got!
The Friendly Young Ladies spends several chapters following Elsie, a wildly sheltered eighteen-year-old with wildly dysfunctional parents. Elsie soon develops a crush on a visiting doctor and decides to run away from home and find her long-lost sister, who left ten years ago in the midst of Mysterious Scandal, at which point it becomes very rapidly clear that in fact the book is not really about Elsie at all.
Elsie discovers her sister Leo -- the actual protagonist of the book -- living in domestic bliss on a houseboat with her girlfriend Helen, having made a modest success at the writing of popular Westerns. Leo and Helen have a solid, healthy, committed open relationship and as soon as they were introduced I spent the rest of the book extremely stressed out that they were going to be broken up by the end of it because I DON'T TRUST MARY RENAULT WITH HAPPINESS.
Things that threaten Helen and Leo's relationship but do not seem to be at actual risk of breaking them up:
- having Elsie hanging around the houseboat all the time being mostly useless and entirely clueless (by the end of the book Elsie STILL has not learned that queerness is a thing, and, like, I GET why Leo would just want to entirely avoid having this conversation with her sheltered bourgeois baby sister but it might have helped)
- having Elsie's smugly awful doctor crush hanging around the houseboat all the time trying to seduce either Helen or Leo into being straight, he'll generously devote his time to helping either or both with this, he's not picky! (Leo instead seduces his girlfriend, in the funniest scene in the book)
Things that may in fact be at risk of breaking Helen and Leo up:
- Joe, who comes from America and provides Leo with flavor-text for her books, and writes the kind of modernist novels that Mary Renault and Leo think are amazing (Elsie picks one up at one point, discovers a naturalistic scene involving mother washing her dead baby, and puts it down again very quickly, which I'm not sure I blame her for although Mary Renault does), and functions as Leo's Chill Best Bro With Whom To Perform Homosocial Masculinity until suddenly traditional heterosexuality gets in the way, which unfortunately Mary Renault (of the 1930s) thinks might be True Love
(It's worth noting that Mary Renault of the 1980s, in an afterword, thinks Leo would be ridiculous to even consider giving up what she has with Helen in favor of the inevitable crash-and-burn with Joe, which is definitely a correct opinion. Unfortunately, Mary Renault of the 1980s also has some extremely incorrect opinions, like "I don't understand why the gays these days keep doing silly attention-grabbing things like 'asking' for 'rights' instead of just being chill and not making people mad...")
And, I mean, there's a lot to unpack in the Leo-Joe relationship and how it reflects Leo's complicated relationship with gender -- and of course a person with complicated gender feelings in 1937 has different tools and vocabulary to express that than a person in 2018 and I feel like some of the available 2018 tools might indeed be relevant and helpful here and CERTAINLY might help with, for example, Joe writing a dramatic letter about how in pursuing love interest f!Leo he's ruthlessly throwing his best bro m!Leo under the bus because the two probably can't coexist! (And there went my affection for Joe, who really is perfectly nice for the first 2/3 of the book.)
So it's interesting and frustrating and sad, but also it doesn't have to be, which of course is a large part of why it's frustrating. Leo and Helen and Joe were all doing perfectly fine before Mary Renault decided to throw all-encompassing heterosexuality at them! It was entirely unnecessary!
The Friendly Young Ladies spends several chapters following Elsie, a wildly sheltered eighteen-year-old with wildly dysfunctional parents. Elsie soon develops a crush on a visiting doctor and decides to run away from home and find her long-lost sister, who left ten years ago in the midst of Mysterious Scandal, at which point it becomes very rapidly clear that in fact the book is not really about Elsie at all.
Elsie discovers her sister Leo -- the actual protagonist of the book -- living in domestic bliss on a houseboat with her girlfriend Helen, having made a modest success at the writing of popular Westerns. Leo and Helen have a solid, healthy, committed open relationship and as soon as they were introduced I spent the rest of the book extremely stressed out that they were going to be broken up by the end of it because I DON'T TRUST MARY RENAULT WITH HAPPINESS.
Things that threaten Helen and Leo's relationship but do not seem to be at actual risk of breaking them up:
- having Elsie hanging around the houseboat all the time being mostly useless and entirely clueless (by the end of the book Elsie STILL has not learned that queerness is a thing, and, like, I GET why Leo would just want to entirely avoid having this conversation with her sheltered bourgeois baby sister but it might have helped)
- having Elsie's smugly awful doctor crush hanging around the houseboat all the time trying to seduce either Helen or Leo into being straight, he'll generously devote his time to helping either or both with this, he's not picky! (Leo instead seduces his girlfriend, in the funniest scene in the book)
Things that may in fact be at risk of breaking Helen and Leo up:
- Joe, who comes from America and provides Leo with flavor-text for her books, and writes the kind of modernist novels that Mary Renault and Leo think are amazing (Elsie picks one up at one point, discovers a naturalistic scene involving mother washing her dead baby, and puts it down again very quickly, which I'm not sure I blame her for although Mary Renault does), and functions as Leo's Chill Best Bro With Whom To Perform Homosocial Masculinity until suddenly traditional heterosexuality gets in the way, which unfortunately Mary Renault (of the 1930s) thinks might be True Love
(It's worth noting that Mary Renault of the 1980s, in an afterword, thinks Leo would be ridiculous to even consider giving up what she has with Helen in favor of the inevitable crash-and-burn with Joe, which is definitely a correct opinion. Unfortunately, Mary Renault of the 1980s also has some extremely incorrect opinions, like "I don't understand why the gays these days keep doing silly attention-grabbing things like 'asking' for 'rights' instead of just being chill and not making people mad...")
And, I mean, there's a lot to unpack in the Leo-Joe relationship and how it reflects Leo's complicated relationship with gender -- and of course a person with complicated gender feelings in 1937 has different tools and vocabulary to express that than a person in 2018 and I feel like some of the available 2018 tools might indeed be relevant and helpful here and CERTAINLY might help with, for example, Joe writing a dramatic letter about how in pursuing love interest f!Leo he's ruthlessly throwing his best bro m!Leo under the bus because the two probably can't coexist! (And there went my affection for Joe, who really is perfectly nice for the first 2/3 of the book.)
So it's interesting and frustrating and sad, but also it doesn't have to be, which of course is a large part of why it's frustrating. Leo and Helen and Joe were all doing perfectly fine before Mary Renault decided to throw all-encompassing heterosexuality at them! It was entirely unnecessary!