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As It Was in the Beginning
One of the most audacious of all modernist novels. Millicent, Lady Cheseborough -- fifty, widowed, rejected by her much younger lover -- lies dying in a nursing home, the victim of a stroke. As she nears death, her thoughts go back through her life in a desperate attempt to find its meaning.
Millicent is a woman who has never been fully sure of herself. We see her as a child asking her nanny why she has to live within her body. We see her as a young woman wondering how any eligible bachelor will take an interest in her. We see her as the wife of an older, assured man upon whom she becomes dependent. We suffer with her as a gigolo seduces her, wastes her money, and abandons her. And we feel ourselves with her as she struggles to be understood through her stroke and disorientation. As was her trademark, Gertrude Trevelyan takes us deeper into the mind of her subject than almost any novelist ever attempted, creating an intense and absorbing reading experience.
With great stylistic daring, Gertrude Trevelyan recreates the stream of consciousness in its most realistic and moving form. As It Was in the Beginning is perhaps Trevelyan's most important work, a novel that belongs with To the Lighthouse or As I Lay Dying
Millicent is a woman who has never been fully sure of herself. We see her as a child asking her nanny why she has to live within her body. We see her as a young woman wondering how any eligible bachelor will take an interest in her. We see her as the wife of an older, assured man upon whom she becomes dependent. We suffer with her as a gigolo seduces her, wastes her money, and abandons her. And we feel ourselves with her as she struggles to be understood through her stroke and disorientation. As was her trademark, Gertrude Trevelyan takes us deeper into the mind of her subject than almost any novelist ever attempted, creating an intense and absorbing reading experience.
With great stylistic daring, Gertrude Trevelyan recreates the stream of consciousness in its most realistic and moving form. As It Was in the Beginning is perhaps Trevelyan's most important work, a novel that belongs with To the Lighthouse or As I Lay Dying
- GenresFiction
258 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1934
111 people want to read
About the author
G.E. Trevelyan
7Ìýbooks8ÌýfollowersGertrude Eileen Trevelyan was an English novelist. She was born on 17 October 1903 in Bath, Somerset, England. She attended Princess Helena College, then located in Ealing, and was confirmed at St Peter's Church, Ealing in 1920. She attended Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford from 1923 to 1927, graduating with a second-class degree.
While at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, she won - as the first female winner - the Newdigate Prize for Poetry with her 250-line poem in blank verse titled, Julia, Daughter of Claudius. After leaving Oxford, she moved to London, where she first lived in a women's residence hotel in Bermondsey. She later lived as a lodger in several locations in Kensington.
Trevelyan wrote eight groundbreaking novels between 1932 and 1941, but her writing career was tragically cut short when her flat was hit by a German bomb during the Blitz. She died shortly afterward because of her injuries.
Trevelyan was largely forgotten after her death and for many years her work was out of print. However, in 2020, her debut novel Appius and Virginia was republished by Eye & Lightning Books, seeking to restore the Trevelyan to her rightful place in British literature.
While at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, she won - as the first female winner - the Newdigate Prize for Poetry with her 250-line poem in blank verse titled, Julia, Daughter of Claudius. After leaving Oxford, she moved to London, where she first lived in a women's residence hotel in Bermondsey. She later lived as a lodger in several locations in Kensington.
Trevelyan wrote eight groundbreaking novels between 1932 and 1941, but her writing career was tragically cut short when her flat was hit by a German bomb during the Blitz. She died shortly afterward because of her injuries.
Trevelyan was largely forgotten after her death and for many years her work was out of print. However, in 2020, her debut novel Appius and Virginia was republished by Eye & Lightning Books, seeking to restore the Trevelyan to her rightful place in British literature.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 17, 2024
For one thing, this affirms my feeling that my sweet-spot for literature is that produced around 1930-1935.
Look. Either you are interested in the unjustly buried and the forgotten or you are not. Either you care about finding those voices that were unfairly silenced by The Market and Time and Misogyny and all that Jazz or you don't. If you do, this book (and this press more generally) should be on your radar.
This is an extraordinary text that belongs firmly on that line running from Dorothy Richardson to Beckett. If you are comfortable dancing along that line, then this will hopefully get those feet twitching. It is beautifully written- angry and sad and frustrated. Peeling off layers and layers down to a terrifying and heartbreaking final 30 pages. But nothing special about that sorrow. Just the normal horror of it all.
The fact she was doing these kinds of things in 1934, and particularly both stylistically and the way it deals with things like the female body, age, the patriarchal cage, puberty etc blew me away.
I wish I had more time to write something worthy of it, as I used to do on this site years ago, but work and life and all the rest just mean I dont have the time or the mental space.
Just one point (and I don't want to criticize the press at all, as what they are doing is incredible) but I do wish the intro and afterword both hadn't gone on about how difficult the text is. It really is not when you put it in context. And not if you are used to that sort of thing.
Regardless, I adored this. It is the 4th of hers I have read, and each one has been deeply impressive in its own way. So glad she is being unburied, and so glad we get to read her.
Look. Either you are interested in the unjustly buried and the forgotten or you are not. Either you care about finding those voices that were unfairly silenced by The Market and Time and Misogyny and all that Jazz or you don't. If you do, this book (and this press more generally) should be on your radar.
This is an extraordinary text that belongs firmly on that line running from Dorothy Richardson to Beckett. If you are comfortable dancing along that line, then this will hopefully get those feet twitching. It is beautifully written- angry and sad and frustrated. Peeling off layers and layers down to a terrifying and heartbreaking final 30 pages. But nothing special about that sorrow. Just the normal horror of it all.
The fact she was doing these kinds of things in 1934, and particularly both stylistically and the way it deals with things like the female body, age, the patriarchal cage, puberty etc blew me away.
I wish I had more time to write something worthy of it, as I used to do on this site years ago, but work and life and all the rest just mean I dont have the time or the mental space.
Just one point (and I don't want to criticize the press at all, as what they are doing is incredible) but I do wish the intro and afterword both hadn't gone on about how difficult the text is. It really is not when you put it in context. And not if you are used to that sort of thing.
Regardless, I adored this. It is the 4th of hers I have read, and each one has been deeply impressive in its own way. So glad she is being unburied, and so glad we get to read her.
October 12, 2024
A woman lies immobile and dying, not fully aware of what has happened or where she is. The milestones, obsessions and scattered thoughts and impressions from her life tumble through her mind, from a love affair with a younger man who abandoned her, all the way back to the cradle.
I didn't find it difficult to read or to follow, though the afterward says it can be. The narration presents the rather limited existence of a woman in the early twentieth century in England, a person who had little identity beyond the men she connected with -- the childhood friend later lamented when he married someone else, the boring well-to-do husband who leaves her a widow, and the younger man she adores who bides his time with her manoeuvring for money and expensive gifts.
I think the book was an interesting experiment, and the experiment succeeded. It reflected a woman's life in that era, but I found it occasionally tedious being inside Millicent's head. She is not an unsympathetic character, but in line with times she lived in, she was a lost and hollow soul.
I didn't find it difficult to read or to follow, though the afterward says it can be. The narration presents the rather limited existence of a woman in the early twentieth century in England, a person who had little identity beyond the men she connected with -- the childhood friend later lamented when he married someone else, the boring well-to-do husband who leaves her a widow, and the younger man she adores who bides his time with her manoeuvring for money and expensive gifts.
I think the book was an interesting experiment, and the experiment succeeded. It reflected a woman's life in that era, but I found it occasionally tedious being inside Millicent's head. She is not an unsympathetic character, but in line with times she lived in, she was a lost and hollow soul.
September 11, 2024
oh my. honestly, oh my.
somehow� i get it.
i could see myself in millicent, in ways i’ve never seen explained and worded quite like this. was blown away the entire time i read this that it was originally published in 1934. what remarkable talent, and outlooks on human life. I GET IT.
this book was gutting. and real.
—â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä�-
People do their duty by you � or they don't.
Besides, I was half asleep, I believe. I didn't know it; not until afterwards. I thought I was using my brain on charity reports and committees, but it was only the surface. The rest of my brain was asleep, as if I had been stunned. There was only a top layer racing.
Like a frozen river with a surface sheet of water fluid on the ice.
We’re going the same way, the same way. We can never meet because we’re going the same way. Of course, we’re going the same way.
You can't argue like that: you can't say What would have happened if because if you'd acted differently you'd have been somebody else. The person I am is the person who acted as I did: that's it, isn't it?
Then what sort of person should I have been? I shouldn't have been at all. Or should I have been, and now I'm not? Is that why I sometimes feel I'm not quite a person, only pretending to be one? In 'buses, for instance?
Because I oughtn't to exist?
Odd, the way things have their niche if one can only find it.
Nothing quite wasted. A lesson to one, isn't it, to look for the pattern in life. Nothing useless, if one considers it.
You've thought it all out carefully, haven't you? You want him to see how reasonable it is? But he won't. It's wonderful how little reason a man can see if a woman shows it to him. No no, my dear, you'd better make up your mind to it.
Much better let him go his own way, and you go yours: save a lot of trouble in the end.
I don't know why people should look at me like that. I suppose they can see I'm not anything. I don't see how they can see I'm not anything. They're all solid and I'm hollow, but they can't see that.
I don't know why I should feel like that. I suppose I've been hollow like that all the time, but he put a kind of artificial life into me.
And cold and wet and want and warm and nothing.
And want and full and nothing, and want and warm and nothing.
And want and want and want and want.
Alone and alone and alone. Huge aloneness.
Alone and alone and the huge world unknown and hostile. Huge and hurting, and the menace of big movements and the future pressing down. Time and hurt and having to be and things lurking in time. Enormous emptiness; and light, pressing. Why. Why.
Pressure of air and the hurt of breathing: hurtful, hard compulsion; and the open world opening out, shelterless, on and on, into time.
somehow� i get it.
i could see myself in millicent, in ways i’ve never seen explained and worded quite like this. was blown away the entire time i read this that it was originally published in 1934. what remarkable talent, and outlooks on human life. I GET IT.
this book was gutting. and real.
—â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä”â¶Ä�-
People do their duty by you � or they don't.
Besides, I was half asleep, I believe. I didn't know it; not until afterwards. I thought I was using my brain on charity reports and committees, but it was only the surface. The rest of my brain was asleep, as if I had been stunned. There was only a top layer racing.
Like a frozen river with a surface sheet of water fluid on the ice.
We’re going the same way, the same way. We can never meet because we’re going the same way. Of course, we’re going the same way.
You can't argue like that: you can't say What would have happened if because if you'd acted differently you'd have been somebody else. The person I am is the person who acted as I did: that's it, isn't it?
Then what sort of person should I have been? I shouldn't have been at all. Or should I have been, and now I'm not? Is that why I sometimes feel I'm not quite a person, only pretending to be one? In 'buses, for instance?
Because I oughtn't to exist?
Odd, the way things have their niche if one can only find it.
Nothing quite wasted. A lesson to one, isn't it, to look for the pattern in life. Nothing useless, if one considers it.
You've thought it all out carefully, haven't you? You want him to see how reasonable it is? But he won't. It's wonderful how little reason a man can see if a woman shows it to him. No no, my dear, you'd better make up your mind to it.
Much better let him go his own way, and you go yours: save a lot of trouble in the end.
I don't know why people should look at me like that. I suppose they can see I'm not anything. I don't see how they can see I'm not anything. They're all solid and I'm hollow, but they can't see that.
I don't know why I should feel like that. I suppose I've been hollow like that all the time, but he put a kind of artificial life into me.
And cold and wet and want and warm and nothing.
And want and full and nothing, and want and warm and nothing.
And want and want and want and want.
Alone and alone and alone. Huge aloneness.
Alone and alone and the huge world unknown and hostile. Huge and hurting, and the menace of big movements and the future pressing down. Time and hurt and having to be and things lurking in time. Enormous emptiness; and light, pressing. Why. Why.
Pressure of air and the hurt of breathing: hurtful, hard compulsion; and the open world opening out, shelterless, on and on, into time.
June 17, 2024
First published in 1934 and neglected for the last ninety years, As It Was in the Beginning is a short novel depicting the confused memories of an elderly woman dying in a nursing home after suffering what seems to be a stroke. Told entirely in stream-of-consciousness, the novel presents us with Lady Millicent’s disjointed thoughts as they track backwards through her life.
Initially she is fixated on her time as a well-to-do widow in her forties and her intense affair with a younger man who emerges as little more than a gold-digger. Later she focuses on her youthful marriage to Sir Harold, the squire of the small community in which she has grown up, who is both dependable and suffocating. Finally, she recalls episodes from her childhood as the daughter of a country doctor, regressing all the way back to infancy.
Millicent is not a particularly likeable character. She is not at ease with herself, or with the role expected of a woman of her class and time, or even with her own body. She suffers from a sort of generalised alienation which makes her feel at odds with much of the world. However, she never seems to have discovered, or even sought out, an alternative way of being. Instead, she has allowed herself to be borne along by the tide of events, always experiencing intense anxiety about whatever persona she finds herself adopting.
This is an important re-publication. Trevelyan’s mastery of stream-of-consciousness narrative surely merits her recognition as a significant modernist writer. Perhaps even more significant, however, is the spotlight she turns on issues of identity and gender. Lady Millicent is no radical; she pursues no cause; but she suffers, and sharing her suffering is like watching a moth battering itself against a lamp. The inside of her head is not a comfortable place in which to be but there is too much within it that is recognisable and relevant for the contemporary reader to ignore.
Initially she is fixated on her time as a well-to-do widow in her forties and her intense affair with a younger man who emerges as little more than a gold-digger. Later she focuses on her youthful marriage to Sir Harold, the squire of the small community in which she has grown up, who is both dependable and suffocating. Finally, she recalls episodes from her childhood as the daughter of a country doctor, regressing all the way back to infancy.
Millicent is not a particularly likeable character. She is not at ease with herself, or with the role expected of a woman of her class and time, or even with her own body. She suffers from a sort of generalised alienation which makes her feel at odds with much of the world. However, she never seems to have discovered, or even sought out, an alternative way of being. Instead, she has allowed herself to be borne along by the tide of events, always experiencing intense anxiety about whatever persona she finds herself adopting.
This is an important re-publication. Trevelyan’s mastery of stream-of-consciousness narrative surely merits her recognition as a significant modernist writer. Perhaps even more significant, however, is the spotlight she turns on issues of identity and gender. Lady Millicent is no radical; she pursues no cause; but she suffers, and sharing her suffering is like watching a moth battering itself against a lamp. The inside of her head is not a comfortable place in which to be but there is too much within it that is recognisable and relevant for the contemporary reader to ignore.
December 24, 2024
Millicent is dying in a nursing home reminiscing about her life long life. Millicent is a woman who has never been fully sure of herself. We see her as a child asking her nanny why she has to live within her body. We see her as a young woman wondering how any eligible bachelor will take an interest in her. We see her as the wife of an older, assured man upon whom she becomes dependent. We suffer with her as a gigolo seduces her, wastes her money, and abandons her. And we feel ourselves with her as she struggles to be understood through her stroke and disorientation. As was her trademark, Gertrude Trevelyan takes us deeper into the mind of her subject than almost any novelist ever attempted, creating an intense and absorbing reading experience.
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