The Camomile by Catherine Carswell

Catherine Carswell’s book, The Camomile is about a woman who rents a room close to home, so she can focus on her creative pursuits. Recently returned home to Glasgow after studying music at a conservatory in Frankfort, Ellen Carstairs initially wants a place to practice the piano without being interrupted by her intrusive aunt, but it is writing that soon becomes Ellen’s primary focus.

The book is divided into three parts, starting with a letter dated 2 September, which Ellen writes to Ruby Marcus, a friend from the conservatory, who like Ellen has moved back home after finishing her training. In fact, the entire book is like one long letter to Ruby, because the second part is a journal addressed to Ruby, which Ellen mails off in parts. The third section is another letter to Ruby. This one dated 8 December, a year and three months on from the start of the book.

But—though it took us so long to realise it fully—you and I were both there under false pretences. You were there because you loved all the arts and had to escape from West Hampstead, I because I loved all the arts and had to get away from Glasgow. And though we had both been buttered up by our silly music-teachers into the belief that because we had general artistic taste music was our gift, I think we always ‘knew in our souls,’ as Boris used to say, that nothing comes of choosing an art; the art must choose you. I daresay it was party this that made us such friends right from the beginning.

Meanwhile here we are, both back in the places we worked so had and lied so stoutly to escape from, both faced with the necessity of justifying our brief escape by giving music lessons for money. It all seems very strange to me. (11-12)

Ellen talks about the everyday struggles with living in a close knit community and wanting to have a claim in her personal freedom. She quickly discovers that having a room to work in does not mean that you will always be able to get work done there. At one point she lists the advantages verses the disadvantages of her room, with the disadvantages far outweighing the advantages. Some of disadvantages are very funny indeed. My favourites being, number two, “Cats (many outside, one—not a nice one—inside)” and number 14 “Boy in the lane with an instrument giving lifelike imitation of cats” (29).

But I think the journal entry from 20 December perfectly captures what it is to have the physical space for your creative pursuits, but still finding there are other road blocks in the way of being creative.

For once I am going to write in this in the morning. Generally I don't let myself touch it till night. But of late writing at night has turned my head into a rookery, with ideas for the rooks, caw-cawing by the hour, but never getting any farther, and serving no end but to keep me hopelessly awake when I want to sleep.

After playing at Miss Sutherland's school this morning and giving lessons to the very unmusical Lockhart children, I went to my Room meaning to practise. But the whole house smelt so fusty and steamy, with a washing going on just under my window, that I fled.

Now I am sitting in the Botanic Gardens. Though the puddles are frozen in the shade, you could sit out for ever so long in the sun without feeling cold. (40)

I can picture Ellen huddled on a bench in the cold to scribble in her notebook and trying to convince herself it really is very warm in the sunshine,—if where was any—whilst slowly losing feeling in her fingers.

At one point Ellen is reading an autobiography by an aristocratic woman that a friend insists on lending to her, because she claims Ellen is getting too solemn and serious. It’s not the type of thing Ellen would normally read, and Ellen is confused as to why her friend thought it would help cheer her up, because the more she thinks about it, the more she realizes that the life of an aristocrat wouldn’t suit her at all. 

I need so much leisure and being by myself doing nothing in particular, and she seems always to have done everything in company. I do love meeting people, but a whole day with them nearly kills me. Having to be socially polite for a couple of hours at a stretch makes my face ache all over. (91)

It’s just five pages later that Ellen’s love interest is first mentioned. There are too many red flags to the relationship to share them all, but this one stuck with me. When she asks him how he would feel if “instead of playing tennis and things I wanted to sit dully at home writing ‘highbrow’ stories” after they are married, he assures her that she won’t want to do that.

[H]e would never like to stand in my way, but he thought I was ‘so much a woman’ that what I suggested was unlikely to happen. ‘Life,’ he said, ‘is a bigger affair than books, and life is pre-eminently your business. Wait till your hands are full of life, and I doubt if you will have the time or the wish to add to the mass of feminine writings already in the world.’ This, I must say, deeply impressed me. (163-64)

This felt distinctly similar to a passage in Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel, The Bell Jar. 

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn’t want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterwards you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state. (The Bell Jar 81)

Surprisingly, it is the book that was published earlier which offers hope for a character who feels the attraction to two things, being a wife and being a writer, which she has been lead to believe are mutually exclusive. As we find out at the beginning of The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood has a baby, but there is no mention of her being a writer. While Ellen Carstairs’ story ends with a section called ‘Also, Vorwärts!’. In reminding her friend Ruby of this encouraging cry which was a favourite of their music teacher, Ellen is urging Ruby as much as herself to move forwards, march onwards. It is distinctly optimistic.

According to the back cover of The Camomile, Catherine Carswell’s book is “widely considered a fictional counterpart to Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’”. Originally published in 1922, The Camomile, predates both ‘A Room of One’s Own’, published in 1929 and the 1928 Cambridge lectures the essay grew out of. This begs the question, did Woolf read The Camomile and could she have found inspiration in Carswell’s writing? Did Sylvia Plath, for that matter? Perhaps. However, it seems more likely that all of these writers were concerned with the pressing issues for women of their day, issues that continue to be of concern now. 

If there is to be a takeaway from this novel I think it is, at least in part, that the issues facing Ellen Carstairs are not solved by simply having a room and an income. A room is a start. And in this novel Ellen makes a start at carving out a space for herself and for her art. There is more work to be done, but if the last section heading, ‘Also, Vorwärts!’ is any indication, she is facing it from a position of vindication and optimism for the future. 

I found this book to be thought provoking and compelling. It was also a really enjoyable read. I think I will always list F. Tennyson Jesse’s A Pin to the See the Peepshow as my favourite book from the British Library Women Writers series, but this one is definitely up there. 

Thank you to British Library Publishing for kindly sending me a copy of The Camomile for review. All opinions on the book are my own.