Books by and for independent women

The Bodice Ripper: Catherine Hall’s The Proof of Love

I hope you all had a fabulous, thoroughly bodice-ripping Valentine’s Day (or at least spent it curled up with a good book and vast quantities of chocolate). As I recover from the hedonistic pleasures of February 14th, it’s time for another foray into my bookshelves in search of the best (and worst) in historical fiction.

The second installment of the LGBT History Month Bodice Ripper columns looks at Catherine Hall‘s 2011 novel, The Proof of Love. It’s an unusually modern choice for me, set as it is in the Lake District of the 1970s, but this dreamy, vivid novel captures with painful intensity the clash between forbidden desires and social mores.

Spencer Little is a mathematician up from Oxford on a cycling tour, hoping to find a refuge to complete his phd and recover from an abortive sexual encounter that could cost him his career. He finds sanctuary in the farm and house of Hartley and Mary Dodds, and falls into an odd, comfortable friendship with their bright, curious ten year old daughter Alice. Whilst there, he is plagued by fears about his academic future as he stumbles into an unexpected illicit liaison with a local labourer.

Spencer’s sexuality is not explicitly referred to until about halfway through the text, and  the threat of a sexuality of a different sort lurks behind the burgeoning friendship between Spencer and Alice, conveyed largely through the subtle references to Charles Dodgson and Alice in Wonderland that Hall skilfully weaves throighout the novel.  It becomes a powerful reminder of the vulnerable position that Spencer, as a single man with no visible interest in women of his own age, is in.

The novel conveys a powerful, painful sense of being an outsider – Hall infuses the novel with her own experience of growing up queer in the Lake District – and Spencer’s inner conflict between the messiness of his own desires and the clarity he seeks in pure mathematics is sympathetically drawn. The suspicion that the villagers feel towards this educated, Southern outsider is surpassed only by their distaste for the hippies who camp out nearby in their luridly-painted vans, and whose ethos of free love and sex without guilt contrasts sharply not only with Spencer’s masochistic self-loathing but with the strict heteropatriarchal values of the community.

The agony and delight of furtive first love is intricately drawn, along with the tension between what is expected of Spencer and Edmund and what they actually want. The restrictions of such a closed community mean that gossip and speculation is rife, and Spencer is denied the anonymity he came in search of – especially when it becomes clear that he isn’t entirely who he says he is…

The Proof of Love is Hall’s second novel, and is a dreamy, bittersweet love story that fully deserves the Green Carnation award it won last year. She is one of the most exciting new novelists to have emerged in recent years, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Kaite Welsh