Many people were contemplating suicide as a solution,Cunningham says,which perhaps puts Virginia’s own 1941 suicide in context.
The cover of Sophie Cunningham’s This Devastating Fever.
Leonard was a passionate environmentalist,birdwatcher,animal lover and gardener who lobbied against pesticides and wanted to make the South Downs a national park. That has echoes in Cunningham’s own advocacy for the environment,particularly for wildlife and trees.
“It’s been my driving passion and concern and anxiety,” she says,and indeed that has shown up in a string of non-fiction books that she has written,edited or contributed to in recent years.
Cunningham is aware her fascination with Leonard has something to do with her relationship to masculinity. “I found myself thinking of father figures and authoritarian figures.” She has two fathers:her biological father,the academic and science fiction expert Peter Nicholls,and her mother’s second husband,John Cunningham,who brought her up.
Both are now dead:Nicholls died while she was researching the Bloomsbury archives in the Lilly Library at Indiana University,and she had to say goodbye to him via Facetime. In a maudlin frame of mind,she watched an animated film with skeletons,and suddenly Virginia’s ghost turned up on the page as a caustic skeleton.
What of Leonard’s marriage? That is what has fascinated most readers,particularly the sexual side – if indeed there was one. Leonard and Virginia were part of the Bloomsbury set,famed for their unconventional sexual practices,which in many ways foreshadow our own preoccupations with gender fluidity and sexual identity.
Leonard had “a lot of self-loathing” around sexual issues,Cunningham says. The title of the novel comes from his description of lust as “this devastating fever”. She thinks “one of the reasons he found Virginia attractive was because he thought it was perfectly reasonable that a woman wouldn’t have sex with him”.
After her death he had a second relationship,which was also apparently platonic. “He was in his 60s and had prostate problems and maybe he’d lost confidence. He had an active sex life in Ceylon,but I don’t know if he ever had a sexual relationship with an Englishwoman.” Virginia had “strong erotic attachments”,particularly to women,but despite some theories Cunningham doubts that she ever had lovers.
How would she characterise the marriage?
“I think they loved each other very much and were very loyal and devoted to each other. That took years to build. The first few years,probably both were thinking,what have I done? She had a massive breakdown and became very dependent on him. He had to feed her six hours a day,just to keep her alive. For many months.”
Cunningham found at first she was trying to make readers like Leonard. “That’s never a great thing to do with a character. I was in danger of making him saintly. He could be quite boring and pompous,he could drone on and talk over people. He had a terrible temper. He was his best self with Virginia,when he was getting on well with her,and with animals,and doing his own thing. Once I got to know him enough,I could allow different aspects of his personality to come through.”
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The reader might be tempted to see the fictional novelist Alice Fox and Sophie Cunningham as one and the same person. But she insists they are different,with different female partners and different families. Alice has,however,done the same research and has become excited by the same breakthroughs in libraries and archives around the world. Cunningham wanted to convey the momentum and fascination of literary detective work,and a bit of light relief when Alice talks to the querulous ghosts.
There was a point when Cunningham felt like giving up. She had finished a draft in 2018 and the consensus among her feedback readers was that it wasn’t working. “Then the pandemic happened.” In Albert Camus’The Plague,a novelist keeps rewriting the first page of his novel and never finishes it.
“I thought,I’m going to die and I won’t have finished this bloody novel. So I just sat down and wrote for three months and finished it. I knew my material pretty well,I suddenly felt more confident,and I stopped worrying about what people would think.”
This Devastating Fever is published in September by Ultimo Press,RRP $32.99. Sophie Cunningham is a guest atMelbourne Writers Festival.The Age is a festival partner.
The Age is a festival partner and is pleased to offer a20 per cent discount on tickets forAge subscribers.
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