Dorothy Cowlin

Dorothy Cowlin (16 August 1911 – 10 January 2010) was a British novelist, poet, newspaper columnist and article writer with strong associations to North Yorkshire.

During her life she wrote 8 novels which were all published by Jonathan Cape, 4 biographical novels aimed at younger readers, and 4 collections of poetry.^[1][2]

She wrote columns for Malton newspaper the Gazette & Herald for more than 30 years, a long running series of articles for Scarborough's weekly paper The Mercury, and articles for magazines like The Dalesman, Yorkshire Life and Yorkshire Ridings, which often concerned local history and her own reminiscences.^[3] A collection of 25 articles that originally appeared in the Gazette & Herald was published in 2000 under the title Do You Remember? Pickering 50 years ago. Her poems appeared in The Dalesman and many other magazines.^[4]

Her poem The Sound of Rain has been featured by BBC Radio 4's programme Poetry Please,^[5] and her poem Pennine Tunnel was the winner of a competition run by Yorkshire Television's magazine programme Calendar and judged by David Morley ^[6]

All her work was published under her maiden name rather than her married name, Dorothy Whalley.

Bibliography

Novels

• Penny to Spend (1941)

Often witty, sometimes cynical, this uncommonly good first novel has an experiment with time for its theme, and a charming and unusual woman for its central character.

— The Glasgow Herald, 14 June 1941^[7]

Lovable people are often rather indecisive. Miss Dorothy Cowlin's heroine in Penny to Spend... is that sort of girl. The author shows her as a child, not knowing what to spend her penny on. Later in life the problem becomes more acute. Which man shall she marry? By an impossible device, plausibly conveyed (a tribute to the author's skill), Prunella is allowed to have her cake and eat it. Her first choice played out (in every sense), back go the hands of the clock, and there she is married to Prospect No. 2. Ladies who married Tom and sigh for Charles will follow Prunella's career with interest. Ladies who married neither Tom nor Charles may smile if they like.

— Stevie Smith, September 1941^[8]

• Winter Solstice (first published 1942 by Jonathan Cape in the UK and 1943 by Macmillan in the US; republished 1991 by Merlin Press with an introduction by Gabriele Griffin^{[note 1]})

Miss Cowlin has taken a very interesting subject for her second essay in fiction, and in the first half of her story has handled it convincingly and with literary skill. Her chief character is Alexandra Gollen, a woman of twenty-one when we first meet her, paralysed from the waist down and with the mentality of a child of twelve, at which age after a horrible childhood she lost her memory and the use of her legs as the result of a very severe shock. She lives in a small Lancashire town, and is cared for by her twin half-brothers who have a small tailor's business, working in the room in which she passes her dreamy, contented life. The influence that largely determines her recovery is the coming of Iris Young, a secondary schoolmistress of thirty with a vigorous and lively personality, and the steps that lead to Alexandra's recovery of the power to walk, and to the much slower revival of her earlier memories are probable and well-considered. The second half of the book does not reach the same level of achievement. Alexandra's unhealthy and overdrawn passion for Iris becomes very tedious, and we lose the sympathy and interest that she inspired in her earlier paralysed condition and in the first stages of her convalescence. We leave her as a whole, though slightly abnormal, human being on the verge of a natural but somewhat perfunctory love affair.

The writing, despite occasional marks of amateurishness, is vivid and graphic, and if the development of Alexandra's character had been on more attractive lines, Winter Solstice might have made an original and fascinating story. As it is, we are left with the feeling that our natural desire for her recovery has not been justifiably satisfied.

— Times Literary Supplement, 7 November 1942

Winter Solstice, first published in 1942 by Jonathan Cape, is a curious and compelling novel, detailing a psychological drama dressed in twentieth-century garb against a social backdrop of decidedly Victorian fabric.

— Gabriele Griffin, from the introduction of the 1991 republication

• The Holly and the Ivy (1950)

Her two characters are brilliantly drawn, and some of the passages between them are narrated in a way difficult to forget. In this as in other respects The Holly and the Ivy leaves the impression that uncommon reserves of thought and feeling have gone to its writing.

— The Scotsman

• The Slow Train Home (1951)

At eighteen a boy leaving a Yorkshire Grammar School travels to London with an architectural scholarship. He does not return for fifteen years. Coming back to the district on a professional visit, he meets the schoolboy son of whose existence he has never been told – and in whose embryo existence he once refused to believe. Too young then to face his responsibilities, he becomes increasingly eager to assume them now, but is faced with the bitter recognition that her has forfeited the right to display the pride and affection he feels. Neither he nor the boy's mother has married; their adolescent love revives hesitantly, hindered by her unacknowledged resentment of his early desertion, and he sees that although it was easy when he was a youth to break all emotional bonds and travel south, in maturity the inner journey home can be made only by slow stages.

This is a novel of strong feeling and compassionate characterization in which the author's skill in displaying a conflict of temperaments, shown in her last book, The Holly and the Ivy, is further developed. The scene is a small Yorkshire town, built of local stone, surrounded by the rising moors and linked by the railway on which every level-crossing still has its 'gate-house'.

— Blurb

Miss Cowlin writes with distinction and great beauty, and she has an understanding of human motives which breathes life into everyone whom she depicts. It is true to describe this novel as romantic, but it is the best sort of realism as well.

— Truth

A good well-written honest book. Miss Cowlin uses prose of great clarity, and her writing is imbued with an unusual quality of charity. Her descriptions, both of people and places, have great lucidity, and she transcribes dialect -- with a more accurate ear than most.

— Marghanita Laski, The Spectator

A very moving book, and a convincingly human one.

— John O'London's Weekly

• Rowanberry Wine (1952)

Dorothy Cowlin has had much praise for her unobtrusive skill in analysing the effect in domestic life of unexpected but not incredible emotional situations. In her new novel a middle-aged couple surprise themselves. Happily married, with a common interest in archaeology, their personal and professional lives are so interwoven that nothing, it seemed, could disrupt their marriage. But they reckoned without Nature. The combined effects of a holiday in isolation on the North Yorkshire moors, the bewildering heat of the sun, the dreaming perfection of the summer moon, and perhaps a draught of home-brewed wine, induce aberrations in the pattern of behaviour to an extent alarming to themselves and embarrassing to their companions.

— Blurb

Here is a novel which states fearlessly the grimmer side of married middle life, when love requires grit rather than salt.

— The Listener

Fluent, intelligent and vivacious.

— The Spectator

Her prose is beautiful, and her vivid descriptions of the hot summer weather among the hills remain in the mind. This is a considerable advance on her last novel, and she is a novelist whom her adopted county may be glad to claim.

— The Yorkshire Post

• An End and a Beginning (1954)

Olga Ward, inheriting a big old house, unexpectedly, at the age of twenty-two, and fancying that the role of landlady will enable her to indulge more thoroughly an unsatisfied craving for 'life', decides to give up her job as an assistant in a public library and live on the rentals of her property, setting aside a flat in it for herself. She soon finds that tenants can present all kinds of problems, including the ones they confide in their youthful landlady. For a time her own emotional life is too engrossing to allow her to give much attention to that of anyone else, but the loss and sorrow brought by war leaves her glad to renew her concern with the lives of others until she is capable of falling in love again.

In this new novel Dorothy Cowlin remains true to the north country scenes she knows so well, and once more shows her ability to reveal that 'ordinary life' is always new, variable and full of interest.

— Blurb

• Draw the Well Dry (1955)

A village on the border of England and Wales is the setting of Dorothy Cowlin's new novel, and Peter Harkness, vicar of the parish, is its chief character. For health reasons, Peter has recently been transferred from a busy town living. The accidental rediscovery of a forgotten old well in the vicarage garden soon disturbs the quiet of his new surroundings: the idea that this well was once credited with supernatural powers is publicized by the local press and, to Peter's dismay, adopted with enthusiasm by most of his parishioners. He regards a reputed miracle with suspicion, and for reasons of temperament and conscience struggles against the general tide of credulity - not with entire success.

Though she has chosen as her theme a problem of conscience, Dorothy Cowlin is not concerned with religious propaganda, for or against, but only with humanity, and even comedy, that there may be in the most serious questions of clerical 'right conduct'.

— Blurb

• The Pair of Them (1956)

Dorothy Cowlin's new novel gives a striking account of a Lancashire elementary school teacher's experiences in a poor industrial area during the nineteen-thirties and forties. Barbara Neave, a young woman of working-class origin, has climbed the scholarship ladder to university level, and enters the teaching profession at the time of a 'glut' of qualified teachers. She is obliged to accept a job in a small Elementary Church School. The descriptions of her slow apprenticeship - disheartening, tiring, occasionally comic or rewarding - have the sureness of personal knowledge. Side by side with these runs the story of her personal life, and in this Dorothy Cowlin shows again that vividness and honesty which distinguishes so much of her writing.

— Blurb

Biographical novels

• Greenland Seas: The story of Scoresby the whaler (published 1965 by E. J. Arnold & Son Limited of Leeds, with illustrations by Ray Bailey)

Young William Scoresby grew up in the time of Nelson and Napoleon, with a background of ships and seamen. He was only ten when, for the first time, he sailed out of Whitby Harbour for the Arctic seas. This voyage was made with his father, the captain of a whaling vessel. He has second thoughts about taking so young a boy, and tried, unsuccessfully, to leave him behind in the Shetland Islands.

This book follows Scoresby from this point, when as a novice, the ice-floes, the Northern lights, the behaviour of whales, and the smallest details of the business of whaling, and of life aboard ship, are all new and endlessly fascinating, to the time when he is a veteran captain, on whose skill and experience the lives of fifty men depend.

But he never, even in that latest time, loses his zest and curiosity. Studying the Arctic animals, or the Arctic Sea currents, or ice crystals, or the peculair behaviour of a ship's compass in Polar regions, or planning to sail further North than any man had yet sailed, his sense of wonder and adventure never fails.

Though the scenes at sea are the heart of the book, we see him also on land, at Edinburgh University, writing somewhat tactless letters home to the girl he is in love with, though he is slow to realise this. The background of life at home contrasts with, and highlights, the dangers and strange beauty of life in the Arctic seas.

A scholar and explorer as well as a famous whaling captain, brave, inventive, and generous, William Scoresby is vividly brought to life again in Greenland Seas.

— Blurb

• A Woman in the Desert: The story of Gertrude Bell (published 1967 by Frederick Muller Limited of London, with illustrations by Penny Carey)

They called her, in affection and admiration, The Khatun (The Lady), and one of her Arab friends once said: "For a hundred years they'll talk of the Khatun riding by!"

A hundred years is a lot to ask of the human memory. But Gertrude Bell, traveller, archaeologist, writer, and amateur diplomat well deserves to be remembered. Very few Europeans, and almost no other woman, have penetrated into the land of the Bedouin as she did, speaking the language, and eating and drinking in their black tents almost as one of them. "A daughter of the desert", one tribe called her.

Ten years of her life were spent in this fascinating and daring study, and she wrote vividly in a number of books of her experiences and also in her letters home, from which the author has drawn much of her material.

Then came the First World War. Her travels came to an end. But for the next ten years, she spent her terrific energy, her almost unique knowledge, her charming and powerful personality, not to mention much of her own wealth in the service of the new Arab State of Iraq which emerged after the war.

In 1926, worn out by her labours and the abominable climate, she died in Baghdad and was buried there, honoured by both Arabs and Britons.

— Blurb

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning (published 1968 by Frederick Muller, with illustrations by Sheila Bewley)

The story of a generous, brave and determined woman who, despite the overbearing influence of her father and her own ill-health, became a widely-read scholar, a famous poet and a keen student of current events. Dorothy Cowlin, whose biography of Gertrude Bell: A Woman in the Desert achieved wide acclaim, reveals in this latest work the lively personality of a woman who, in spite of being an invalid, fought strongly against the conventions and taboos of Victorian England in pursuit of her studies and her happiness.

Her story offers insight into family life in this period as well as showing how a young lady of Elizabeth's position was expected to conduct herself, her day-to-day occupations and her limited freedom to think and act for herself. Elizabeth met many of the foremost personalities of the day: Wordsworth, Tennyson, Harriet Martineau, George Sand and, of course, Robert Browning. She had views and comments to make on topics such as the plight of the factory children, the extension of the franchise, and especially the place of women in Victorian society.

The last part of the book, describing Elizabeth's married life in Italy with Robert Browning, is set against the background of Italian unification, a cause in which Elizabeth fervently believed.

— Blurb

• Cleopatra: Queen of Egypt (published 1970 by Wayland Publishers)

Writing in the form of a biographical novel, Dorothy Cowlin vividly reconstructs the life of the last, and one of the greatest, Pharaohs.

Cleopatra succeeded to the throne jointly with her little brother, whom she had to marry. Throughout her reign, once-great Egypt lay under the shadow of Roman legions, and so it was that Cleopatra – renowned more for her vitality and intelligence than her looks – threw in her fortunes with two great Roman generals: first Julius Caesar and, after the Ides of March, Mark Anthony. How far was Cleopatra involved with them as a head of state, and how far as a woman? She bore them both children, although she married neither, at least in Roman law. Using all the known facts of Cleopatra's life, Dorothy Cowlin suggests her own clues to this engaging but complex character.

We follow Cleopatra through her first meeting with the hawk-nosed Caesar, rolled up in a carpet, on the idyllic journey they made together to the pyramids and temples of the Nile, and we go with her to the noise, splendour and dust of Rome itself; we follow her back to Alexandria where she met Mark Anthony, harassed by both by civil war and the Parthians, and eventually committed suicide with a snake-bite. One of the best-known figures in history, Cleopatra remains a tantalising enigma. She doubted whether she were really a goddess, as her people believed, but she certainly has become a legend.

— Blurb

Other works

• The Sound of Rain (1991)
• Winter Rooks (1998)
• Do you remember? Pickering 50 Years Ago (2000, Blackthorn Press)
• Pigeon Past (2002)
• The Sound of Rain and 99 other poems (2009, self-published)

Biography

Dorothy Cowlin was born in Grantham, a market town in Lincolnshire, England in 1911.^[2] She studied Geography^[9] at the University of Manchester and was awarded a BA.^[2] She was a teacher in Stockport^[2] before getting married to Ronald Whalley on 12 April 1941 at the parish church of Hampton Bishop whilst he was serving as a chiropodist in the RAF Hospital at Locking.^[10] At that time a married woman could not continue working, so she turned her attention to writing which she had always had an ambition to do.^[9] She had a single daughter on 15 October 1942 whom she named Virginia after Virginia Woolf, an author whose work she greatly admired.^[11] Her first novel, "Penny To Spend", was published by Jonathan Cape in 1941 and was followed by 7 others, but her style of writing fell out of favour,^[3] and she turned her attention to poetry.

The family first moved to Pickering, North Yorkshire in late Autumn 1948 when Ronald came to teach at a school in the neighbouring village of Thornton-le-Dale. Dorothy fell in love with the countryside of the nearby Dales, and her writing often used the local environment as a background^[12]

Notes

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Dorothy Cowlin

• "The Sound of Rain" Text of poem
• "The way of the Wolds" An article published in the Gazette & Herald, 14 June 2006
• "When words mean so much more" An article published in the Gazette & Herald, 27 December 2001
• "On the grand tour with the over 50s" An article published in the Gazette & Herald, 30 November 2006
• "All change in Pickering" An article published in the Gazette & Herald, 26 February 2003
• "The nuns of Pickering" An article published in the Gazette & Herald, 25 September 2002
• "Meet one of the founding fathers of Beck Isle Museum" An article published in the Gazette & Herald, 14 March 2002