Inventory Of A Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir by Marina Warner (William Collins, 2021)

Frequently non-fiction erupts into the ripe sweetness of fiction. It does in this sentence, a sentence that clings tightly and carefully - ‘though wryly - to history. Something like this did happen, the narrator suggests, but what matters more is the quality of affection we feel as readers, in this instance, for the writer’s young mother who finds herself in the most vulnerable of positions.

She smiled, a sweet dimpling smile that lit up her plump face and gave a glimpse of the young girl she once was, who had been slender and light as the feathers that sprang from her jewelled bandeau in her silver sequined dress and train when she was received at court with the debutantes of 1902, during the first year of Edward VII’s reign, when, thank goodness, the annual ceremony had been held, in spite of a move to defer it a year in honour of the dead queen.

The circumstances are this: a young Italian girl named Ilia has just arrived from Italy and is meeting her mother-in-law for the first time in her curious top-floor Kensington flat. ‘She’ here is her mother-in-law, affectionately called Mother Rat. The sweet dimpling smile she receives from Mother Rat reads as a generous photographic exchange of one young self with another; and from this sweet dimpled smile radiates an entire history of a young girl coming of age in late Victorian England. This sentence is Mother Rat’s young history.

And this is how it is delivered:

as a miniature historical tour through a series of visual snapshots — as the narrator pushes us out and away from the corners of that animated plump-faced smile — once young like Ilia — to the face of the ‘dead queen’ Victoria. And so we travel back through the historical past, glimpsing, in the way Virginia Woolf asks us to glimpse at sights that cannot ever be fully captured, through a carefully curated exhibition of ‘The Young Girl’. I mention Woolf because the sentence carries a wave-effect, rather giddying (the subject is a young debutante after all); at the same time, we are offered a carefully curated exhibition of The Historic Past. This is a museum space filled with real historical objects; and each object is granted just enough space within the sentence that we can feel a pinch of their animate/animal life: that real historical rush from the past. This is a memoir after all, and all memoir —the work of remembering — dilly-dallies with fiction, even while it calls to the surface real historical objects and events.

So, here is the exhibition of The Young Girl radiating from the warm smile of Mother Rat, who, for a generous moment, transforms herself into the young girl she herself once was. On the other side of her smile is her young and hesitant daughter-in-law, who has just now stepped into the confines of her heavily-draped room. I am reminded of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, where young Isabel Archer finds herself sitting in several museum-style spaces awaiting - so she imagines - the blessed benediction of English culture:

The Cultural Exhibition of The Young Girl:

‘slender and light as feathers’, ‘jewelled bandeau’, ‘silver sequined dress and train’, the royal court in 1902, Edward VII; ‘the annual ceremony’ to ‘the dead queen.’

Certainly, we are no longer in Italy - and we are too late for the Great Exhibition of 1851 — but this is a marvellously moving diorama of the late Victorian age from which this dimpling smile emerges.