Who was Sophie? My grandmother, poet and stranger.

Sophie started life as Joan Adeney Easdale, a teenage poet whose work was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Joan wrote plays for the BBC, married a scientist and had three children. She had a rich creative life and close friendships, including the writer Naomi Mitchison. Celia Robertson is her grand-daughter. This may sound like any Bloomsbury-ish, glamourous family history, but as Celia Robertson's narrative continues, Joan struggles with running a home, keeping to a budget and caring for her family, she begins to suffer from paranoia and her marriage fails. Her struggle to maintain an intellectual life, and to continue writing, also take their toll, especially when her psychiatrist tells her to just stop trying to write, and to keep to housewifely duties. Separated from her children, she has a catastrophic breakdown, and ends up confined in a mental hospital. She renames herself Sophie Curly when, on release from hospital, she gets off a train in Nottingham and settles there. As a middle aged and elderly lady she is utterly marginalised, often homeless, rejecting help because of her anxiety and paranoia.

Celia Robertson lightly weaves material from diaries, letters and her family members' memories, with her own compassionate impressions of how Joan/Sophie's life unravels.  She empathises with the difficulty Sophie has "the daily grind of survival" with dealing with social services, the benefits agency, and the health service, keeping herself clean, fed and safe: how she loves to engage in conversation in pubs, and earns the respect and kindness of people she meets in the pubs, her social worker and solicitor.

What makes this biography so important for learning about empathy is the detail of the effect of Joan/Sophie's mental illness on her children and grandchildren - how burdened, desperate, and overwhelming love and guilt can be - and how even when relationships are at their most difficult, it is possible to show care.

In the Introduction, Celia Robertson writes: "Other families did not have mad grandmothers who washed their hair in margarine and cut up their nightgowns... I was sure no one would understand, and partly through a dread of what might happen.. In the back of my mind there was always the fear that I too might unravel and spin off into nothing. As we got older our mother told us about her; the good bits and the weird bits, shielding us from the worst. It was difficult to grasph who she really was or what had really happened to her. On one hand she was the brave creative spirit who had written poems and lost everything: on the other she was the person who sent angry letters scrawled in mad biro, which seemed to fizz by themelves on the hall table and made my mother cry... As children, we began to recognize the envelopes quite early on and knew that they heralded a difficult day."

 

This book is honest and generous to members of a family trying to do their best in the face of untreated mental illness, but also how in the worst of circumstances, a person like Joan/Sophie can find friendship and understanding. It ends with a facsimile of Joan's poem Amber Innocent, including its beautiful Hogarth Press cover, and Celia Robertson's new reflections on Joan's experiences prompted by her own new life as a mother. "I understand completely her panic in the face if mounds of damp laundry, a wailing child with tooth pain and blank pages demanding to be filled. At the same time, the differences between our experiences of life, of motherhood, are huge." If a book can be empathy medicine for a reader dealing with mental illness, this is medicine, a strong medicine.

Comments

A great recommendation

A great reading recommendation during a time when female depression is hitting epidemic proportions and, as Lisa Gormley points out, the psychiatrist's advice to the troubled mother to give up writing was particularly chilling: This was a woman who was being silenced by the very person who had been entrusted to help her. In closing down her ability to channel her pain and express and reformulate herself through her writing, he was sabotaging her very capacity to take things into her own hands and get well. Intimate terrorism indeed.

 

Rating: 
4
4
Average: 4 (1 vote)
Author(s): 
Celia Robertson
Year: 
2008
Book type: