Maggie Craig by Marie Joseph

Marie Joseph was who my Mam read when she ran out of Catherine Cooksons. This was in the late Seventies, early Eighties. Her novels are set in West Yorkshire and East Lancashire. Characters are heard to mutter darkly about those who live in Todmorden.

So there are touches of DH Lawrence, as there are with Cookson. Kids playing out in the streets, mothers slaving in sculleries, fellas boozed up and raging in tiny sitting rooms. There are also Gothic touches here, too: Maggie Craig's father's despair and how he cuts his own throat when her back is turned. The tiny wizened evil woman who leaps out of her bed to strangle our heroine on a stormy night. And the Brontesque feature of how just about every character at some point suffers with a fever or the flu and staggers about on the cobbles or round the shops for a delirious chapter or so.

It's another Seventies book set in Edwardian times, rehearsing once again the lives of ordinary working class people as mapped against the events and the aftermath of the Great War. I have this idea that people learned this history in the Seventies from novels like this and TV shows like 'Upstairs Downstairs' and 'When the Boat Comes In.' I certainly did, as a kid.

Marie Joseph gives us the feeling of the time really well, I think. We've got a stroppy heroine, glamourous in all the muck of her town, and she makes her predicament central and believable. There are little touches that ring true - the details of food (cod head stuffed with bacon bits begged off the butcher) and things like the kids going to school with rags pinned to their pinafores, for wiping clean their slates. The close confines, darkness and muck are so well captured. She puts us right inside those deep, dark valleys by Todmorden and Hebden bridge.

She even does her scenes in the trenches of WW1really well, with Maggie's lost love Joe Barton being in the thick of all that horror. When he's invalided out there's an incredibly touching scene in which a nurse gives him a newborn baby to look after, following its mother's demise. It's a lovely piece of writing, filled with tenderness. Joe lies with the baby tucked into his side and his pent-up composure cracks at last.

Then, of course, the baby turns out to be the very thing that brings Maggie back to her one-time lover, in a bit of plotting and coincidental magic that I don't think even I would try to pull off. But it works nevertheless and the book keeps us guessing right until the very last line, whether love will win the day.

Only thing I'm not at all sure about is the treatment of Maggie's husband - the 'soft, flabby. womanish' fella she marries once her lover has gone. Kit Carmichael is obviously gay and everything in the time and place mitigates against him. At first it seems Marie Joseph is approaching his story with compassion and understanding, showing a thwarted and brave soul, making the most of things and loving Maggie as he can. But because of the clunky demands of what is in the end a Romance novel, his uselessness has to be constrasted sharply with the desirability of the virile and very straight Joe. In both Edwardian times and popular fiction of the late 1970s, it seems there was no other way for Kit to be portrayed, other than an emasculated 'mummy's boy.' It's made me wonder about hunting out a good novel that deals properly with Edwardian working class gay life. Any ideas? It'd be fun to turn 'Maggie Craig' or its like on its head and write it from Kit's point of view. Has it been done yet? It must have, surely...?