It Ends with Revelations

It Ends with Revelations is a 1967 novel by Dodie Smith, author of I Capture the Castle and 101 Dalmatians. It has been reviewed by Clothes in Books, but look out for spoilers!

Smith was always interested in clothes. The heroine, Jill dresses older than her age in "off-black or gunmetal". The two teenage girls she befriends wear miniskirts, white boots and a home-made felt Modigliani shift. The elder has "veils" of long blonde hair, the younger a dark elfin crop that makes her look like a cat. There is a good scene in a coffee bar full of youths who all seem rather dirty or at least "sickly and pale". Angela Carter pointed out that beatniks and hippies stopped wearing the currently fashionable heavy, vividly coloured make-up, and to someone who hadn't seen a naked face since the 30s they did look "dirty and pale".

Jill is married to a famous actor, Miles. After her rough childhood and early life, Miles's money cushions her from unpleasantness. Their marriage is sexless, but loving. They are in "Spa Town" for an out-of-town tryout when Jill meets a handsome widower, Geoffrey, and his two teenage daughters. The girls immediately latch on to her in a somewhat overpowering way. They seem "precocious" and annoying, but it transpires that they grew up without a mother and have clearly educated themselves from books (probably Pelican paperbacks). There is another precocious child - Cyril, the boy actor in the play who seems unsure of his real age.

Apart from the convoluted plot, which reads like a compendium of problem pages, the interest for me was the light shed on pop psychology of the day.

The younger girl is sure she’ll turn out to be “frigid”, the other has feelings, but represses them in case she turns into a “nymphomaniac” like her mother, who was also a “dipsomaniac”. (She was an alcoholic and had many affairs.) They don't hold back when discussing all this with Jill. People can be "sex mad" or "thoroughly repressed".

Eventually Geoffrey tells her the story of his wife's alcoholism. “Her doctor said a psychiatrist would upset her and she just needed patience.”  She periodically “pulled herself together” (presumably "sobered up"), but “she wouldn’t cooperate, see doctors or psychiatrists”. Perhaps I “drove her to drink”, he wonders.

Miles's opinion of Cyril? "The boy’s just a drooling mass of self-pity."

The following year, homosexuality was legalised. Read the book to find out who ends up with whom.