'If she was a bloke, she’d still be in print': the lost novels of Gertrude Trevelyan
Her debut about a woman who raises an orangutan as a human was widely praised in 1932, but her work has slipped from sight. Is it time for a revival?
Great things were predicted for Gertrude Trevelyan in 1932, when she published her debut, Appius and Virginia, about a lonely woman who sets out to raise an orangutan as if he were a human child. The novel was heralded by the Spectator as “exciting both in promise and achievement”, while the eminent critic Gerald Gould wrote: “So original is it that I have scruples about writing the word ‘novel’ at all.”
Trevelyan, who has all but sunk into obscurity, had been the first female winner of Oxford University’s Newdigate prize for poetry while a student there – a win that garnered headlines from Wisconsin to Auckland, and prompted the Daily Mail to predict that her “future work will be watched with interest”. By 1940, she had published seven more novels as GE Trevelyan, when her Notting Hill home was hit by a bomb during the London blitz. She died of her injuries in February 1941, at the age of 37; her death certificate described her as “Spinster – an Authoress”.
Appius and Virginia by GE Trevelyan is published by Lightning Books.
