The Woman Who Did — Context and Discussion

Diction and the Construction of Character

Allen’s word choices reveal his characters’ inner lives through small, telling verbs and adjectives. When Alan is introduced to Herminia, he “drew back with a vague gesture of distaste”—the word “vague” suggesting a reflexive, almost unconscious aversion. Later, Herminia’s reaction to Perugia is rendered through verbs of negation: the hills “depressed her,” the Etruscan tombs “stirred her heart but feebly,” and St. Francis “fell flat on her English fancy.” These are not grand pronouncements but quiet, cumulative rejections. The narrator’s vocabulary for Alan’s sketching—he “revelled all day long in his native element”—contrasts sharply with Herminia’s passive “wondered how he could sit so long.” Such lexical choices build a portrait of two people fundamentally out of sync, long before the crisis arrives.

Dialogue as a Vehicle for Ideological Tension

The dialogue in the opening pages is economical but loaded. Mrs. Dewsbury’s “gay wisdom” in pairing Alan with Herminia because she also dislikes deans is a light, almost comic moment, yet it foreshadows deeper ideological divides. When Alan later falls ill, the telegram from his father—“marry the girl at once, and legitimatise your child”—introduces a blunt, legalistic voice that clashes with the couple’s professed principles. Herminia’s internal response is rendered in indirect speech: “she feared lest in this extremity… he might wish to take his father’s advice, and prove untrue to their common principles.” The word “common” here is telling, implying a shared creed that is now under threat. Allen uses dialogue and its reported aftermath to dramatize the conflict between personal conviction and social pressure.

Setting as a Mirror of Emotional State

The description of the Surrey landscape in the opening paragraph is not merely decorative. The “endless middle distances” and “uncertain blue line” of the South Downs mirror the moral and emotional ambiguities to come. When the scene shifts to Perugia, the setting becomes actively hostile: “Bare white boughs of twisted fig-trees depressed her.” The adjectives “bare,” “twisted,” and “depressed” are chosen to reflect Herminia’s growing unease. The Italian doctor’s diagnosis of typhoid is delivered with clinical precision—“Twenty-one days before… he had drunk a single glass of water”—and the narrative then shifts to a scientific register: “those victorious microbes had brooded in silence in his poisoned arteries.” This juxtaposition of the picturesque with the pathological underscores the novel’s concern with hidden dangers and the fragility of idealistic plans.

Recurring Details: The Hand of the Artist

Allen repeatedly draws attention to the act of seeing and representing. Alan is introduced as a painter “diverted by pure circumstance into a Chancery practice,” and his sketching in Perugia is described in detail: “He sketched every morning, among the huddled, strangled lanes; sketched churches and monasteries, and portals of palazzi.” The repetition of “sketched” emphasizes his compulsion to frame and fix the world. Herminia, by contrast, fails to respond to art: “The very pictures in the gallery failed to interest Herminia, she knew not why.” This recurring motif—one character who sees through an artist’s lens, another who remains unmoved—is a subtle structural device. It suggests that their incompatibility is not merely ideological but perceptual, rooted in how each engages with the world.

Readers approaching The Woman Who Did should attend to the precision of Allen’s language, particularly in the early chapters where character is established through small gestures and offhand remarks. The novel’s arguments about marriage, motherhood, and independence are carried not by abstract debate but by concrete scenes—a lawn, a telegram, a fever. The excerpts offer a limited view, but they reveal a writer who trusts his details to do the work of persuasion.

There’s a particular ache in rereading Allen’s descriptions of the typhoid fever in Perugia—how he lingers on details that feel almost accidental, the way memory itself surprises us. It reminded me, quietly, of the gentler notes I found in Clarence — Reading Notes, where the same patient eye turns toward what remains unspoken. I still think about that opening scene sometimes, on ordinary afternoons.