Despised and Rejected

By a forgotten writer who deserves to be revived, Despised and Rejected has a number of strong themes: opposition to war, acceptance of homosexuality, tolerance of others, awareness that 'it is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple, one must be woman-manly or man-womanly' (Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own). It is also a very well-written novel, and a page-turner. The book begins deceptively as light social comedy (one reason it is not better known): in July 1914 a family gathers at a holiday hotel in Devon. There is a dominant father and a socially ambitious mother who adores her son Dennis. When he arrives it is at once clear to the reader why he does not fit in with his smugly conventional family. Then, with the outbreak of war, the tone of the book changes: it focuses on Dennis's refusal to fight, indeed on his abhorrence of violence; his falling in love with Alan; and his close friendship with Antoinette, who has not realised she is lesbian but is unabashed when she does. Dennis, however, is in agony about being 'a musical man' (slang for being gay): 'Abnormal - perverted - against nature - he could hear the epithets that would be hurled against him. But what had nature been about, in giving him the soul of a woman in the body of a man?'