1970s

The 1970s are the later phase of Beatrice Nest’s teaching career, remembered through the changing students who filled her literature classes and the growing sense that the academic world was moving on without her. The decade links women’s intellectual work to the institutions that limited it: Beatrice taught poetry and literary history, but her professional life had been formed by exclusion, dependence, and the need to demonstrate her usefulness on terms set by others.

Teaching Through a Changing Decade

Beatrice taught students the shape of the sonnet through the ages, the nature of the lyric, and the changing image of women. Her recollection of the successive student generations registers the 1970s as a distinct cultural moment: students appeared in black lipstick beneath Pre-Raphaelite hairstyles, following earlier cohorts in swing skirts and miniskirts. The changing clothes, scents, and styles give her teaching career a lived chronology, while the recurring subjects of her classes connect literary form with the changing public image of women.

The classroom was also where Beatrice’s academic work and her students’ lives met. She remembered these years as good ones, in contrast to the bad period that followed, which she did not care to revisit. Her recollection does not provide a detailed account of that later decline, but it makes the 1970s a threshold: a sustained period of teaching before she took early retirement and ceased to cross the threshold of her former college.

Work Against Institutional Exclusion

Beatrice’s position in the decade had a longer institutional history. In her early career, women at Prince Albert College were barred from the main Senior Common Room until the late 1960s. The alternative room was small and pretty, while decisions of consequence were made in the pub, where women were neither invited nor comfortable. Formal employment therefore did not give women equal access to the informal conversations through which departmental policy was shaped. Beatrice recalled being grateful for work even as she recognized that exclusion from those conversations was unjust.

Her career had also depended on producing work that established her suitability for employment. When Professor Bengtsson doubted that she could make a scholarly contribution through a dissertation on Ash’s poems, he steered her toward editing Ellen Ash’s journal. He later urged her to publish and said that evidence of her suitability was required before he could give her work. Beatrice responded by writing a short book about the daily lives of the wives of eminent men, after which he offered her an assistant lectureship. By the 1970s, she was teaching across literary forms and representations of women, but that professional authority had been won through a constrained route into scholarship.

Women’s Work and the Cost of Dependence

The period’s professional history contrasts with the economic arrangements of Roland Michell and Val. While Roland completed his doctorate, Val became the breadwinner, typing academic work at home in the evenings and taking temporary jobs in offices, hospitals, shipping firms, and art galleries. She resisted specializing and repeatedly described her work as menial. Her paid labor supported Roland’s academic progress, yet remained a source of strain in their domestic life. The typewriter’s nighttime clatter made the cost of that support materially present.

The novel also sets Beatrice’s teaching against a remembered experiment in women’s independence. In Blanche Glover’s account, she and Christabel LaMotte had tried to build useful, fully human lives as independent women, living together without relying on men or outside help. They hoped to live frugally, charitably, philosophically, and artistically in harmony with one another and with nature; Blanche judged that the experiment had failed, whether because the world opposed it or because the women lacked sufficient resources and strength. Her appeal for later, stronger women to continue the task makes female autonomy an unfinished project, not a settled achievement of the 1970s.

Retrospective Significance

The decade is presented retrospectively through Beatrice’s memory of teaching, so its changing fashions matter alongside the larger shifts in academic life. The succession from the 1950s and 1960s into the 1970s makes visible both cultural change and the continuing vulnerability of women’s professional standing. Beatrice’s recollection of the good years is shadowed by what came afterward: retirement, a sense of growing irrelevance, and a college whose threshold she no longer crossed. The 1970s thus signify both the reach of her teaching and the limits imposed on the career she had built.