Megan Nolan Hails Agnes Owens's A Working Mother as Class Radicalism

Agnes Owens published her debut story collection, Gentlemen of the West, at fifty-eight. Megan Nolan leads her new foreword to Owens's 1994 novel A Working Mother (McNally Editions) with that fact, and it does quiet work as a rebuke. A journalist once expressed breathless surprise that Nolan lacked a college degree. Owens, Nolan notes, did poorly in school and was described as "a hopeless case."

Owens worked as a typist, in factories, and as a cleaner. Her first husband, a traumatized war veteran who self-medicated with alcohol, died at forty-three. She raised seven children across two marriages. A 2014 obituary in The Scotsman called her upbringing "poor, but not uncommonly so."

Who discovered Owens, and when?

James Kelman, Alasdair Gray and Liz Lochhead found her at her local writing group — which, Owens said, she joined to get out of the house. Kelman stands out as her particular antecedent, though they differ formally. Kelman wrote Glasgow dialect close to everyday speech; Owens wrote staccato sentences in the vein of Gertrude Stein. Both belonged to a literary era that took politicized pride in the local, rooted in socialist principles rather than chauvinist nationalism. Kelman, like Owens, refused the framing of working-class Scottish life as something exhilaratingly foreign to the presumed reader.

A Working Mother marked Owens's return to publishing after a fallow period following the 1987 murder of her son Patrick, killed outside the family home at nineteen. The novel is autobiographical. Its narrator, Betty, raises children amid substance-fueled chaos while her husband Adam — modeled on Owens's first husband, WWII trauma and alcoholism included — crawls on all fours in his sleep, sweating out the memories.

What makes the novel singular?

Nolan's verdict is precise: Owens found a novel way of conveying the surrealness of everyday life. Events carry curious, even weight. Losing a prized umbrella gets as much attention as a wedding day:

"He's just gone round for sugar," said Adam's stepmother, who hated Adam. "But he's getting married today," Betty calls up. "Oh yes, I believe he mentioned something about it."

The couple bicker with melancholy and malice, then function like a companionable Punch and Judy show before their children. Their son Robert erupts at a dinner of chips with no sauce: "I can't eat no more of this rubbish." The marriage runs on a wearily comic bond:

"I've got a job," I told Adam. "Good for you. I can now relinquish all responsibility for this household then?" "And I can save up for a divorce." "So, let's celebrate," said Adam.

At work as a typist for a legal firm, Betty meets Mai, an unwed single mother too scandalous to be open about at the office, made up with spidery mascara and dyed jet-black hair. Mai prefers Adam's company to the baleful Brendan, whom the couple treat as something between a pet and a foster child — and whom Betty, on the sly, takes as a lover too.

Is this an alcoholism novel?

Nolan says no, firmly. "There is no misery porn here," she writes. "Nothing plaintive." Betty's passivity is heightened to the point of becoming willful, a philosophy: if you haven't much say in your own life, why not submit to the whims of fortune? Owens's son John Crosbie told his mother one critic had called the novel an important book about alcoholism. Owens responded drily that she didn't know she had written a book about alcoholism.

The book's other great character is Betty's boss, Mr. Robson, who pays her to type his book, The Study of Human Behaviour in Animals, while masturbating behind a screen. "As I wasn't involved in this I considered I had been let off lightly," Betty recalls. Robson observes her behavior as though she were a lab specimen — a disdainful fascination with a class of people who seem bestial to him. Nolan reads this as the novel's mirror: Owens rejected the impulse to categorize her work much as Betty rejects Robson's impulse to categorize her person.

What was at stake for working-class writers?

The context is damning. When Kelman won the 1994 Booker Prize, the literary establishment reacted with disgust; one prominent English columnist called him "an illiterate savage." A publisher told Owens they were not interested in writing about poor people. In A Working Mother, Nolan concludes, Owens proposes the radical notion that you can be both poor and a person — and that any given life rewards intelligent attention when it is as fine and as funny and incandescent as hers.