The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution by Claire Langhamer – review

The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution by Claire Langhamer – review
From a suitable match to the search for a soul mate – Alexandra Harris on our romantic expectations
Alexandra Harris

Fri 9 Aug 2013 11.00 BST First published on Fri 9 Aug 2013 11.00 BST
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Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in the 1945 romance Brief Encounter
Look of love … Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in the 1945 film Brief Encounter. Photograph: Allstar
In January 1930 a 27-year-old woman placed an advertisement in the Matrimonial Post. Perhaps it was a new year's resolution after being badgered by the family at Christmas. Act now, or you'll be settling in on the shelf. So what did she hope for, this young woman, who described herself as "in business"? "Desires to meet clean, and if not good looking, at least pleasant man, earning about £5 per week." This was fairly standard in the matchmaking newspapers (which had been going since the late 19th century). Another woman wanted a "homely man, not too stout, well educated, and of sober habits".

Do we smile, or pity, or admire their expedience? How different are these people from ourselves? Social historian Claire Langhamer works carefully through diaries and magazines, watching for the shifting tones and tendencies of romantic love in mid-20th-century England. "Love has a history," she writes, and it's a striking premise, given our tendency to think of love as an emotion that transcends history and geography and much else besides. If love changes, there's a danger of Shakespeare's sonnets going out of date.

But in fact she rarely gets very close to emotional experience. There's no sense that actually being "in love" felt any different in 1920 than in 1970. What Langhamer attends to is the infrastructure and habits of love: the social rules that determine who you could – and should – fall in love with, the way to meet and court them, the wisdom or otherwise of marrying them. Already we're back in safer territory. Few would dispute that the practice of courtship has a long history involving all kinds of high thrills and sober longueurs, and that today's internet-dating culture (inaugurated in 1966) will soon evolve into something new again. Courtship changes, as do the motivations for choosing life partners. Historians have long been telling versions of these stories.

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Still, Langhamer lays out vivid evidence for small changes amounting to something so radical she calls it a revolution. The language of those pre‑war Lonely Hearts, pragmatic as good brogues and three vegetables, is replaced by talk of emotional fulfilment. By the 1950s and 1960s, you would no longer seek out a man who was "at least pleasant". You hoped for a soulmate, you hoped for the love of your life. And increasingly it seemed that "real" love must involve physical attraction. If, on a first date, the "chemistry" wasn't right, then there was no point in carrying on – even if he was earning a good few pounds a week. "Emotional intimacy became increasingly valorised as the key to happiness," writes Langhamer, "it promised self-fulfilment and well-being." People at any time might have felt this, but the trend towards a majority of people feeling it, and publicly expressing it, is remarkable.

Beneath this broad arc, the evidence leads off in all directions. Finding a suitable partner in the 1930s and 1940s generally meant finding one just like you – except, of course, of the opposite sex. (Langhamer puts same-sex love beyond her remit, though it would be good to hear more about the influence on heterosexual love of that other unfolding revolution.) If there must be an age-difference, the man should be the elder partner. Older women were problematic, confounding the husband's established role as guide and educator.

And what about foreigners? Commentators kept issuing warnings against American soldiers, but English women kept falling for them, with an estimated 40,000 GI brides by the end of the war. A vicar's wife in Somerset instructed women to move away from a black soldier should they see one in the cinema; many parishioners thought this outrageous and said so. In little scenes like this, one sees the rules being remade by people thinking both practically and ideologically.

One hopes there was at least one happy interracial love affair in the North Somerset village of Worle. But Langhamer's evidence shows lovers to have been conservative in their choice of partner throughout the period. It became possible to love openly across boundaries of class, faith, age and race, but in practice people kept wanting to marry those who made them feel "at home".

Much of the source material comes from the Mass Observation Archive, an extraordinary project of social anthropology that began in 1937 and (having been relaunched) is still going today. The idea was to enlist the help of "ordinary" people in gathering information about English lives – all sorts of things, from holiday habits to depilation to taste in pot plants. One of the founders, Tom Harrisson, was an ornithologist known for his census of great crested grebes, and there's plenty of the birdwatching spirit in Mass Observation. Observers in pubs wrote as if they were crouching in bulrushes waiting for a mating ritual to begin. But they also went beyond this to chart their own inner lives, keeping diaries and responding candidly to questions about romance.

The results are a social historian's goldfield. And yet this is tricky material, too, since we don't really know enough about the observers to judge their motivations. An RAF clerk in 1943 writes that marriage partners should share the same fundamental views on social and political matters. Does this tell us anything about RAF clerks generally, or clerks who may or may not live in Lincolnshire with three daughters? In this hinterland between statistics, anecdotes and life stories, it's hard to tell.

The voices we hear most consistently, refereeing the match in moments of doubt, are those of agony aunts from women's magazines. The problem page was apparently invented in 1691 by "troubled adulterer" John Dunton, and I'd have liked more on him. But we hear a good deal from Leonora Eyles in Woman's Own (yes that's Leonora Eyles, "the woman who understands").

To my mind, it's a shame that academic propriety binds Langhamer to objective analysis in neutral language. Quotations are too often sewn together with sentences so safe they are redundant. "Men too could feel let down by love." Well, yes. The problem is that, with material so splendidly eclectic, with exceptions multiplying more quickly than rules, conclusions are necessarily very generalised. Langhamer ends a chapter by saying that "mid-century love was rich and multifaceted, infused with complex hopes and troublesome desires". That sounds like the least that might be said of love at any time. The intense specificity of Ian McEwan's novella On Chesil Beach is fiction, of course, but might get us closer to the truth.

Nonetheless, I'd gladly read a sequel that brought The English in Love into the 21st century. Langhamer argues that, by the 1970s, expectations of romantic self-fulfillment were placing on relationships a pressure they often could not bear. It was no coincidence that this was when calls mounted for change in the divorce laws. Langhamer sees the end of a golden age of marriage.

So where are we now? The English in Love is liable to turn its readers into amateur anthropologists, mass-observing their own culture. I can record that five couples from the same year at the same Oxford college have set up home together. I can't think of any partnerships I know in which the woman is older, but that seems odd. Middle-class weddings are now so extravagant that a fly-past is beginning to seem quite average. Where such anecdotes fit in the arc of love's history remains to be seen.

• Alexandra Harris's Virginia Woolf is published by Thames & Hudson

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