Stained Radiance: A Fictionist's Prelude

by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, James Leslie Mitchell

This partly autobiographical first novel sketches the lives of ordinary people living through the Jazz Age and the troubled sexuality of the times.

219 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pen name of the Scottish author James Leslie Mitchell.

Born in Auchterless and raised in Arbuthnott, then in Kincardineshire, Mitchell started working as a journalist for the Aberdeen Journal and the Scottish Farmer at age 16. In 1919 he joined the Royal Army Service Corps and served in Iran, India and Egypt before enlisting in the Royal Air Force in 1920. In the RAF he worked as a clerk and spent some time in the Middle East. He married Rebecca Middleton in 1925, with whom he settled in Welwyn Garden City. He began writing full-time in 1929. Mitchell wrote numerous books and shorter works under both his real name and nom de plume before his early death in 1935 of peritonitis brought on by a perforated ulcer.

Reviews

[Ian Jardine · Rating 4 out of 5]

As far as I can see this book is usually regarded as an obscure first novel, thoroughly eclipsed by later, better works. So I was pleasantly surprised to find it was interesting and enjoyable in its own right. Certainly there are bits that don’t work too well and I’m not going to argue it’s a great novel. The relentless irony gets very wearing. The little precis at the start of each chapter and the division of chapters into subchapters with roman numerals came across as rather affected, but the structure of longer sections, with shorter enigmatic little bits to set the mood, struck me as effective and there are plenty of more modern novels that do the same. But there is probably no excuse for using a word like ‘appogiatose’ on page one. There are lots of ideas in here – probably too many and there are times it seems like intellectual showing off. But there are thoughts about love, life, politics, history, art, science, religion, social change, morality, psychology and more which give an insight into the intellectual context of the 1920s and 30s, although some of these ideas seem a bit bizarre a century on. One of the strengths of the book is the portrayal of the changing and uncertain world for young adults in the aftermath of the Great War: the young single women experiencing the freedom and excitement but also the uncertainties of personal independence working in the city, and the young men, unsure of what the world now expects of them or what to expect for themselves. It gives a picture of life in 1920s Britain with the emergence of an educated, more socially and morally liberal lower middle class, still teetering on the brink of poverty but freeing itself from generations where manual labour or domestic service were the only real options. It is undoubtedly romantic, but a romance grounded in reality and risk. For the young women their new freedom to form their own relationships is exciting and liberating but there are dangers; emotional, reputational, financial and physical. But the best bits in the book are the lyrical sections with the terse, poetic writing style describing landscapes, urban and rural, and the people who work in them, giving a foretaste of the kind of writing that LGG would perfect in Sunset Song and its sequels.

[Laura McDonald]

Lewis Grassic Gibbon's very first novel (as James Leslie Mitchell) and one of my dissertation books.. like meeting up with old friends! :)