"I'm enslaved in one vast love affair with seventy childen"
By sally tarbox on 17 Jan. 2014
Format: Paperback
Based on the author's own teaching experience in New Zealand, this novel follows Anna Vorontosov, committed but unconventional infant teacher in a mainly Maori school. Anna's personal life is a mess: she moons over former love Eugene, needs a glass of brandy to make it in to work, and feels a constant failure from the inspectors' visits and the low marks they award her. I found the first part of the book hard going, especially Anna's irritating relationship with new teacher Paul. It was only lifted by the episodes of classroom life and their humour:

"Miss Vontosov, can I leave the axe in here. Seven's brother is trying to chop my little sister's neck off."

As the book goes on, Anna finds a new interest in life, as she starts to develop 'Key Vocabulary' to get her Little Ones reading - words that pertain to things they love or fear, rather than the stilted and meaningless readers issued by the government. But will the inspectors recognise her genius?...
The book really began to take off for me at this point. ( )

Written in 1958, Spinster by Sylvia Ashton-Warner is the fictional account of a teacher who recognising that each person has their own personal key vocabulary is able to reach the Maori children in her school who previously had been dismissed as slow learners.

The book is based on Ashton Warner’s own career as a teacher in New Zealand and the reading scheme described is her own highly successful method of teaching reading for which she became internationally known.

As well as fiction, she wrote two autobiographies, had a biography written about her and a film made about her life in 1986.

I ended up buying this book as I misread the author's name as Sylvia Townsend-Warner and didn't realise my mistake until I was adding it to my catalogue. Oh well, I thought, another Virago Modern Classic, I'll happily read it.

So I read it, and I have to admit it involved some skim-reading, but on the whole it is rather engaging novel about a middle-aged single woman teaching in a small school in New Zealand and struggling to teach the little ones to read when all the official lesson plans are heavily structured and don't actually engage the kids, so she ends up trying something else that's grown out of her experience.

The foreword was interesting and shed some light on the context of the book, and how Ashton-Warner turned her teaching ideas into a novel to get the ideas out there and noticed. ( )

Initially published in 1958, Spinster is the story of a 34-year-old woman named Anna Vorontosov who teaches young Māori and white children in a small New Zealand school. Written from Anna’s first-person point of view and in a stream-of-consciousness style, the book takes readers through a year in Anna’s life. When the novel begins, a new young teacher named Paul Vercoe has just joined the school, and Anna’s job appears to be in some sort of jeopardy. Anna launches herself into each day with a brandy, and she defends the trees in the schoolyard while looking for some sort of key that will enable her to reach the small children in her care.

I have a love/hate relationship with stream-of-consciousness narration. Done well, it can be extremely effective, but it’s tough to bring readers into a character’s mind. Stepping into this book felt far too much like stepping into the middle of a story, and it took me a while to feel I understood much of anything.

This struggle to understand would be forgivable if it had led me into the mind of an interesting character, but I wasn’t far into the book before I developed an intense dislike for Anna. She is the embodiment of almost every unpleasant stereotype I can think of about spinsters. She’s afraid of men and annoyingly naive about them; she spends much of her time mooning over Eugene, the love she gave up years ago, and mourning for the children they might have had. Although she claims (and sometimes exhibits) devotion to her Little Ones at the school, whenever a man enters the picture, her emotions are thrown into a tailspin. What makes it worse is that it draws from the married author’s assumptions about spinster life, and that just rubs me the wrong way.

At about the halfway point, I very nearly gave up; however, I decided to press on because there is some arresting prose in the book, and I enjoyed Anna’s interactions with the children. The last half of the book, which focused more on Anna’s teaching, was a big improvement over the frustrating first half; however, Anna’s tendency toward melodramatic flights of fancy continued to annoy me.

See my complete review at Shelf Love. ( )