Two young women move into a student hall of residence in London, and have this conversation:
"It would be nice if we went around and talked like an Edna O'Brien novel. It would suit us."
"Yes it would become us" I said. "We haven't the class for Girls of Slender Means."
Hilary Mantel knows exactly the tradition her 1995 novel An Experiment in Love is tapping into. Set in 1970, it is the perfect template of the women-living-together book: here are the shared clothes – a hideous-sounding but very fashionable fox-fur coat – the rivalries and jealousies, the secrets, the alliances. (And an appearance by an unnamed character who is clearly Margaret Thatcher).
Because after all, what do women do when they grow up? They move to the big city, where they share flats, rooming-houses, hostels or halls together, in twos and threes and fours. One of them is anxiously pursuing a career, but another just wants to get married. One will have an affair with someone who is married, and one will have an unwanted pregnancy. There's a whole genre out there of books (and films and TV) about women sharing flats or student digs - yet it's hard to think of any corresponding literature about men.
Perhaps the knife-edge dynamic of shared accommodation suits the female narrative: is it where you feel safe, so you can go out and conquer the world, but at home are free to wander round in your knickers and borrow each other's clothes? Or is it more a place of stolen stockings, stolen boyfriends, the last egg (labelled) gone missing from the fridge, and notes about the cleaning rota? The women might be loyal sisters in solidarity (lying for each other to parents and boyfriends on the phone, providing a shoulder to cry on) or they might be rivals for careers and men.
In real life, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby shared a flat in a rather go-ahead, avant-garde way after the first world war: there's now a blue plaque outside their building in Doughty Street in London. Brittain said in Testament of Youth (1933) that it wasn't just independence they gained – she makes the telling point that it was the first taste of privacy either of these privileged women from well-off families had had. Both pacifists, they taught, wrote, and pursued wide-ranging political interests.
In Dodie Smith's 1920s-set novel The Town in Bloom, the young women alternate between a "Club" (read: respectable hostel) for young women, and sharing a mews flat – it's called The Heathen because it hasn't been wholly converted from being a stable/garage. The aspiring actresses and their stories are quite strange, but comparison with Valerie Grove's 2011 biography of the author, Dear Dodie, shows that the book (published in 1965) was hugely autobiographical – one of Smith's most surprising remarks is that she and her friends were "just clinging on to their amateur status" regarding their sex life in the period.
Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means (published 1963, but set in 1945) is the ur-novel of women living together: "love and money were the vital themes in all the bedrooms and dormitories" of the May of Teck Club. There's the taffeta Schiaparelli evening dress, which can be borrowed from its owner on payment of soap or clothes coupons: "you can't wear it to the Milroy. It's been twice to the Milroy." And there are the arguments, the fascination with food and calories, going up on the roof to chat, the still-shocking ending (thin women win, in a way you couldn't expect).
Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar was published the same year and again was looking back – this time to "the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs", ie 1953. Esther is an intern in New York and living with the other girls in a hotel: there is a similar collection of clothes crises, bitching and sudden friendships. Rona Jaffes's The Best of Everything – a massive 1958 bestseller, a successful Hollywood film and widely accepted as one of the inspirations for Mad Men – is another classic of the genre: three young women are friends, with two flats between them, and going in wildly different directions in their lives. Unrequited love, nervous breakdown, career vs marriage prospects, illegal abortion – it's all there.
Cait and Baba, Edna O'Brien's Country Girls (1960), move to a room in Dublin, go out into the "neon fairyland" of the city and know that "we're living at last". Next thing they're buying black underwear and stockings – no wonder the book was considered shocking when it first came out. They know their room is shabby, but any kind of city life is preferable to the country, and a married lover from the past turns up again. It's a far cry from Brittain and Holtby working for feminism and the League of Nations from their flat.
Of course murder story writers caught on to the possibilities of the shared flat: it's a group of people living in proximity, strangers, with endless motives, possibilities, and perhaps hidden identities. Ruth Rendell has flatshares in, for example, Some Lie and Some Die and Murder Being Once Done, both early 1970s, and Agatha Christie's Third Girl in 1966 describes the logistics in detail: "it's the way girls like living now … the main girl takes a furnished flat, and then shares out the rent … They fix it among themselves which one has the flat to herself which night a week."
That last feature turns up surprisingly rarely in literature: perhaps it was merely how Christie imagined it would be … But then we get to Tales of the City: when Michael Tolliver's friend and room-mate Mona brings home a young man, they decide to – how can we put it? – share even more. Armistead Maupin's 1978 book makes it clear that the days of single-sex accommodation are over: the San Francisco residents of Barbary Lane live together and have a past of shared flats and houses in every possible configuration – and Michael, one of life's natural sharers, takes a prominent role along with her-name-says-it-all Mary Ann Singleton.
The whole rich field raises many questions which I hope readers can answer. Examples, please, of men sharing flats. Which literary flat would be most fun to live in? Time to share your views along with your flats …
