A Crooked Mile

In Short

Set in pre-World War I London, Oliver Onions’s 1914 novel examines the lives of two contrasting women—the fiercely intellectual, bohemian Amory Towers and her pragmatic, exasperated friend Dorothy Tasker. While Amory and her husband Cosimo finance progressive magazines, host intellectual salons, and preach free love and feminist theory, their actual home life falls into financial chaos and emotional paralysis. Dorothy, meanwhile, groundedly navigates domestic realities alongside her improvident husband. The novel endures as an unsparing, dryly comedic critique of intellectual pretension, contrasting fashionable utopian theories with the stubborn demands of real human relationships.

The Story

The narrative opens with old Lady Tasker navigating North London to visit her family, serving as an outsider's window into the suburban bohemia of Hampstead. Her niece-in-law, Dorothy Tasker, lives in a modest flat, constantly overwhelmed by financial anxieties, her growing brood of children, and her easygoing, shiftless husband, Stan. To keep their household afloat, Dorothy writes advertising copy while Stan takes on bizarre, perilous stunt jobs for moving pictures.

In sharp contrast stands Dorothy’s former art-school companion, Amory Towers. Wealthy following her husband Cosimo Pratt’s inheritance, Amory inhabits "The Witan," a Hampstead home outfitted with iron ties, electric fixtures, and an asbestos-log gas fireplace. Amory and Cosimo view themselves as vanguard pioneers of modern thought. They fund and publish The Novum, an unlucrative radical journal edited by the calculating Edgar Strong. The Witan becomes an arena for high-minded debates, where political figures, art students, and free-love advocates gather to pontificate on everything from Indian policy and Trade Union militancy to insect sociology and the abolition of traditional marriage.

Despite their endless talk of liberation, the inner lives of the reformers are thoroughly disorganized. Amory rejects traditional motherhood, treating her twin children as theoretical exercises and handing them over to servants. She maintains a tense, posturing connection with Cosimo, who engages in a subtle, semi-public flirtation with the bohemian Britomart Belchamber. Seeking to assert her own authority and test her emotional limits, Amory engineers Cosimo's departure for India to investigate colonial political crises.

In Cosimo's absence, Amory’s grand theories begin to unravel. Her working relationship with Edgar Strong founders on financial realities; the journal bleeds money, and Edgar cares far more for cold figures and editorial control than for Amory's vague spiritual inspirations. Meanwhile, the pretensions of the salon are periodically shattered by outsiders—most notably by Eli Crabtree, a blunt Yorkshire collier who openly scoffs at the salon's theoretical chatter, calling the gathering a "menagerie" of people who do not know they are born.

As financial losses mount past three thousand pounds, Cosimo’s fortune dwindles, and the grand social experiments founder. Amory experiences a profound inner collapse, realizing that her art, her public causes, and her marital independence have left her spiritually hollow and completely exhausted. Unable to bear the wreckage of her domestic life, she wanders out onto the dark heath in a state of silent numbness. Dorothy finds the drifting, despondent Amory and takes her in, putting her to bed in the Tasker family dining room. Striped of her intellectual armor and wearing a borrowed nightgown, Amory looks back on her lost ideals. Years later, the chaotic vanity of the Hampstead salon gives way to quiet recovery; the scene shifts to the country estate of "The Brear" in Ludlow, where a noisy, healthy horde of children runs wild through the summer air, anchored at last in traditional, unpretentious domestic stability.

How It Unfolds

The suburban vanguard Lady Tasker visits her family in Hampstead, highlighting the divide between old-fashioned social expectations and the trendy, theoretical lifestyles of the younger generation. Dorothy Tasker struggles to balance her chaotic household, her children, and her husband Stan's precarious employment.

The architecture of reform Amory Towers and her husband Cosimo establish their home, The Witan, as a hub for progressive thought, financing the radical journal The Novum. Amory surrounds herself with artistic symbols and intellectual admirers like editor Edgar Strong, preferring theoretical social revolution to the mundane work of parenting.

The commerce of ideas Dorothy takes up writing advertising copy to manage her family's debts, crossing paths with commercial figures like the manager Mr. Miller. Meanwhile, Amory and Edgar clash over advertising standards and editorial direction, exposing the friction between pure idealism and financial necessity.

The salon at work Radicals, Labour MPs, and eccentric theorists gather at The Witan to debate industrial warfare, feminist literature, and progressive child-rearing. Their lofty pronouncements on free love and social evolution are bluntly disrupted by Eli Crabtree, a visiting Yorkshireman who mocks their total ignorance of practical working-class life.

The drift toward crisis Feeling emotionally detached from Cosimo, Amory encourages him to travel to India. Left behind with Edgar, she tries to play the role of political muse, but her romanticized ideals crumble against Edgar's cold pragmatism and the journal's ruinous financial losses.

The breakdown and retreat Overwhelmed by spiritual emptiness and the realization that her modern lifestyle has delivered neither happiness nor art, Amory suffers a quiet emotional collapse on the heath. Dorothy rescues her, taking her into the modest Tasker home, where Amory finally abandons her radical posturing for simple, grounded human care.

The People

• Amory Towers (Mrs. Pratt): An ambitious, self-absorbed painter and intellectual who seeks to remake her life according to modern feminist theories. She wants artistic prestige, political influence, and absolute personal independence, but her contempt for domestic duty leaves her emotionally hollow, exhausted, and alienated from her family.
• Dorothy Tasker: Amory’s pragmatic, fair-haired friend from art school. Lacking Amory's financial resources and intellectual pretensions, Dorothy wants only to keep her growing family fed and housed. Her unpretentious common sense and warm capacity for affection make her the ultimate anchor for those around her.
• Cosimo Pratt: Amory’s wealthy, easygoing husband whose inheritance bankrolls The Novum. He wants to be seen as a patron of advanced thought and modern freedom, but his lack of business acumen leads to massive financial losses, while his marriage dissolves into passive indifference.
• Edgar Strong: The calculating, unsentimental editor of The Novum. Driven by a desire for professional efficiency and control, he tolerates the bohemian posturing of his backers only so long as it serves the publication, treating Amory's romanticized ideals with sharp realism.
• Stan Tasker: Dorothy’s good-natured, shiftless husband. He takes physical risks performing movie stunts to support his household, enduring constant bruising and hardship with cheerful resignation.
• Eli Crabtree: A outspoken Yorkshire collier whose brief appearance at the salon exposes the absurd disconnect between urban theoretical socialism and actual working-class experience.

In Its Own Voice

"He was saying something about South Square and Merton Lane. Lady Tasker addressed the bracing Highgate air in one of those expressionless and semi-ventriloquial asides that, especially in a mixed company, always made her ladyship very well worth sitting next to."

— Lady Tasker makes her disdain for North London suburban geography quietly known.

"Capitalist-employed troops would not destroy more property than they need; in a crooked-streeted town the advantage of long-range fire would be gone; and Mr. Wilkinson was prepared to demonstrate that a town defended on his lines could hold out, in the event of Industrial War pushed to an extreme, until it was starved into surrender."

— The Witan’s resident Labour politician delivers his grand, bloodless theories on urban strike warfare.

"As a spinally-anaesthetized subject may have a quite poignant interest in the lopping off of one of his own limbs, and may even wonder that he feels no local pain, so she assisted at her own dismemberment."

— Amory observes the quiet collapse of her marriage, motherhood, and artistic ambitions without feeling immediate emotional distress.

What It's Really About

At its core, the novel is a sharp critique of intellectual vanity and fashion-driven radicalism. It examines how modern theories—whether regarding free love, advanced child-rearing, or political restructuring—can become convenient shields against genuine self-knowledge and ordinary human responsibilities. Through the contrast between Amory’s high-minded, expensive failures and Dorothy’s chaotic, affectionate domesticity, the book argues that life cannot be lived inside abstract dogmas. When theories of marriage and social reform ignore the realities of human emotion, money, and parental instinct, they lead not to liberation, but to exhaustion, isolation, and spiritual bankruptcy.

Why Read It Today

Oliver Onions offers an unsparing satire of progressive intellectual culture that feels remarkably modern. Readers who enjoy psychological realism, social irony, and sharp character studies will appreciate his piercing observations of human self-deception. The writing possesses a dry, precise wit that strips away romantic illusions without becoming overly bitter.

The novel presents a few period difficulties. The prose is deliberately layered and dense, demanding attentive reading rather than quick scanning. Modern readers will also encounter heavy regional Yorkshire dialect during Eli Crabtree's monologue, alongside early twentieth-century political and philosophical allusions that reflect the specific anxieties of Edwardian Britain.

What lingers after finishing the book is its subtle psychological accuracy. Onions captures the quiet terror of realizing one has built a life around fashionable postures rather than authentic feeling. It is a rewarding, unusually perceptive read for anyone interested in the friction between public ideologies and private lives.