Gaslight Express: Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins, the Vanishing Spinster, and the Freewheeling Single Englishwoman

I was determined to read at least a few chapters of The Wheel Spins (1936) in transit.  The novel is, after all, set aboard a train, hundreds of miles from what the main character, Iris Carr, regards—and at times calls into question—as home.  Written by a female novelist born in Wales, it is a story concerned with Englishness, with patriotism, prejudices and pretenses, and with feeling foreign in strange, peculiarly European, company.

So, after booking a last-minute vacation in the Europe that is now foreign territory to the British—living though they may be alongside European expatriates like myself—I made sure to slip the 2023 British Library paperback edition of White’s mystery into my hand luggage before departure for Vienna.  Habitually slow to turn the pages, I was certain there would be more left in store for me than the dénouement on the short onward rail trip a few days later to the capital of Slovakia, just as it was turning on besieged Ukraine in the matter of grain exports.

The Wheel Spins is an acknowledged variation on the “Mystery of the Paris Exposition” legend, the old chestnut about the disappearance of a woman in a hotel room, and the apparent dematerializing of the very room.  The novel involves a young Englishwoman travelling home after an extended holiday (British for ‘vacation’) in the sublimity of an unidentified region, presumably of the Alps.  Surrounded by non-English speaking travellers in a crowded compartment, she makes the acquaintance of a nondescript middle-aged English spinster, Winifred Froy, who soon vanishes into the proverbial thin air en route to Trieste.  No one except Iris Carr seems to have noticed her; or rather, even the passengers who were in Froy’s company along with Carr, claim that she was never on board.

I might be in a minority on this, but the “Curse of the Zumbro Falls Tunnel” came to mind.  Gratuitous Golden Girls trivia aside, train journeys have long held a fascination for me, albeit culturally and romantically rather than from the viewpoint of someone who does not entirely ride by choice, let alone for pleasure.  As part of an honor’s program while pursuing a Bachelor’s degree at Lehman College—a course of study involving a commute from Manhattan to the Bronx—I even devoted an essay to the subject, and to the relationship between motion pictures and locomotion in particular. While that essay (which you may access here) is concerned with the films of a particular leading lady not associated with Alfred Hitchcock, the adaptation of White’s novel, The Lady Vanishes, nonetheless gets a mention as a cinematic example of the “plot-propelling and symbolic potentialities of the locomotive.”

To be sure, White’s novel takes its time to set us up for the perilous journey by separating Carr from the British youthful and scandalous companions she at once longs for and loathes.  Still, readers of The Wheel Spins get to spend more time aboard a moving train than do viewers of The Lady Vanishes, which obliges us to idle away nearly a third of the film’s running time in the company of mostly minor characters in a long, madcap exposition set in a chaotically crowded pension that serves as a microcosm of a Europe on the verge of another nervous breakdown.

The titular disappearing act—actual and metaphorical, as a threat to national identity in interwar England – is the key theme that The Lady Vanishes retains from its source material; what it ditches, for the most part, is the commentary of the role and status of women in what turned out to be pre-war Britain all over again.  Whether they identify as mother (a mother like Mrs. Barnes, whose husband demands of her not to talk about their absent and, as it turns out, ailing son while on vacation), movie star or mistress, The Wheel Spins is a yarn by and about women.  The underlying question posed by White seems to be: who will advance in modern times, and who is destined to left on the tracks? Is it Winifred Froy, the tweed-clad spinster? Is it Iris Carr, the freewheeling Englishwoman? What is the chance of survival for either of them?

One of Carr’s fellow passengers is a married woman who, aiming to better her position, has an affair with a married man who, in turn, has no intention to get a divorce.  In the film, the husband is exposed as a white flag-waving coward when the going gets tough; but the novel, in which there is no such scene, gives us access to the mind of a woman largely kept from public view behind the blinds drawn on the door of their shared compartment.

“To make matters worse,” White’s narrative sums up her dilemma, “while he was careless of his own failings, his standard for women was so fastidious that she found it a strain to live up to it.  She could never relax, or be natural, without being conscious of his criticism or impatience.”  Briefly, she considers blackmailing her lover into matrimony; and it is the tortured contemplation of her fortune, tied to a man’s fame—for which promises and principles are stretched and broken on the wheel of industry—that further endangers the lives of Carr and Froy alike.

While the shadowy foreign Baroness, who maddens Carr by insisting that she, Carr, is the “only English lady here,” exerts considerable influence on a small group of strangely oblivious European travellers, none of the women in the novel has a role as vital to national security or the future of Britain as Winifred Froy, a character inhabited with brio by Dame May Whitty in the movie.

The position of women in White’s novel is precarious not because they are integral to the wheeling and dealing of male-dominated society but because, without much of an opportunity to take the wheel, they remain inextricably bound up in the machinations of a man’s world.

The greatest threat to Carr’s life is the authority of the sinister “Professor”—rather less menacing in the movie—who declares her “hysterical” and, she is warned by another male traveller, may be “forced to take steps to ensure [her “safety”], unless [she] can manage to keep perfectly quiet.”

“What steps?” and alarmed Carr replies.  “No one can do anything to me against my will.”  And yet, she realizes that it is precisely the freedom of her will that is at risk.  Is it going to be the Professor’s winning spiel that determines whether fortune’s wheel will keep spinning for Carr?

Carr’s peril brought to mind an exchange in White’s earlier thriller Some Must Watch (1933), which was adapted for motion pictures as The Spiral Staircase (1946). “Why do you want to kill me?” the heroine confronts the man who threatens to kill her.  “Because you have neither beauty, nor brains, nor any positively useful quality, to pass on to posterity,” he replies.  “I have a scientist’s dread of an ever-increasing population and a shrinking food supply.  Superfluous women should be suppressed.”

With its toy train gadgetry, its magician’s trunk and climactic shootout, The Lady Vanishes has little of the sustained menace of The Wheel Spins.  Like The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935), an earlier film Hitchcock directed in England before making it big in Hollywood, The Lady Vanishes is a thriller wrapped and at times trapped in the tropes of screwball comedy, a genre that questions gender roles ultimately to confirm them, a naughty cousin of rom-com that was at the height of its popularity in the mid-to-late 1930s.

Whereas White’s narrative centers on the experiences of a single young woman whom no one seems to believe and a single older woman whom nobody claims to remember, the focus of women in peril is sacrificed, to a considerable extent, to make way in The Lady Vanishes for a girl-meets-boy comedy-romance turned spy thriller whose plot thickens—or, perhaps, curdles—whenever Michael Redgrave’s character, a substitute for the two male travel companions whose assistance Carr seeks in the novel, takes the lead.  In the film, it is his ultimate trust in Carr—restored by a clue found in the trash – that saves the day.

Granted, there is more attention in the film on the vanishing Froy—early middle-aged in the novel and elderly in the film—who is reimagined in The Lady Vanishes as an improbable agent in the guise of a spinster.  It is a revision that justifies the plot’s attention to her in her prolonged absence: watching the movie adaptation, we sense from the start, witnessing the attempt on her life in the pension, that she matters, not only to another woman but in the patriarchal scheme of things.

In The Lady Vanishes, Froy’s existence is never in doubt.  We know she is real as soon as we see her among the guests in the pension before she boards the train.  In the novel, we see her only when Carr interacts with her; and Carr, before boarding the train, experienced what might have been a sunstroke—meaning that we are encouraged to question her judgment before taking her side as we get to know her and witness, with her, the extraordinary measures taken by Froy’s enemies to discredit Carr.  Even though the novel is written in the third person, we are looking over Carr’s shoulder, as it were, and, for the most part, see things as she experiences and reflects on them.

In The Wheel Spins, we get to puzzle over why Froy, of all people, should be made to disappear, which makes us wonder at first whether she exists at all.  Along the way, we get to know Froy’s parents—a structurally inelegant backstory designed to assure us that Iris Carr was right all along and that the lady in question is not a figment of female hysteria.  

“Wo ist die dame English?” Carr at one point exclaims in desperation, confronting her fellow travellers.  They only shake their heads and shrug their shoulders as we, even those among us who have watched the movie prior to picking up the book, worry about the protagonist and the dangers to which she exposes herself in her determination to prove her sanity and restore her self-confidence by solving the mystery.

The Wheel Spins and The Lady Vanishes are very different vehicles.  The geopolitical climate changed considerably between 1936, the year the novel was published, and 1938, the year in which the film adaptation was released.  However, that does not entirely account for the difference in tone and perspective.  A male-dominated industry does.  What Alma Reville might have done with the material had she been given the opportunity to work independently of her lionized husband would require a rewrite of history.

The bias against authors of the maligned “Had-I-But-Known” school of mystery, among whom White numbered, persists to this day.  Dismissed in a single parenthetical clause by a male reviewer for the Criterion edition of the The Lady Vanishes in 2011 as ‘a rather unthrilling thriller,’ The Wheel Spins is all the more thrilling for its one-track mindedness. Short on back story, it stays focussed on the ride for which I was thrilled to be taken.

White’s narrative still spinning in my head, the return journey from London took me by car through the Welsh town of Abergavenny, the author’s birthplace.  The driving rain and the impaired vision brought to mind the windowpane bearing Froy’s name—briefly appearing and then fading.  I had assumed this to be one of Hitchcock’s celebrated cinematic touches; but, as it turned out, it is the product of White’s visual imagination, evidence of which I had seen previously in some of her short stories, such as “The Scarecrow.”

In The Wheel Spins, the quality and character of Ethel Lina White’s storytelling is in plain sight; but the name she made for herself was as ephemeral as Froy’s signature on the window.  However resourceful—writing even in the absence of means that, traditionally, have been more readily available to male authors or auteurs who were able to carve a lasting legacy—the once prominent White has all but faded from view.  Rather than subject to the natural process of volatilization, her name has continued to suffer effacement at the hand of critics who, despite evidence to the contrary, are invested in keeping the gaslight burning.  The republication of The Wheel Spins by the British Library constitutes a significant remediation.