The Tower Study Guide

Born in Manchester, England to a Jewish family of prominent intellectuals, Marghanita Laski worked briefly in fashion before studying English at Somerville College, Oxford. She met her husband, John Eldred Howard, while studying there and then began work as a journalist. Following the birth of her children, Laski focused her attention on writing, mainly fiction and some screenplays. Her novel, Little Boy Lost, about a father searching for his son in post-war France, was published in 1949. Laski spent the 1960s and 1970s publishing nonfiction about other English writers, acting as science fiction critic for the British newspaper The Observer, and participating in popular BBC panel shows. Laski was a member of the Arts Council of Great Britain and chaired the Literature Panel from 1980 to 1984. Throughout her life, she was a prolific contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, amassing around 250,000 quotations. A voracious reader, she was personally invested in the history and development of the English language, and sought to shed light on non-literary vocabulary that was often neglected in the OED. Other notable works by Laski include The Victorian Chaise-Longue, an unsettling novella about a woman who slips into an alter ego’s body, and Tory Heaven, a satirical novel taking place in an alternative Britain. Laski died in 1988 at the age of 72.

In 1955, Britain was a decade removed from the horrors of World War II and had made significant movement toward a new standard of social normalcy. The Labour Party had returned to power and, in 1946, created a comprehensive welfare state to provide healthcare for the working class. At this time, an emphasis was placed on conformity, traditional marriage, and the cultivation of the nuclear family, in which women were expected to maintain the home while their husbands worked. Popular media and public education reinforced these gender roles as the foundation on which Britain would rebuild. Simultaneously, women were seeking occupations outside the home in increasing numbers, lobbying for equal pay and organizing housewives’ associations to promote the interests of working mothers. Early feminist writers spoke of social responsibility, insisting that women should be encouraged to contribute outside the home as well as within it. The tension between the gendered indoctrination and burgeoning feminist ideology of this time period is easy to locate in Caroline, the protagonist of “The Tower.” Caroline is torn between her desire for independence and her supposed duties as a wife; in attempting to satisfy both, she betrays her own intuition and realizes the extent of her own patriarchal entrapment.

Though many of Laski’s other writings are very different from “The Tower,” her 1953 novella, The Victorian Chaise-Longue, explores similar themes of horror and entrapment from a female perspective. In it, a woman recovering from tuberculosis falls asleep on a Victorian chaise-longue and wakes up in a different sick body in an earlier time, trapped by both illness and patriarchal oppression. An earlier example of feminist writing dealing with these themes is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” published in 1892. In this story, a husband confines his young wife to a single room in an effort to cure her so-called hysterical tendencies, but the room’s hideous yellow wallpaper drives her to madness. Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House, also features a female protagonist losing her grip on reality—the protagonist even makes a harrowing trip to the top of Hill House’s tower. As in “The Tower,” Jackson’s horror is primarily psychological and layered with unsettling ambiguity. Finally, Laski’s novel The Village provides a deeper dive into the author’s views on what it meant to live as a woman in post-war Europe. This book tells the story of a young couple in love but forbidden to marry, touching on the themes of cultural pretense and class differences that make a brief appearance in “The Tower.”