Why Lord of the Flies author William Golding didn't put girls on his classic novel's island

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

When Judy Carver was a child, her schoolmaster father regularly sent off a parcel to London that always, to his dejection, came back. She eventually understood that it was a story called Strangers from Within.

One day, there was elation in the house. The story was going to become a book. Judy heard the words “Faber and Faber” so often she thought that was now the book’s title rather than the name of the publisher, but Lord of the Flies, written by her father William Golding, was published in September 1954, when Judy was nine. The book is now 72 years old and flourishing again as a four-part BBC One drama that concludes this week.

Judy – Carver is her married name – remembers that much-travelled and long-unwanted manuscript: “It was dog-eared. That was one of the things that [editor] Charles Monteith at Faber spotted: other publishers had been reading it, but it was well read only up to a certain point, when people gave up. So he pushed on further, and transformed my father’s life.”

Judy agrees that Faber’s choice to call the book Lord of the Flies – a traditional name for the Devil, that also alludes to a buzzily scary scene in the novel – was an improvement on her father’s original. It reflects ominous, mystical qualities in the story of a group of schoolboys stranded on a tropical island following the crash of a government plane evacuating them during a nuclear crisis, who descend into violently competing cliques. Does Strangers from Within, though, address more directly the book’s theme of how people can transform when in extremis?

“Well, indeed,” says Judy. “That word ‘strangers’. Another phrase, in an essay my father wrote, is that we are suffering from ‘the terrible disease of being human’. And you could say what he is talking about is an internal intrusion or a malignant growth or something like that.”

In one way, the famous title became an irritation to Golding. His daughter’s 2012 memoir, The Children of Lovers, includes a story about photographer Lord Snowdon capturing a furious reaction from Golding after congratulating him on having written The Lord of the Rings, the JRR Tolkien book that is another adolescent classic.

“People made that mistake lots and lots of times,” says Judy. “I think he knew he was being manipulated by Snowdon to get a reaction, but he couldn’t help looking thunderous in the picture. The mistake still happens and I just have to let it go. I think it was clever of Snowdon to do that because Daddy loved to subvert photographers’ expectations of what the author of a book like Lord of the Flies should look like by smiling and telling jokes.”

The island dystopia of Lord of the Flies has been shared with tens of millions of readers and viewers of movies and now TV. But what was Judy’s experience of it? “When it was first published, I was nine, and Daddy said I could read the first 50 pages before things got bloodthirsty. And all I really remember is thinking: goodness, there’s a reference to [Arthur Ransome’s] Swallows and Amazons! I really loved those books.

“I read the whole of Lord of the Flies when I was 14 and can still feel the sense of dread. I wouldn’t say that I re-read it now reluctantly but it’s always going to be a tough read. It’s a very sad book.”

Today’s TV viewers of Lord of the Flies will find it unusual to see four hours of drama featuring only male characters. Judy remembers that when Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn bought the film rights to the book, he had a “bit of a rumpus” with Golding: “Goldwyn wanted to put little girls on the island and my father said, ‘No, if you do that, you completely change the story and have to have things like sex.’”

An interesting aspect of the book is that the government seems only to have put boys on the evacuation flights; if the aim was to repopulate elsewhere, surely girls would eventually be required? “There’s a lot more detail in the full unedited manuscript that I sometimes think I might publish and then think: no, he cut that stuff out. I don’t remember any reference to girls in the manuscript. But actually I will rush back to it and have a jolly good look because it’s a good question.”

Judy later contacts me to say that, in the first paragraph of the initial version, there is a reference to politicians sending abroad “a job lot of children”. However, her father crossed out “children” and replaced it with “boys”.

With that pen stroke was born what has come to be seen as a handbook about masculinity. Golding had been a teacher of boys – is the book very directly about the male psyche? “He never said that specifically. What he did say was that he was a son and a brother and a father, and so he knew about boys and didn’t know about girls. The fact that he was the father of me seems to have eluded him at that point! I don’t think, though, he wanted to commit himself to the book being about what we now call ‘toxic masculinity’.”

The late Sir Tom Stoppard told a story about his sons studying Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at school and getting bad marks when the playwright helped them with their essays. Did any later generations of Goldings get Lord of the Flies as a set text?

“That Stoppard story is wonderful. My children’s schools carefully avoided them being in the tutor groups that did Lord of the Flies. None of my grandchildren, as far as I know, has been taught it, although one was told that he should read The Inheritors [Golding’s 1955 novel about Neanderthal society]. Which I don’t believe he has done.”

Golding wrote other novels that were arguably greater – such as The Spire (1964), in which a spiritually uneasy Dean supervises the building of a huge cathedral – but his story of feral plane-wrecked boys so dominated the novelist’s reputation that the subtitle of John Carey’s posthumous biography was The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies. Did Golding ever regret or resent the book being seen as his creative pinnacle?

“I think Daddy was superstitious about ever regretting it, because it changed so much. Later in his life – when he was in his 60s – he had a nightmare about Charles Monteith writing to him and rejecting the book. So it still seemed to him a bit of a knife-edge. He felt the same thing about being interviewed or praised too much: that he was tempting fate.”

Judy recalls that, when asked to list his favourite books, her father “would say he thought The Inheritors was his best. Then The Spire. Then he’d add, in a slightly shamefaced way: ‘And Lord of the Flies isn’t bad!’”

Golding “hated the idea of a film being made” but came to love Peter Brook’s 1963 movie adaptation, especially the black-and-white photography, and the use of choral music by Raymond Leppard, an admirer of Benjamin Britten, whose own music is, in a deliberate link, used in the current BBC version. However, the novelist refused to see Harry Hook’s 1990 version due to suspicions that seemed justified by the reviews.

In 2005, the BBC broadcast Golding’s trilogy about an early 19th-century sea voyage as the mini-series To the Ends of the Earth, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jared Harris (now available on Amazon Prime). But, as a director of the family company that manages the Golding estate, Judy says that most inquiries involve Lord of the Flies.

“A very good film director held the rights to The Spire for many years, but that won’t happen now. People often want to turn The Spire into an opera. And a very determined man tried to make an animation of The Inheritors, which would have been interesting. But none of these things seem to happen. Maybe they will now.”

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