"F B Mayor stands as a link, both stylistic and historical, between Jane Austen and Barbara Pym."
Michael Arditti has written twelve novels and a collection of short stories. He began his professional career writing plays for the radio and stage and has worked extensively as a literary and dramatic critic. His novels have been short- and long-listed for several major prizes. He has been a Leverhulme artist in residence at the Freud museum, a visiting professor at King’s college, London, and was awarded an Honorary D Litt from the University of Chester. His most recent novel is The Young Pretender.
F M Mayor doesn’t feature in my copy of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, although she surely merits a place between children’s writer William Mayne and Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. The unjustly neglected Mayor (1872 - 1932) wrote a collection of stories and three novels, of which The Rector’s Daughter is generally considered her masterpiece.
The Rector’s Daughter was first published in 1924 by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and, in an early chapter, the protagonist, Mary Jocelyn, is taken up by a London artistic coterie, which is surely based on the Bloomsbury Group. The novel was well received, and Mayor was compared to three of her literary heroines: George Eliot, Mary Gaskell and Jane Austen. All of them, incidentally, are referenced here: Mary reads to her father from Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life; she alludes to ‘the Cranford ladies’; more obliquely, a maid is named Mansfield.
Mayor insisted that the book wasn’t autobiographical. Although a spinster who, in later life, divided her time between her parent’s home in Kingston and her brother’s house at Clifton School in Bristol, she had a far more active and eventful youth than Mary, having been one of the first women to matriculate at Newnham College, Cambridge, and enjoyed a brief career on the stage. What she does have in common with her protagonist is the clerical background. Indeed, whereas Mary is merely the daughter of a clergyman, the octogenarian Canon Jocelyn, Mayor was the daughter of one and niece of several others, including the Cambridge professor of Moral Philosophy, John Grote.
This ecclesiastical heritage suffuses the novel and gives it its authenticity. The village of Dedmayne (the name is a clue to its character) is defined as a series of negatives. It is ‘insignificant’, ‘without a station’, ‘ugly’, ‘treeless’, ‘on the way to nowhere’ and, most damningly, ‘the social advantages of Dedmayne were on a par with the scenery.’ Mary and her father are the only gentry in the village and act as moral and social arbiters of its rigidly stratified community.
Mayor allows 35-year-old Mary even fewer physical attractions than Charlotte Bronte allowed Jane Eyre. ‘Her uninteresting hair, dragged severely back, displayed a forehead lined too early. Her complexion was a dullish hue, not much lighter than her hair. She had her father’s beautiful eyes and hid them with glasses. She was dowdily dressed.’
Although the rectory is staffed with a cook, housemaid and coachman, Mary is little more than a drudge, caring for her mentally ill sister, Ruth. When Ruth dies, Mary devotes herself to her father, who shows few signs of gratitude, let alone affection. Her life changes when Robert Herbert, the son of one of the Canon’s old friends, takes over the neighbouring parish of Lanchester. Mayor skilfully delineates Mary’s attraction to him, which she hardly dares admit to herself. After one of the most tentative love scenes in literature, Mary is convinced that an understanding exists between them. Then, on a short visit to Buxton, Herbert meets, falls in love with and becomes engaged to the brittle social butterfly, Kathy Hollings.
Mary behaves with absolute propriety, calling on the new Mrs Herbert, who patronises her. She feels utterly isolated, unable to confide in her one girlhood friend, Dora, who is visiting her sister in China, where (in a phrase that would not get past today’s sensitivity readers), ‘the natives are just like children.’ Afraid to admit that Herbert kissed her to her father, whose enjoyment of Scenes of Clerical Life is marred by knowledge of George Eliot’s adultery, Mary is left to deal with her desolation alone.
The second part of the novel shifts its focus from the rector’s daughter to the vicar’s wife. Mayor expertly depicts the wretchedness of the Herberts’ marriage, from which Kathy flees to the Riviera with her malevolent sister-in-law, Lesbia (in this case, the name is not a clue!). There, something occurs, which it would be unfair to disclose, but which effects a sea change in Kathy. These passages inspire Mayor’s finest prose and reveal her deepest sympathies, as she endorses Mary’s belief that ‘Mistakes sometimes turn out right in the end.’
Notwithstanding its excursions to London, the Riviera and Southsea, The Rector’s Daughter is steeped in a village life which was old-fashioned even at the time of writing. Virginia Woolf may have published the novel, but its subject, style and concerns could not be more remote from The Voyage Out and Night and Day, which had appeared, respectively nine and five years earlier, let alone Mrs Dalloway, which appeared the following year. Nevertheless, the book is a middlebrow classic, and F B Mayor stands as a link, both stylistic and historical, between Jane Austen and Barbara Pym.
F M Mayor doesn’t feature in my copy of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, although she surely merits a place between children’s writer William Mayne and Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. The unjustly neglected Mayor (1872 - 1932) wrote a collection of stories and three novels, of which The Rector’s Daughter is generally considered her masterpiece.
The Rector’s Daughter was first published in 1924 by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press and, in an early chapter, the protagonist, Mary Jocelyn, is taken up by a London artistic coterie, which is surely based on the Bloomsbury Group. The novel was well received, and Mayor was compared to three of her literary heroines: George Eliot, Mary Gaskell and Jane Austen. All of them, incidentally, are referenced here: Mary reads to her father from Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life; she alludes to ‘the Cranford ladies’; more obliquely, a maid is named Mansfield.
Mayor insisted that the book wasn’t autobiographical. Although a spinster who, in later life, divided her time between her parent’s home in Kingston and her brother’s house at Clifton School in Bristol, she had a far more active and eventful youth than Mary, having been one of the first women to matriculate at Newnham College, Cambridge, and enjoyed a brief career on the stage. What she does have in common with her protagonist is the clerical background. Indeed, whereas Mary is merely the daughter of a clergyman, the octogenarian Canon Jocelyn, Mayor was the daughter of one and niece of several others, including the Cambridge professor of Moral Philosophy, John Grote.
This ecclesiastical heritage suffuses the novel and gives it its authenticity. The village of Dedmayne (the name is a clue to its character) is defined as a series of negatives. It is ‘insignificant’, ‘without a station’, ‘ugly’, ‘treeless’, ‘on the way to nowhere’ and, most damningly, ‘the social advantages of Dedmayne were on a par with the scenery.’ Mary and her father are the only gentry in the village and act as moral and social arbiters of its rigidly stratified community.
Mayor allows 35-year-old Mary even fewer physical attractions than Charlotte Bronte allowed Jane Eyre. ‘Her uninteresting hair, dragged severely back, displayed a forehead lined too early. Her complexion was a dullish hue, not much lighter than her hair. She had her father’s beautiful eyes and hid them with glasses. She was dowdily dressed.’
Although the rectory is staffed with a cook, housemaid and coachman, Mary is little more than a drudge, caring for her mentally ill sister, Ruth. When Ruth dies, Mary devotes herself to her father, who shows few signs of gratitude, let alone affection. Her life changes when Robert Herbert, the son of one of the Canon’s old friends, takes over the neighbouring parish of Lanchester. Mayor skilfully delineates Mary’s attraction to him, which she hardly dares admit to herself. After one of the most tentative love scenes in literature, Mary is convinced that an understanding exists between them. Then, on a short visit to Buxton, Herbert meets, falls in love with and becomes engaged to the brittle social butterfly, Kathy Hollings.
Mary behaves with absolute propriety, calling on the new Mrs Herbert, who patronises her. She feels utterly isolated, unable to confide in her one girlhood friend, Dora, who is visiting her sister in China, where (in a phrase that would not get past today’s sensitivity readers), ‘the natives are just like children.’ Afraid to admit that Herbert kissed her to her father, whose enjoyment of Scenes of Clerical Life is marred by knowledge of George Eliot’s adultery, Mary is left to deal with her desolation alone.
The second part of the novel shifts its focus from the rector’s daughter to the vicar’s wife. Mayor expertly depicts the wretchedness of the Herberts’ marriage, from which Kathy flees to the Riviera with her malevolent sister-in-law, Lesbia (in this case, the name is not a clue!). There, something occurs, which it would be unfair to disclose, but which effects a sea change in Kathy. These passages inspire Mayor’s finest prose and reveal her deepest sympathies, as she endorses Mary’s belief that ‘Mistakes sometimes turn out right in the end.’
Notwithstanding its excursions to London, the Riviera and Southsea, The Rector’s Daughter is steeped in a village life which was old-fashioned even at the time of writing. Virginia Woolf may have published the novel, but its subject, style and concerns could not be more remote from The Voyage Out and Night and Day, which had appeared, respectively nine and five years earlier, let alone Mrs Dalloway, which appeared the following year. Nevertheless, the book is a middlebrow classic, and F B Mayor stands as a link, both stylistic and historical, between Jane Austen and Barbara Pym.
The Rector's Daughter is published by Virago Modern Classics.
Michael Arditti's The Young Pretender is reviewed here by Adèle Geras.
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