Laughter in the library
F.M. Mayor's The Rector's Daughter (1924)
Hello and a warm welcome to this week’s edition of the Ladies’ Dining Society. It’s a mild, sunny day as I write here in Cambridge, but the leaves are changing colour rapidly and starting to twirl downwards (always hard to resist gathering those shiny new conkers/horse-chestnuts). Soon students will be returning to their colleges in the town, and some of them might even be lucky enough to study somewhere like this, below. It’s the beautiful Yates Thompson Library at Newnham College Cambridge, designed by Bail Champneys in 1897. When the young Flora Thompson first studied at Newnham in the early 1890s this library had not yet been built, but being in Cambridge was still a happy, life-changing experience for her, allowing her the freedom to make new friends and have fun reading and discussing books. Pretty much what we do here too.
First, some news
After almost a year of writing my newsletter I’m delighted to report that Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society is now a ‘Substack Bestseller’ (with a suitably autumnal orange tick after my name). Huge, heartfelt thanks for all your support. This post is free for all readers but as it’s the first in my ‘book club’ series, the discussion in the comments will be for paid subscribers. Thank you very much for reading!
Last month lots of readers reacted positively to my post about the history of the feminist publisher, Virago (see below) and in particular their role in reissuing ‘lost’ twentieth-century classics. However, as I wrote in ‘A 1924 best-seller’ previously, The Rector’s Daughter not exactly a neglected classic, over the past fifty years anyway. After Penguin Books reissued it in their Modern Classics series in 1973, Virago, took it over and reissued it in 1987 and then it was reprinted in 1999, 2008 (twice) and 2009 (three times). Even so, in 2010 BBC Radio 4 ‘Book at Bedtime’ described it as ‘an unfairly neglected classic’ when it was read in ten episodes by Juliet Stevenson (it's still available on the BBC Sounds app, and is well worth listening to). In 2021 The Rector’s Daughter was reissued by Persephone Books in an elegant new edition with a biographical foreword by Flora's great-niece, Victoria Gray, who in 1992 wrote a radio play based on the book with her late husband, the dramatist Simon Gray.
This week’s post is the first is what I’m hoping will become a regular book club series (more book clubs are listed in
’s indispensable new Directory here). Every month or so I’ll suggest a mid-20th-century novel or memoir by a woman writer, with copies available secondhand or via a library if you’d like to read it. A few weeks later I’ll publish a piece about the book in this newsletter and then we can discuss it, either in a ‘chat thread’ or via the comments. Very much hoping you’ll join us. The Slightly Foxed editors have kindly given me permission to reproduce my essay on The Rector’s Daughter in full below.Reading 20th-century women writers
Out of the Shadows
Take two sisters, Alice and Flora Mayor, identical twins born into a comfortable upper-middle-class family in Surrey in 1872. Their clergyman father was also a professor of classical literature at King’s College, London, and their mother Jessie a talented musician and linguist. As members of a Victorian clerical family, the girls had certain duties (‘Church as depressing as usual. 2 and a half people there,’ young Flora wrote in her diary), but mostly they and their two older brothers had tremendous fun: performing amateur theatricals, skating and playing tennis, singing, writing stories, going to the theatre, and always, always reading: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Mrs Gaskell.
‘Church as depressing as usual. 2 and a half people there.’
Some of their parents’ intellectual interests must have rubbed off though, because at 20, Flora decided to study history at Newnham College, Cambridge. She hated to leave Alice behind, but the sisters wrote to each other every day, Flora’s letters bursting with news of boating on the river, late-night cocoa parties, debating and drama. A college photograph of her shows a dark-haired young woman with laughing eyes (‘Miss Dant said I’d got a great deal of fun about me’). Alice remained quietly at home, sketching and practising her music, while Flora was having all sorts of new adventures. ‘The bicycle is fascinating,’ she told Alice, ‘it’s much easier than skating – not so tiring. Mounting is a trial and one must have knickerbockers for it.’
In the late 1980s, almost a century after Flora, I became a postgraduate student at Cambridge and bought a second-hand bicycle during my first week. Cycling to the university library every day – in jeans rather than knickerbockers – gave me a delicious sense of freedom. I found a battered green-spined Virago paperback of Flora’s novel The Rector’s Daughter on a market stall and fell in love with it, but I didn’t know much about its author. Tidying my bookshelves recently, I rediscovered my student novel collection, and decided to find out more about her.
Growing up, the Mayor twins were close to ‘the Aunts’, their father’s seven unmarried sisters who lived together in Hampstead. All were energetic, cultivated and useful women, but Flora was determined not to be like them or the sister whom she so closely resembled. After four years at Cambridge, she decided to go on the stage, but it wasn’t the glamorous life she’d envisaged. With mostly nonspeaking parts, little money and endless provincial tours, her health began to suffer. Her ambitions to be a writer seemed to be equally ill-starred. When her collection of stories, Mrs Hammond’s Children, was published under her stage name ‘Mary Strafford’ in 1901, the critics were decidedly lukewarm.
So there would be no standing ovation for Flora/Mary, but there was someone waiting in the wings. Ernest Shepherd, a young architect and close friend of one of her brothers, had been in love with her for years. After he was offered a post in the Architectural Survey of India, he travelled to Flora’s cheap lodgings in Macclesfield to propose. She said yes, rather to her own surprise. ‘Being kissed is so odd,’ she told Alice. Ernest left for India, and six months of letters followed, discussing the date of their wedding and their plans for the future.
‘Being kissed is so odd,’ she told Alice.
When the telegram came with the devastating news that Ernest had died of malaria, Flora broke down. At 32, her dreams of a life as an actress and as a cherished wife and mother were over. She poured her feelings into a ‘Grief Journal’ that she signed Flora Shepherd, the name she would now never have. Writing – and Alice’s loving care – were to save her.
Flora’s masterpiece, The Rector’s Daughter, was published under the authorship of F. M. Mayor by the Hogarth Press in 1924. It’s a short, quietly humorous and deeply perceptive novel that’s as good as anything George Eliot ever wrote. Set in the fictional village of Dedmayne, ‘on the way to nowhere’ in the eastern counties, most of the action, such as it is, takes place at the Rectory, where the clocks seem to have stopped around 1895. The Rector, Canon Jocelyn, is an octogenarian clergyman whose dignified bearing and ‘severe, satirical, and melancholy’ eyes make him a striking figure. By contrast, his 35-year-old daughter Mary is described as ‘a decline’.
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.
Dowdy Mary Jocelyn seems nothing like vivacious Flora Mayor, but they have a similar intellectual heritage. ‘Books streamed everywhere, all over the house, even up the attic stairs’ of the Rectory, but ‘not more than three Miltons, because of undesirable views on kings, liberty and divorce’. Canon Jocelyn has a sharp, inquiring mind but his daughter is a puzzle to him, and he fails to grasp her aching need for love. For a time, her older, disabled sister Ruth provides this, but after she dies, only Cook (‘a working woman of sixty-three’) shows Mary any affection. Novels offer her some solace during the long winter months: Trollope, Charlotte M. Yonge and Jane Austen are ‘friends so dear and familiar that they peopled her loneliness’.
‘Books streamed everywhere, all over the house, even up the attic stairs’.
Mary has a secret that she does not share with her father or Cook: she writes stories and poetry. By chance, she is introduced to the well-connected Brynhilda, whose poet friend Dermott is enthusiastic about Mary’s writing. ‘I have never known anyone on such intimate terms with toads,’ he writes, ‘and this, coupled with a passion for Mother Julian of Norwich, indicates a mind I want to know more of.’ Mary, daringly, agrees to visit Brynhilda’s bohemian London flat and at first enjoys its relaxed atmosphere. ‘There was no snapping, fussiness or anxiety. Mary remembered many throes at the Rectory: if the cat took the day off in the woods, if a member of the household was late.’ But after a miserable soirée among the fashionable literary set (‘it was a tribute to Brynhilda that it should come to such a wrong part of London as Kensington’), Mary realizes that she is little more than an object of curiosity to these bright young things, and she returns with relief to decaying Dedmayne.
‘On the whole she was happy. She did not question the destiny life brought her. People spoke pityingly of her, but she did not feel she required pity.’
Like a bright-eyed toad in its shadowy habitat, Mary is content to hide herself away. Then Robert Herbert, a middle-aged clergyman from a neighbouring parish, comes to call. Like Canon Jocelyn, he is a well-read Cambridge graduate, and the two men get on famously, discussing the Greek testament and seventeenth-century folios. Mr Herbert and Mary establish a tentative friendship too, but neither is romantically inclined, or so they tell themselves. One wintry day, as they take their usual walk together in the Rectory garden, everything changes.
The equinoctial wind rushed through the branches of the old elms and roared like the sea. It gave a colour to Mary’s cheeks; her eyes dilated and brightened; the spirit that sometimes showed itself in her writings looked forth. Mr Herbert saw her eyes.
It’s a charged encounter that neither of them will ever forget, but like the wind that changes direction unexpectedly, things don’t go according to plan.
When The Rector’s Daughter was first published, it was widely praised by critics who traced its lineage to the writers whom Mayor loved: Jane Austen, George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. ‘It is like a bitter Cranford,’ wrote Sylvia Lynd. The public loved it too, and Boots Library had to restrict its lending rules due to the novel’s overwhelming popularity. In 1925 The Rector’s Daughter was shortlisted for the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse, an annual literary prize in the interwar years for a work ‘calculated to reveal to French readers the true spirit and character of England’. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India won it that year, but Mayor’s consolation prize was an admiring letter Forster wrote to her that begins ‘This is Dedmayne, plus better scenery’ (he was staying at his unmarried aunt’s house on the Isle of Wight at the time). ‘Mary begins as ridiculous and ends as dignified,’ he told her, ‘this seems to me a very great achievement.’
I like to picture the young Flora Mayor in Cambridge, cycling by the river and dreaming of the adventures that lay ahead of her. Life didn’t bring the excitement she wanted, but she found a lasting contentment in her writing, and in sharing a home with her twin. Flora died of pneumonia in 1932 at the age of 59; Alice, who cared for her sister and made it possible for her to write, lived until 1960.
F. M. Mayor’s small output of novels, including The Third Miss Symons (1913) and The Squire’s Daughter (1929), soon fell out of print, but those who read The Rector’s Daughter never forgot it. In 1941, amidst the London Blitz, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann paid tribute to Mary Jocelyn as ‘my favourite character in contemporary fiction’, and in 1967 Leonard Woolf described the novel as ‘remarkable’ in the fourth volume of his autobiography, Downhill All the Way.
Encouraged by this, Flora’s niece Teresa (Lady Rothschild) asked her brother Andreas Mayor to approach Penguin Books, and The Rector’s Daughter appeared as a Penguin Modern Classic in 1973. It became a Virago Modern Classic in 1987 and has recently been reissued by Persephone Books with a foreword by Alice and Flora’s great-niece, Victoria Gray. It seems somehow right that it was Flora Mayor’s nephew and niece, remembering their writer aunt, who helped to bring her extraordinary, understated novel out from the shadows.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 77 © Ann Kennedy Smith 2023. First published in the Spring 2023 edition of Slightly Foxed ( 77: 'Laughter in the library').
Further reading
There’s an enjoyable piece by
(who wisely doesn’t give any plot spoilers) here; and a good introduction on the publisher Persephone’s website here. You can find out more about Flora Mayor and her family in Sybil Oldfield's Spinsters of this Parish: the life and times of F.M. Mayor and Mary Sheepshanks (Virago, 1984), a well-researched dual biography that provides a fascinating social context for Flora Mayor’s life and work. The chapter on her four years of studying (and acting) at Newnham College, Cambridge in the 1890s is wonderful.Now over to you!
If you have read The Rector’s Daughter for the first time in 2024 (or if you’re coming back to it), I’d love to know what struck you most about it and other books you’d recommend.
Do you think it deserves its reputation as a great novel, and who was the most memorable character for you?
‘Mary has a choice, twice, and makes it to the best of her maturing judgment’ writes the critic Janet Morgan. ‘She keeps her freedom and in the process finds more.’ Would you agree?
‘People spoke pityingly of her, but she did not feel she required pity.’ The Rector’s Daughter has been described as a sad book. Did you find it any humour in it too?
All comments and thoughts very welcome - or you can always send me an email by replying to this newsletter.
Ok I will try answering some questions myself... I was very struck by the development of Kathy as a character (or rather, she's the one who most sticks in mind, in the years since I first read it). Like AN Wilson, I don't give plot spoilers in my essay here, but I'm going to assume if you've got this far, you probably know what happens. Perhaps in creating the glamorous outgoing Kathy, Mayor was exploring what might have happened if she herself, as a would-be actress, had settled down with a decent but rather staid man. Kathy's loss of beauty (and her feckless friends) allows her to show her vulnerability rather than cover it up with 'hilarity' and makes her all the more interesting as a character, I think. While Robert Herbert shows signs of turning into a Canon Jocelyn, perhaps...
I thoroughly enjoyed the novel! I looked forward to picking it up every evening--always the sign of a good book for me. I like books that are both plot and character driven, and this one met those criteria. Mayor was a gifted and insightful writer. I highlighted extensively, both long, descriptive paragraphs and short, substantive observations such as "The soft power of time at length healed her."