A lovely thing

Featuring on Substack & book club plans

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society. Some news… towards the end of last month my publication featured in Nick Hornby’s piece for Substack Reads, a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, and art from the world of Substack. (Posts and publications are recommended by staff, writers, and readers and edited from Substack’s UK outpost.¹) As a result, I was sent this delightful rosette which, if it was available in non-digital form, I’d be proudly pinning to my jacket lapel from now on.

To celebrate, I’m launching my new feature of my publication: a virtual ‘book-club’. Every month or so I’ll suggest a vintage novel or memoir and publish a piece about it here. If you like the sound of the book, and want to read it yourself (copies available secondhand or via a library) we can discuss it a few weeks later, either in a ‘chat thread’ or via the comments. Because of the numbers involved, this discussion will be limited to paid subscribers.

Below is a short introduction to the first novel in this series; my essay on The Rector’s Daughter followed by our online discussion is planned for 21st September 2024. Hope you’ll join us!

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The Rector’s Daughter, Virago

A 1924 best-seller

Soon after Flora Macdonald Mayor’s second novel, The Rector’s Daughter, was published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1924, they discovered they had a best-seller on their hands. The chief literary critic at Time and Tide, Sylvia Lynd praised it warmly, saying it belonged to ‘the finest English tradition of novel writing’ and she compared it to Elizabeth Gaskell’s affectionate novel of English village life: ‘It is like a bitter Cranford... Mary Jocelyn’s “nothing” is a full and rich state of being.’²

The public clearly loved The Rector’s Daughter too, and lending libraries had to restrict how long readers could borrow it for, due to its overwhelming popularity. The sophisticated members of London’s Bloomsbury set agreed, even though (or perhaps because) Mayor satirised their literary pretensions in her novel. ‘Lytton Strachey, my sister and Duncan Grant have all been reading it with great interest’, Virginia Woolf told Vita Sackville-West (a copy of the book is among the 4,000 volumes in Vita’s writing room).

Vita Sackville-West’s tower writing room at Sissinghurst Castle, Kent

The Rector’s Daughter was a runner-up for the 1925 ‘Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse’, a literary prize for a work ‘calculated to reveal to French readers the true spirit and character of England’. Unfortunately for Mayor, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India was published that year and ended up winning the prize. But she had the satisfaction of knowing that Forster himself was an admirer. He wrote to her to offer his congratulations, describing The Rector’s Daughter as ‘a very great achievement’.

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The Rector’s Daughter, Penguin Modern Classics

A twentieth-century classic

Flora Mayor’s lifelong poor health made her unable to fulfil much of her early literary promise. But she was a successful author with a three-book publishing contract when she died suddenly of pneumonia in 1932, aged fifty-nine. Her 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. Reading it for comfort during the Blitz, the English novelist Rosamond Lehmann realized what a great book it was: ‘In its quiet and personal way The Rector's Daughter is a piece of history’, she wrote in 1941.

Then, in 1973, Penguin Books reissued The Rector's Daughter in their Modern Classics series. In 1987 the new publishers on the block, Virago, took it over and reissued it in their own highly successful Virago Modern Classics series, with its distinctive bottle green spines (my post about this publisher is here). The Rector's Daughter was reprinted by Virago in 1999, 2008 (twice) and 2009 (three times), and has the rare distinction over of being one the few novels that has been published in the UK as a Penguin Twentieth Century Classic, a Virago Modern Classic and most recently, by Persephone.

‘a masterpiece, a flawless English novel… most beautifully written, with economy, plain elegance, perspicacity, grace.’ Susan Hill on The Rector’s Daughter

Yet loved as it is by readers, it’s somehow a novel that’s still not widely known, and often described as ‘neglected’. In a recent piece for The Times, the writer and critic D.J. Taylor describes The Rector’s Daughter as ‘one of those curious novels in which a cauldron of suppressed emotion and unrequited love boils away behind a landscape in which, for all practical purposes, hardly anything happens’. He says that as a novelist, F.M. Mayor ranks with Jane Austen and George Eliot, and I tend to agree.

More on this heartbreaking, unforgettable novel soon. Do please add any of your thoughts below - and thanks, as ever, for reading.

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1.

Sarah Fay

has written knowledgeably about this:

How to Be Featured by Substack

2. Sylvia Lynd, Time and Tide, 18 July 1924. More on Cranford here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranford_(novel)