A House of Air. Hermione Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ had asked for, and got, £1,500 for the The Perpetual Curate. It was the highest payment she ever had from a publisher. John Blackwood’s old clerk (she was told) turned pale at the idea of such a sum, and remonstrated with his master. The story began to run in Blackwood’s in June 1863, and was produced under even greater difficulties than usual. Mrs Oliphant wrote it only one or two instalments in advance—this at her own request, as the monthly deadline, she said, ‘kept her up.’ In the autumn she travelled, with her usual large party of friends and children, to Rome. There, in January 1864, her only daughter fell sick, and died within a few weeks. Maggie was ten, ‘the beloved companion,’ as Mrs Oliphant had been as a little girl, to her own mother. ‘It is hard to go out in the streets,’ she wrote, ‘to look out of the window and see the other women with their daughters. God knows it is an unworthy feeling, but it makes me shrink from going out.’

      In spite of this, ‘the roughest edge of grief,’ as she found it, she missed only one instalment for Blackwood’s, for May 1864. Stress, perhaps, was responsible for a few mistakes (the church architect is called first Folgate, then Finial), and for the weakness of the sub-plot, involving Frank, as it does, in unlikely misunderstandings. Fourteen years earlier Mrs Oliphant had sent her first novel, Margaret Maitland, to the stout old critic Francis Jeffrey; he told her it was true and touching but ‘sensibly injured by the indifferent matter which has been admitted to bring it up to the standard of three volumes.’ The difficulty remained, the standard length was still demanded in the 1860s by publishers and booksellers, and she set herself to meet it. Certainly the story, with its comings and goings from house to house, moves slowly at times. But Mrs Oliphant, I think, is able to persuade the reader to her own pace, so that we can truly say at the close that we know what it is like to have lived in Carlingford.

      Whatever we may think of the turns of the plot, she is at her shrewdest in this book, and at the same time at her most human. Her refusal to moralize is striking, even disconcerting. It is here in particular that she stands comparison with Trollope, whose titles Can You Forgive Her? and He Knew He Was Right challenge readers not so much to judge as to refer to their own conscience. In The Perpetual Curate the worthless do not repent. Jack Wentworth, the bon viveur, seems on the point of sacrificing his inheritance but the old Squire tells him sharply to do his duty. Everyone is fallible. Young Rosa, who causes so many complications, looks as though she is going to be a helpless victim of society. She turns out to be nothing of the sort. Miss Wodehouse becomes not gentler, but tougher. In Chapter 43 she is treasuring up an incident that might be useful to her in arguments with her future husband. Lucy, because she had made up her mind to sacrifice herself and marry Frank, even though it means being a poor man’s wife, can’t rejoice whole-heartedly at his success; it lessens her, she feels ‘a certain sense of pain.’ And when Frank speaks of poetic justice, Miss Leonora says, ‘I don’t approve of a man ending off neatly like a novel in this sort of ridiculous way.’

      Frank Wentworth’s story returns to the problem of The Rector and Salem Chapel—What does it mean for a man to call himself a priest? and, closely related to this—What can he do without the partnership of a woman? ‘Partnership’ is the right word here. In The Perpetual Curate, the lesson Frank learns is this: ‘Even in Eden itself, though the dew had not yet dried on the leaves, it would be highly incautious for any man to conclude that he was sure of having his own way.’

      Adapted from the introductions to the Virago editions

      of The Rector (1986), The Country Doctor (1986), Salem Chapel (1986) and The Perpetual Curate (1987)

       The Mystery of Mrs Oliphant

      Mrs Oliphant, ‘A Fiction to Herself’: A Literary Life, by Elisabeth Jay

      ‘I don’t think I have ever had two hours uninterrupted (except at night, with everybody in bed) during the whole of my literary life,’ said Mrs Oliphant. At night, therefore, she wrote—nearly one hundred novels, more than fifty short stories, history, biography, travel, articles ‘too numerous to list’ in the index even of this meticulous book.

      She was born in 1828 in Wallyford, near Edinburgh, and brought up in Liverpool. Her father, a clerk, seems never to have counted for much. The mother kept everything going, and this pattern—the helpless man, the strong woman—persisted through her life and in her fiction. Of her two brothers, one became a drunkard, the other a bankrupt invalid. She married her cousin, an unpractical stained-glass designer. He died (for which she found it hard to forgive him), leaving her to drift about Europe for cheapness’ sake, with £1,000 in debts and three young children to feed.

      Before long, her brothers, nieces, and nephews would also look to her for support. Words had to be spun into money, even when her only daughter died at the age of ten, leaving her to ‘the roughest edge of grief.’ She never expected help from her two idle, graceless sons; indeed she indulged them absurdly. Part of her rejoiced in taking charge and preferred her dependants to be weak. She knew this tendency of hers, and described it unsparingly in The Doctor’s Family. In her new biography of Mrs Oliphant, Elisabeth Jay calls her ‘completely self-aware,’ able to see herself in both comic and tragic lights, or as ‘a fat little commonplace woman, rather tongue-tied.’ This phrase comes from her Autobiography, still unpublished when she died in 1897. It reads as a spontaneous outpouring of love and grief, with sharp passages, too, when other women authors come into her mind. (‘Should I have done better if I had been kept, like George Eliot, in a mental greenhouse and taken care of?’) Jay, who edited the Autobiography in 1990, makes it her starting-point here. But she didn’t want, she says, to go through the life and the work, comparing them blow by blow: a career is linear, but a woman’s life is cyclical. Her part-headings speak for themselves: ‘Women and Men,’ ‘A Woman of Ideas,’ ‘The Professional Woman.’ Her only firm ground, she tells us, has been Mrs Oliphant’s attempt to ‘evaluate her gender role,’ but her book, after eight hard years of original research, is much more comprehensive than this.

      Mrs Oliphant, in any case, wasn’t evaluating so much as surviving. The necessities of the long battle made her unpredictable. More than once she described her visit, in 1860, to Blackwood’s offices—‘myself all blackness and whiteness in my widow’s dress,’ a humble supplicant who understood little about money—but when that didn’t work she negotiated advances with the best. She believed that women should be given the vote, but not that she herself would ever want to use it. She could be ‘almost fearsomely correct and in the middle of it become audacious.’ Often, too, her stories don’t give her readers the satisfaction of closure—a conventionally happy or even a well-defined ending. She doesn’t want us to expect too much of life, certainly not consistency.

      Her subjects were the staples of Victorian women’s fiction—money, wills, marriages, church and chapel, disgraceful relatives, family power-struggles, quarrels, deathbeds, ghosts—though she fearlessly stepped outside this in her Little Pilgrim stories, which take place beyond the grave.

      ‘Is she worth reading?’ Elisabeth Jay has been asked time and again. The question is difficult to answer, since the books are so hard to find, and publishers who do reprint them always go back to the Chronicles of Carlingford, probably because the title suggests Trollope’s Barchester series (from which Mrs Oliphant borrowed a little when she felt like it). But although she wrote with marvellous fluency—writing, she said, felt to her much like reading—the length of the three-volume novel seems not to have suited her.

      She is at her very best in novellas and short stories. Two of them, which might well be reprinted together, are ‘The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow’ in which a conventional widow with a large estate falls in love with her coarse-mannered steward, and ‘Eleanor and Fair Rosamond’. Here the wife finds out that her husband has made a bigamous marriage. She has the other woman’s address, and resolutely sets out for СКАЧАТЬ