The Rector’s Daughter, by F M Mayor A N Wilson

OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH Faith, hope and love

AN WILSON The Rector’s Daughter By FM Mayor Persephone Books £13

This novel, first published by the Hogarth Press in 1924 at the author’s own expense, became an instant success. The book was so popular that Boots’ lending libraries restricted the number of borrowers allowed.

Perhaps part of its appeal was that it depicted a way of life that was all but obsolete, even then. Mary Jocelyn leads an uneventful existence in her father’s rectory in a remote East Anglian parish, far from the nearest railway or town. Her father is a learned classicist, a griefstricken widower who takes refuge in his studies as a hedge against sorrow. He is incapable of expressing emotions.

Insofar as he appears to notice his daughter, as she enters her thirties, it is only to belittle her achievements, to throw scorn on her literary ambitions and to ignore, because too painful, her heroic, heart-rending care for Ruth – her sister with what we should call learning difficulties, who dies in the course of the story.

Canon Jocelyn is a Victorian gentleman, who is appalled by the intellectual inadequacy of the modern Church, and who lives, more or less, as if the 20th century has not dawned. Mary subjugates herself almost entirely to her father’s will, consoling herself by reading the novels of Trollope and Charlotte Mary Yonge.

Part of the book’s appeal is that it enabled readers who had lived through the horrors of the First World War, the Spanish flu, the eruption of the Irish Civil War and the poverty and horror of the 1920s to step back into a world that was largely unchanged since Charlotte M Yonge chronicled Victorian parish life in the countryside. But it is a disturbing book, the very reverse of escapist.

Mary is a clever person, and if she had been male, she would have done what her brothers have done – escaped the restrictions of life in the parish and followed a career. It is entirely her gender that is the cause of her imprisonment in her father’s parsonage and her father’s ego. This is made the more frustrating since she, and the reader, can see that in his way Canon Jocelyn is an admirable old man, with his veneration for learning. (Mayor was the great-niece of Grote, the historian of Greece, and her father was a high-flying classicist.)

But what about love? What about feeling? What about the hope, as she passes into middle age, and watches her sister dying, that life might offer her rather more to look forward to than the next Harvest Festival? Hope flickers that a Bloomsburyish little ‘set’ in London might recognise her skills as a poet.

This is an especially powerful element of the novel. This review won’t offer a ‘spoiler’ as to the fate of her literary career, but Mary learns, in her muted, pessimistic way, that literary ‘success’ would be no more fulfilling than parish life if she cannot have something else.

That something is, of course, love. The novel brilliantly depicts a quartet of destinies: those of Canon Jocelyn and Mary and also a neighbouring clergyman, Mr Herbert, and the beautiful, highspirited and highly sexed aristocrat, Kathy, who marries him.

Again, no spoiler will be offered here, but the ‘twist’ in the plot is quite masterly. The reader thinks that the crisis in the Herberts’ marriage, and the strength of feeling between Mary and Mr Herbert, can lead in only one direction. The reader is wrong.

By the end, that reader is beginning to discover that this most surprising work of art is no crude feminist tract, deploring the lot of the unmarried woman, or the married woman. It is an analysis of love, worthy of George Eliot herself – a novelist whom Canon Jocelyn met as a young man, on one of her visits to Cambridge.

What a pleasure to have the chance to re-read this great book, not in the ugly green Virago incarnation of my youth, but in the elegant opal-grey Persephone format, with its fine paper, marbled endpaper and handsome typeface (ITC Baskerville). If you have never read it, you are in for surprise. If you are returning to it, you will be reminded that FM Mayor, that chronicler of the concealed emotion and the quietly nourished intellect, and the well-spent, well-read, unshowy day, left behind a masterpiece.