The Readers Review: Literature from 1714 to 1910 discussion

Biographical information
**Note = this author's last name was probably pronounced Chumley**

Mary Cholmondeley was born in Shropshire, the third of eight children of Rev Richard Hugh Cholmondeley (1827–1910) and his wife Emily Beaumont (1831–1893).

Much of the first 30 years of her life passed in helping her sickly mother to run the household and her father to do his parish work, although she herself suffered from asthma. She entertained her brothers and sisters with stories from an early age and had the ambition of being a writer.

After her father died, she lived with her sister During the war she did clerical work at the Carlton House Terrace Hospital. Mary died unmarried on 15 July 1925, aged 66.

Her first novel was The Danvers Jewels (1887), a detective story that won a small following. It was followed by Sir Charles Danvers (1889), Diana Tempest (1893) and A Devotee (1897).

Red Pottage (1899) satirizes religious hypocrisy and the narrowness of country life, and was denounced from a London pulpit as immoral. It was equally sensational when exploring "the issues of female sexuality and vocation", recurring topics in late Victorian debates about the New Women.[

Red Pottage was not serialised, since Mary Cholmondeley “refused all offers for the serial rights (…), feeling that, to be fairly judged, the story must be read as a whole” . Its success was immediate: The Academy of 18th November devoted an article to the extraordinary demand for this ‘novel of the moment’:

"On Tuesday, October 24, eight thousand copies of it were offered to London, and it was also published in New York and in the Colonies. Over two thousand supplementary copies were ordered on November 2, and the same on November 3. (…) On the 9th the first edition was exhausted, and large orders yet unfulfilled; but a great firm of printers had the affair in hand, and on the 15th, by the aid of their resources, a second edition of ten thousand copies was ready to be devoured. (…) And he to whom “Mary Cholmondeley” is unfamiliar will henceforth hide his ignorance like a sin. That is fame. Miss Cholmondeley is famous. In three weeks she has become so."

Despite the book's great success, however, the author received little money for it later as she had sold the copyright. A silent film, Red Pottage, was made in 1918. Mary wrote several more novels and stories, but none matched this level of success. Her obituary in The Times of London stated:

Her literary style is simple and unaffected, with admirably concealed art. A severe critic might object to an occasional touch of melodrama in her plots. But in her wit and wisdom, her vein of satirical humour, her resolute refusal to turn her novels into propagandist pamphlets, and her intensive cultivation in each story of one group of characters whose little closed world is made absorbing by her artistry, she reminds us of her great exemplar Jane Austen.

Sources: Wikipedia, Victorian Fiction Research Guides - https://victorianfictionresearchguide.... The latter has detailed analysis of Cholmondeley's plots, characters, values, and writing style. **Probably contains spoilers!**

In one of my comments, I mention an autobiographical note of Cholmondeley on creating her characters. Now I've found the source again: it is the preface to "The Lowest Rung" (and other stories), available on Project Gutenberg:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/...

Recommended reading for fans of Cholmondeley's sharp pen and humour. Here is a quote referring to Mr. Gresley:

The worst of it is that with the academic or clerical prig, when the mind has long been permitted to run in a deep, platitudinous groove from which it is at last powerless to escape, the resemblance to a prig in fiction is sometimes more than fanciful. It is real. For there is no doubt that prigs have a horrid family likeness to each other, whether in books or in real life.

sabagrey wrote: "In one of my comments, I mention an autobiographical note of Cholmondeley on creating her characters. Now I've found the source again: it is the preface to "The Lowest Rung" (and other stories), av..."

In Let the Flowers Go: A Life of Mary Cholmondeley: A Life of Mary Cholmondeley, Carolyn Oulton considers the author’s novel Red Pottage to be’her semi-autobiographical masterpiece.’

Considering that her father was named Hugh, one her brothers Richard (affectionately known as Dick) and one of her sisters Hester, it is not unlikely that their characteristics were close to the surface in her mind when she was writing the novel.

There are too many spoilers in Carolyn Oulton’s biography for me to recommend reading it until most of Mary Cholmondeley’s books have been read. However I am rereading Under One Roof alongside this reading of Red Pottage because large chunks of that book focus on her father, (who as a man of the cloth was probably the polar opposite of Mr. Gresley,) and her sister Hester, both of whom Mary admired greatly.

Trev wrote: "In Let the Flowers Go: A Life of Mary Cholmondeley: A Life of Mary Cholmondeley, Carolyn Oulton considers the author’s novel Red Pottage to be’her semi-autobiographical masterpiece.’"

*sigh* - if the book were not so expensive ... it has been sitting on my wishlist for a long time now.



Edit: ... our University library has got it online, and I know someone who can give me access, hooray! (... my own account having expired years and years ago)

Maybe her father shows up in the character of the Bishop, who is a kind and open-minded cleric.