Mrs. Molesworth (1839–1921)

The Story of a Year is the narrative of one Fulvia Derwent who was the happiest of girls until she was ten. Then ‘came the tidings which were to change our happy life’ and the Derwent home has to be broken up, Mr Derwent has to leave and poor Mrs Derwent is thrown ‘suddenly on her own resources’.

Mr Derwent must go away and attend to his ‘good deal of property in the West Indies, which had come to him from a godfather.’ A letter, one of those fatal Victorian letters, announces show more the ‘exceedingly bad news from St. Benito – in fact as bad as it well can be. The manager of my property, the head man, has decamped, leaving things in the direst confusion, and carrying off all he could lay hands on … and the friendly neighbour who writes to me says I must go out at once, if I don’t want to be utterly ruined.’

In the subsequent discussion and shock Mr Derwent explains why he cannot take his wife and daughter with him. ‘You see it is some way from Jamaica and the more civilised parts of the West Indies. It would be terribly rough – in short, I don’t know what it would be! I have never been there you know. I trusted this fellow completely. Perhaps I should have gone out to see for myself, but my work here has tied me so. And … there is the money to consider! I gather that none will be forthcoming from St. Benito – none’.

The Derwents’ backstory is obvious even with Mrs Molesworth’s always delicate handling, and their ruined inheritance is some kind of plantation and almost inevitably associated with slavery. The novel was first published in 1910 but, from internal evidence, set much earlier. The illustrations in my edition were by Gertrude Demain Hammond and were hazily somewhere between the 1870s and 1880s. Mr Derwent goes off to Jamaica to do the manly task of recovering the family fortune, despite its horrific origins, and leaves his family behind. Mrs Molesworth does not mention whatever happened to the money they (or perhaps more likely his godfather) must have been awarded under the Slave Compensation Act 1837 but she is concerned more with the family left behind in England.

Like Charlotte M. Yonge in Heartsease; or, The Brother's Wife (1854) Mrs Molesworth examines obliquely the legacy and dynamics of enslavement and exploitation through the fate of Fulvia and her mother. They are taken in by a distant elderly and rich relative a Miss Leinster. Mrs Derwent and Fulvia travel to 27 Montagu Gardens, Northborough and their new home. It is a long train journey and Fulvia longs for ‘some hot tea, and bread-and-butter, or cake’ but as her mother whispers, ‘of course it costs two or three shillings.’ Miss Leinster will have tea ready for them mother is sure.

Ominously, they are not met at the station by Miss Leinster, there is no waiting confidential maid and ‘There was no one at all to meet us!’ But Miss Leinster never intended to meet them, she has a ‘dried-up heart’ and Montagu Gardens is a ‘house of cold and gloom’ where they have to unpack for themselves, Mrs Derwent overpays the driver of the fly much to Miss Leinster’s horror, there was just a ‘small bit of candle’ , a damp bedroom for Fulvia, a tiny fire in the drawing-room (more than begrudgingly provided) and some kind of milk pudding ‘of which the predominant liquid ‘must certainly have been water’. This is only the beginning of her two guests being subjected to unnecessary straightened circumstances, encompassed by petty rules and regulations, neglected and having to subsidise their own survival to stave off physical illness and worse. Miss Leinster has taken ‘elegant economy’ to a dangerous almost inhuman level being a thorough miser. Throughout their uncomfortable stay the unforgiving Miss Leinster blames Mr Derwent for the financial disaster in Jamaica. ‘Why, his criminal carelessness is the cause of it all!’

Plot spoiler alert! The Derwents are aided but in a delicate way that Mrs Molesworth borrows directly from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford – through female friendship and agency and the intervention of Miss Guise. Here is Mrs Molesworth’s description of her, ‘a small, middle-aged woman, dressed so neatly, though plainly as almost to look like a Quakeress.’ Her dwelling is pure Cranford being ‘of grey stone, the windows small-paned and not very large – something demure and “old-maidish” … one felt their inhabitants were scrupulously neat and tidy; the doors were painted bright green, as were the window frames, the brass knockers sparklingly polished.’

The borrowing from Cranford is not unexpected as it occurs in The Cuckoo Clock (1877) too. Remember also that Mrs Molesworth was educated by the Rev. William Gaskell and told to write down her stories by Elizabeth Gaskell herself when she lived in Manchester in her youth. There we will leave The Story of a Year because we can’t tell the ending and whether Mr Derwent is of any use at all. His travails in Jamaica are a subplot but one steeped in the story of empire and looking the other way, and while Mrs Molesworth does not tussle with it, she does survey empire’s sister arts of capitalism, the accumulation and maintenance of wealth, exploitation and the dangers of too little money in this compelling and highly recommendable novel. show less

And so, to ‘this beautiful country of France’ once again with Mrs Molesworth and one of her favourite storytelling structures, the story wrapped within another tale. The central story is that of Edmeé (daughter of the Count de Valmont and the young girl in the little old portrait itself) and her experiences of the French Revolution told in a handwritten written memoir.

As a novel for older children Mrs Molesworth was quite clear of the moral of her story: ‘cruel as were the leaders of show more this revolt, frightful as were the deeds they committed, it is impossible, and it would altogether be unjust, to blame them and their followers alone … and certainly the misdeeds which were at the bottom of this most terrible of quarrels, were far more on the side of the upper classes than of the lower.’

From the bucolic estate of Edmeé’s childhood, Valmont-les- Roses in Touraine, the narrative takes the reader to the triumph and fear of revolutionary Paris. There is an eery appearance of a mob singing and dancing to La Carmagnole as well as reflections on the condemned approaching their ‘ghastly journey to death’. ‘Some of them appeared ‘strong in despair, some fainting and unconscious as if already dead, a few, but very few, shrieking wildly for mercy to their brutal keepers - others, many even, with looks of sweet resignation and noble courage, to whom the guillotine was indeed but the gate of Heaven.’

Can Edmeé and her mother escape the guillotine? As a character comments to good Pierre Germaine, Edmeé’s peasant foster-brother, ‘Madame Guillotine will tell you; she’s the only Madame now!’

This novel was later reissued with a different title Edmeé: a tale of the French revolution. show less

In Imogen Mrs Molesworth examines how a single action can lead to unexpected consequences – in the Old Pincushion for example, there’s an unposted letter. Here a mother and her daughter arrive unexpectedly early at a remote country house in this novel for grownups.

The early guests disrupt plans in the house and the visitors are then at the mercy of two unpleasant young women. One can find echoes of Les Liaisons dangereuses and Oscar Wilde’s problem plays as unlikely as it sounds. She show more even borrows the dangers of private theatricals from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

While not as wicked Marquise de Merteuil, both Trixie Helmont, who ‘really forgets she’s a lady sometimes’ and ‘that horrid’ Mabella Forsyth have nastiness and humiliation as their goal and use Imogen Wentworth to attempt to break the spirit of another house guest. Their victim is perhaps one of the noblest and nicest male characters Mrs Molesworth created. But will the good end happily and the bad unhappily? That is for Mrs Molesworth to tell in this dark and unexpected novel. show less

What survives of a literary career after the author’s death, monumental societal changes and the fluctuations of fictional styles and fashions? Mrs Molesworth was born in 1839 and did not die until 1921, although her writing career had effectively ended before the start of the First World War.

Her most republished works were Carrots (1876), The Cuckoo Clock (1877) and The Carved Lions (1895). Dent’s Children’s Illuminated Classics (from the 1960s) republished both the latter two as well show more as Charlotte M. Yonge’s Little Duke. Choosing between Cuckoo Clock and Carved Lions is hard but this reader would have to plump for the latter as well as asking for the inclusion of The Story of a Year.

While some of Mrs Molesworth’s fantasy works require a certain indulgence with their copious doses of whimsy, sentimentality and the fantastical, The Carved Lions always, always charms and soothes because of its roots in the ordinary everyday world of Manchester (Mexington) before she deploys her magic. Even the dreary old city can produce a touch of suburban pleasure for this story’s heroine Geraldine.

'It was not a very cheerful prospect before us – the gloomy, dirty streets of Mexington were now muddy and sloppy as well – though on the whole I don’t know but that they looked rather more cheerful by gaslight than in the day.'

That’s without the kindness of the Miss Fryer the Quakeress, ‘confectioner, or pastry-cook … she was grave and quiet, but we were not at all afraid of her, for we knew that she was really very kind.’ There is Geraldine’s fondness for two carved wooden lions in the entrance of Cranston’s furniture shop, ‘a pair of huge lions carved in very dark, almost black, wood they were nearly if not quite, as large as life, and the first time I saw them, when I was only four or five, I was really frightened of them. …But when mamma saw that I was frightened, she stopped and made me feel the lions and stroke them to show me that they were only wooden and could not possibly hurt me. And after that I grew very fond of them, and was always asking her to take me to the lion shop’.

But Geraldine’s world, where comfort can be found in ordinary things, is shattered when the family has to separate and Geraldine is sent unhappily to a school called Green Bank. She runs away from school, finds Cranston’s and once it is closed dozes by the side of the lions. It is then that she begins to hear the brother lions talking about her unhappiness and their plan to comfort her. Their stratagem involves a ride through the night sky – ‘overhead in the deep blue sky innumerable stars were sparkling’ - to reunite her magically with her family across the seas.

Here Mrs Molesworth mixes fantasy with psychological truth – a distraught and sorrowful young girl needing comfort and reassurance. For this reader at least The Carved Lions is a perennial favourite and especially because this enchanting tale begins in the muddy streets of Manchester. show less