The Rector's Daughter (Virago Modern Classics)

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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, and it was reprinted in 1999, 2008 (twice) and 2009 (three times). The chapter on her four years at Newnham College, Cambridge in the 1890s is particularly revealing, including the revelation that Mayor and her former tutor, Mary Bateson, remained close friends until Bateson’s early death in 1906.

The Rector’s Daughter – F.M. Mayor – Stuck in a Book The Rector’s Daughter – F.M. Mayor – Stuck in a Book

In October, as regularly as the leaves fell, she began the winter habit of reading her favourite novels for an hour before dinner, finding in Trollope, Miss Yonge, Miss Austen, and Mrs Gaskell friends so dear and familiar that they peopled her loneliness. The novel is minutely observed; there is beautiful detail about each day and the East Anglian countryside, so that although time passes in the book very slowly, it is wonderfully described.I’m not suggesting that all novels ought to be comic novels, but without a slightly ironic eye, or dark humour, or even a slight reflective smile, I am rather lost. Dedmayne Rectory is quietly decaying, its striped chintz and darkened rooms are a bastion of outmoded Victorian values. The Rector, is a stern, scholarly, authoritative figure – often appearing to live for only himself, with little care to the emotional needs and wants of his middle aged daughter.

The Rector’s Daughter’ by F.M. Mayor | Bag Full Of Books ‘The Rector’s Daughter’ by F.M. Mayor | Bag Full Of Books

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. I read 'The Rector's Daughter' a long time ago now–back, I think in 1981 or 1982, and I remember loving it and being emotionally drained by one particular scene, a moment of unrequited passion (and socially impossible to express) where Mary and the man she should have married both experience a moment of revelation. If you can get hold of it, try The Squire's Daughter – it's out of print now but was a Virago at one point.I didn’t find it quite relentless, but otherwise I agree with this sentence (although Hilary, as you’ll see at the bottom, was overall more positive about the novel. With Robert, Mary discovers an intelligent mind, a passion for reading and their friendship gradually develops into a very deep love – which consumes Mary in ways, she had not thought previously possible. It sounded great, but it was not just earnest–and it had some humorous moments–but actually depressing. M. Mayor’s novel was out of print and apparently forgotten, although reading it during the Blitz did give the English novelist Rosamond Lehmann some comfort: ‘In its quiet and personal way The Rector’s Daughter is a piece of history’, she wrote in 1941. The Rector’s Daughter by the cruelly underrated FM (Flora Macdonald) Mayor is a book worthy to rank with anything that George Eliot or Jane Austen set their hand to.

The Rector’s Daughter by FM Mayor review — a novel to rival

The Rector’s Daughter (1924) concerns the life and ill-fated love of Mary Jocelyn, the rector’s daughter in question. 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’ (Forster’s A Passage to India won that year instead). Forster described it as ‘a very great achievement’, and critics on both sides of the Atlantic praised it. Lytton Strachey, my sister and Duncan Grant have all been reading it with great interest’, Virginia Woolf wrote. However, as I finish a lukewarm review of The Rector’s Daughter, I am chastened by the memory of my initial response to Mollie Panter-Downes’s One Fine Day.It would have been all too easy for the author to treat her just as a coarse grained, upper crust horsey type, but F. There was one of the curates at Southsea – I never imagined he cared at all for me; I had hardly ever spoken to him. Aside from the whole issue of romance and spinsterhood etc it's also about general life disappointment in the sense of not achieving your dreams and having to deal with the consequences of that. But what happens to Mary is a fate too cruel to behold and as a reader we share Mary’s feelings of dismay and disappointment.