Harold Nicholson and Desmond McCarthy—the terrible twosome

Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough, but the only photos I’ve seen that feature Harold and Desmond have also included other Bloomsberries, notably Vita Sackville West. I’m not a fan of Bloomsbury and could only bear to watch ten minutes of one episode of the current TV drama, Living in Squares, but I don’t think either man was part of the Virginia 'n Duncan inner circle, as it were, and I don’t think the two were great friends. But there must be some reason why they were snapped together. Perhaps it was another bookfest organised by the Times or Sunday Times, as was the case with the Read and Spender press photo. This one, from the Graphic Photo Union,  bears identifications in pencil on the reverse . Desmond died in 1952, aged 75, a year after being knighted for services to the critical essay and the amusing anecdote, so the photo was probably taken around the mid 1930s.

Some of the most entertaining and scathing remarks on MacCarthy and Nicholson can be found in Virginia Woolf’s published Diaries. I have the volume for 1931 – 36. Here, for instance, are her views on Desmond:

Thursday, 3rd September 1931
‘…Oh, I was annoyed at Desmond’s usual sneer at Mrs Dalloway---woolgathering. I was inspired to make up several phrases about Desmond’s own processes, none of which, I suppose, will ever be fired off in print. His worldliness, urbanity, decorum as a writer; his soft supple ways. His audience of teaparty ladies & gentlemen. His timidity. How he wraps everything in flannel…His perpetual condescension.His now permanent stoop in the back. His aloofness---in the bad sense. I mean, he never takes a nettle by the leaves: always wears gloves…’

And Nicholson:

August 12, 1934
‘…Vita thinks Harold is getting soft & domestic, because he talks of grandchildren & wants to have a butler to brush his clothes & a spare room…’

[R.M.]

Secret Places XV & XVI

Two more chapters of The Secret Places (Elkin Mathews & Marrot London 1929) - a chronicle of the 'pilgrimages' of the author, Reginald Francis Foster (1896-1975), and his friend 'Longshanks' idly rambling in Sussex, Kent and Surrey. See our posting of the first chapters for more on Foster and this book, including a contemporary review in The Tablet.

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Edward Fitzgerald buys a Constable and conceives Alice (1841)

Found in  A Fitzgerald Medley (Methuen, 1933) an excerpt from a letter by Fitzgerald (the translator of Omar Khayyam) that he sent to his friend Frederick Tennyson in January 1841. Charles Ganz, the editor of the anthology, includes this in the introduction to a piece Fitzgerald wrote for children - a version of Dickens's Little Nell in simple language for children. The letter reads:

I have just concluded, with all the throes of imprudent pleasure, the purchase of a large picture by Constable*, of which, if I can continue in the mood, I will enclose you a sketch. It is very good:but how you and Morton would abuse it! Yet this, being a sketch, escapes some of Constable's faults, and might escape some of your censures. The trees are not splashed with that white sky-mud, which (according to Constable's theory) the Earth scatters up with her wheels in travelling so briskly round the sun; and there is a dash and felicity in the execution that gives one a thrill of good digestion in one's room, and the thought of which makes one inclined to jump over the children's heads in the streets. But if you could see my great enormous Venetian picture you would be astonished.

Does the thought ever strike you, when looking at pictures in a house, that you are to run and jump at one, and go right through it into some behind-scene world on the other side, as Harlequins do? A steady portrait especially invites one to do so: the quietude of it ironically tempts one to outrage it: one feels it would close again over the panel, like water, as if nothing had happened.

Ganz comments: "This fantastic idea reminds us of Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there. Carroll wrote his story. Fitzgerald played with the idea and let it slide. One cannot  help regretting that he never wrote an original story for children, but we must rejoice that Little Nell's Wanderings, the result of the efforts of two men of genius is left to us."

*Not sure what this picture was. I can find no paintings of Venice by Constable. It would of course be excessively valuable now. He is known to have bought two Constables in 1842 that sold for healthy sums when he died in 1876. The cover of the book is by Frank Brangwyn.

Read and Spender—unlikely double act

Whatever—or whoever—could have brought publicly together ‘pylon’ poet Stephen Spender (1909 – 95) and Herbert Read (1893–1968), art critic,  professional writer of introductionsto other people’s books and self-styled anarchist? This press photograph gives few clues, although the most evident seems to be the large posters advertising The Sunday Times, in front of which the two men are standing. The photo was one of many in a small archive of similar material that turned up in an auction a few years ago.

The photo appears to date from around the mid thirties, which may suggest that both men were snapped at the London International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, which was covered by al the major London papers, including the Sunday Times. However, there is no real reason why the two very different writers should have been grouped together. Spender admitted that Read had become a friend ever since the older man’s sympathetic review of his Poems (1933), but Read’s name is missing entirely from the published Journals, 1939 – 82, of Spender, who never showed much interest in Surrealism. It does not follow, of course, that there should be any connection between the two figures, who may have been snapped by a Sunday Times photographer while they visited the Exhibition.

An alternative circumstance for this pairing may have been the Spanish Civil War, which was dividing intellectuals in the mid thirties. Both Read and Spender would have supported the Communists, and indeed Spender reported to Read at this time that he had become a communist.

While Spender’s reputation has been enhanced since his death. John Sutherland’s biography and the Stephen Spender Trust has seen to that, Read’s profile, despite a biography  (The Last Romantic) has faded somewhat. The view of his contemporary and fellow critic, Geoffrey Grigson is fair, I think, and echoes my own views of Read, who was once such a ubiquitous presence in the literary world.

‘He was no genius, he had no very acute perception… of the arts of painting, sculpture or writing. I would even say there was something to Wyndham Lewis’s charge that he had never looked a picture in the face, although he knew the kind of picture to look in the face…Not much of a poet, to tell the truth not much of a writer, he was an art apostle who stuck to his preaching…’ [R.M.Healey]

J. B. Priestley by L.R. Reeve

Another piece from the papers of L.R. Reeve*. He never met Priestley but saw him speak and even appears to have been pointed at by the great man.

J. B. PRIESTLEY

J. B. Priestley may during his adult life have sometimes failed to reach his usual high standard. Certainly I have at times experienced an uneasy feeling that some passages have galloped along giving a faint impression of superficiality, a suspicion of slickness, pretentiousness, and pot-boiling. Yet I would forgive him half-a-dozen trifling contributions because of the heart-lifting, sustained enjoyment arising from The Good Companions, which I encountered more than thirty years ago, and have read again in 1969 with even more pleasure than at the first reading: a fact which leaves me wondering why thirty years on, when one is supposed to reach a plateau of jaded thrills and fancies, the enjoyment of an earlier book is assuredly enhanced. It may be that one's appreciation of a classic increases after many years of weary persistence in studying second-rate literature which misguided critics have informed us are masterpieces; or it may be that when one's knowledge of the human condition is greater than in early days, the better we are able to appreciate a perfect delineation of real men and women.
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John Mitford—‘a pleasant layman spoiled’

Mitford's vicarage at Benhall

That’s what Charles Lamb called this literary odd job man, who was a cousin of the essayist Mary Russell Mitford, and who wrote of a visit to Lamb at his home in Islington in the  Gentleman’s Magazine, which he edited for seventeen years; he was   also editor of Gray and Goldsmith, and collected manuscripts ,old books, paintings and Chinese ceramics. He was a gifted cricketer too, a passionate gardener, and in any spare time left to him, he managed to squeeze in a bit of preaching in his parish of Benhall, near Saxmundham in Suffolk.

Here we have a tiny letter from Mitford, in miniscule handwriting, dated July 5th 1848 and addressed to an unnamed correspondent—probably the editor of a magazine, for Mitford was a prolific writer of articles. At this time Mitford himself was editing the Gentleman’s Magazine. It’s worth transcribing the letter in full as it gives a flavour of what a literary hack of the early nineteenth century got up to, although with the security of a clergyman’s income, Mitford was hardly a typical denizen of Grub Street. The letter relates principally to Mitford’s opinion of a new biography of Oliver Goldsmith.

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Violet Jacob—-Scottish poet and novelist

Although Violet Jacob (1863 – 1946), is highly regarded in her native Scotland as the author of the much admired novel Flemington (1911) and as a poet writing in the Scots vernacular, she is hardly known in England. She is often compared in stature to Hugh MacDiarmid (whom she knew) and her work,both printed and in manuscript form, can be found in public collections throughout Scotland. She is also appreciated online, where a scholarly site records her life in two parts—early and late. The letter shown here , which dates from Boxing Day 1935, and is from the  archive of her friend Annie Schletter,
belongs to the last decade of her life, when she was often to be found touring Europe with her severely asthmatic  husband Arthur, a former soldier. On this particular sojourn in a part of Italy that she seems to have known since at least 1930, she was staying in the very opulent Hotel de la Reine in the fashionable Ligurian resort of Ospedaletti, a favourite haunt of the English for decades. In the previous decade Sigmund Freud had stayed at the same hotel, but a very different kind of clientele became the target of Jacob’s lash in Christmas 1935. In a very lively account of her latest stay at the hotel, she turns her withering humour and novelist’s eye on her fellow guests:

The usual old trouts---Mrs Steve, the Ellis & Benson sisterhood, the Nightingale family & the trio of Miss Ashley, her sister, Mrs Fletcher & her cousin Mrs James. The latter sisterhood are almost more than I can bear. Miss Ashley herself has a face like a cow-pat & that is the truth. Platitudes fly from table to table. I just pretend that I am deaf & dumb & blind & so I survive. I do wish you were here. Arthur & I laugh in private & he, being one of the greatest mimics I ever knew, gives me little private impersonations.

Jacob also announces that she has taken up oil painting and that the Italian that Schletter had taught her ‘has been the joy of life here ‘. Alas, Jacob’s life was to change forever a few months later with the death of her beloved husband. She retired to Kirriemuir in Angus and died in 1946. [RR]

Gordon Bottomley – 1890’s poet

Found in a copy Poems at White Nights (published in 1899 in Cecil Court, London) a contemporary review of the book. The review is unsigned but was obviously from a national daily paper as there are financial reports on the back. Gordon Bottomley is a mildly collected fin de siecle poet, of considerable talent but slight neglected -possibly because of his name which could be used as the the butt of jokes, so to speak. His first book The Mickle Drede and Other Verses was privately printed in Kendal in 1896  and is a great rarity and of some value. He attempted to destroy all of the 150 copies as he considered the work immature..The reviewer below senses dark currents in his work.

Mr. Gordon Bottomley's second volume, Poems at White Nights (At the Sign of the Unicorn), shows him still frequenting the darker woods of Faerie. One fragment in it is a dedication for some book of verses in which the receiver is bidden to read:

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The Secret Places XIII & XIV

Two more chapters of The Secret Places (Elkin Mathews & Marrot London 1929) - a chronicle of the 'pilgrimages' of the author, Reginald Francis Foster (1896-1975), and his friend 'Longshanks' idly rambling in Sussex, Kent and Surrey. See our posting of the first chapters for more on Foster and this book, including a contemporary review in The Tablet.

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Mendel, A Story of Youth (Mark Gertler)

Found - a rare 1916 first edition of Mendel, A Story of Youth by Gilbert Cannan. The novel is a roman a clef about the artist Mark Gertler and has much on his disastrous affair with Bloomsbury Goddess Dora Carrington. The verse dedication is to her:

To D.C.

 Shall tears be shed because the blossoms fall,
Because the cloudy cherry slips away,
And leaves its branches in a leafy thrall
Till ruddy fruits do hang upon the spray 
Shall tears be shed because the youthful bloom

And all th'excess of early life must fade
For larger wealth of joy in smaller room
To dwell contained in love of man and maid?
Nay, rather leap, O heart, to see fulfilled
In certain joy th'uncertain promised glee,
To have so many mountain torrents spilled
For one fair river moving to the sea.

 Gilbert Cannan entertained Mark Gertler, Katherine Mansfield and D H Lawrence among others to a famous 1914 Christmas party at Cholesbury Mill in Buckinghamshire and between 1914 and 1916 Gertler was a frequent visitor. Gertler used Cannan’s shed as a studio and his painting of Gilbert Cannan at his Mill now hangs in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (for which much thanks).

Between 1914-15 Gertler pursued a frustrating love affair at Cannan's  Mill and elsewhere with Dora Carrington, who eventually left him to live with Lytton Strachey. Their relationship is the subject of the 1995 film Carrington*. After Strachey’s death in 1932 Carrington committed suicide.

*Rufus Sewell played a fiery Mark Gertler in the movie. Below is a sample from Christopher Hampton's script - Gertler is very annoyed that Carrington is in love with Strachey:

Mark Gertler: Haven't you any self-respect? 
Dora Carrington: Not much. 
Mark Gertler: But he's a disgusting pervert! 
Dora Carrington: You always have to put up with something.

Disability ! What disability ? The Amazing Constance Smedley

In her sixty six years Constance Smedley (1875 - 1941) managed to pack more into her life than most centenarians would do. Despite being on crutches from her early years and confined from her thirties to a wheelchair (due to some unidentified disability, possibly a hip problem) this Birmingham-born fireball, who married the gay artist Maxwell Armfield, was at various times a crusading feminist, suffragist  and journalist, an artist,  novelist, playwright, organiser of pageants and folk dances, and perhaps most notably, the founder of the world’s first arts and science club devoted entirely to women.
It is on the notepaper of the London-based Lyceum Club, which the twenty-eight  year old Smedley helped to found in 1903, that this featured letter (below) also shows her to be a tireless encourager of talent among women—especially budding musicians and actresses. Here she writes to an actress and fellow feminist Annie Schletter, inviting her to a ‘ semi dress rehearsal ‘where she will witness the enormous promise of a twenty three year old thespian called Gwenol Satow:

‘…I feel Miss Satow has great gifts, but they are entirely undeveloped: her intelligence is far before her technique---& she needs the discipline of training . She is ineffective for lack of technique & is very self-conscious. If she stayed with us & really worked day by day & all day, she might be very, very good.
It is a very hard profession---and she has a great opportunity with us—but I don’t know if she quite realises what a lot of hard work she has to put in, if she is to make good …’

Alas, Miss Satow does not appear to have made the most of her extravagant gifts. In fact, there is no record of her lighting up the professional stage in any way. She became the second wife of the brilliant songwriter David Heneker, also born in 1907, and the composer responsible for such hit musicals as Irma La Douce, Charlie Girl and Half-a-Sixpence. Indeed, Heneker credits his wife for bringing Tommy Steele’s musical into being. According to him she ‘suddenly sat up in bed one night and produced the idea for Half-a-Sixpence ‘. So, in her ninety years perhaps Satow did contribute something to the success of the British theatre, although it is unlikely that Constance Smedley would have been impressed. [RR]

The Secret Places XI & XII

Two more chapters of The Secret Places (Elkin Mathews & Marrot London 1929) - a chronicle of the 'pilgrimages' of the author, Reginald Francis Foster (1896-1975), and his friend 'Longshanks' idly rambling in Sussex, Kent and Surrey. See our posting of the first chapters for more on Foster and this book, including a contemporary review in The Tablet.

XI

THE FRIARY IN THE HILLS

It chanced that I had to go over into Surrey hm Sussex to pay a visit to the Franciscan Friary whence we had started on our wanderings. Leaving Longshanks, therefore, in an inn at Chidding in the fold country, whither we had gone in search of a man who claimed to be a direct descendant of Earl Godwin–though what he was doing here in the south I do not know–I went through the gap in the hills to Guildford and, being weary, took a ‘bus thence to Chilworth.
  Because I was stupid with sleep I left that ‘bus at the wrong place, and, being unfamiliar with the country west of the Friary, I sought direction from a butcher and a queer man who carried a lighted lantern, though it was yet mid-afternoon. Thereafter I walked two miles, as I had been told, I came at last to a large crucifix by the roadside and entered the Friary grounds.
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Literary Cranks of London– The Whitefriars Club

This was established in 1868 in three rooms at Radley’s Hotel, in New Bridge Street, Blackfriars. The authors don’t mention the fact, but  in the 1820s Radley’s was known as Walker’s Hotel and was infamous as the HQ of the generally despised Constitutional Association, the reactionary group dubbed by William Hone, the ‘Bridge Street Gang’, which harassed radical booksellers  it accused of circulating seditious libels--- usually the pirated works of Thomas Paine.

By the time it had come to house the Whitefriars ( incidentally, a humorous reference to the nearby Blackfriars) Radley’s was a respectable family business with ‘ an old-fashioned cuisine and an excellent cellar of wines ‘. Of the three rooms occupied by the Club, the one used as a dining room had ‘three windows looking out on Ludgate Hill Station, filled with heavy furniture and black horse-hair sofas of a late Georgian period’. Behind this was a smaller room dedicated to ‘smoking and writing’, which  commanded a view behind the Bridewell gaol ‘of a neglected bit of ground, on which flourished rank grass, oyster shells , and dead cats…and a row of picturesque and irregular backs of ancient houses, delightful for their finely-toned red brick, their old red tiles and their quaint chimney pots ‘. By 1900, when the history of the Club was privately published, Radley’s Hotel had been pulled down ‘for improvements’.

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The Secret Places IX & X

Two more chapters of The Secret Places (Elkin Mathews & Marrot London 1929) - a chronicle of the 'pilgrimages' of the author, Reginald Francis Foster (1896-1975), and his friend 'Longshanks' idly rambling in Sussex, Kent and Surrey. See our posting of the first chapters for more on Foster and this book, including a contemporary review in The Tablet.

IX

MY LADY OF THE MIST

To tell of the incidents of every day of our wanderings would be monotonous and wearisome, and so I make no effort to do so. Moreover, what is of interest, or gives happiness, to Longshanks and myself is not necessarily entertaining to anyone else. And because we had no aim but aimlessness–which is good for men sometimes–we wandered from county to county as the spirit moved us, having no regard for even a daily itinerary or for a settled account when our adventures should be written down.
  It was at Small Dole–which is in Sussex–that we discussed, the relative merits of hot and cold shoeing with the big blacksmith, and when we had worked him to a passion of rage at our obstinacy, so that he stuck out his big fan of a beard at us and cursed us with a strange oath, we were minded to continue our journey to the Downs. It was not long after dawn, and October rime still lay where the sun had not yet thawed it.
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Sherlock’s Watson — was he a bad doctor?

Found in The London Mystery Magazine of April/May 1951 this amusing Sherlockian poem casting doubt on Watson's medical credentials…The author 'Sagittarius' was a journalist named Olga Katzin* who wrote several humorous and satirical books, some in rhyme. A short life  is appended below. The London Mystery Magazine began in 1949 and went on into the mid 1950s. It gave its address as 221b Baker Street. Adrian Conan-Doyle (Arthur's son) 'not uncharacteristically' sued the magazine, but lost the case.

Illustrated by 'Figaro'

DOCTOR…?

Holmes left one unsolved mystery,
The case of the strange M. D.;

Was he ever qualified?

Had he anything to hide?
And why was he always free?
Facts of his previous history
Researchers fail to trace,

But there’s something queer in his medical career,
For he never had a single case.

Nobody called Dr Watson
For medical advice;
If Sherlock in a hurry asked his company in Surrey,
Watson would be ready in a trice.
No one ever seemed to worry,
When he drove to Charing Cross,
Which strengthens the suspicion that as surgeon or physician
Watson was a total loss.

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E. M. Forster, the Rajah and his tutor

Most people who know E.M.Forster’s Passage to India (1924) also know that the background research for the novel was undertaken while the author worked as private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas, senior, who ruled a tiny State in north central India. In 1953, many years after the novel appeared, and sixteen years after the Maharajah had died, Forster published as The Hill of Devi  recollections of his time in  what he called ‘ the oddest corner of the world outside Alice in Wonderland’.

Forster had first met the young ruler, who bore the rather cumbersome cognomen of  Sir Tukoji Rao III, in 1912 , while he was the guest of the high-flying administrator  Malcolm Darling, who had himself arrived in India in 1904.  ‘His Highness’, or H.H., as the Rajah styled himself, was then just in his early twenties, having succeeded his father in 1900 at the tender age of twelve. In 1906 Darling was appointed his tutor and mentor, and in October 31st, 1907 the two men, together with the usual retinue, including possibly the Rajah’s beloved brother, embarked on what might today be called a ‘ fact -finding ’ tour of ’ All-India’ and Burma , which is briefly mentioned by Forster in his book. Various members of the party were responsible for taking snaps of the sights along the way. The Rajah himself can be seen in many of the photos, and Darling features in at least one. The camera used seems to have been a Kodak, which had become popular early in the 1890s—and it is this photographic record, mounted in a Kodak album, with brief identifying captions by the Rajah, that has recently come to light in a provincial auction house in the UK.

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The Secret Places VII & VIII

Two more chapters of The Secret Places (Elkin Mathews & Marrot London 1929) - a chronicle of the 'pilgrimages' of the author, Reginald Francis Foster (1896-1975), and his friend 'Longshanks' in Sussex, Kent and Surrey. See our posting of the first chapters for more on Foster and this book, including a contemporary review in The Tablet.

THE WOOD OF MYSTERY

Leatherhead used to be famous for its "nappy" ale, as King Henry the Eighth's laureate knew, for he wrote a song about the mistress of the Running Horse Inn and praised the brew, as a man should. And the Mole, which chatters its way half round the town, was famous for its trout. Alas! in these days the ale there is no better than it should be, and of trout there are none–at least Longshanks and I were not served with any.
  But Leatherhead has its distinction even now, and you shall mark it whether you proceed thither by train, by car, or on foot. For at Leatherhead the rather threadbare rusticity of the country south of London ends, and when you have climbed the steep hill beyond the bridge on the Guildford road you are in a new land. In the little rectangle of which one side is the main road between Leatherhead and Dorking, and the opposite side an imaginary line running through Little Bookham and Effingham and ending roughly five miles due ; west of Dorking, you may get lost an hundred times.
  I scruple to say how this may be done, for when a horde of people get lost together there is no mystery nor any fear; only paper bags and bottles left on the eternal hills and in the secret places of the woodland. And so I shall be vague.
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60 years of ‘Dumbing Down’?

Found in the bookseller's magazine Desiderata from September 1955 this piece reprinted  from Atticus in the Sunday Times.

Teenagers may care to try to name the authors of the following 12 books:

An American Tragedy, 
Babbitt,
The Canterbury Tales,
Gulliver's Travels,
Leaves of Grass,
The Old Wives' Tale
Utopia,
Vanity Fair, 
The Origin of Species,
The Wealth of Nations 
The Rubaiyat
Tom Jones 

...then compare their standard of education with that of the average American college graduate, aged 21.  According to a recent Gallup poll, 9% of graduates could not give the author of a single one, 39% could not name more than three, and 52% could name only four.

At least three titles may have dated too much since 1955 - An American Tragedy, Babbitt and The Old Wive's Tale - they could be replaced, say, by The Hobbit, To Kill a Mockingbird and Ulysses. It was a slightly odd list to start with (no Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Poe) but you have to start somewhere. Surely there must have been the occasional bright spark who could name the lot? 60 years on people constantly lament 'dumbing down' but it would be interesting to see if figures have greatly changed  for the worse…

Coventry Patmore rejects his uninspiring ‘vegetables’

The poet who composed the long love poem, The Angel of the House, which appeared in four volumes from 1854, became, like many of his generation, a convert to Catholicism, and so his remarks, voiced in a letter to the editor of the Spectator  regarding a bust of Cardinal Newman by the pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner, come as no real surprise.

The original letter, written from Hastings, was discovered in a pile of similar autographed material.

‘It may interest some of the readers of a Paper which has shewn so special an interest in and affection of Cardinal Newman, that by very much the finest likeness of him in existence is the bust which was made of him some ten or fifteen years ago by Thomas Woolner…I was once in a room containing first-rate busts of all the most famous men of the past generation. That of Newman made all the others look like vegetables, so wonderfully was it loaded with the great Cardinal’s weight of thought and character.’

We don’t know who the sitters for other busts were, or the identity of the sculptors, but we do know that as a friend of Woolner, as indeed he was of Dante Rossetti, W. Holman Hunt, and other Pre-Raphaelites, Patmore was bound to defend the merits of the Newman bust over perhaps some more conventional works of art. As a child, Patmore himself wanted to be an artist and at the age of fifteen won the Silver Palette of the Society of Arts. The poverty of his father made such an ambition impossible and Patmore ended up in the British Museum library. In later life, spurred on by his association with the Pre-Raphaelites, he wrote on Art, but he is best known today as the author of The Angel of the House, although it is generally recognised that his best poems, which have strong spiritual qualities, were written towards the end of his life. [R R]

Dolf Wyllarde—crazy name, crazy gal

The actress Annie Schletter had a number of enthusiastic correspondents not all of whom were necessarily connected with the theatre. One of these was Dolf Wyllarde (1871 – 1950), whose real name was Dorothy Margarette Selby Lowndes . A prolific author of adventure and romance novels, she was  popular in her day, but is largely forgotten now, though her books turn up regularly in secondhand bookshops and online at Abebooks. Wyllarde appears to have done well through her writing and at least one of her novels was filmed. By 1927 she was living in some splendour at the seventeenth century Oldmixon Manor, near Weston-Super-Mare. Why Lowndes chose her particular pseudonym will probably never be known. Perhaps she thought a masculine name might attract more readers. However, she could well have been interested in the ramifications of sexual identity. In The Lavender Lad (1922) a talented actress disguises herself as a ‘ragged urchin’ in order to work on a lavender farm.

We should remember that this was the period when female impersonators were a common sight on the English Music Hall stage. Interestingly, she doesn’t appear to have used her real female name when creating   her ‘ romance’ stories. She even uses her pen name when writing to friends, as in this chatty epistle to Schletter, which is dated 12 December 1927. In it she describes domestic life at Oldmixon, which seems idyllic and very far from some of her swashbuckling fiction. She begins by announcing that she plans to send her friend a turkey through the post for Christmas —a practice, incidentally, performed by middle class country folk from at least the eighteenth century onwards—but warns her friend that this might be the last she receives from them.

‘…I am afraid we shall have none to send next year as we are thinking of giving them up. They are so difficult to rear, and my gardener’s wife has to get up at five o’clock in the spring to feed the chicks…We are very busy and very domestic ! I have an energetic little cook who positively likes using my grandmother’s recipes and I find myself involved in old-fashioned jams (crab apple is really delicious) and hams pickled with things that remind me of the White Knight’s pudding in “ Alice through the looking glass “. I am not sure that gunpowder and blotting-paper are not among the ingredients. We are all supposed to rub the ham in turn. I went and looked at it in its pickle, but the treacle and juniper berries, the old beer and the black pepper, were so awful that I fled !...’  

Wyllarde features in a few reference works on popular Edwardian fiction, but little or anything is known about her personal life. She died in 1950, aged 79. Her former home, Oldmixon Manor, has survived, but is now divided into apartments. [R.H]