The Rector's Daughter (Virago Modern Classics)

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F. M. Mayor - Wikipedia

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. That’s true of a lot of novels, but in The Rector’s Daughterthe theme is love-out-of-reach; the journey from innocence to experience, bypassing happiness. I have an enduring memory of this book, of being unable to read the words for tears when Herbert remembers Mary. It is left to Mary to look after her feeble needy sister and her stern father – and she does these things with all her heart.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. Dedmayne, a rural backwater in the eastern counties of England, is a place where nothing much ever happens. Well, you know my thoughts and I am a bit disappointed but not altogether surprised, just as you were not surprised that I liked A View of the Harbour better than you did. I really enjoyed this book, and at times thought of it in a similar way to One Fine Day in wishing to re read.

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

To discuss her life and plight would reveal too many aspects of the plot – so it is difficult to discuss in great detail. 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. Published in 1924 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, it is one of those curious novels in which a cauldron of suppressed emotion and unrequited love boils away behind a landscape in which, for all practical purposes, hardly anything happens.

I am very defensive of this book though found that The Squire’s Daughter frustrated me and could hardly believe it was written by the same hand.

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

I think Mary was supposed to be in the mold of silently passionate women, having to be content with their lot.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. 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. 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). She was dowdily dressed, but she had many companions in the neighbourhood, from labourers’ wives to the ladies of the big houses, to share her dowdiness. 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.