My trip home from London was not as readerly as I had planned. My seat turned out to be next to a little girl whose questions to me never ceased from St Pancras to Gare de Nord. I soon gave up on the idea of reading and allowed myself to be interrogated. I was only slightly taken aback when she looked at me after a short pause and said, “What’s it like to have orange hair?” I said that I had always enjoyed it. So, it was for this reason that Mary Cholmondeley’s “Red Pottage” sat unread on my lap for the journey. Back at home; I have devoured it eagerly and with much enjoyment.Red Pottage is a subversive and thoughtful novel that traces the fortunes in love and work of two closely bonded women of the fin-de-siecle. The plain but self possessed Rachel is mainly concerned with love. She is a woman of vast fortune, who has been through a formative period of poverty. Her misfortune is to fall in love, against the wiser counsel of all who know her, with a reforming philanderer whom she knows to have been involved in the most bizarre morality scandal that London society doesn’t yet know about. Rachel is a listening character – she is a magnet for confidences and a calm and intelligent presence. Her friend since the earliest days of childhood is the worldly delicate novelist, Hester. Hester is fragile of body and robust of mind. She has grown up under the wealthy and cosmopolitan tastes of an old aunt and at a young age has written a novel which has been acclaimed in every corner of intelligent society. The death of her aunt has forced her into residence at the parsonage of her self righteous and doctrinaire brother – the vicar of Warpington – in the aptly named “Middleshire”. Here she will battle against the constraints and pretensions of parochial society – but will she be able to write what is within her?
The text bristles with an array of superbly drawn characters. Our two heroines stand tall but around them are a host of others ranging from vacuous society ladies, insecure middle class women wh
o feel envy and call it disapproval and displaced outsiders who will show more bravery than any reader would expect. Their men folk are no less varied. There are those that are weak minded and uncomprehending and care only for the avoidance of scandal. On the other hand – many of the male characters reach out to both Rachel and Hester and respect them as thinking women who are entitled to love and work as they wish. In particular the wonderful “Bishop of Southminster” deserves a special mention for kindness and intelligence – he has more than a hint of E. M. Forster’s “Mr Beebe” (from A Room with a View) about him. The Bishop is an important character because it is he who prevents “Red Pottage” from being a work of anti clericalism. Like Rachel and Hester, he is a character who shows that it is possible to live well and morally, without resorting to dogma.It is easy to see how Red Pottage caused a scandal upon publication in 1899. It is deeply subversive of church, family and social conventions. Bubbling beneath the personal stories of its narrative are much grander themes – themes of women and society. It imagines a world where one who was “a born gentleman spoke to ‘em as man to man, not as if we was servants and childer”. It is a world where a woman can be as creative and more so than a man, and where the profound friendship between two women may prove to be stronger than any other social tie. It is a revolution indeed, and its power has not entirely been lost by time and social changes. Much of the force of Cholmondeley’s message still comes through in the text, even though the world we now live in is so different.
The narrative switches artfully between the two women, interlacing their stoires and themes. There is a powerful cinematic quality to the story and the novel would make excellent material for a film or a TV adaptation. The drama is heightened throughout by the dark shadow of a pact between the object of Rachel’s love and a male friend of Hester. It is a pact of death – but who will die and how? Red Pottage manages to be both dark and extremely funny. The height of Cholmondeley’s humour is undoubtedly an ill fated meeting of the Middleshire temperance society which takes unexpected turns under the vicarage roof and which left me laughing out loud. Cholmondeley writes with a knowing eye of the nonsense of her age. She satirises people mercilessly and illustrates what we all know: that we can all be unconscious comedians.
