A book in my life

Lettice Cooper

We continue the occasional series in which contributors write oftr book which has been important to them. This week Lettice Cooper considers The Pillars of the House by Charlotte Mary Yonge.

-E1 dward Underwood, Senior Curate of

St Oswald's in the industrial town of Bexkey, died of T.B. on his 40th birthday, leaving 13 children, including twins born that morning. 'My full dozen and one over', the Victorian father murmured joyfully.

The twins became part of the responsi- bility shouldered by the eldest son, Felix, aged 16, and by his sister Wilmet, 15 years old. Felix resolutely put away all thoughts of further education, and started as an odd- job boy in a local firm of printers and sta- tioners. Wilmet became a pupil-teacher in her school.

There was some help — not very much from rich relations; friends found places for a couple of the schoolboys in clergy and choir schools. The clutch of babies were brought up by an Irish nurse who had become part of the family, and by any of the older brothers and sisters who had an hour or two to spare. Their mother, not surprisingly reduced to helplessness, had become a cherished part of the burden that rested almost entirely on the two young pillars.

The Underwoods were disinherited. Vale Leston, a beautiful country house, with village, Church and land as part of the pro- perty, should have come to Edward Under- wood, but 'a flaw in the will' made it possi- ble for a distant cousin to grab the inherit- ance. Edward could have recovered it by going to law, but he thought it wrong for a clergyman to engage in litigation. More than half way through The Pillars• of the House, two deaths in the other branch of the family brought Felix back into the line, and on his 30th birthday — birthdays are very important in this domestic novel — he was reinstated in the home where he had been born.

The story of the years of struggle is utter- ly engrossing. The reader sighs with relief when two of the schoolboy brothers are taken on as choristers; when Wilmet has done so well that she is given a bonus of an extra £5 at the end of her first year as pupil

teacher: when the rich relations send down a big package of nearly new clothes for the girls.

Charlotte Yonge was a very dramatic novelist. Not only was she able to introduce unexpected events and characters into her novels without giving any impression of unreality or jerkiness, but she was also ex- tremely skilled in the true novelist's drama, the impact of character on character, and the situations that arise from it. She knew her characters so well! You feel that if she was suddenly asked what one of them was doing after a long interval she would not have to think, she would know instantly, without thinking, and her questioner would realise at once she was right. Suspension of disbelief is absolute.

Charlotte's own life, first as a devoted daughter at home, then as an ageing spinster living in the village where she had been born and brought up was outwardly uneventful. Perhaps it was because of this that the colours of her imaginary world were so clear, her handling of it so certain.

Felix Underwood never married, he knew that it would be impossible for him to take on any more responsibility. The only time that he really fell in love was a private tragedy, since Edgar the brother whom he loved best, became without knowing it his successful rival. How well Charlotte con- veyed, though only in glimpses, Felix's working life, as he fought his way up to be head of the printing and stationery business, editor of the local paper!

Wilmet was the absolute authority in the home; none of the younger ones dared to disobey her. Charlotte Yonge, who had plenty of irony, showed Wilmet to us in another light as she learned that she could not expect to dominate her husband in the same way. A ' more sentimental novelist would have made her son, Christopher, a delightful little boy, the darling of the affec- tionate family but he was a thoroughly tiresome child.

The Pillars of the House was first published in 1873, 20 years after the ap- pearance of Charlotte's first novel, The Heir of Redcliffe. A prolific author of children's books, short stories, and articles for her magazine, The Monthly Packet, she went on writing till almost the end of the century. I think that The Pillars of the House, in the sustained tension, the vivid gallery of portraits, and the close weave of the pattern is her best novel, although The Daisy Chain is perhaps better known.

But why are they not all better known? They are, as Henry James said of George Eliot's novels, 'moral fables', but so are more than half the novels written. Is it because the morality with which they are so deeply imbued is so definitely that of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England? Is it because Charlotte had feeling but not passion, intelligence but not in- tellect? She was not a great novelist but in narrative power and knowledge of human nature she was very near it, and she is surely due for a reassessment.

In 1961 a small Charlotte Mary Yonge Society was founded and still exists. The founder members included Georgina Battis- combe, Katherine Briggs, Annis Gillie, Elizabeth Jenkins, Marghanita Laski, Violet Powell, Catherine Storr, Kathleen Tillotson and myself. There were to be 15 members who lunched at each other's house in turn, and paid the hostess for their lunch — three shillings and sixpence when the society started, now four pounds. The number was kept to 15 or near it so that the luncheons could be held at home, and a member always reads a paper on some aspect of the novels. In 1965 The Cresset Press published a selection from the papers of the first four years of the Society, and called it A Chaplet for Charlotte Yonge.