Mary Cholmondeley Reconsidered (review)

Scholars familiar with the work of Mary Cholmondeley have likely considered only her most famous novel, Red Pottage (1899). The editors of this volume would have scholars reconsider Cholmondeley's larger body of work, because—as Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton and SueAnn Schatz assert in their introduction—"the success of this one novel, the importance of which is now starting to be fully appreciated, has dealt something like a death blow to her other work" (1). The twelve essays in this collection provide a compelling argument for scholars to become more familiar with a wider range of Chomondeley's writing. All of the articles are well informed about Cholmondeley and the pertinent criticism: readers of this volume will find reference to the major recent works on New Woman fiction, late-century aesthetic movements, and historico-political contexts; moreover, many refer to recently discovered diaries or to archival materials not available in print.

The essays are organized by broad themes—"Defining Women/Defining Men," "Creating Identities," "Past, Present, Future"—but they are so broad as to provide little guidance to a reader looking for a certain approach, text, or genre. I find that the majority of the essays also fall into a different set of categories: interpretations of paired short stories; readings of Cholmondeley's fiction that connect to socio-historical movements or to other texts; or readings of novels that emphasize connections with, revisions of, or relations to other novel subgenres.

The interpretations of short stories are valuable for bringing to light works that are little read and for providing guidance about where a reader seeking to read more Cholmondeley should start. Several of the short stories, moreover, recur in various scholars' analyses. "The Goldfish" (1919), "Geoffrey's Wife" (1885), "The Lowest Rung" (1908), and "The Pitfall" (1901), for instance, receive multiple readings—and the various interpretations of these works are interesting for the reader engaged with Cholmondeley's short fiction. The best of the essays are interpretations of paired short stories, like Christine Bayles Kortsch's "Writing Women: Narration and Literary Culture in the Short Fiction," which helpfully associate Cholmondeley's themes and techniques with other writers and works.

Kortsch analyzes and identifies Cholmondeley's distinctive narrative voice: the irony and distance achieved by the "first-person, limited-omniscient or free-indirect narration" allows "her characters to reveal their own bias, grandiosity and thwarted desire" (50). Brenda Ayres, in "Moth and Rust: Cholmondeley's Assessment of the Church of England," disregards or misreads this distinctive technique when she claims that the character Diana Tempest is Cholmondeley's persona and thus speaks for Cholmondeley. Indeed, Ayres claims that the fates that befall characters in "Moth and Rust" (1902) make up "Cholmondeley's exhortation to her readers; they should relinquish their hearts to God and receive His love" (150). While "Moth and Rust" can support a reading that inductively reaches such a conclusion, to claim that Cholmondeley "exhorts" her readers is to misrepresent her distinctive and customary narrative style.

The essays that trace Cholmondeley's engagement with subgenres of the popular novel—including New Woman novels, sensation novels, novels of empire, and gothic novels—are perhaps most valuable to general-interest Victorianists. Karen Yuen, in "Revising the Gothic: The Spiritual Female in 'The Ghost of a Chance' and 'The End of the Dream,'" proposes the gothic as a "major feature in Cholmondeley's short stories, as well as a key component of her feminist literary aesthetic" (103). Providing a short genealogy of gothic writing by women, Yuen (drawing on work by Ann Heilmann) culminates this timeline with two measures that lead Cholmondeley to incorporate gothic tropes: widespread cultural interest in the occult—and the fact that women often had leadership roles in organizations that explored the occult—coinciding with increased interest in changing women's social roles. Yuen thus suggests the existence of a "New Woman Gothic strand in the Gothic tradition" (108), supported especially by her compelling reading of...