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Chapter 6 L i n da pet er son Mary Cholmondeley (859–925) and Rhoda Broughton (840–920) Mary Cholmondeley and Rhoda Broughton were both daughters of Anglican clergyman. Both grew up and spent their early adult lives in isolated parsonages on the northern English-Welsh border (Broughton in Cheshire and Staffordshire , Cholmondeley in Shropshire); both moved in overlapping circles of the country gentry, though as children of impoverished “younger sons” rather than titled aristocrats; and both moved to London, where they continued their friendship after they became established novelists. A friend of the family and the elder by a generation, Broughton mentored the younger Cholmondeley, encouraging her career as a novelist and introducing her to Richard Bentley, the publisher of triple-decker novels and the periodical Temple Bar. If biographical anecdotes are true, both Rhoda Broughton and Mary Cholmondeley turned to writing fiction after unhappy love affairs: Michael Sadleir postulated that the impetus for Broughton’s novel writing was “the sublimation of an unhappy teenage romance,” and Percy Lubbock quoted Cholmondeley as saying that it was “the repression of my youth, my unhappy love-affair,” rather than sheer talent, that motivated her career.¹ Whether true or not, the two young women were motivated more significantly by the desire to join a women’s literary tradition that had gained strength and status during the nineteenth century. After reading Anne Thackeray’s The Story of Elizabeth (863), written by an author her own age, Broughton began drafting her first novel, Not Wisely But Too Well (867), which she placed in the Dublin University Magazine before revising it for Bentley. Taking Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë as her model, 08 | linda peterson Cholmondeley compared herself and her three sisters to the Brontë siblings; she recalls in her memoir, Under One Roof (98), how, like those “other eager young women” before them, “we often raced up and down the old schoolroom to get warm,” while “our hands in our muffs, we had long discussions on books and people and Life.”² A women’s literary tradition, as well as a cultural practice of experienced professional women helping younger aspirants to break into the ranks of authorship , provides the basis for the correspondence between Broughton and Cholmondeley . The earliest letters between these two friends and fellow writers seem to be lost, most likely because Broughton “destroyed during her last illness all the letters she had received.”³ A set of later letters, however, remains intact. It begins with a discussion of Cholmondeley’s highly successful künstlerroman, Red Pottage (899), and continues until Broughton’s death in 920, just as Cholmondeley was collecting stories for her final volume, The Romance of His Life (92). I like to think that Broughton preserved these letters from the general destruction because they represent the successful transmission of literary talent, professional lore, and cross-generational friendship from an older to a younger woman writer—in effect, from literary mother to daughter. The letters selected here focus on two important aspects of literary life: assessment of Cholmondeley’s work, especially its ambitions and achievements; and professional negotiations in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century marketplace, especially about royalties and other financial matters. The artistic assessment was important to Mary Cholmondeley, who wrote in isolated circumstances until she was forty and who, after her mother’s early death, relied on Rhoda Broughton and their publisher, Richard Bentley, for literary advice. The professional exchange was equally important. As memoirs and letters reveal, Broughton was forthright, even brash, in her dealings with editors and publishers ; Cholmondeley was far more uncertain and reticent. Thus, for example, as represented in the first letter below, Broughton was perfectly willing to challenge Bentley about the reduced royalties for her novels of the 890s, whereas Cholmondeley was too timid—and too proud—to write to Macmillan, the publisher who bought out Bentley and Son in the mid-890s, about their interest in her new work.⁴ Of course, the letters are also about other things: family affairs, friends and authors of mutual acquaintance, incidents of daily life and local color. Cholmondeley frequently sent Broughton news of writers in their London circle. In August 93, for example, she reported her worries about Howard Sturgis, a mutual friend and fellow author, to whom Cholmondeley had dedicated her collection, The Lowest Rung (908). Sturgis had suffered an accident that required multiple [3.139.72.78] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 11...

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