Let the Flowers Go: A Life of Mary Cholmondeley (review)

Like many other once-obscure women novelists, Mary Cholmondeley has benefited from recuperative scholarly efforts to bring important fiction to the forefront. With the burgeoning interest in New Woman writing in recent years, Cholmondeley’s signature novel, Red Pottage (1899), has gained much-deserved regard, and her other writings have gradually garnered merited attention as well. Limited biographical focus had been directed to Cholmondeley, however, until the publication of Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton’s recent book. The text’s appearance is propitious for scholars, as the biography is splendidly done, replete with an eclectic blend of archival documentation and penned in a fluid style.

Meticulously researched, the biography is built from a plethora of diverse sources that bring the reclusive Cholmondeley to textual life. Especially significant are the diaries unearthed in 2005, which had disappeared from notice for generations following a 1928 memoir by Percy Lubbock. Although only two of the three volumes have been recovered, they nevertheless provide an expansive view of Cholmondeley’s personal and authorial experiences. Beginning in girlhood in 1872 and continuing for more than three decades, the journals catalog Cholmondeley’s travails and triumphs with the exception of a period before World War I. The biography quotes copiously from the journal entries, which provide a rich texture through Cholmondeley’s own compelling voice as she recounts events in considerable detail, providing a window into not only her own existence but also late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century life. As Oulton remarks, the “extraordinary document” that the journals constitute offers “a privileged view” of Cholmondeley that reveals enviable “descriptive powers”; indeed, “certain scenes almost seem to have been composed in colour,” reflecting Cholmondeley’s early avocational interest in painting as her prose “literally invit[es] the reader to see pictures behind the words” (13).

Adding to the thick fabric of this impressive biography is a broad range of archival material. A vast body of Cholmondeley correspondence is referenced, including exchanges between literary friends, such as Rhoda Broughton; professional acquaintances, including mentor and publisher George Bentley; and a variety of family members who wrote to Cholmondeley as well as to each other. Numerous sources are identified as private, which enhances the biography’s effect of depicting Cholmondeley in an especially intimate and illuminating manner, as does Oulton’s personal contact with the Cholmondeley family. Among these private resources are not only Cholmondeley’s original diaries, but also manuscripts of Red Pottage and other work, a wealth of correspondence, portraits of the author captured in youth and in adulthood, annotated pictures, and even such items as a program from an amateur theatrical, a note on an envelope, a personal record book, and contractual agreements. Other archival sources include collections of papers of Cholmondeley acquaintances, museum items, and holdings of libraries throughout Great Britain and across the Atlantic. References additionally include an array of primary sources such as newspaper accounts, registries, a railway guide, genealogical listings, medical texts, census information, and a scrapbook of the author maintained by a New Zealand Cholmondeley. The biography is copiously and carefully footnoted, providing a wonderfully detailed resource for Cholmondeley scholarship.

As Oulton rightly points out early in the biography, Cholmondeley’s personal story resembles that of other Victorian women. Deprived of the educational benefits accorded her brothers, the never-married Cholmondeley seemed destined to spend her days within the family’s country residence of a Shropshire parsonage, taking on the responsibilities in early years of managing the extensive household of her high-born family when her mother was unable to do so and presumably heading toward the future sacrifice of caring for relations the rest of her days. Complicating these duties was Cholmondeley’s own precarious health, which began its deterioration in her youth through debilitating asthma that would compromise her strength throughout her life and leave her vulnerable to other illnesses, which in turn caused her to spend much of her time in...