This is a long blog post about Betty’s literary work. Writing as Mrs Henry de la Pasture, she published 15 novels between 1894 and 1913, as well as writing plays for amateur or charitable productions, as well as West End success. I’ve written an overview of her life in a separate post. This post contains spoilers for some novels; if you just want a simple bibliography, you can jump to it here.
Betty’s career as a fiction writer began in the early 1890s, apparently following a discussion at a dinner party with the writer and journalist Edmund Yates, who encouraged her to try her hand at fiction. Some short story writing for Yates’s The World was succeeded in 1894 with A Toy Tragedy. This novel about children for adults was praised by the Daily Telegraph for its charm and its characterisation; her next book, A Little Squire, was about and for children. This piece of juvenalia did not go down so well; Punch found it “hackneyed and amateurishly conceived”. In 1897, she published Deborah of Tod’s. Deborah, the result of the marriage of a young army officer and a farmer’s daughter, has been brought up by her aunt and uncle and now inherited the farm. She is beautiful, innocent, naïve, and surprisingly rich. This combination draws the attention of General Sir Arthur D’Alton, who meets her by chance; coincidentally, he had been her father’s commanding officer. She conceives a highly idealized love for him on this basis; he cannot resist the advantages of the match, and they marry. The novel traces Deborah’s awkward transition from farm girl to Lady D’Alton, and the gradual erosion of her ideals about her husband. The novel was reasonably well-received, the Glasgow Herald finding it “well told, and interesting”. The comedy of the novel comes from class contrasts, as Deborah’s simple manners clash with the social requirements of the upper-class society in which she finds herself. She is not a victim, however; her morality and good-heartedness emphasise the frivolity and superficiality of upper-class social life. She is also constantly presented as having a sort of hybrid vigour, blending the wholesomeness of her peasant farmer mother and the nobility of her gentleman soldier father; she also has a Persian grandmother to give her an exotic beauty too. The upper-class characters fare less well: they often treat Deborah unkindly, are prone to unpleasant vices, and their appearance, maintained through cosmetics, wigs and other artificial means, is contrasted unfavourably with Deborah’s natural beauty. Sir Arthur is an extreme example of this, described constantly in repulsive terms that emphasise his age: “The hands betray age far more surely than the face. Decreasing flesh, baggy wrinkles, claw-like fingers and knotted veins are difficult to conceal” (p258). A gambler, a flirt and, eventually, an adulterer, his interior is no more attractive than his exterior. There is also a hint that he is syphilitic: his two previous wives have died, one daughter loses a baby in infancy, and the other dies, with her baby, after childbirth. The novel reflects prevalent fin-de-siecle concerns about heredity and degeneration, and shows us that while Betty was a respectable Catholic wife and mother, she also knew a lot more about the world than you might expect. Presumably growing up in various consulates had an educational effect.
Age-gap relationships recur in Betty’s novels, as we shall see, often described negatively. It seems unlikely that she was thinking of her own marriage (she was twenty-five years younger than her husband) when she described Deborah. She might have been making literary use of some of the criticism she probably received for marrying a man so much older. Perhaps, though, the main inspiration for this was her sister Constance’s marriage to Francis Phillips, barrister and mountaineer, in November 1897. Constance was 27; her groom 67. If Mr Phillips was offended by his sister-in-law’s novel, he did not suffer for long, as he died in spring 1898. Betty’s next novel was Adam Grigson (1899), again a story mainly about class. The first chapter uses one of her favourite devices: a compressed family history of the Evelyns of Varley running up to the 1890s, when the action starts. This chapter emphasises the nobility of the family, the extravagance of the patriarch Sir Wilfrid, the austerity of his wife Lady Mary, and their now reduced circumstances. There is a Jane Austenish quality to this novel: our protagonists are Margaret and Elizabeth Evelyn, two plucky young women facing the marriage market, and their cousin Rosamond, whose class origins — her mother was the daughter of a tobacconist — constantly betray her as she tries to climb the social ladder. Adam Grigson himself is a comic but rich Northerner with an extraordinary reverence for the nobility; when he marries Rosamond (another age-gap marriage) he puts her on an aristocratic pedestal until he learns the truth about her social background. Heredity and class background blend in Rosamond: “tobacco will out,” her aunt announces, whenever she has done something particularly frightful. The narrative is very critical of Rosamond — she wears make-up! She likes fun! — and she is eventually subdued by her husband, who takes her to Australia where she has twins and declines into invalidism. There is a strong suggestion that the marriage has been sexless until Adam realises she is not really aristocratic. While Margaret Evelyn is a kind, romantic young woman, swept up into a highly sentimentalised marriage at a young age, her sister Elizabeth is bright and clever, able to earn some money by writing, thinking of becoming an artist, and politically engaged — she is a member of the Conservative women’s organisation the Primrose League, so perhaps unsurprisingly we hear nothing about women’s suffrage. However, this novel follows the romance plot, so she too makes a satisfactory marriage to her first cousin. The novel’s heavy focus on class makes it a rather snobbish read. Minor characters are disdained for their nouveau riche ways, Adam and his son John are mildly ridiculed, and Rosamond is constantly criticised and eventually punished. Adam Grigson was reviewed with tepid enthusiasm by the Observer, the Pall Mall Gazette, which praised it as “well above the average” despite its support for consanguinous marriage and its “crowd of characters”.
Catherine of Calais followed in 1901. Catherine, orphaned at sixteen and living in Calais with her odd and unkind great aunt Isabella, falls passionately in love with a noble, grey-haired stranger she sees leaving a boat at the harbour. The two meet when there is a disastrous fire in the town; he is Sir Philip Athelstane and — Betty is fond of coincidences — Isabella was once engaged to his father. After this meeting, Isabella becomes odder than ever and dispatches Catherine to stay with relatives in Devon, who — coincidentally! — are neighbours of Sir Philip; Isabella’s interference in Catherine’s life impels, rather than prevents, his courtship of her niece. The novel is a rather complicated romance plot with strong echoes of Mansfield Park both in the characterisation of loving, naïve Catherine and the older women who meddle in her affairs. Betty casts a satirical eye on many aspects of upper-class society and an affectionate one on the landscape of Devon, which is lushly described. The controlling women in this novel — Isabella and Lydia Chilcott — are interesting and well-drawn, and there are more attractive women characters in eccentric Aunt Dulcinea and the slightly Bohemian art student Delia. The age-gap relationship is shown favourably in this novel — the problems within it are to do with the people involved. Punch gave it a flattering review that compared Betty’s characterization to Thackeray and the Sheffield Daily Telegraph found it “altogether charming”. Country Life considered it “a pleasant, sauntering novel”, but the Manchester Guardian was less enthusiastic, suggesting that Catherine lacked interiority and development, and justifiably criticising the inclusion of a protracted house-party which makes the final part of the novel cluttered and slow. Several of Betty’s novels include, often in the third act, a house-party, sometimes with amateur dramatics involved; it always seems as if she suddenly decided her current novel needed fattening up with a lot more minor characters, and its plot needed slowing down through the accounts of tea parties and rehearsals. Betty, of course, wrote and acted in a number of amateur productions as well as professional ones, and may simply have thought this was as much fun for the reader as it was for her.
This device is to be found in full in Cornelius (1903), where a house party and some amateur dramatics provide the setting for the plot to resolve itself. This novel opens when David Morrice “unexpectedly inherited, from an unknown namesake, a small landed property situated on the borders of South Wales”. David and his sister Philipotte (named for her French mother) are both unmarried, in their sixties, and though of an upper-class background, have lived most of their lives in genteel poverty. Their father died young, having turned a fortune into debt; David has worked all his life, and Philipotte manages the appearance of gentility in her London flat on very little money. Their younger brothers are both dead, one leaving a snobbish widow, Susan Morrice, and the other two orphaned daughters, Anne and Lilias. Their convent education at an end, the girls come to live with David (after an unsuccessful stay with Susan, their legal guardian). There are more Austenish qualities here, with thrifty, housewifely Anne having something of Sense and Sensibility’s Elinor Dashwood, and intelligent, romantic Lilias resembling her sister (and, perhaps, the author). Cornelius is a godlike young man who becomes David’s estate manager: golden-haired, broad-chested and over six feet tall, he is an autodidact, a good cricketer, and possessor of a fine bass voice. Could this extraordinary young man really just be the son of a Somerset housemaid, or is he — as his mother asserts — the son of a gentleman?
Betty once again engages with issues of heredity, promoting the idea of hybrid vigour; the upper-class young men of the book compare unfavourably to Cornelius, who is presented as the coming man of the new century. Anne and Lilias, who are about three-quarters French, compare favourably to the English girls they meet. Noble blood remains important, but obsession with titles is presented as snobbish and foolish. But if titles are unimportant, money is vital, and all Betty’s characters are comfortably settled by the end of the book. Anne and Lilias progress successfuly through the marriage plot, although I remain unconvinced that Anne’s marriage (to a decidedly unattractive first cousin) will be a particularly happy one. This is perhaps Betty’s funniest novel for adults, much of the comedy provided by Philipotte, particularly in her exchanges with her cockney maid Eliza. Betty’s affection for the South Wales countryside is also given full rein in extensive and lyrical descriptions, and in the love that David Morrice has for his new home. Reviews of Cornelius uniformly praised its wit and characterisation and, as the Sunday Times reviewer put it, for being a “book to read and enjoy”.
If Cornelius is Betty’s funniest book, Peter’s Mother (1905) was perhaps her most successful novel for adults. Sir Timothy Crewys, a self-important and aloof Devonshire squire, needs an operation urgently; by way of putting his affairs in order, appoints his cousin John Crewys, a barrister, as executor and guardian of his son Peter, now eighteen. Peter’s mother is the beautiful Lady Mary Crewys, who married Sir Timothy, then her guardian, when she was seventeen. Peter secretly arranges to join the Army and head to South Africa where the Boer War is in progress. Lady Mary’s marriage has been fairly loveless and she has been treated like a child by her husband and his waspish half-sisters. When Sir Timothy dies, John Crewys begins to educate her about her financial position, and together they make long-needed repairs to the house and estate, which Sir Timothy has been too stingy to do. Gradually, the house is transformed, the tenants’ cottages greatly improved and, perhaps inevitably, John and Mary fall in love. But when Peter returns from the war, his expectations of his mother do not include her marriage; indeed, he sees her as part of his inheritance rather than as a person in her own right. Betty analyses Lady Mary’s dilemma from various points of view, and pokes fun at Peter’s pompous habits and expectations. The dilemma is solved through the agency of women, old and young, and the loose ends tied up nicely. Once again, the characterisation is excellent and Betty’s description of the beauties of Devon is convincing; she also includes some very detailed descriptions of dress . The waspish half-sisters are often very funny, like escapees from a blackhearted Cranford. Matters of class and breeding persist; Sir Timothy’s cold reserve is attributed to his social anxiety because his mother was of a lower social class, and most of the young Lady Mary’s attraction was bound up in her class position. Unusually for one of Betty’s novels, John Crewys speaks out strongly against marriages between older men and very young girls. I could have done with fewer conversations in dialect, and there is a strong sentimental streak throughout. But Lady Mary’s resistance to patriarchal norms gives the story a mild feminist flavour, a theme that Betty would pick up again in later works. The TLS praised its charm and grace, although quibbled a little at a lack of emotional depth and the likeliness of the plot resolution; Punch enjoyed the comedy and praised her “pure, picturesque literary style”. As well as succeeding as a novel, Peter’s Mother became a very successful stage play, first produced in London in 1906 and published in book form in 1910. This followed another play produced in the West End but not published: The Lonely Millionaires was also staged in London in 1906.
Betty was busy in 1905, because The Man from America came out later that year. Set in the 1880s, this is another story of half-French sisters, Rosaleen and Kitty, who live with their widowed father George Trewethy in Devon, next door to their grandfather the Vicomte de Nauroy, who has a heroic background in France. The man from America is the oddly-named Iron Brett, son of an old friend of the Vicomte, who visits to ask a favour: will he invest in a new mining venture? He will, greatly to his advantage. The plot is rather slight, and its resolution fairly obvious, but there are some excellent characters including Conrade, the nephew of a social-climbing MP, Charlotte, the girls’ rather graceless stepsister, and the Vicomte himself, who, as the TLS puts it, “radiates genial warmth”. Another age-gap marriage closes this novel, which also pokes fun at snobbish pursuit of titles and influence. The TLS compares Betty’s characterisation favourably to Jane Austen’s.
Another half-French heroine features in The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square (1907). Jeanne de Courset and her twin Louis are the orphans of an aristocratic father and a Welsh farmer’s daughter, and have been brought up in Wales by their uncle. Louis has been away with the army in South Africa for five years, and Jeanne comes to stay with her great-aunt Caroline in Grosvenor Square. When Caroline dies, she is found to have left the house to Louis, and Jeanne decides to stay on and look after it for him. There are some comic interludes as she attempts, gauchely, to socialise in London, but she does make a friend in Denis, the current Duke of Monaghan. This is a fairly straightfoward romance novel, as Jeanne overcomes her hero-worship of her brother and marries for love; the relationship of solidarity she develops with her brother’s wife is also touching. Betty must have drawn on her brother Walter’s experiences with the army in South Africa to write Louis’s accounts of his life there, and she also draws on her own loss — Walter died in 1905, and the novel is dedicated to him. She can’t let go of her ideas about heredity: Jeanne almost fetishises her French ancestry, but then it is this background that allows her to mix in aristocratic society. Virginia Woolf reviewed this novel for the TLS; she cavilled lightly at its mild superficiality and Betty’s talent for “writing charming chapters of small talk without advancing her story or impeding it”, but she could not disagree that the book itself is charming as well. The Manchester Guardian noted how “the sentiment of race” dominated the novel and praised the way Louis is constructed as a character. For the Aberdeen Journal’s reviewer, though, this was a book to “please the large class of novel readers who do not wish to overtax their thinking powers”.
1907 also saw the publication of Betty’s most enduring work, a comic story for children called The Unlucky Family. The Chubbs are a middle-class couple with eleven children, living in the London suburbs happily enough, although inevitably money is short. When Mrs Chubb unexpectedly inherits a fortune — another whimisical bequest, as in Cornelius — and a large country house, their lives change overnight. Many farcical situations ensue as they attempt to adapt to country-house living and their new class position. The book was enthusiastically reviewed as appealing to adults as much as to children in Country Life; the Daily Telegraph found it “high-spirited, witty and entertaining”. Some of the humour is quite dated, parenting styles have definitely changed, and the labelling of children according to their defining negative characteristics — two of the children are known throughout as Careless Charles and Greedy George — is a bit uncomfortable for the modern reader. But the book was reprinted throughout the twentieth century; Evelyn Waugh, who perhaps identified with Mr Chubb and his large family in a country house they couldn’t really afford, passed on a love of it to his son Auberon, who wrote an introduction to the Folio Society edition in 1980. As late as 1991 it featured on the BBC children’s programme Jackanory, read by Penelope Wilton. Betty had a third play produced in London’s West End in 1907, the comedy Her Grace the Reformer.
In 1908, Betty published two more novels for adults, The Grey Knight and Catherine’s Child. In the former, beautiful, half-French Louise Owen is widowed at thirty-three after a difficult marriage to her first cousin, who was 17 years her senior and a perpetual invalid. She astonishes her aunt and cousin Anna by taking up a job as a nurse in Wales, facilitated by Dr Morgan, once the family physician. Her first job is to nurse the local squire, Sir Harry Gwyn, a widower in his sixties who contracts pleurisy. Inevitably, the proximity of their relationship means they fall in love. There is some disapproval about the difference in their classes, but their marriage seems certain until Louise makes a lapse in judgement that threatens her future happiness. Sub-plots focus around Sir Harry’s son (also Harry) and his cousin Gwenllian, and the marriage of Dr Morgan and his city-loving wife, but Louise is the main focus of the novel and the narrative insists fairly relentlessly on her charming, sympathetic character. Most of the other characters agree: almost all the men in the novel are in love with her and she receives a large number of proposals of marriage. Only Anna Owen and her mother are immune to Louise’s charm, misreading her amiability as insincerity: Anna likes a good scrap, and can’t understand why Louise will never assert herself. There are some interesting strands in the book about women’s work; nursing is heavily valorised as a career for women, and Louise is very proud of earning her own money. Cousin Anna, a disappointed woman in her fifties, has some affecting things to say about the life of an Edwardian spinster. And the narrative around the younger generation throws up some conflict as Victorian parents attempt to come to terms with their twentieth-century offspring; the first Lady Gwyn is shown explicitly to have been a controlling wife and mother, and to have damaged her relationship with her own daughter as a result. Again, Betty hints obliquely that the problem with Louise’s first husband was syphilis; he has had a “wild” youth, and Dr Morgan suggests that he “ought never to have married at all”. We see both sides of the age-gap marriage here. Louise’s first marriage is a disaster, consuming her youth and happiness to please her husband, who she has cared for devotedly. Her relationship with Sir Harry must overcome an even greater age gap, but they are presented as equals in experience. The TLS enjoyed the novel, but took issue with the characterisation, finding Louise a bit to good to be true, and criticising the use of sudden death in the plot — a device Betty is extremely fond of. Country Life’s review was entirely positive, and praised Betty’s handling of the sentimental story. The Manchester Courier commended the characterisation and handling of the various narrative strands, although the reviewer found that “the story always carries our sympathies if not aways our reasoning”.
Catherine’s Child is a sequel to Catherine of Calais: Catherine’s daughter Philippa is now 16, the heir to her father’s estate, and eager to see more of the world than their little house in Devon. Catherine is unsure about this, but is persuaded to let her go to London in the safe hands of her cousins Cecil and Augusta. Catherine’s friend Delia has died in childbirth, and her brother David Moore arrives in Devon after heroic service in the Boer War, to rescue his little niece Lily from a bullied, harried existence with her grandmother and aunt; he also forms a strong attraction to Philippa. In London, Augusta hires Mme Minart, a French companion, to entertain Catherine and take her to suitable places. The novel starts out as a fairly straightforward romance, but takes an odd turn into sensation fiction when Philippa goes missing. When she wrote this novel, Betty was dealing with her own teenage daughters, and there are some very telling sentences about maternal disappointment and also the inability of mothers to recognise their children as people in their own right:
There are some children who, as they grow up, ask of their parents only one thing — to be let alone to develop in their own way — and to whom the anxious counsel, the constant questioning and attention and watchfulness engendered by parental love, are insupportable [...] since this relationship is eternal — unchangeable — the tragedy in a sense lies deeper. The parent seldom speaks of the bitter love and disappointment — the failure of earthly hopes involved; nor does the child often utter its impatience of an affection beyond its powers of comprehension, nor explain its own yearnings for individual freedom (pp376-7)
The novel’s plot suggests, however, that mothers are usually right — while the desire for independence in children is understandable, their inexperience means that it ought not to be indulged. E.M. Delafield would pick up this theme in the less dramatic Thank Heaven Fasting (1932).
The age-gap relationship between David Moore and Philippa is welcomed, although Betty undercuts her romance plot resolution rather darkly at the end of the novel. Catherine herself is only thirty-five or so during the novel but she is considered entirely on the shelf rather than being a possible wife for David. Heredity continues to dominate, but in this novel it is the heritability of personality that is discussed: Philippa has her father’s detached chilliness while little Lily has her mother’s animation and cheek. A minor character, Mrs Ralt, is rather interesting: unfeminine and dynamic, she is nonetheless in an affectionate marriage; her interests are sport and technology, especially the new world of the motor-car; but she is not ridiculed and shown instead to be kind and insightful. Catherine’s Child was serialised in the Cornhill Magazine early in 1908. The Daily Telegraph praised Betty for her skilful management of the plot (having given it all away in the review) and for her characterisation; the Daily Mail preferred Betty’s “clever and amusing” style to her plotting. The critic of the Manchester Courier seems to have read some other novel, describing it as “sweet” and “wholesome”; the darker elements of the plot, and its resolution, suggest something quite different.
The Tyrant, published in 1909, is Betty’s most feminist novel, dealing with what we would now call coercive control and financial abuse. Arrogant, antagonistic Richard Kemys keeps his substantial wealth hidden from his wife Annette, micromanaging the household expenses and refusing to spend money on his six children. He is also intensely controlling, imposing arbitrary rules on the household — nobody but him may touch the post when it arrives, for example. Advised to take a sea voyage for his health, he disappears suddenly on a trip to New Zealand, without any explanation. In his absence, Annette takes control of the family finances and — echoing Peter’s Mother — improves the state of her house, her children and the cottages of her tenants, although she is consumed by guilt. There is also a romance plot for the younger generation. Richard’s abusive behaviour is recognised by those around him, including his children and the local solicitor, who, when Annette comes to see him about accessing money, assumes she has come to ask for a divorce. Betty is very good at showing how Annette’s spirit and agency have been eroded by years of controlling behaviour, and how she and the children blossom in his absence. Betty fudges the ending somewhat, and the Daily Telegraph reviewer picked up on this, recognising that Richard is not at all reformed, although it praised her characterisation and the story’s “wholesome” atmosphere. Punch found it “huge fun” and “altogether charming”. In some ways the freedom the Kemys children achieve through the application of cash echoes that of the Chubbs in The Unlucky Family. Part of the criticism of Richard is that he will not spend money to keep up his class position, happy for his children to go about in rags and refusing to engage in philanthropy in the village.
There was a pause in Betty’s literary output, probably due to the death of her first husband and her subsequent marriage to Hugh Clifford in 1910. But in 1911, she published what was intended to be the first of a trilogy, Master Christopher. This novel reverts to Betty’s interest in heredity and deals extensively with issues of class. The Denys family, ancestral squires of Moreleigh Abbey in Devon, have breeding but no money, and sell the Abbey to a local mill-owner. His son Christopher inherits the Abbey, and invites his sister May to live with him. May has grown up abroad with their mother, an artist who has now died, after their parents separated. Christopher is endlessly characterised as vulgar, brutish and rough; he drinks too much and has unsuitable friends. A cousin, Erica Clow comes to stay; a statuesque Edwardian beauty, fond of telling people bluntly that she weighs eleven stone, she flirts generally but eventually becomes engaged to Christopher. Christopher and Erica are constantly, unfavourably contrasted with the upper class May and Anthony Denys, who lives with his mother in the Dower House. The interest in heredity extends in this book into a fascination with bodies and what they tell us: Christopher’s hands betray his class background, Erica and her mother are overweight and greedy, and Erica is rather grubby. Mothers play a big role in this book, with both idealised and toxic mother-daughter relationships discussed. The Observer praised the characterisation, especially of the mothers; Country Life was less generous, remarking that Betty’s work “has been called old-fashioned” and suggesting that her favoured characters in the novels were just prigs, and some of the minor characters simply unbelievable. Both reviews describe the book as “wholesome”, an adjective that stalks all the reviews of Betty’s work.
Betty did not complete the planned trilogy, but did provide a sequel: Erica (The Honorable Mrs. Garry in the USA) appeared in 1912. This continues the story, with the focus firmly on Erica as protagonist and anti-heroine. As in the first novel, cross-class marriages, social climbing, vulgar behaviour and unruly common bodies abound. Erica is a highly enjoyable creation, tremendously badly behaved, acquisitive and vain. The novel introduces a foil for her, a German Jewish financier called Reinhardt, who recognises her for what she is, but likes her anyway. Inevitably, there are some antisemitic tropes in his portrayal but he is a very interesting character. Once again, the characterisation was praised by reviewers but sympathies for Erica herself were divided. As this novel closes, it seems like Erica has come out on top; I long to know whether Betty would punish her anti-heroine in the proposed third volume, or allow her to triumph.
Betty’s final novel was Michael Ferrys (1913, published as Michael in the USA), a more serious work that deals — as none of her other books do — with her Catholic faith. The eponymous hero is a rich South African, who is attempting to convert to Catholicism so he can marry Winefride Gryffydd, daughter of an old Catholic family who live in a decaying castle in a Welsh valley. Michael struggles with the idea of religious faith and is a man with a past — the Gryffydds find he has a history of drinking and gambling, and the novel strongly hints at a sexual relationship with a married woman. The plot encompasses the Boer War, nursing as a career for women, and a young woman who leaves a convent after her religious vocation evaporated, as Betty’s daughter had just done herself. The highly religious Bernard Gryffydd, who wants to rebuild Tintern Abbey to be a centre of Catholic faith, is quite reminiscent of Bridey in Brideshead Revisited; perhaps Evelyn Waugh read this novel, too. Religion is central and important in this novel, which treats the issue of faith very seriously; however, it undermines Michael’s eventual conversion, based on what he takes to be a spiritual vision which, the reader knows, has an entirely materialistic explanation. There are a number of interesting women characters, particularly Edith Roath, who is Michael’s intellectual soulmate if perhaps not a love interest, and the exotically beautiful Mrs Roath, who, widowed, marries an ambassador-poet — much like Betty’s own second marriage, and it’s hard not to read this character as a rather self-serving self-portrait. Reviews for this work were rather lukewarm; the handling of matters of faith and rationalism was praised, but the characterisation drew some criticism and one reviewer found the opening chapters, where two elderly Catholic ladies provide exposition through the medium of gossip, rather dull.
After 1913 Betty’s writing was limited. She contributed a story to the fundraising The Queen’s Gift Book (1915) and edited Our Days on the Gold Coast (1919) which is a collection of essays, stories and poems submitted to a competition she ran, as the wife of the Governor. There are submissions from Africans and Indians as well as colonial administrators, as well as a number of pieces by Betty herself. These show her enthusiasm and support for the British imperial project, contrasted with the sort of mercantile imperialism typified by Cecil Rhodes in Africa. She also writes about a typical day in the life of a Governor’s wife (including dealing with an infestation of bats and having to shoot a crocodile) and the importance of letters from home, and the painfully infrequent and unreliable postal service. She is enthusiastic about improving educational options for Africans, especially African girls, and about respecting and preserving local customs, but inevitably there’s a Eurocentric and sometimes racist tone to her writings in this book.
Why did Betty stop writing novels? Our Days on the Gold Coast gives some clues: she was simply very busy with her own work as the Governor’s wife in various colonial administrations, living in six different countries between 1910 and 1929 when Sir Hugh Clifford eventually retired from the colonial service, and frequently travelling back to England. She was also quite seriously ill a couple of times, with yellow fever in 1913 and appendicitis in 1924. Towards the end of his career, Sir Hugh’s mental health (described as ‘cyclical insanity’, possibly some sort of bipolar disorder) must also have needed a lot of management. Like other late Victorian and Edwardian writers, she may also have felt that her style of novel was adrift from modern and modernist literary developments. There was still recognition of her as a writer: Patrick Braybrooke in his Some Goddesses of the Pen (C. W. Daniel, 1927) has an enthusiastic chapter on her novels, but is obliged to acknowledge that both her style and her content are now — if charmingly — old-fashioned. In 1930 she attended a lunch at the Criterion Restaurant in London intended to celebrate pre-First World War women writers. The other guests — Marie Belloc Lowndes, Annie Swann, Elizabeth Robins and May Sinclair — were still publishing books at this time, however, and some of them had moved more obviously with the times. Her obituary in the Times gives substantial space to her literary career, describing her writing enthusiastically:
There was an engaging charm about her novels, with their delicate nuances and good-tempered humour, and the pleasing environment, very often Welsh--the countryside of her first marriage--in which so many of her placid and gentle characters moved. Finished in expression, they were usually comedies of social life.
Charm, humour and delicacy are recurrent words in all the critical writing on Betty’s fiction, but her novels also evoke a mild feminism, a fascination with class, and a deep interest in heredity that is highly typical of her era. She celebrates the French heritage of her husband and daughters, valorising French ancestry in a number of novels. Her works are generally conservative and traditional in their views, with marriage often the only possible conclusion for her young women protagonists; however, she also recognises the need for careers for women, the importance of fairness in marriage, particularly around finance and property, and for women’s self-determination in general. She is often sympathetic to middle-class women who have fallen on hard times but are trying to maintain an appearance of gentility; social climbers generally get it with both barrels. She’s very good at loving, detailed descriptions of the countryside, especially in those novels set in Wales or Devon, both places she knew well, and was obviously a gardener from her extensive descriptions of plants and flowers. For all that the reviewers called her wholesome, there can be a dark undercurrent to her fiction; minor characters sometimes disrupt the smooth passage of a romance plot by showing how it failed them, or suggesting an alternative way of life. Cruelty, abuse and indifference all feature in her fictional marriages for all that her young women protagonists inevitably find their way to the altar. Her novels probably are now of most interest to scholars of late 19th century and Edwardian fiction, but they can be read for enjoyment too.
Bibliography
Here’s a full bibliography of Betty’s published work. Most of her published books can be read online at the Hathi Trust; The Unlucky Family is easy to find secondhand.
A Toy Tragedy. Cassell and Company Limited, 1894.
The Little Squire : A Story of Three. Cassell and Company, Limited, 1894.
Poverty : A New and Original Comedy in Three Acts. Palmeira House Printing Works, 1895.
Deborah of Tod’s. Smith, Elder & Co, 1897.
Adam Grigson . Smith, Elder & Co, 1899.
Catherine of Calais. Smith, Elder & Co, 1901.
Cornelius. Smith, Elder & Co, 1903.
The Man from America : A Sentimental Comedy. Smith, Elder & Co, 1905.
Peter’s Mother. Smith, Elder & Co, 1905.
The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square. J. Murray, 1907.
The Unlucky Family. Smith, Elder & Co, 1907.
Catherine’s Child. Smith, Elder & Co, 1908.
The Grey Knight : An Autumn Love-Story. Smith, Elder & Co, 1908.
The Tyrant. Smith, Elder & Co, 1909.
Peter’s Mother: a comedy in three acts. Samuel French, 1910.
Master Christopher. Smith, Elder & Co, 1911.
Erica. Smith, Elder & Co, 1912.
Michael Ferrys. Smith, Elder & Co, 1913.
‘A Man of Words’. The Queen’s Gift Book, Hodder and Stoughton, 1915.
(as Lady Clifford) Our days on the Gold Coast in Ashanti, in the Northern Territories, and the British sphere of occupation in Togoland. J. Murray, 1919
with C. E. N. Charrington: Phœbe’s Dream : A New and Original Operetta in Two Acts. Chappell & Co., 1895.
The cover image shows Fingle Bridge by William Widgery, in Betty’s beloved Devon. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons