A House of Air. Hermione Lee

one sentimental, whose hair ‘wavered in weak-minded ringlets’; one stern and practical—install themselves in Grange Lane. From there they circulate through the town, at once menacing and ridiculous.

      It is no surprise, however, in a novel by Mrs Oliphant, to find enterprise in the hands of the women. Frank’s father, the Squire, is an attractive figure, but a bewildered one, with only ‘that glimmering of sense which keeps many a stupid man straight’. He is shown, in fact, as acting largely on instinct. Outside his broad acres (where he is shrewd enough) he seems at a loss. From his three marriages there are numerous children with conflicting interests, and he hardly seems to know what to do with them either. And the family not only descends remorselessly on Frank but summons him home to deal with the problem of his stepbrother Gerald.

      Gerald is the Rector of the parish of Wentworth itself. But he has been struggling with doubts and has now been converted—‘perverted,’ the aunts call it—to the Roman Catholic Church. The wound to his family and their sense of betrayal leaves them almost helpless. ‘Rome, it’s Antichrist,’ says the old Squire. ‘Every child in the village school could tell you that.’ More monstrous still, Gerald hopes to become a Catholic priest. And then there is a very real obstacle: he is married. His wife, Louisa, is a fool. While Gerald struggles to be ‘content to be nothing, as the saints were,’ Louisa complains, through ready tears, ‘We have always been used to the very best society!’ But she has the power of weak, silly women, a power that fascinated Mrs Oliphant, herself an intelligent woman who had to struggle to survive. Gerald, obsessed with his wife’s troubles and his own ordeal, is ‘like a man whom sickness had reduced to the last stage of life.’

      Frank’s generous heart aches for his brother. The whole family relies on him to bring Gerald to his senses, and the debate between the two of them is extended through the central part of the novel. It begins at Wentworth Rectory, where the solid green cedar tree on the lawn outside the windows seems to stand for ancient certainties, and it echoes the painful divisions in so many English families after the turning point of Newman’s conversion in 1845. Frank is aware that if Gerald resigns the Wentworth living it will be there for himself and Lucy, but he hates himself for remembering this. Indeed, all he has time for is the distress of his brother’s sacrifice.

      Mrs Oliphant herself was no sectarian. The ‘warm Free Churchism’ of her early days was behind her, or rather it had expanded, in the course of a hard life, into tolerance. Forms of worship interested her very little. She knew only, as she told one of her friends, that she was not afraid of the loneliness of death because of ‘a silent companion, God walking in the cool of the garden.’ Time and again she relates religion to instinct and nature. This doesn’t mean that she treats Gerald and Frank’s debate as unimportant, only that it follows its own lines. There is, for instance, nothing like Charlotte Brontë’s romantic approach to the question in Villette (1853). The real point at issue is reached in Chapter 40 when Gerald explains himself in terms of authority. He needs a Church that is ‘not a human institution,’ one that gives absolute certainty on all points. Although the steps by which he has reached this decision aren’t given, there is a hint here of Charles Reding, the hero of Newman’s Loss and Gain (1848). Frank’s answer is unexpected. He bases it, not upon freedom of conscience, but on the sufferings and inequalities of this life. How can the Catholic Church, which can no more explain these things than anyone else, claim that its authority is sufficient when it comes to doctrine? If trust in God is the only answer left to us for the pain of life, then, says Frank, ‘I am content to take my doctrines on the same terms.’

      Frank is to be seen here as the true priest, because he puts himself at the service of human suffering without pretending to be able to explain it. He understands, too, the relief from anxiety, which Mrs Oliphant herself thought was ‘our highest sensation—higher than any positive enjoyment in this world. It used to sweep over me like a wave, sometimes when I opened a door, sometimes in a letter—in all simple ways.’ The complement of this is the sympathy for others which relief brings, ‘the compassion of happiness,’ and this, too, Frank feels at the last. But this is the same Frank Wentworth who has to restrain himself from whacking his aunt’s horrible dog, and who lies awake maddened by the sound of the drainpipe—his landlady has ‘a passion for rain-water.’ Mrs Oliphant is determined to keep him human. Indeed, it is only on those terms that he can truly be a priest.

      After the success of Salem Chapel, Mrs Oliphant had asked for, and got, £1,500 for the The Perpetual Curate. It was the highest payment she ever had from a publisher. John Blackwood’s old clerk (she was told) turned pale at the idea of such a sum, and remonstrated with his master. The story began to run in Blackwood’s in June 1863, and was produced under even greater difficulties than usual. Mrs Oliphant wrote it only one or two instalments in advance—this at her own request, as the monthly deadline, she said, ‘kept her up.’ In the autumn she travelled, with her usual large party of friends and children, to Rome. There, in January 1864, her only daughter fell sick, and died within a few weeks. Maggie was ten, ‘the beloved companion,’ as Mrs Oliphant had been as a little girl, to her own mother. ‘It is hard to go out in the streets,’ she wrote, ‘to look out of the window and see the other women with their daughters. God knows it is an unworthy feeling, but it makes me shrink from going out.’

      In spite of this, ‘the roughest edge of grief,’ as she found it, she missed only one instalment for Blackwood’s, for May 1864. Stress, perhaps, was responsible for a few mistakes (the church architect is called first Folgate, then Finial), and for the weakness of the sub-plot, involving Frank, as it does, in unlikely misunderstandings. Fourteen years earlier Mrs Oliphant had sent her first novel, Margaret Maitland, to the stout old critic Francis Jeffrey; he told her it was true and touching but ‘sensibly injured by the indifferent matter which has been admitted to bring it up to the standard of three volumes.’ The difficulty remained, the standard length was still demanded in the 1860s by publishers and booksellers, and she set herself to meet it. Certainly the story, with its comings and goings from house to house, moves slowly at times. But Mrs Oliphant, I think, is able to persuade the reader to her own pace, so that we can truly say at the close that we know what it is like to have lived in Carlingford.

      Whatever we may think of the turns of the plot, she is at her shrewdest in this book, and at the same time at her most human. Her refusal to moralize is striking, even disconcerting. It is here in particular that she stands comparison with Trollope, whose titles Can You Forgive Her? and He Knew He Was Right challenge readers not so much to judge as to refer to their own conscience. In The Perpetual Curate the worthless do not repent. Jack Wentworth, the bon viveur, seems on the point of sacrificing his inheritance but the old Squire tells him sharply to do his duty. Everyone is fallible. Young Rosa, who causes so many complications, looks as though she is going to be a helpless victim of society. She turns out to be nothing of the sort. Miss Wodehouse becomes not gentler, but tougher. In Chapter 43 she is treasuring up an incident that might be useful to her in arguments with her future husband. Lucy, because she had made up her mind to sacrifice herself and marry Frank, even though it means being a poor man’s wife, can’t rejoice whole-heartedly at his success; it lessens her, she feels ‘a certain sense of pain.’ And when Frank speaks of poetic justice, Miss Leonora says, ‘I don’t approve of a man ending off neatly like a novel in this sort of ridiculous way.’

      Frank Wentworth’s story returns to the problem of The Rector and Salem Chapel—What does it mean for a man to call himself a priest? and, closely related to this—What can he do without the partnership of a woman? ‘Partnership’ is the right word here. In The Perpetual Curate, the lesson Frank learns is this: ‘Even in Eden itself, though the dew had not yet dried on the leaves, it would be highly incautious for any man to conclude that he was sure of having his own way.’

      Adapted from the introductions to the Virago editions

      of The Rector (1986), The Country Doctor (1986), Salem Chapel (1986) and The Perpetual Curate (1987)

       The Mystery of Mrs Oliphant

      Mrs Oliphant, ‘A Fiction to Herself’: A Literary Life, by Elisabeth Jay