Book Review: Sheila Kaye-Smith's "The End of the House of Alard"

From one English family saga to another! I already had this book, given to me as a Christmas present. To read it right after Josephine Ward's One Poor Scruple didn't invite comparisons as much as highlight how different two novels in same genre can be so different. The title indicates what is going to happen in the novel: a family "house", the hegemony of a family, not just the building of course, is somehow going to come to an end. No heirs, no handing on of the family property or traditions: the end.

How the family's house ends is the story: who are the last members of the house of Alard? What did they do that brought it to its end? That's the story Sheila Kaye-Smith tells as three sons and three daughters deal with the legacy of their land-holding, mortgaged to the hilt, over-taxed (in their opinion), failing, image-conscious family. They have a hard problem to solve in the first place and Kaye-Smith's plot demonstrates how the choices their parents, especially their dictatorial father, and they make contribute to the decline and end of their house.

One reason I was interested in this novel when CUA Press announced its publication was that I had read some of Sheila Kaye-Smith's fiction before: Joanna Godden, Susan Spray--and Superstition Corner, the tragic story of Kate Alard in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. 

Kaye-Smith wrote that novel, which I first read in high school, after she and her husband, an Anglo-Catholic minister, were received into the Catholic Church. This novel, about the later Alard family--at least, I presume it's the same family--pre-dates her conversion to Catholicism, but an astute reader sees the sympathy for Catholicism in post-recusant England after World War I. At least three characters are Catholic (including the parish priest), one converts to Catholicism, and another is shaken by what he discovers and desires when he learns just a little bit about the Catholic Church after stepping into the local parish and meeting the priest. The traditional, non-religious Anglicanism of the Alard family in the early twentieth century has little basis to respond to the incarnational, costly and rewarding Catholicism Kaye-Smith describes it--particularly as Gervase describes it to Jenny on page 329:

"But Catholic Christianity stands fast because it belongs to an order of things which doesn’t change. It’s made of the same stuff as our hearts. It’s the supernatural satisfaction of all our natural instincts. It doesn’t deal with abstractions, but with everyday life. The sacraments are all common things—food, drink, marriage, birth and death. Its highest act of worship is a meal—its most sacred figures are a dying man, and a mother nursing her child. It’s traditional in the sense that nature and life are traditional....”

As the publisher's blurb describes the book:

The End of the House of Alard (1922) documents the choices made by the final generation of the aristocratic Alard family and the ways in which they, both willingly and reluctantly, bring the long line of their ancestral blood to a complete and sudden end. For some of them, the end of the Alard line is as painful to enact as it is for others to witness; for others it is welcomed as a necessary modernization or a true realignment toward religious integrity and universal human truth. Some of the family's children yearn for individual liberty; others have it forced upon them. But none of them can find it under the burden of the Alard name and its crumbling estate. The End of the House of Alard is a novel about the human need for purpose, for a truth by which to live and for which to die. It is a novel about faith and idolatry, love and death, freedom and bondage, nature and grace. Put another way, it is about how human beings cannot escape the great challenge of salvation, of breaking free from false, man made gods in order to unite instead with the divine love of Christ. The novel's characters span a breadth of options on this spectrum and their various outlooks on life continue to reflect those available to us today.

That's very accurate summary of the book, and the reader's interest is constantly maintained as the characters make their choices while the omniscient narrator explores their thoughts and feelings. Each of the sons and daughters of Sir John and his wife Lucy (nee Kenyon), Peter, George, Gervase, Doris, Mary, Jenny receive their due attention, as do the women the brothers marry or are in love with: Rose, George's wife; Vera, Peter's wife; and Stella Mount, the doctor's daughter, loved by both Peter and Gervase. 

Except for Ben Godfrey, the men in Mary and Jenny's lives are less important to the plot of the end. 

The crux of the story really is that Peter, demobbed from World War I in 1918, loves Stella Mount, but marries for money as a sacrifice for the Alard family legacy, and although he contends he loves his wife, he just can't let go of his love for Stella. 

Gervase loves Stella too, but he finds a greater love and follows it. The end of the house of Alard comes down to those two men, and I won't spoil the plot, except to say, inscrutably: The end of the end is the only end there could be.

There is verse at the beginning of the novel, lines from G.K. Chesterton's "The Secret People":

We only know the last sad squires rode slowly towards the sea,
And a new people takes the land . . .

The section titles of the novel are:

Part One: Conster Manor

Interlude

Part Two: Leason Parsonage (George, the Anglican minister deals with his vocation and faith in this section)

Part Three: Fourhouses (Jenny, the youngest daughter, makes her choice in this section)

Part Four: Scarecrow

Again, I highly recommend this novel and my only disappointment is that there's only one more book currently published in this series, The Dry Wood by Caryll Houselander. But there's a consolation to be had there too: Eighth Day Books has two copies!

Book Review: Josephine Ward's "One Poor Scruple"

I could not put this book down Saturday afternoon. I bought it at Eighth Day Books that morning, ran a couple of errands after that, and started reading it at lunch. Finished it at 10:45 p.m., well past my usual bedtime! It was compelling, dramatic, and insightful. The blurb almost invites comparison with Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, so I'm going to follow that lead to some extent in my review.

The publisher's blurb:

The Catholic University of America Press is pleased to continue to present new volumes in our Catholic Women Writers series, which will shed new light on prose work of Catholic women writers from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Josephine Ward is one of Catholicism’s greatest literary treasures and a foremost contributor to English literary history – except that she has all but completely fallen from the historical record. She spent her life in close companionship with the most active minds working in the late 19th century to restore to the Catholic Church in England the intellectual, sacramental and theological integrity it had once enjoyed before three hundred years of persecution. All seven of her novels are out of print, despite their once high acclaim in the fin de siècle literary world.

First published in 1899, One Poor Scruple follows the recusant Riversdale family who have survived the long penal years by observing a quiet aristocratic life of sport and agriculture, never stepping into the public sphere from which Catholics in Britain had been barred for so long. But at the start of the twentieth century, a new generation has emerged. The novel’s younger characters are now legally able to go to Oxford and Cambridge and to enter the public life of letters. Emboldened by the confident work of John Henry Newman, this younger generation of Catholics are nonetheless cautioned not to trust the Protestant establishment. One Poor Scruple is a coming-of-age story in which the new generation of more worldly Catholics search for love, friendship and intellectual emancipation in the decadent social world of Edwardian London. Decades before Evelyn Waugh examined in Brideshead Revisited the human struggle to distinguish between true and false beauty, Ward’s novel examined the challenge of discerning between conflicting desires and of living a life that is as truthful and good as it is beautiful.

Since this is novel about a family, the relationships, good and bad, between the characters are consequential for the plot as Ward has woven it. One of the most crucial of these relationships is the one between the protagonist, the childless widow Marge Riversdale and her in-laws, especially her mother-in-law. Her late husband George, whom his mother idolizes, treated Marge badly (details about infidelity, lavish spending--leaving her in debt--abandonment, and a mysterious death are only hinted at), yet his mother blames Marge for not reforming him. Because of this divide, which even the regard Marge feels for her father-in-law cannot mend, she does not have the moral support she needs as she has entered London society. Even a visit to the Riversdale's home in Lancashire, where she intends to go to Confession after some delay, can't provide her refuge because of this rift (on both sides, of course).

I wish there'd been a family tree: these relationships are a little confusing to me! 

It also must be said that the older Mrs. Riversdale, Helen, has no great sympathy for her sister-in-law, Mrs. Arthur Riversdale, Janet, nee Harding, a convert from Broad Church Anglicanism to Catholicism through Saint John Henry Newman! Helen doesn't trust Newman as a Confessor to Janet because he'd been an Anglican too; and she doesn't like it that Janet is reading George Eliot's Adam Bede, details recounted in the chapter devoted to Janet and her daughter Hilda, who will be coming at the Hunt Ball (that must be delayed!). But Mrs. Arthur Riversdale, also a widow, doesn't figure much in the story, except for sending Hilda first to the family home and then to London, and keeping her there in dangers unbeknownst to her mother.

You can see some parallels to the Flyte family divisions in Brideshead Revisited, I think. One huge difference between the two novels is there is little or no humor--certainly no characters like Rex Mottram to provide ridiculous comic relief. The diversions of the world, the desire for Catholics to fit in British society after centuries of recusancy are dangers to the Faith for the characters in both novels. 

The big issue in One Poor Scruple, as in Brideshead Revisited, is that Marge (like Lord Marchmain and Julia), needs to repent and reconcile with Jesus and the Catholic Church. The problem for Marge is that she contemplates marriage to a divorced Lord Bellasis and that her London friends (?), most notably Lady Cecilia Rupert and Laura, Mrs. Hurstmonceaux plot to enmesh Marge: Laura wants her to marry Lord Bellasis, partly to demonstrate her power and partly to force Marge out the "superstition" of Catholicism, while Lady Cecilia wants Lord Bellasis for herself. Marge is no match for these two plotters, but fortunately, her sister-in-law Mary is (no spoiler!)

It's the web of gossip and double-timing that Laura and Cecilia weave that ensnares Marge, Hilda, Marmaduke Lemerchant, and even Mark Fieldes in great moral dangers. Cecilia's efforts to use Hilda, in London for her first Season, are particularly malign. One thing that Marge vows is to never see Laura Hurstmonceaux again, because she's a "heap" of trouble. The three men, Lord Bellasis, Marmaduke, and Mark, are also wrapped up in these plots as Laura and Cecilia find them useful.

Also unlike Evelyn Waugh's novel, this novel has an omniscient narrator, who knows the characters' thoughts and even interprets, for example, Hilda's efforts to write home to her mother, editing her letters as she writes them.

The denouement in One Poor Scruple is more realistic than Lord Marchmain's signed acquiescence to the Sacrament of Extreme Unction because it relies more on Marge's childhood devotion to Our Lady and her battles with her conscience before agreeing to marry Lord Bellasis. It is not quite as miraculous as that Sign of the Cross, but it is spiritually dramatic. And the aftermath of that intervention is congruent with Marge's character throughout the novel: she still struggles to confess her sins.

As Thomas Woodman comments in his Faithful Fictions: The Catholic Novel in British Literature, "No plot summary can do justice to the impressive psychological realism and restraint of this work." (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022 Second Edition, p. 25). Ward also excels in the physical descriptions of these people, their looks and mannerisms: they are embodied in my imagination.

I hope the editors of the Catholic Women Writers series, Julia Meszaros and Bonnie Lander Johnson, plan to publish more of Josephine Ward's fiction. She is an excellent novelist, based on this example, sympathetic and yet realistic about her characters, and with an eye for social satire combined with excellent plotting (not like Laura or Cecilia, though!).

The title comes from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1 in a speech of Portia's at the trial of the bond:

Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh.
Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more
But just a pound of flesh: if thou cut'st more
Or less than a just pound, be it but so much (2275)
As makes it light or heavy in the substance,
Or the division of the twentieth part
Of one poor scruple, nay, if the scale do turn
But in the estimation of a hair,
Thou diest and all thy goods are confiscate.

Highly recommended.