Flora Mayor

Flora Mayor, the youngest daughter of Reverand Joseph Bickersteth Mayor and Alexandrina Jessie, was born at Kingston Hill, Surrey, on 20th October 1872. Flora was an identical twin. As Sybil Oldfield has pointed out: "Her relationship with Alice proved immensely positive for much of her life. Some twins... suffer from confusion about their identities or engage in acute sibling rivalry, but both Flora and Alice Mayor seem to have had strong, individual, characters from birth."

Flora was educated with Alice at Surbiton High School. According to one of the other students, they were "appallingly clever" and Flora went on to win the Sixth Form Latin Prize. However, her main pleasure came from acting in school productions and she had the star part in Little Lord Fauntleroy.

After leaving school Flora and Alice were sent to the Moravian School of Montmirail in Switzerland in order to perfect their French. Flora found the school very strictly regulated: "You can't do a single thing here without asking permission. You can't wear a different dress, you can't leave the room even without asking first - at least if you do somebody comes up with an awestruck face." Sybil Oldfield points out: "Both the twins, now eighteen years old, were frequently corrected for their pride, their untidiness, talking too much English, banging the door, bad sewing, and for sitting with their legs crossed. Many of the English girls began to have attacks of hysteria and fainting fits."

In 1892 Flora went to Newnham College to study history. She enjoyed her time at university but did not spend enough time studying. Flora wrote to Alice saying: "I don't get compliments about my history. I guess I'm going to do awfully badly." Flora took part in several theatre productions. Flora explained to Alice: "The Acting is simply lovely, infinitely nicer than our School for Scandal. Of course it's more fun to stage-manage and have the best part." Alice later remarked: "When Flora was at Newnham she burnt the candle at both ends and her health never recovered."

While at Cambridge University she met Mary Sheepshanks, who became a life-long friend. Flora introduced her to her sister Alice: "Mary Sheepshanks is an awfully nice girl to talk to". Alice agreed: "We had lots of interesting talk. I think (Mary Sheepshanks) about the most interesting girl I know to talk to ... she talks a good deal about men and matrimony, religion, books, art (very intelligently which is more than most people do)... She is certainly very keen on men and would get on with them admirably I'm sure... it is inspiring to the intellect to have her to discuss things with, we differ exceedingly."

Another friend was Florence Melian Stawell. In a letter to Alice she explained how they met: "Miss Stawell was very nice and just think in the evening she asked me to dance with her and afterwards to come and see her. Unenlightened as you are you don't know what an honour that is but she is absolutely the Queen of the College... I did feel proud. She dances most splendidly."

Flora and Mary Sheepshanks both became friends with Bertrand Russell, a strong advocate of free love and women's suffrage. Both women became critical of organised religion. Mary's sister, Dorothy Sheepshanks, recalled that, "Mary came to hold very advanced views in many respects, views of which father disapproved." John Sheepshanks, who was Bishop of Norwich at the time, was so shocked by Mary's views on politics and religion that he insisted that Mary must not spend any of her future university vacations at home.

Flora also had trouble from her father, Reverand Joseph Bickersteth Mayor. He wrote to her about the dangers of developing progressive political and religious views at Newnham College: "You will probably meet people of advanced views at Newnham, and some of our friends thought we were rash in letting you go there, but it is no longer possible for women to go through the world with their eyes shut, and if the highest education is reserved for those who have already a tendency to scepticism, or who belong to agnostic homes, it will be a very bad look-out for English society in the future.... Your position is probably better than that of most of your companions, both socially and intellectually, and in time you ought to be able to exercise some influence. That God's blessing may be with you through this eventful year is the earnest wish and prayer of your affectionate father."

While at university Flora, Florence Melian Stawell and Mary Sheepshanks began to teach adult literacy classes in the poor working-class district of Barnwell. Mary came to the conclusion that she wished to spend the rest of her life helping those from disadvantaged background. Flora was not so committed to social reform as Mary. Edward Marsh wrote to Bertrand Russell about meeting Mayor and Stawell in Cambridge. "I met a lovely person on Sunday. Miss Stawell, whom Dickinson was nice enough to ask me to meet. I think she's very superior indeed - she seems to have quite a rare feeling for beauty in art, I hope we shall see more of her. Mayor's sister was there too, she seemed rather common and flippant in comparison."

After leaving university Mary Sheepshanks found work at the Women's University Settlement, later the Blackfriars Settlement, in Southwark. Flora Mayor visited the settlement but admitted to her sister Alice that she could not do that kind of work: "I felt rather shy though I must say the Settlement people are very nice... I don't think I shall go again... The children are rather revolting I think on the whole."

According to her biographer, Merryn Williams: "A lively girl, she threw herself so fervently into Cambridge pleasures that despite earlier academic achievement at school, she got only a third. For the next seven years she thrashed about in search of an occupation."

Flora Mayor told Mary Sheepshanks that she intended to become an actress. This was influenced by seeing Ellen Terry perform. She told her Alice: "Ellen Terry is just sublime. Her gestures are so awfully natural, and her voice thrills me to the marrowbone." In another letter to Alice she wrote about her future career. "I am much exercised about my future ... I am wondering whether I really am capable of writing or not. I feel sometimes I'm not really in the least clever and that it is futile thinking of anything even like research work, let alone writing my prophesied book. Now my dear girl think the problem seriously over. It's awful when one's self-complacency gets undermined. If only I could go on the stage, it's the one thing I feel sure of... I don't know what to do if father is set against the Stage. I do want it and I feel more and more it's the thing I'm most fitted for but if it really grieves him I can't do it. I want awfully to talk to Mother and him about it."

In her book, Spinsters of this Parish (1984) Sybil Oldfield has argued: "Theatre life was insecure and even sordid; only actresses and prostitutes then ever used make-up and the unchaperoned young women would necessarily hear bad language backstage and be thrown into undesirable company.... Flora also had a host of opponents within her immediate family. Her mother was totally against the stage on snobbish grounds; her father was opposed on spiritual and moral grounds."

In February 1897 Flora Mayor joined a small theatre group based in Hastings. As Flora told her sister Alice: "The company arrived in detachments, very ordinary rather flashy-looking, shop-walking young men and pretty girls. The leading lady is charming-looking ... I feel horribly ugly beside them. There was one awful lady who crept along with a most terrible smile, very wicked-looking, a sort of Potiphar's wife. The ladies of the company hate her and she tells disgusting stories to the men. She was good-looking in a way but very musty... The dressing rooms are rather horrid gloomy little holes, no hot water or anything of that sort, a pot to act as a slop-pail... Conversation in the dressing room is not inspiring, it is mostly about what cleanser one uses and what lodgings one is going to take in the next town.... It really does seem to me rather immoral in places, and the tone is low throughout. As to the acting none of it was very bad and none very good... These stage experiences have been well worth getting - this is private of course."

When the season came to an end Flora was dismissed from the company. The actor, Arthur Paterson, told her that she had a "good figure, striking eyes but a ugly mouth". She wrote in her diary that "he thought my appearance was against me for seeing managers first off." However, Paterson thought she had an attractive personality and added: "You must make them talk to you and then you can do what you like with them."

Flora and Mary Sheepshanks remained good friends. Sybil Oldfield, the author of Spinsters of this Parish (1984) pointed out: "From time to time during her vain assaults on the agents and actor-managers in the capital, Flora vvould call in for tea and sympathy with her friend Mary Sheepshanks in her lodgings in Stepney. Mary could always be relied upon for approval and encouragement in the matter of striking out independently and unconventionally, so Flora did not have to be at all defensive about the stage with her, but she did wish she could have reported a little more success. However, Mary did not depress Flora by claiming to be any more successful in life than she was. Flora could even feel that she was cheering Mary up by recounting her own inglorious struggle... One bond between the two of them, in addition to their wish to achieve something in the world, was their shared sense that they were not a success with men. Men might find both women stimulating to talk to, but they did not invite them out. Marriage was far from being their great aim in life; nonetheless it was a sore point that neither of them could, at the age of twenty-five, feel confident of any man's passionate affection."

While out of work she began writing her first novel, Mrs Hammond's Children. During this period her brother, Henry Mayor, introduced her to Ernest Shepherd. Shepherd was an architect with a strong interest in literature, theatre, music and art. Flora introduced Shepherd to Mary Sheepshanks. As a result he volunteered to teach students at her Morley College for Working Men and Women. Shepherd was a great success at the college: "His enthusiasm for church architecture and for conducting student excursions to local landmarks - in fact for every kind of antiquity - was infectious."

On 23rd June, 1900, Flora, Mary, Ernest and Frank Earp went to Queensgate House together. Flora wrote in her diary: "Mary Sheepshanks came to lunch looking very pretty. We met Ernest and Frank Earp and went on the river, most successful and most cheerful tea. Ernest was very lively, possibly owing to Mary. Mary talked a good deal about Mr. Fountain's engagement."

Flora's novel was nearly completed when she was employed by the Benson Shakespearian Company at the Lyric Theatre, in December 1900. Flora received no pay for the first six weeks, then 15 shillings a week thereafter. Over the next few months she had small parts in The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice. Flora was disturbed by the behaviour of some male members of the company. She wrote in her diary: "There is a great deal more pawing and squeezing from the managers than one is used to."

Ernest Shepherd came to see her in the plays. She wrote in her diary: "Ernest was so very nice. He is such a good friend, so awfully sympathetic. He said several times how lucky Benson was to have me." However, when the season came to an end, Flora was not retained. Flora Mayor returned to her novel writing. She showed the manuscript to Ernest, who encouraged her to send it to a publisher. It was rejected as not "being suitable neither for children nor for adults". Other publishers took a similar view but it was eventually accepted by a small firm called Johnson. Mrs Hammond's Children was brought out in September 1901 but it was ignored by the reviewers and sold very few copies.

Flora returned to the stage and got a small part in Our Boys, a comedy written by Henry James Byron. In 1902 she appeared in The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. This was followed by Bethlehem, a play by Laurence Housman that was part of a production by the feminist, Edith Craig. In January 1903 she joined the cast of The Eternal City, a popular play written by Hall Caine, in its tour of the provinces.

Ernest Shepherd had fallen in love with Flora but he was not earning enough money as an architect to marry her. In March 1903, Ernest took a well-paying post as part of the Architectural Survey of India. He then proposed to Flora. At first she hesitated because she did not want to be separated from her family. She wrote to her twin sister, Alice: "I don't like the thought of India... what am I to do without you?" Flora also suspected that Ernest was really in love with Mary Sheepshanks. This he denied and eventually she agreed to marry him.

Under instructions from Flora, Shepherd went to see Mary. That night he wrote to Flora: "I called on Mary Sheepshanks today and told her about ourselves; you know I said I should... Of course I did not expect her to care one way or the other and I don't think she did; but she spoke very nicely, and was pleased that I had come to tell her; so though it was very awkward, embarrassing and hateful I am very glad I did it."

In April 1903, Ernest Shepherd left for India and Flora agreed to travel to the country to get married later that year. He wrote to Flora on 11th July complaining about his colleagues: "The men are unutterably dull - they never talk of anything but sport and bridge; and are intensely competitive about tennis... I don't know anybody - never shall know anybody as far as I can see; everyone is so exceedingly reserved." However, he did grow to love the country. On 2nd August he wrote: "I believe I am getting to like India - The lovely bright sun and clear air, the beautiful views of the country through the arches of the mosque quadrangle." In their letters they made arrangements to get married in Bombay.

In October, 1903, Ernest Shepherd was taken ill and he was sent to hospital in Simla. He wrote to Flora on 7th of that month: "Don't be alarmed at this address... When I went to see the Doctor on Monday he said I wasn't getting on a bit and looked the picture of misery - which I thought a gross libel - and therefore I'd better go into hospital and take vigorous measures to get well, which seemed sensible."

Ernest Shepherd died on 22nd October, 1903. He had been suffering not only from malaria but also from an undiagnosed acute enteric disorder. Flora later recalled that the telegram said: "Deeply regret Mr Shepherd died yesterday, funeral today." In her diary she wrote: "I read it over and over but it really didn't convey anything."

A few days later Flora received a letter from Fanny Fawcett, the woman who nursed him in Simla, enclosing a lock of Ernest's hair: "He (Ernest Shepherd) was conscious up to the last, but very, very weak of course. Just at the end I asked him if he had any message for you, and he said Tell her I have never forgotten her, and his last words were Best Beloved. I send you some of his hair which we cut off for you. He looked so peaceful and he was taken to his last resting-place surrounded by friends and exquisite flowers. Forgive a complete stranger saying so, but oh! his love for you was so true and ever-present with him, and I want you to feel this and to know his last thoughts were yours."

Mary Bateson wrote: "I heard from Alice Gardner today. I can't invent one single word or thought of consolation, and I can't pretend. Try not to mourn too terribly... Many of us stumble along without meeting the one co-soul; to have known that there was such an one, and what life could hold, can't have been a thing to crush and blight you utterly and for ever: I mean somehow or other you must live upon the riches you have got within you."

Flora kept a grief journal where she carried out a conversation with Ernest. The final entry was nine years later: "It is just ten years ago since our engagement. I am forty. You seem so young, thirty-one. I always love best your letter to Alice and the one about Alice to me. Help me if you can to cure my faults and make me more tender, you are so much much more unselfish. Each year brings us nearer."

In April 1904, Flora's brother, Henry Mayor, who had been appointed classics master at Clifton College, suggested that they should set up house together in Bristol. She agreed and returned to writing. However, she suffered from chronic bronchial asthma, that had been aggravated by the emotional shock of Ernest's death.

Flora Mayor was a member of the National Union of Suffrage Societies. However, she rejected the militant tactics of the Women Social & Political Union. In a letter to Alice in 1907 she explained how Annie Kenney had tried to persuade her to join the WSPU: "I saw the little Kenney again, to whom I feel quite warmhearted. She again implored me to join her, but I would have none of her, chiefly for your sake you stupid ass... I think it is rather cowardly of me when I do feel it is right and important."

In another letter in April 1908 Flora admitted she had been told by a friend, Emily Leaf, that Charlotte Despard and Anne Cobden Sanderson, "might take to bomb-throwing". She added that the women were "getting almost irresponsible through the strain of the one idea". However, she admitted that: "I feel just as keen on Suffrage. Why should one fool make any difference to me?"

Flora Mayor published her next novel, The Third Miss Symons, in 1913. Sybil Oldfield has argued that in the book: "'We watch an intensely loving child become an interesting, clever schoolgirl and then deteriorate, through loneliness and emotional disappointment, into a nagging, jealous, petty-minded caricature of the typical spinster, as she bullies the chambermaid or cheats at Patience or turns two hours of her company into a bad-tempered nightmare... Finally Henrietta even perceived an answer to why she had been unloved. It had been her own anger towards all the world which had exacerbated her awful loneliness - her resentment at being rejected had led to her rejecting everyone in her turn, and therefore she had been more rejected still."

The book received several good reviews. The Daily Telegraph commented that: "In many ways this slim volume represents an extremely interesting experiment. It ranks as fiction, and yet it is entirely unlike the average provender of the circulating libraries. It is very short... being something between a half and a third the length of an ordinary novel. It is also completely unpopular in style, making no concession to the common taste for gush and sentiment, eschewing decoration of every kind, and keeping close to the bare, austere presentation of a single character... It deserves success more than 90% of the novels which commend themselves so glibly to the public taste. For the author, Miss F.M. Mayor, is a true artist, restrained but confident in touch... her elaborate study of a spinster's life... is brilliantly clever, actual, and sincere. Without the slightest attempt to play upon the feelings, it reaches to the very heart of things, and leaves the reader with an aching sense of the intolerable waste of human nature."

After comparing Flora Mayor to Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell the reviewer in the New Statesman added: "She uses English with a wise economy employed by few writers today; she moves the reader strongly again and again without ever resorting to hysterical methods; and she manages, above all, to interest one profoundly in the destinies of a wasted, unloved woman, whom in life nine-tenths of us would have passed by as boring or positively irritating. She enables us (unusual thing) to look at Henrietta from the outside and the inside at one and the same time."

On the outbreak of the First World War, some of Flora's friends such as Mary Sheepshanks and Bertrand Russell, were active in the anti-war movement. Sheepshanks was a leading figure in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom whereas Russell was one of England's best known pacifists and became chairman of the Non-Conscription Fellowship. Flora was a strong supporter of the war and in her letters she referred scornfully to "the Bertrand Russell gang" and "the Lytton Strachey set" and suggested that they should be sent to the trenches on the Western Front.

After the First World War Mayor began work on her third novel, The Rector's Daughter. According to her biographer, Sybil Oldfield, the novel is about the 35 year old Mary Jocelyn: "Motherless from a child, isolated physically from her brothers, mentally from her subnormal sister, emotionally from her withdrawn and chilly father, and considered odd by all the contemporaries of her own social class." Merryn Williams has pointed out: "This is a longer and more complex novel, concentrating on the inner life of a middle-aged spinster, Mary Jocelyn, her unconsummated love for a married clergyman, and her lonely death."

The book had difficulty finding a publisher until Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf offered to take it on a commission basis for the Hogarth Press. The book was extremely popular with Britain's main literary figures. E. M. Forster wrote to Flora saying that: "Mary Jocelyn begins as ridiculous and ends as dignified: this seemed to me a very great achievement." John Masefield, the future Poet Laureate, also wrote to Flora: "It is a remarkable book and confirms you in your remarkable rank... It is a great advance in every way on your other two stories, though you know that I thought and still think both of them most unusually good in their own ways."

Gerald Gould wrote in The Saturday Review: "Miss Mayor has taken the subject-matter of all the serials in all the journals suitable for home reading of the last century, and made it live.... She has the true novelist's divine incommunicable gift: no shadows flit across her pages: she has but to mention someone, give him a phrase to say or even to write, and he puts on solidity and permanence."

Sylvia Lynd, was another reviewer who was very enthusiastic about The Rector's Daughter, in Time and Tide: "The Rector's Daughter belongs to the finest English tradition of novel writing. It is like a bitter Cranford. Miss Mayor explores depths of feeling that Mrs Gaskell's generation perhaps did not know and certainly did not admit to knowing. Mrs Mayor's genius struggles with exasperation where Mrs. Gaskell's struggled with the much milder demon of sentimentality... The Rector's daughter, Mary Jocelyn, is one of those sad figures of whom it is said that nothing has ever happened to them. Mrs Mayor reveals the meaninglessness of that phrase."

Despite the good reviews the book sold badly and it was soon out of print. Over the next few years Flora concentrated on writing ghost-stories. During this period Flora developed right-wing opinions that alienated her from her friends such as Mary Sheepshanks who was active in the Labour Party.

In September 1926, Flora Mayor had a letter published in the Church of England weekly newspaper, The Guardian, about the General Strike. She accused the miners' leaders of exploiting the "natural weaknesses of greed, intellectual laziness and moral cowardice". She contrasted the miners' refusal to work a longer shift with "the clergy, the house-masters at public schools and civil servants, all of whom (like her own father and brothers) were willing to work much longer than eight hours a day out of their sense of duty". The editor pointed out that "miners, unlike public schoolmasters, do not have three-and-a-half months' annual holiday, nor do they earn more money when they are sixty than when they are twenty, nor can they ever afford to retire before they are old."

Flora Mayor's next novel The Squire's Daughter appeared in 1929. The main character, Sir Geoffrey De Lacey, fortunes are in decline and at the end is forced to sell off his centuries-old ancestral home. The story deals with the problems that this causes his daughter. Unlike her previous novels, it was disliked by the critics. Gerald Gould, who had written such a good review of The Rector's Daughter, argued that he found the daughter's selfishness and emptiness unbearable. He added that "apparently she had some sort of charm and attractiveness which her creator never succeeds in communicating."

Flora Mayor died at her home at 7 East Heath Road, Hampstead, on 28th January 1932 of pneumonia complicated by influenza, and is buried in Hampstead cemetery. John Masefield wrote an obituary for The Times but such was the decline in her reputation that they refused to publish it.

On 28th February 1941, John O'London's Weekly, published a tribute to Flora Mayor by Rosamond Lehmann. In the article, Lehmann praises The Rector's Daughter with the comment that: "It is the daughter, Mary Jocelyn, who makes the book particularly memorable. She is my favourite character in contemporary fiction: favourite in that she is completely real to me, deeply moving, evoking as vivid and valid a sense of sympathy, pity, and admiration as do the Bronte sisters each time I live with them and through them again in the pages of Mrs. Gaskell's biography."

The Rector's Daughter was republished as a Penguin Modern Classic in 1973. This was followed in 1979 by The Third Miss Symons that appeared in the Virago Modern Classic series.

Primary Sources

(1) Joseph Bickersteth Mayor, letter to Flora Mayor (c. 1893)

The book you speak of (An African Farm) shows the reaction from Calvinism resulting in the most dreary scepticism and opening the way to positive immorality. It is of course clever, and when the writer gets into more healthy surroundings, she may perhaps become a useful teacher, but it is not in the least the book for young and thoughtless girls. You will probably meet people of advanced views at Newnham, and some of our friends thought we were rash in letting you go there, but it is no longer possible for women to go through the world with their eyes shut, and if the highest education is reserved for those who have already a tendency to scepticism, or who belong to agnostic homes, it will be a very bad look-out for English society in the future. You, I think, ought to be able "to prove all things and hold fast to truth". Your position is probably better than that of most of your companions, both socially and intellectually, and in time you ought to be able to exercise some influence. That God's blessing may be with you through this eventful year is the earnest wish and prayer of your affectionate father.

(2) Alice Mayor, letter to Flora Mayor (c. 1895)

We had lots of interesting talk. I think (Mary Sheepshanks) about the most interesting girl I know to talk to ... she talks a good deal about men and matrimony, religion, books, art (very intelligently which is more than most people do)... She is certainly very keen on men and would get on with them admirably I'm sure... it is inspiring to the intellect to have her to discuss things with, we differ exceedingly.

(3) Flora Mayor, letter to Alice Mayor (c. 1896)

We do have fun here. It's such a different life from usual. I shall look back to it as most doux. We have awfully interesting discussions usually after supper. We talk about religious things pretty often, also books a good bit... The bicycle is fascinating... it's much easier than skating - not so tiring. Mounting is a trial and one must have knickerbockers for it ... Has Judith said anything to you about the mock-Parliament debate? Yesterday I got up at 7 and played my tennis tie and beat her easily ... After dinner we had dancing. It was lovely. I do enjoy the dancing so. If you'll believe it I've had one or two compliments on my steering. Am reading Wages of Sin. Fiction Library has kept me horribly busy also I had to hold a beastly Newspaper meeting ... Miss Stawell was very nice and just think in the evening she asked me to dance with her and afterwards to come and see her. Unenlightened as you are you don't know what an honour that is but she is absolutely the Queen of the College... I did feel proud. She dances most splendidly... The Acting is simply lovely, infinitely nicer than our School for Scandal. Of course it's more fun to stage-manage and have the best part. I did funk doing that beastly washing scene but all, dons included, have been most complimentary. We gave a performance for Newnham yesterday, people yelled out "Speech" but I wouldn't do that. They put me up for Vice-President of Debate which was rather jolly ... Altogether Newnham is as rapturous as ever.

(4) Edward Marsh, letter to Bertrand Russell (c. 1896)

I met a lovely person on Sunday. Miss Stawell, whom Dickinson was nice enough to ask me to meet. I think she's very superior indeed - she seems to have quite a rare feeling for beauty in art, I hope we shall see more of her. Mayor's sister was there too, she seemed rather common and flippant in comparison.

(5) Flora Mayor, letter to Alice Mayor (May, 1896)

I am much exercised about my future ... I am wondering whether I really am capable of writing or not. I feel sometimes I'm not really in the least clever and that it is futile thinking of anything even like research work, let alone writing my prophesied book. Now my dear girl think the problem seriously over. It's awful when one's self-complacency gets undermined. If only I could go on the stage, it's the one thing I feel sure of, that I am dramatic. I don't know if that means I could act... I don't know what to do if father is set against the Stage. I do want it and I feel more and more it's the thing I'm most fitted for but if it really grieves him I can't do it. I want awfully to talk to Mother and him about it.

(6) Flora Mayor, letter to Alice Mayor (1896)

I went to a Miss Fowler who manages the Invalid Aid and she gave me two children to visit - one a three year-old paralytic boy, the other I hadn't time to go and see as the Mother of Albert (the baby) talked such a lot. She lives in a room about the size of the bath-room. I've never seen anyone so poor... Happily she's a chatterer so she's easy enough to get on with. I felt rather shy though I must say the Settlement people are very nice but have not the faculty of making one at home and one feels that they are frightfully critical. The basket-making class was rather silly because there were too many helpers for the children. I don't think I shall go again... The children are rather revolting I think on the whole.

(7) Flora Mayor, letter to Alice Mayor (February, 1897)

The company arrived in detachments, very ordinary rather flashy-looking, shop-walking young men and pretty girls. The leading lady is charming-looking ... I feel horribly ugly beside them. There was one awful lady who crept along with a most terrible smile, very wicked-looking, a sort of Potiphar's wife. The ladies of the company hate her and she tells disgusting stories to the men. She was good-looking in a way but very musty...The dressing rooms are rather horrid gloomy little holes, no hot water or anything of that sort, a pot to act as a slop-pail... Conversation in the dressing room is not inspiring, it is mostly about what cleanser one uses and what lodgings one is going to take in the next town. I have only heard one of them say a single interesting thing about the acting, it is all arrangements or make-up... The play I think is rather a questionable one. It really does seem to me rather immoral in places, and the tone is low throughout. As to the acting none of it was very bad and none very good... These stage experiences have been well worth getting - this is private of course.

(8) Sybil Oldfield, Spinsters of this Parish (1984)

From time to time during her vain assaults on the agents and actor-managers in the capital, Flora vvould call in for tea and sympathy with her friend Mary Sheepshanks in her lodgings in Stepney. Mary could always be relied upon for approval and encouragement in the matter of striking out independently and unconventionally, so Flora did not have to be at all defensive about the stage with her, but she did wish she could have reported a little more success. However, Mary did not depress Flora by claiming to be any more successful in life than she was. Flora could even feel that she was cheering Mary up by recounting her own inglorious struggle... One bond between the two of them, in addition to their wish to achieve something in the world, was their shared sense that they were not a success with men. Men might find both women stimulating to talk to, but they did not invite them out. Marriage was far from being their great aim in life; nonetheless it was a sore point that neither of them could, at the age of twenty-five, feel confident of any man's passionate affection.

(9) Flora Mayor, letter to Alice Mayor (24th March, 1903)

I was too ill to think properly but I managed to send the wire off telling him (Ernest Shepherd) to come. It did not strike me first what the probable meaning was. When it did I tried to put it out of my head...

I had hardly come back to these dismal Macclesfield lodgings when Ernest came... and from his extreme nervousness and stammerings and his looking so awfully ill I felt sure what was up. I said would he come out and have tea at a hotel, our lodgings were so horrid. As soon as we got outside he began."Do you think I look different."I said "I think you look ill."Then he told me of India and he said "Now you must know what I want to say?"I said "no I didn't."

Then with much stammering he said, would I go with him?

I said "Yes, I think I should". And then immediately afterwards felt I couldn't. I said I did not know if I could leave you. He is as nice as can be. If I don't like the thought of India I am to stop in England and he will come over but that would be too unfair. Still, what am I to do without you?... I don't think I feel in love, in fact it is all so horribly oppressive and exciting... I do feel giving up the Stage awfully, I suppose you can't understand it... Being kissed is so odd.

(10) Flora Mayor, diary (22nd October, 1903)

Then about 4 o'clock Mother came in and said she wanted to say something to me... Mother said: Did I feel well? She said it very tenderly and I saw she was crying. I thought she was overcome thinking of India. I said, "Yes darling, quite well." Then I seemed to know there was something. I said: "Is there any bad news? Is it about Ernest" Mother showed me Mr Marshall's telegram: "Regret to say Mr Shepherd's condition very critical. Please inform Miss Mayor."

(11) Flora Mayor, letter to Ernest Shepherd (22nd October, 1903)

My dear, dearest, I have just got Mr Marshall's telegram telling me about you. I feel in a maze and can't think of anything. Darling if God spares you to me I shall come out at once, for you must not be alone. My own darling I must tell you how I love you, and I can't find any words. Then I think of your love for me and of our goodbye in Warwick Square and my last sight of you at Dover. In your last letter you said I was not to "absent me from felicity". I did not feel anxious only sorry for the dull time for you. And now all this three weeks I don't know what has been happening. Have you been all the while keeping back from me how ill you were? If I knew what it was, I might bear it better. Oh this horrible India.

It's no good darling, I can't write a long letter till I know more. Only you don't know how I wish I was out with you and doing something for you, and here I can do nothing and know absolutely nothing... Goodbye dear darling, God be with you and take care of you.

(12) Flora Mayor, Grief Journal (November, 1903)

I kept turning over those words "very critical" wondering what ray of hope could be got from them and how I did pray all that long long day...

In the morning, Friday, the 23rd there was no more news and I began to hope a little. I thought I would go out to India that evening if I could... I went up at once to Warwick Square. As I got near I thought they might have a message and the blinds might be down. I was relieved beyond measure that they were up. Gertrude opened the door. I said was there any news? She said "No", and I felt so relieved. I began crying rather hysterically and I think we got more cheerful together. Then there was a ring. Gertrude went to the door. I heard a boy saying "Telegram for Miss Sinclair". Gertrude took it. Of course we both guessed. The one hope had been there would be no wire. She opened it, looked at it, and nodded to me. She couldn't speak. We went into the library. I sat down on the sofa and she knelt by me just saying over and over again sobbing, "My darling, my darling"... I was quite blank and dazed... Marshall's telegram said: "Deeply regret Mr Shepherd died yesterday, funeral today." I read it over and over but it really didn't convey anything... I don't know how long we stayed in the Library. Daisy came in and Gertrude told her and then Auntie. She went upstairs alone first of all, then she came down crying rather hysterically. She said "Poor child, this is cruel, it's cruel." Then Mother and Alice came. Gertrude went out and told them. I heard Mother's exclamation of horror. Then I went out. Alice said "You must let us comfort you." I don't know what I felt - miles away from everything I think. We went back - oh it was such a radiant Autumn day.

Alice and I came upstairs and Mother told Father. He knocked at our door and Alice said to me "Here's Father!" He came up and kissed me very tenderly. I don't know how the afternoon passed. Robin was coming in the evening and I wanted to tell him myself... When he came he said "What is it Flora?" I said: "I've got something to tell you. Ernest is dead". He turned away and I said "You must comfort me." He came back and seized me in his arms and carried me somehow to the sofa. Then he kept saying "Oh Flora, oh my dear Flora". I was so much touched, so very much for... he is cold and reserved and I thought the coldness was growing.

(13) Fanny Fawcett, Superintendent of Walker Hospital (28th October, 1903)

He (Ernest Shepherd) was conscious up to the last, but very, very weak of course. Just at the end I asked him if he had any message for you, and he said "Tell her I have never forgotten her", and his last words were "Best Beloved". I send you some of his hair which we cut off for you. He looked so peaceful and he was taken to his last resting-place surrounded by friends and exquisite flowers. Forgive a complete stranger saying so, but oh! his love for you was so true and ever-present with him, and I want you to feel this and to know his last thoughts were yours.... remember your tender kind folks about you, who have loved you all your days and put that decent outward face upon it which will be a little consoling to them and in the end help you.

(14) Mary Bateson, letter to Flora Mayor (27th October, 1903)

I heard from Alice Gardner today. I can't invent one single word or thought of consolation, and I can't pretend. Try not to mourn too terribly...

Many of us stumble along without meeting the one co-soul; to have known that there was such an one, and what life could hold, can't have been a thing to crush and blight you utterly and for ever: I mean somehow or other you must live upon the riches you have got within you. But damn my moralizing, it's easy for me you'll think.

(15) Flora Mayor, Grief Journal (20th March, 1913)

It is just ten years ago since our engagement. I am forty. You seem so young, thirty-one. I always love best your letter to Alice and the one about Alice to me. Help me if you can to cure my faults and make me more tender, you are so much much more unselfish. Each year brings us nearer.

(16) Flora Mayor, letter to Alice Mayor (1907)

I saw the little Kenney again, to whom I feel quite warmhearted. She again implored me to join her, but I would have none of her, chiefly for your sake you stupid ass. I thought about that text whosoever loves mother or sister etc. cannot be my disciple and I think it is rather cowardly of me when I do feel it is right and important.

(17) The Daily Telegraph (11th April 1913)

In many ways this slim volume represents an extremely interesting experiment. It ranks as fiction, and yet it is entirely unlike the average provender of the circulating libraries. It is very short... being something between a half and a third the length of an ordinary novel. It is also completely unpopular in style, making no concession to the common taste for gush and sentiment, eschewing decoration of every kind, and keeping close to the bare, austere presentation of a single character... It deserves success more than 90% of the novels which commend themselves so glibly to the public taste. For the author, Miss F.M. Mayor, is a true artist, restrained but confident in touch... her elaborate study of a spinster's life... is brilliantly clever, actual, and sincere. Without the slightest attempt to play upon the feelings, it reaches to the very heart of things, and leaves the reader with an aching sense of the intolerable waste of human nature.

(18) The New Statesman (12th April 1913)

She is in the tradition, though her performance is not yet on the level of Jane Austen and Mrs Gaskell. But she uses English with a wise economy employed by few writers today; she moves the reader strongly again and again without ever resorting to hysterical methods; and she manages, above all, to interest one profoundly in the destinies of a wasted, unloved woman, whom in life nine-tenths of us would have passed by as boring or positively irritating. She enables us (unusual thing) to look at Henrietta from the outside and the inside at one and the same time.

(19) Gerald Gould, The Saturday Review (7th June, 1924)

Miss Mayor has taken the subject-matter of all the serials in all the journals suitable for home reading of the last century, and made it live. The scholarly, selfish old rector, blind to the needs and hungers of his plain, unselfish daughter: the neighbouring parson, who loves the plain daughter for her goodness but marries somebody else who is beautiful and then finds that beauty in a wife isn't everything: the wife who is going to run away with a dashing young soldier, but loses her looks through an unfortunate operation at the crucial moment and discovers that it was those looks, and not her spirit's self, that the young soldier wanted to run away with: the apposite recovery of her looks after she has been reconciled to her husband - here they are, and yet how different they seem! Can it be that things really did, and do, happen thus - that the journals suitable for home reading learnt them in the first place from life? For in Miss Mayor's hands they are far more real, far nearer to experience, than all the sly quests and exquisite analyses which pass for realism now. She has the true novelist's divine incommunicable gift: no shadows flit across her pages: she has but to mention someone, give him a phrase to say or even to write, and he puts on solidity and permanence.

(20) Sylvia Lynd, Time and Tide (18th July, 1924)

The Rector's Daughter belongs to the finest English tradition of novel writing. It is like a bitter Cranford. Miss Mayor explores depths of feeling that Mrs Gaskell's generation perhaps did not know and certainly did not admit to knowing. Mrs Mayor's genius struggles with exasperation where Mrs. Gaskell's struggled with the much milder demon of sentimentality...

The Rector's daughter, Mary Jocelyn, is one of those sad figures of whom it is said that nothing has ever happened to them. Mrs Mayor reveals the meaninglessness of that phrase. Mary Jocelyn's `nothing' is a full and rich state of being.