A Son of the Rock

Virago, 1990, 303 p, including xii p Introduction by Victoria Glendinning. First published in 1931.

When the book opens, Lord Slane, former Ambassador, Viceroy of India and an ex-Prime Minister, has just died. His – mostly unappealing – children gather round to dispose of the estate and decide on what rotation to house their mother in her widowhood. Lady Slane (now the dowager Lady, I suppose,) has other ideas. After a lifetime of following her husband’s path, dutifully performing her roles as Ambassadress and Vicereine, she has no desire to conform to their wishes. Instead, she will take a house in Hampstead – one she saw years ago and has always hankered after.

As a youth she had seen a future for herself as a painter but Henry Holland’s marriage proposal had put an end to that. In the Hampstead house she remembers her confusion at the proposal and the swiftness with which her parents and sisters welcomed it; “never had the rays of approval beaten down so warmly upon her.” But “there was only one employment open to women.” (That would certainly be so for women of her class.)  And the painting never materialised. Ruefully she had reflected that, “It would not do, in such a world of assumptions, to assume she had equal rights with Henry.”

With Genoux, her French maid, she passes the time in Hampstead with desultory visits from her children but more frequent ones from Mr Bucktrout, the housing agent who let it out to her, Mr Gosheron, a builder necessary for renovations, and Mr FitzGeorge, a connoisseur whom she had met in India decades ago and who still holds a torch for her, but withholds that information, with all of whom she has more common ground than with her children. She feels more affinity with her great granddaughter, Deborah, who desires to be a musician and will – perhaps – have more chance of pursuing a career than she did.

Indicative of the times, Lady Slane’s thoughts on her life at one point touch on, “Labour, that new and alarming party.”

Though Sackville-West apparently disliked the term this is undoubtedly a feminist book -outlining as it does the constrictions women endured in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, freed from them only when old age and a husband now gone finally allowed.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction “Keats’ house” (Keats’s house,) concensus (consensus.) Otherwise; “the French government were sending a representative” (the French government was sending,) “a Cabinet Minister of England” (there is no – and never has been an – English Cabinet. That system of government was only introduced well after the formation of the UK in 1707,) “in Genoux’ imagination” (Genoux’s – which was used later. In any case, Genoux surely is not even pronounced with a terminal ‘s’ hence its possessive must have one. There was also a later instance of Genoux’,) “oblivious of” (oblivious to,) “‘me who love him better than anything in heaven or earth’”  (‘me who loves him’ seems more natural,) tight-rope (nowadays ‘tightrope’,) “Keats’ house” (Keats’s house.) Balmy (it meant ‘slightly off his head’, so: Barmy,) “a confidant” (the confidant was female, so ‘confidante’.)