the local author / anachronism

Katherine McMahon: After Mary (London: Flamingo, 2000)

This is a historical novel about English Catholics in the early seventeenth century. It is so well-written that we soon come to trust; here there will be no badly made scenes.

 

The dialogue is written in neutral modern English, always sharp and absorbing, yet somehow recalling Mills and Boon romances.

 

“But you must surely have longed to be more active all these years.”

“I’m not the adventurous type. I only do as I’m told.”

 

“Shall we go to the cathedral first? Shall we see what it’s like to be in a Catholic church?” Isabel asked.

“We’re expected in the Rue Grosse.”

“Ten minutes. Just to convince ourselves of where we are.”

 

But Isabel Stanhope’s story doesn’t lead in a conventional Mills and Boon direction, though it draws on that genre’s fire, idealism, and avoidance of the explicit.

 

The descriptive writing is like this:

 

Behind lacy iron gates the house was burnished the colour of toast.

 

He was a tallish man with a complicated face and flaky scalp.

 

He folded his hands and pom-pommed a little tune to himself.

 

When she pushed back the door the smell of raw wood and incense was at once replaced by a rush of autumn air.

 

 

The logic of Isabel and her world is that Shakespeare, in the book’s most nervous moments, can only be rejected with appalled incomprehension. But it is not the rejection of a pious seventeenth-century Catholic; it is the rejection of a modern awareness.

 

The brilliance of those descriptive sentences is inescapably linked to the anachronism of the dialogue and the implied conceptions of action. Nothing could have been thought in this way, yet these things (or something like them) must have happened. There is indeed a yawning void in our ability to grasp the everyday life of the past. The writers didn’t record it, though we sometimes devceive ourselves into thinking they did.

The effect of the anachronism is to make the book’s image a “fantasy” - a liberating effect when it is employed so seriously. I persistently question what (or where) the book is really about. The ending is thoroughly satisfying. Mary Ward’s project is feminist as well as (or perhaps more than) religious. All the male characters fail Isabel, unless perhaps Father Turner, who (with splendid anachronism) clinches matters thus:

 

Your penance, my dear Mistress Stanhope, and it is a heavy one, is to follow the dictates of your own conscience.

 

 

[Image source: http://www.optimamagazine.co.uk/read/features/people/213-creative-processes-katharine-mcmahon . Katharine lives in N. London.  This is from an interview with the author in a local magazine covering "S. Hertfordshire / N. Middlesex".]


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After Mary draws on the historical figure of Mary Ward (1585 - 1645), a Roman Catholic nun who founded a non-contemplative women's community in St-Omer in 1609, to much conservative disquiet within the church. She conceived it as a sister movement to the Jesuits. The movement carried on after her death, though official status was withheld until 1703. As the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary / Sisters of Loreto,  it now runs 150 schools worldwide: Mary Ward was granted the title Venerable in 2009. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ward_(nun)).


Mary Ward was born in Mulwith, three miles SE of Ripon in North Yorkshire. Presumably this was at Mulwith Farmhouse, though the present-day building is a mid-18th-century construction. Mulwith is on the north bank of the river Ure.








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Katherine McMahon's website: https://www.katharinemcmahon.com/ . Her tenth novel, The Hour of Separation, set in Belgium in March 1939, is just out.


Katharine McMahon's interesting article "Memory and Fiction: Why Historical Fiction is also Contemporary Fiction": https://www.rlf.org.uk/showcase/memory-and-fiction/


Katharine McMahon on her lifelong obsession with the Brontës: https://www.rlf.org.uk/showcase/haunted-by-the-brontes/ . 


(The Hour of Separation has submerged connections with Villette.)