The Dark Cottage

By Mary Cholmondeley

Mary Cholmondeley was born at Hodnet near Market Drayton in Shropshire, the third of eight children of Rev Richard Hugh Cholmondeley (1827–1910) and his wife Emily Beaumont (1831–1893). Her great-uncle was the hymn-writing bishop Reginald Heber and her niece the writer Stella Benson. An uncle, Reginald Cholmondeley of Condover Hall was host to the American novelist Mark Twain on his visits to England. Her sister Hester, who died in 1892, wrote poetry and kept a journal, selections of both appearing in Mary's family memoir, Under One Roof (1918). After brief periods in Farnborough, Warwickshire and Leaton, Shropshire, the family returned to Hodnet when her father was appointed rector in 1874 in succession to his father. Much of the first 30 years of her life was taken up with helping her sickly mother run the household and her father with parish work, although she was debilitated with asthma. She entertained her brothers and sisters with stories from an early age. After her father retired in 1896, she moved with him and her sister Diana to Condover Hall, which they had inherited from Reginald. They sold it and moved to Albert Gate Mansions in Knightsbridge, London. After her father died, she lived with her sister Victoria, moving between Ufford, Suffolk, and 2 Leonard Place, Kensington. During the war she did clerical work in the Carlton House Terrace Hospital. The sisters moved in 1919 to 4 Argyll Road, Kensington, where Mary died on 15 July 1925. She never married.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary Cholmondeley
• Release date: Apr 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9788892594395

Mary Cholmondeley

Mary Cholmondeley (1859-1925) was an English novelist. Born in Shropshire, Cholmondeley was raised in a devoutly religious family. When she wasn’t helping her mother at home or her father in his work as a Reverend, she devoted herself to writing stories. Her first novel, The Danvers Jewels (1887), initially appeared in serial form in Temple Bar, earning Cholmondeley a reputation as a popular British storyteller. Red Pottage (1899), considered her masterpiece, was a bestselling novel in England and the United States and has been recognized as a pioneering work of satire that considers such themes as religious hypocrisy and female sexuality.

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The Dark Cottage

Mary Cholmondeley

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The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed

Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.

Edmund Waller.

Part 1: 1915

John Damer was troubled for his country and his wife and his child.

At first he had been all patriotism and good cheer. It will be a short war and a bloody one. The Russians will be in Berlin by Christmas. We shall sweep the German flag from the seas. We are bound to win.

He had stood up in his place in the House and had said something of that kind, and had been cheered.

But that was a year ago.

Now the iron had entered into England’s soul, and into his soul. He had long since volunteered, and he was going to France tomorrow after an arduous training. He had come home to say good-bye.

He might never come back. He might never see his Catherine, his beautiful young wife, again, or his son Michael, that minute, bald, amazing new comer with the waving clenched fists, and the pink soles as soft as Catherine’s cheek.

And as John Damer, that extremely able successful wealthy man of thirty, sat on the wooden bench in the clearing he suddenly realised that, for the first time in his life, he was profoundly unhappy.

How often he had come up here by the steep path through the wood, as a child, as