The New Mother: With a Poem by Lola Ridge

By Lucy Clifford and Lola Ridge

“The New Mother” is an 1882 short story by Lucy Clifford. The story centres around two young girls who live with their mother and baby sibling in the woods. One day they happen across strange girl who promises to show them a tiny man and woman who live in her guitar if they are naughty enough. Excited by this offer, they return home and try to be as badly behaved as possible, to which their mother responds with threats of leaving and the arrival of a new mother with “glass eyes and a wooden tail” . Three times the strange girl tells them they haven't been naughty enough, and three times they return home to behave more badly than the day before. Finally, the girl tells them that they shall never be naughty enough to see the miniature couple and they return home to find that their mother really has gone. When the new mother arrives, they run away into the woods to live on berries. Lucy Clifford (1846–1929) Clifford, also known as Mrs. W. K. Clifford, was an English journalist, novelist, and wife of notable philosopher and mathematician William Kingdon Clifford. Other works by this author include: “Mrs. Keith's Crime” (1885), “The Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise” (1882), and “Aunt Anne” (1892). Read & Co. Classics is proudly republishing this classic collection of children's short stories now complete with an introductory poem by Lola Ridge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528791311

Book preview

1.png

THE

NEW MOTHER

By

LUCY CLIFFORD

WITH A POEM

BY LOLA RIDGE

First published in 1882

Copyright © 2020 Read & Co. Classics

This edition is published by Read & Co. Classics,

an imprint of Read & Co.

This book is copyright and may not be

reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd.

For more information visit

www.readandcobooks.co.uk

Contents

MOTHER By Lola Ridge

THE NEW MOTHER

I

II

Illustrations

The She Kissed Them

It Really is a Most Beautiful Thing, is a Peardrum

MOTHER

By Lola Ridge

Your love was like moonlight

turning harsh things to beauty,

so that little wry souls

reflecting each other obliquely

as in cracked mirrors . . .

beheld in your luminous spirit

their own reflection,

transfigured as in a shining stream,

and loved you for what they are not.

You are less an image in my mind

than a luster

I see you in gleams

pale as star-light on a gray wall . . .

evanescent as the reflection of a white swan

shimmering in broken water.

THE NEW MOTHER

I

The children were always called Blue-Eyes and the Turkey, and they came by the names in this manner. The elder one was like her dear father who was far away at sea, and when the mother looked up she would often say, Child, you have taken the pattern of your father’s eyes, for the father had the bluest of Blue-Eyes, and so gradually his little girl came to be called after them. The younger one had once, while she was still almost a baby, cried bitterly because a turkey that lived near to the cottage, and sometimes wandered into the forest, suddenly vanished in the middle of the winter; and to console her she had been called by its name.

Now the mother and Blue-Eyes and the Turkey and the baby all lived in a lonely cottage on the edge of the forest. The forest was so near that the garden at the back seemed a part of it, and the tall fir-trees were so close that their big black arms stretched over the little thatched roof, and when the moon shone upon them their tangled shadows were all over the white-washed