After the fall
Matthew Dennison
LADY ROSE AND MRS MEMMARY by Ruby Ferguson Persephone, £12, pp. 222, ISBN 1903155436
There is nothing new about the 'had-it-all, lost-it-all' plot. It provides common ground for the story of Adam and Eve and the labyrinthine ramifications of any highgloss American soap opera. It is also the stuff of Lady Rose and Mrs Memmaty, a fairytale for adult readers with a sting in its tail, a bite in the telling.
Ruby Ferguson's novel was first published in 1937. It is the story of Lady Victoria Elspeth Rose Grahame-RoothTargenct, 'the happiest little girl in Scotland' and also its most materially blessed, heir to the 'dream mansion' of Keepsfield on the shores of Fife and its park stretching 'as far as the eye could sec, as they always say in books'. Lady Rose grows up to make a suitable marriage and provide an heir and a spare for her suitable husband, then throws it all away in a single, impulsive, unconsidered romantic gesture. Pivotal to the 'had-itall, lost-it-all' plot are the folly of human nature and the transience of earthly joys, So Lady Rose pays a savage price for her transgression, but significantly, in this bittersweet novel that is only part girlish souffle, never entirely forfeits her happiness.
The novel is a curiosity. Its 80-year timespan is orchestrated through a series of flashbacks, beginning at the end, in 1933, with Keepsfield abandoned, shuttered and to let. Lawyer's wife Helen Dacre looks over the house in the company of its caretaker Mrs Mcmmary, who tells her, and the reader, the story of her mistress Lady Rose's life. Lady Rose begins life with everything (save arguably any tangible expression of love). That she will end it less fortunately is intimated in a number of narrative asides and in Ferguson's insistence that her story is a modern fairytale, with all the potential for wretchedness that implies: looking at the rooftops of Edinburgh, 18-year-old Lady Rose recognises 'it was like an illustration from a fairytale. Life was rather like a fairytale altogether.'
On its first publication, the Queen Mother so enjoyed Lady Rose and Mrs Memnuny that she invited Ruby Ferguson to dinner at Buckingham Palace. Perhaps the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was moved by Ferguson's encomium of all things Scottish, Lady Rose's passionate engagement with Scottish history, her devotion to 'the most beautiful country in the world', its landscape for her so much more special than the 'pale, poor country' south of the border. Perhaps for Ferguson's contemporaries of the interwar generation the novel's lush, unabashed romanticism invited willing surrender. Present-day readers similarly prepared to suspend cynicism and surrender to its vintage charms will find in Lady Rose and Mrs Memmaty unexpected depths, wisdom and even social protest, though its escapism is incomplete, its portrayal of human nature still red in tooth and claw beneath the trappings of Victorian grand luxe.
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