The Rector's Daughter
By (Author) F.M. Mayor
Little, Brown Book Group
Virago Press Ltd
2nd November 1999
10th August 1987
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
823.912
Paperback
368
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 23mm
260g
Dedmayne Rectory is quietly decaying, its striped chintz and darkened rooms are a bastion of outmoded Victorian values. Here Mary has spent thirty-five years, devoting herself to her sister, now dead, and to her father, Canon Jocelyn. Although she is pitied by her neighbours for this muted existence, Mary is content. But when she meets Robert Herbert, Mary's ease is destroyed and years of suppressed emotion surface through her desire for him. First published in 1924 this novel is an impressive exploration of Mary's relationship with her father, of her need for Robert and the way in which, through each, she comes to a clearer understanding of love.
'it is elegant and flexible, most fluently expressing every shade of human emotion' - Susan Hill 'The most exquisitely written, delicate, passionately felt and haunting book I have ever read' - Elizabeth Buchan
Flora Macdonald Mayor was born in 1872 and read history at Cambridge. Five of her novels have been published, one posthumously, and a collection of stories for children. But it is this novel, published in 1913 and THE RECTOR'S DAUGHTER, published in 1924 which best express her artistic genius. After life-long ill-health she died in 1932.