(Edward)’Our mother has, at all events, the merit of dotting her is and crossing her t’s.’
As he speaks he wheels round, and discovers the fact, before unsuspected by him, of the presence of Miss Bateson. The displeased surprise which that discovery engenders in his already gloomy young eye must be patent enough to its object.
Edward is the new head of the family only at the stage of sitting his Greats at Oxford. Claire is next – engaged to be married. Then Althea followed by Tom who is at Eton and Fanny the youngest who will go with Claire to her married home. The description of Mother Vane in the library before her abdication speech indicates the authors views:
The library is a good sized room—for London a large one—dark with the books that climb the walls to the ceiling, with the dusk of the eighteenth century wainscot and doors, and with the habitual sombreness of a back look-out. The books are for the most part old—obviously the accumulations of respectable generations—but the litter that covers the large writing-table is as obviously new : reports, schedules, books of reference, type-written letters, Socialist journals. At this table is seated a lady, who, as soon as her ear tells her by the cessation of any rustling or footsteps that her audience are arrived, and awaiting her, rises, and, turning slowly round, faces them. Were it not for a slight condescension in the matter of petticoats, it would not be obvious to a stranger that it is not a slender man who is preparing to address the little group, so austerely masculine is the just-gray-touched thick short hair parted on one side, the coat, the tie, the waistcoat. This widow might at a pinch, and behind a table which would conceal the degradation of the female skirt, well pass for a little widower.
The sexual invert tending towards pervert theme is well marked in the novel. Assurances of fidelity go far beyond the girlish gush of innocence. Faustina has moved Althea into her flat in Chelsea and is on her way to a meeting. Althea is staying to type up some letters:
’ Now that you have given me the heads, told me the sense in which you wish these letters answered, I can get through them perfectly well by myself I am really growing quite expert with the typewriter. How long do you expect to be away ?'
‘ You may be quite sure as short a time as I possibly can ‘—using the tone with which in old days that contemptible survival, a man in love, was wont to part from his mistress.’
The vanguard of the “shrieking sisterhood” are depicted as androgynous :
Althea s eyes rove helplessly over the unknown crowd—both over those ladies whose gallant feathers and careful red heads show them to be mere butterfly spectators of the fray, and those others whose wildly cropped grizzled hair and super-manly coats and waistcoats point them out as the nucleus and core—the female ' Old Guard,' as it were—of the army of advance.
Faustina has had a string of acolytes previous to Althea all of whom proved unwilling to give their all to the great work. Will her latest convert revert? A precipitating event is her displacement by Cressida, an airheaded scion of the aristocracy, whom Faustina wants to go on ‘rescue’ work amongst the prostitutes of the Haymarket. Even John Drake an associate of Faustina’s is outraged by this. ‘Twill be the ruin of her. Edward, Althea’s brother is a friend of Cressida’s. If this foolish ‘gel’ goes on that mission she will be disgraced.
This is a satiric novel with the strong contrasts which the genre demands. Due to its challenge to suffragette sanctification and New Woman ideology it is regarded as reactionary by those who would at the same time see Broughton as a feminist. Genius tends to be unclassifiable. It is a finely focussed and well written book, of its time and verging on our own, betimes.
(from archive.org Dear Faustina
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