‘Hester’ A Story of Contemporary Life was published in 1883. It is regarded as a proto-feminist novel but don’t hold that against it. Everything is quite credible and if mapped against the life of its author moderate in its display of female capacity. Catherine Vernon is a firm woman who comes to the rescue of the Vernon Bank when its male head brings it to the brink of ruin by gross extravagance. There is going to be a run on the bank. Market day is nigh and rumours have intensified. John Vernon has decamped, Mrs. John is unaware of the crisis and offers the 20lb. In her purse to stanch the bloody flow of capital not matched by the gold in the coffers. Who are you going to call? Catherine a major shareholder of another major branch of the Vernons has money of her own. The Bank of England supplies the bullion the sight of whose chests eases the fear of Vernon Bank customers. Whew!
The novel uses the excellent device of counterparts. Catherine and Hester as against John Vernon and Edward Vernon. Edward is a Vernon cousin and has a taste for living on the stock market gamblers edge of great profit or mighty ruin. He is the presumed future head of the bank and is also the love interest of Hester as John Vernon the defalcator seemed to be of Catherine. In the end he married another woman. Their daughter Hester has inherited the decisive manner of the true Vernon stock and manages her mother with a nice precision.
Mrs. Oliphant wrote a lot very quickly and Virginia Woolf who admired her regretted that she had not the time to produce a finished work of art. That seems true but the diabolism of it is that it is entirely false. Writers with an intelligence as quick as Oliphant’s use pressure to draw on the active imagination. The narrative swerves are more real for being as haphazard as life itself. Catherine Vernon is always known as Catherine as being of the town’s psychic family and having the dignity of a Christian name like a knight of the realm. She establishes a Veronry where all the genteel members of the Vernon clan that are distressed gentlefolks reside. This is a large mansion divided up into self contained units. The relationship of its tenants to Catherine, abasement before her, bitchy behind her back is expressed to an exquisite level of noticing probably from the author’s own life and the retainers that she supported with her inveterate labor. Being helplessly obliged is uncomfortable and unforgivable. Their grumbling at this onerous predicament is amusing and Catherine who is well aware of their genteel ingratitude is ironically detached from their ostensible fawning.
In the common garden the summer house is a matter of territorial conflict.
“It was at this moment that the two ladies appeared who considered the summerhouse their special property. They were tall women with pronounced features and a continual smile—in dresses which had a way of looking scanty, and were exactly the same. Their necks were long and their noses large, both which characteristics they held to be evidences of family and condition. They followed each other, one always a step in advance of the other with a certain pose of their long necks and turn of their shoulders which made some people think of the flight of two long-necked birds. Mr. Mildmay Vernon, who pretended to some scholarship, called them the Cranes of Ibycus. They arrived thus at the peaceful spot all chequered with morning light and shade, as with a swoop of wings.”
Other residents with a prominent role in the drama are a Captain Morgan and his wife, octogenarian relations of Catherine’s who become friendly with Hester as she is growing up. Their grandchildren Roland and Ellen come into the story also. The young man is a stockbroker, handsome, charming and sure to be a love interest. But there’s Harry Vernon who is courting Hester without success. Will his sturdy if dull soundness win the day or will it be Edward Vernon the putative heir.
Meanwhile the gambling on the market unites Roland and Edward the one cool and controlled professional and the other a potential addict seething and resenting his subaltern role. Will there be a bust? The Vernon Bank is not too big to fail and can history repeat itself in another key. A financial smash and the crushing betrayal of Catherine by Edward may disable her this time. The story moves along smoothly, with sharp observation of the social setting and the machinations of those that would challenge the dominance of the matriarch.
This is a superb novel. I read that Mrs. Oliphant is coming to be recognised as an important writer unjustly neglected. Her characters seem real much more so than the papier mache constructions of the average Trollope.
