Enthusiasms

by Mark Girouard

Overview

“Charming” essays on literature and life by the British raconteur who “often finds poignancy or humor in the seemingly trivial” (Publishers Weekly).

Does a neglected masterpiece by Jane Austen enshrine her first love affair? Who was Vita Sackville West’s real grandfather? What clues are there to the identity of “Walter,” doyen of Victorian pornographers? When and why did P.G. Wodehouse mutate from hack to genius? Was Oscar Wilde really down and out in Paris? Was Brideshead really Madresfield?

These and other excursions into literary or social history have developed out of Mark Girouard’s spare time enthusiasms, as diversions from his main occupation as an architectural historian. In nine essays he calls attention to points that have not been noticed before, corrects fallacies that have gotten into general circulation, suggests, identifies, redates, refutes, or pours a little cold water on unjustified romanticisms. Three further essays sample another enthusiasm, his own family background, and introduce characters such as the dwarf who had to stand on a bench to address the South African Parliament, the colonial governor who fell in love with his niece, and the dowager duchess with whom he spent his childhood on the edge of the park at Chatsworth.

“An architectural historian fascinated not merely by buildings but, still more, by the ways of life which they supported and by the people whom they served.” —The Telegraph

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781010884
Publisher:	Quarto Publishing Group USA
Publication date:	12/20/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	197
File size:	947 KB

About the Author

Mark Girouard was born in 1931. He is a British architectural writer, an authority on the country house, leading architectural historian, and the biographer of James Stirling. He worked for Country Life magazine firstly as its Architectural Writer, and then as its Architectural Editor until 1967. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1975 to 1976, and was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1987. Among his many books is Elizabethan Architecture (2009) and Life in the English Country House, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for 1978, and the WH Smith Literary Award in 1979. Writing with wit and erudition, Mark Girouard's works expertly explore the social history of the fabric in which we live. He lives in Notting Hill, London.
Mark Girouard was born in 1931. He is a British architectural writer, an authority on the country house, leading architectural historian, and the biographer of James Stirling.He worked for Country Life magazine firstly as its Architectural Writer, and then as its Architectural Editor until 1967. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1975 to 1976, and was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1987. Among his many books is Elizabethan Architecture (2009) and Life in the English Country House, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for 1978, and the WH Smith Literary Award in 1979. Writing with wit and erudition, Mark Girouard's works expertly explore the social history of the fabric in which we live. He lives in Notting Hill, London.

Read an Excerpt

6. Drooling Victorians: the strange story of Pet Marjorie



Among the curiosities of biographical dictionaries the pseudonymous Walter can be matched with Marjory Fleming, the only eight-year-old in the DNB. I owe my knowledge of her to a chance pick-up in the local Oxfam bookshop: The Complete Marjory Fleming: her Journals, Letters and Verses, transcribed and edited by Frank Sidgwick, 1934. Below the title on the dust-cover was a quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson: 'Marjory Fleming was possibly - no, I take back possibly - she was one of the noblest works of God.' On opening the book and discovering that she had died of measles in 1811, shortly before her ninth birthday, I was sufficiently intrigued to buy it.



Marjory Fleming was born in Kirkcaldy, Fifeshire, in 1803. Her father was a Kirkcaldy accountant, her mother came from a family of Edinburgh surgeons who were friends of, or at least friendly with, Sir Walter Scott. Her journals, poems and letters were kept by her family, but remained unknown until a London journalist, H.B. Farnie, came across them and wrote an article on her, which was published in 1853 as a booklet entitled Pet Marjorie: A Story of Child Life Fifty Years Ago. He claimed, without justification, that 'Pet Marjory' was what she was called by her family.



Farnie's pamphlet would have sunk without a trace if it had not been unexpectantly written about by Dr John Brown in the North British Review in 1863. His article was turned into a book, Marjorie Fleming: A Sketch, and became a bestseller. His sentimental account of a bull-terrier, Rab and his Friends, had been another bestseller when it was published in 1861, so an expectant public was ready to take 'Pet Marjorie' to its heart. Brown gave his readers everything they could wish for about his 'warm, rosy, little wifie.' The existence of an inscribed copy of Maria Edgeworth's Rosamund and Harry and Lucy given to her by Walter Scott encouraged him to invent several pages of nauseating twaddle about the two of them: 'Marjorie! Marjorie!' shouted her friend, 'where are ye, my bonnie wee croodlin doo,' and so on. He quoted copiously from her work, not hesitating to, in his view, improve it where necessary, and provided the essential end, a tear-jerking death-bed.



It was Brown's presentation that elicited Stevenson's praise, and got Marjorie a mention in a poem by Swinburne and tribute from Mark Twain: 'she was made out of thunderstorms and sunshine'. In 1889 Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf's father and a formidable person in his own right, gave her an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, which he edited, and wrote it himself. A full-scale biography by Lachlan Macbean, with many illustrations, followed in 1904, and was reprinted in 1905, 1914 and 1928. For some years Marjory's house in Kirkcaldy was opened as a museum dedicated to her. In 1930 her manuscripts were presented to the National Library of Scotland. A collotype facsimile of them, edited by Arundell Esdaile, was published shortly after. Frank Sidgwick's book followed in 1934, compete with introduction, family tree, copious notes, appendices and index.



And what were her writings like? They are charming, especially as presented by Sidgwick in a typescript version of the manuscript, complete with wide spacing, crossings out and corrections. Her lessons, naughtiness, friendships, readings and all the events of each day, along with pious reflections and maxims evoked by her Presbyterian family, are mixed up together and expressed in language half-grown up and half-childish. A couple of quotations may give their flavour:



I am not going to tell you about the horrible and wretched plaege that my multiplication gives me you cant conceive it - the most Devilish thing is 8 times 8 & 7 times 7 is what nature c

Table of Contents

Contents



Introduction

1. Jane Austen: re-dating Catherine

2. The myth of the Tennyson disinheritance

3. Up and down with Oscar Wilde

4. Yonghy-bonghy-Wilde

5. Walter wins: a hunt but no kill

6. Drooling Victorians: the strange story of Pet Marjorie

7. The wrong castle: a Charlotte Mew correction

8. Horrors made harmless: Masefield and The Midnight Folk

9. Glossing over the seamy side: Pepita and the Sackville-Wests

10. P.G. Wodehouse: from hack to genius

11. How to write a bestseller: Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford

12. Waugh on Girouard: a correction

13. The Solomons

14. My grandparents

15. Aunt Evie

Editorial Reviews

A delightful bouquet of oddities to charm and intrigue.

Editor's choice: A delightful bouquet of oddities to charm and intrigue.

Editor's choice: A delightful bouquet of oddities to charm and intrigue.

A delightful bouquet of oddities to charm and intrigue.

This is the perfect bedside book and journey companion and, although a mixed assortment, no rag-bag of warmed-up journalism. I cannot think of a better house-present - or a Christmas one, come to that, even if it's only just October.

From the Publisher