The History of Susan Spray [antikvár]

Susan Spray is a remarkable novel by a writer who deserves resurrection: Sheila Kaye-Smith, once celebrated as the "Sussex novelist", and now almost forgotten. Her novels have two major narrative virtues: they go with a "passionate swing" (her own phrase), and they combine a strong sense of place (usually but not invariably East Sussex) with a feeling for English social history. Susan Spray, like her other novels, is saturated in concrete social detail, from the soup made of stolen turnips eaten by the starving farm labourers (the effect of the Corn Laws), to the description of the open country near London in the 1860s where the cottage roofs are dirty and "the little untidy farms seemed nothing but poultry shops". The novel has another virtue surprising to those who know its author only vaguely as a "rural writer": psychological com- plexity. This, rather than the plotting, is the source of its success. Susan's story is absorbingly told (given a certain lushness of style) and the reader is kept in suspense right up to the last page, but it suffers from an excess of coincidence; the architectonics of narrative are not Sheila Kaye-Smith's strong point (as Forster observed apropos of Sussex Gorse). The novel rests on the character of its heroine, whose motives are explored with detached, ironic sympathy. Susan Spray is a success story—with a twist, the twist being religion. In Three Ways Home Sheila Kaye-Smith names the "three things that have meant most to me" as "the country, my writing and my religion", and she argues that religion is an important theme for novelists: It may be suppressed, inhibited or misdirected, after the manner of other human instincts, but it is still there, colouring human life for good or evil . . . Actually religion provides nearly as many good situations as the sex-instinct . . . and its effects on character (either in its growth or its thwarting) make something new in the way of psychological interest. However unpromisingly put, this manifesto is valid for herself: Sheila Kaye-Smith's best energies as a novelist were engaged by the religious psychology and experience of simple people. It is clear too that the idea of a female preacher, not merely a public speaker, laid hold of her imagination. The novel was inspired, she says, by "the visit to England of a notorious American evangelist" (presumably Aimée Semple MacPherson, also the original of Mrs Ape in Waugh's Vile Bodies); and Susan Spray owes little to any literary predecessors. She is a preacher in a poor Protestant sect, like Dinah Morris in Adam Bede, and she has a beautiful voice like Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians, but there the resemblances end. In her literal-minded grasping of the Word, she is a product of Bible Protestantism—(the sect to which she belongs, the Colgate Brethren, actually take their doc- trine of the Gate of Salvation from a pun on their founder's name: "The True Gate, the Golden Gate, the Holy Gate, the Colgate"). As a woman she is a product of the mid-nineteenth century: brought up in the bitter poverty of a farm labourer's family in the Hungry Forties (the bleak chapters dealing with her childhood are the best writing in the book) ; vain and anxious to dress the part of preacher (she is constantly hungry for clothes); an ambitious and successful woman whose social and literal mobility is symbolised by travelling first class on the new railway across Sussex, but still a big fish in a very little pond, she is convincingly presented not as a "typical Victorian" but as someone who could only have become the person she is in the particular time she is born into. The detached sympathy with which she and her congregations are treated is especially impressive, given that the author was a convert to Roman Catholicism; there is almost no mention of Rome and no trace of Chestertonian patronage in the handling of the Colgate Brethren.