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    A Short Story Collection: 'The village lay pasted flat upon the marsh''
    A Short Story Collection: 'The village lay pasted flat upon the marsh''
    A Short Story Collection: 'The village lay pasted flat upon the marsh''
    Ebook67 pages1 hour

    A Short Story Collection: 'The village lay pasted flat upon the marsh''

    By Elinor Mordaunt

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    About this ebook

    Evelyn May Clowes was born on 7th May 1872 in Cotgrave, Nottinghamshire.

    Growing up in genteel circumstances, her early childhood was spent at Charlton Down House near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and her teenage years near Heythrop in the Cotswolds.

    She was educated at home by governesses, excelling at German, Latin, Greek, shorthand, landscape painting, and fabric and wallpaper design.

    In 1897 she went to Mauritius as companion to her cousin Caroline and in 1898 married Maurice Wilhemn Wiehe, the owner of a sugar plantation. She gave birth to two stillborn children. After a few years of marriage, she found life difficult and returned to England. Shortly afterwards she went by herself to Australia, arriving in June 1902 and gave birth to a son a few months later.

    She lived in Melbourne for about eight years. To earn a living she took on a wide and varied range of jobs; she edited a woman's fashion paper, wrote short stories and articles, made blouses, designed embroideries, tilled gardens, acted as a housekeeper, and did other artistic work. Her health was not strong, but she undertook any kind of work which would provide a living for herself and her infant son. This gained her an experience of life which was readily put to use in her literary works.

    Her first book, ‘The Garden of Contentment’, was published in 1902 under her pen-name Elinor Mordaunt. It was the first of many works that covered fiction, short stories, travel and autobiography.

    She changed her name by deed poll to Evelyn May Mordaunt on 1st July 1915 and gained a further reputation as a writer of short stories for magazines which display both her humour and sense of tragedy. Travel was always high on her priority and the experiences used not only for pleasure but in her writings and, as travel books, ideas in themselves.

    On 27 January 1933 at Tenerife, Canary Islands, she married a retired barrister from Gloucestershire. In her own words, the marriage ‘ended in tragedy.’

    Elinor Mordaunt died on 25th June 1942 at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. She was 70.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMiniature Masterpieces
    Release dateAug 16, 2021
    ISBN9781803540177
    A Short Story Collection: 'The village lay pasted flat upon the marsh''

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      Book preview

      A Short Story Collection - Elinor Mordaunt

      A Short Story Collection by Elinor Mordaunt

      Evelyn May Clowes was born on 7th May 1872 in Cotgrave, Nottinghamshire.

      Growing up in genteel circumstances, her early childhood was spent at Charlton Down House near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and her teenage years near Heythrop in the Cotswolds.

      She was educated at home by governesses, excelling at German, Latin, Greek, shorthand, landscape painting, and fabric and wallpaper design.

      In 1897 she went to Mauritius as companion to her cousin Caroline and in 1898 married Maurice Wilhemn Wiehe, the owner of a sugar plantation. She gave birth to two stillborn children. After a few years of marriage, she found life difficult and returned to England. Shortly afterwards she went by herself to Australia, arriving in June 1902 and gave birth to a son a few months later. 

      She lived in Melbourne for about eight years.  To earn a living she took on a wide and varied range of jobs; she edited a woman's fashion paper, wrote short stories and articles, made blouses, designed embroideries, tilled gardens, acted as a housekeeper, and did other artistic work. Her health was not strong, but she undertook any kind of work which would provide a living for herself and her infant son. This gained her an experience of life which was readily put to use in her literary works.

      Her first book, ‘The Garden of Contentment’, was published in 1902 under her pen-name Elinor Mordaunt. It was the first of many works that covered fiction, short stories, travel and autobiography.

      She changed her name by deed poll to Evelyn May Mordaunt on 1st July 1915 and gained a further reputation as a writer of short stories for magazines which display both her humour and sense of tragedy. Travel was always high on her priority and the experiences used not only for pleasure but in her writings and, as travel books, ideas in themselves.

      On 27 January 1933 at Tenerife, Canary Islands, she married a retired barrister from Gloucestershire. In her own words, the marriage ‘ended in tragedy.’

      Elinor Mordaunt died on 25th June 1942 at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. She was 70.

      Index of Contents

      HODGE

      GENIUS

      THE INSPIRED ‘BUSMAN

      HODGE

      People are accustomed to think of Somerset as a country of deep, bosky bays, sunny coves, woods, moorlands, but Hemerton was in itself sufficient to blur this bland illusion. It lay a mile and a half back from the sea, counting it all full tide; at low tide the sly, smooth waters, unbroken by a single rock, slipped away for another mile or more across a dreary ooze of black mud.

      The village lay pasted flat upon the marsh, with no trees worthy of the name in sight: a few twisted black-thorn bushes, a few split willows, one wreck of a giant blighted ash in the Rectory gardens, and that was all.

      For months on end the place swam in vapours. There were wonderful effects of sunrise and sunset, veils of crimson and gold, of every shade of blue and purple. At times the grey sea-lavender was like silver, the wet, black mud gleaming like dark opals; while at high summer there was purple willow-strife spilled thick along the ditches, giving the strange place a transitory air of warm-blooded life; but for the most part it was all as aloof and detached as a sleep-walker.

      The birds fitted the place as a verger fits his quiet and dusky church: herons and waders of all kinds; wild-crying curlew; and here and there a hawk, hanging motionless high overhead.

      There were scarcely fifty houses in Hemerton, and these were all alike, flat and brown and grey; where there had been plaster it was flaked and ashen. The very church stooped, as though shamed to a sort of poor-relation pose by the immense indifference of the mist-veiled sky—the drooping lids on a scornful face—for even at midday, in mid-summer, the heavens were never quite clear, quite blue, but still veiled and apart.

      The Rectory was a two-storied building, low at that, and patched with damp: small, with a narrow-chested air, tiny windows, a thin, grudging doorway, blistered paint, which gave it a leprous air; and just that one tree, with its pale, curled leaves in summer, its jangling keys in winter.

      It was amazing to find that any creature so warmly vital as the Rector’s daughter, Rhoda Fane, had been begotten, born, reared in such a place; spent her entire life there, apart from two years of school at Clifton, and six months in Brussels, cut short by her mother’s death.

      She was like a beech wood in September: ruddy, crisp, fragrant. Her hair, dark-brown, with copper lights, was so springing with life that it seemed more inclined to grow up than hang down; her face was almost round, her wide, brown eyes frank and eager. She was as good as any man with her leaping-pole: broad-shouldered, deep-breasted, with a soft, deep contralto voice.

      Her only brother, Hector, was four years younger than herself. Funds had run low, drained away by their mother’s illness, before it was time for him to go to school; he was too delicate for the second-best, roughing it among lads of a lower class, and so he was kept at home, taught by his father: a thin trickle of distilled classics and wavering mathematics; a good deal of history, no geography.

      He, in startling contrast to his sister, was a true child of the marshes: thin light hair, vellum-white, peaked face, pale grey eyes beneath an overhanging brow, large, transparent ears: narrow-chested, long-armed, stooping, so that he seemed almost a hunchback.

      In all ways he was the shadow of Rhoda, followed her everywhere; and as there is no shadow

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