Red Pottage
1899
Red Pottage burns with the quiet fury of a Victorian woman who saw through the rot at the heart of respectable society. In one thread, Hugh Scarlett rides through a sweltering June night in London, sick with the weight of his affair with Lady Newhaven, a love that has curdled into something between habit and prison. In another, Rachael West, a wealthy heiress, falls for a man trapped in an illicit relationship that will destroy them both. Meanwhile, a brilliant female writer suffocates under the demands of her family, her talent trapped like a bird in a cage. Mary Cholmondeley wrote with a satirist's teeth and a poet's heart, skewering the hypocrisies that kept women silent and men pathetic while maintaining the elegant facade of civilization. The novel pulses with sensuality, guilt, and intellectual rebellion. It remains a startlingly bold exploration of desire, artistic freedom, and the polite cruelties that pass for Victorian morality.
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“Every year I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence which will risk nothing, and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as well.””
— Mary Cholmondeley
“People, like Sybell, believe one can only sympathize with what one has experienced. That is why they are always saying, 'as a mother,' or 'as a wife.' If that were true the world would have to get on without sympathy, for no two people have the same experience. Only a shallow nature believes that a resemblance in two cups means that they both contain the same wine.””
— Mary Cholmondeley
“I venture to think," he continued, his heavy, lustreless eyes coming to a stand-still upon her, "that though I accept in all reverence the position of woman as the equal of man, as promulgated in The Princess, by our lion-hearted Laureate, nevertheless I advance beyond him in that respect. I hold"”
— Mary Cholmondeley
“Confidences and confessions are too often a means of evasion of justice”
— Mary Cholmondeley
“The purple clematis and the small lizard-like leaf of the ivy have laid tender hands on all that is left of that stately house of prayer. The pigeons wheel round it, and nest in its niches. The soft, contented murmur of bird praise has replaced the noise of bitter human prayer.””
— Mary Cholmondeley
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Cholmondeley, Mary. Red Pottage. Lex, lex-books.com/book/red-pottage-40126158-ef5a-4d1a-8ee8-622963239dd6.Cholmondeley, M. (1899). Red Pottage. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/red-pottage-40126158-ef5a-4d1a-8ee8-622963239dd6Cholmondeley, Mary. Red Pottage. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/red-pottage-40126158-ef5a-4d1a-8ee8-622963239dd6.
