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Welcome to our fall read Diana Tempest by Mary Cholmondeley!

I haven't read the author before and I believe the group hasn't read any of her work before. I'm excited to be reading and hosting the discussion.

Who is in? :)

Reading Schedule:

Week 1: Chapters 1-7: Oct. 23 - Oct. - 29
Week 2: Chapters 8-14: Oct. 30 - Nov. 5
Week 3: Chapters 15-21: Nov. 6 - Nov. 12
Week 4: Chapters 22-28: Nov. 13 - Nov. 19
Week 5: Chapters 29-35: Nov. 20 - Nov. 26
Week 6: Chapters 36 - 44 (Conclusion): Nov. 27 - Dec. 3

Author Bio:

Mary Cholmondeley is a Victorian novelist best known for her work Red Pottage. She showed a keen talent for writing and creating stories from a young age. Despite being weighed down by domestic responsibilities, running a large household and tending to her paralyzed mother as well as her own illness with chronic asthma, she managed to "work an occupation" for her as an author.

Mary Cholmondeley was born to a family of moderate means. Her father was a Rector. But her family was well connected from both maternal and paternal sides, so Mary lived a good social life attending many social gatherings. These interactions proved vital in improving her creativity and producing stories and characters of interest.

Diana Tempest

Diana Tempest was first serialized in Temple Bar from January 1893. It was published in Volume the same year. The novel is described as part sensational, part romance, and part 'New Woman' fiction. Thematically, it touches on wealth, greed, family, love, loyalty, betrayal, inheritance, and illegitimacy.

In order to know more about an author that I have never heard of before, I decided to read Red Pottage. Now almost at the end of of the novel, I have been surprised at how much I have enjoyed it. Of particular note were the author’s skills in developing characters, descriptions of scenes/events and the creation of a twisting, turning plot. There were plenty of humorous passages alongside darker, more ‘sensational�� events and emotions which maintained my interest throughout.

If Diana Tempest is anything like her best known novel then it should be a treat.

I'm glad that you enjoyed Red Pottage, Trev. Your description of the author's skill is promising. I hope we'll have an enjoyable read.

Dear Piyangie, there seems to be an audiobook version available on LibriVox and read by Simon Evers.
Just for info, to help those in the group and like audiobooks. Thanks.

Mary Cholmondeley: Diana Tempest

Thank you very much, Marianna. It would be much help to many. I'd like it too, but since I have to lead the discussion, I'll have to settle for the kindle. :) I searched for resources but didn’t come across any except in Project Gutenberg, and that too in separate volumes.

Dear members, if you come across any free versions available for this book, please feel free to share it here. Thanks.

There are also free Kindle copies in three volumes. Here the German Amazon site I use, but I think they will also be available in other countries:

Thanks, Michaela.

I found these links.

Here is a link to a more extended biography of Mary Cholmondeley which includes the chronology of ‘Diana Tempest�� in relation to her other works.

The final few paragraphs of the biography include a review of ‘Diana Tempest�� in a depth that might be considered as containing spoilers so some might prefer not to read them until completing the novel.

Thank you, Trev. I'm sure many will be interested. My copy also has a good insight to Cholmondeley's life. I'd love to read more about her. I'll get to it once I finish the book.

Here in the US, Project Gutenberg has it. In three volumes, it can be found here for free:

Thank you, Jessica.

Interesting premise--I look forward to reading it!

Glad to have you joining in, Jane.

Here is a short excerpt from the biography I have mentioned above.

�� “Nemesis��, as Diana Tempest was originally called, was begun in 1889; its composition was interrupted by Mary’s own severe illness and by increasing worry over the failing health both of her mother and now her youngest sister Hester, who died before its publication in 1893 and to whom it was posthumously dedicated. Diana Tempest was the first of Mary Cholmondeley’s works to appear under her own name and was an immediate success, going into three editions in nine months and staying in print throughout its author’s lifetime.

Early in 1896 Mr Cholmondeley resigned the living at Hodnet and shifted with his three unmarried daughters to London. (Essex, next in age to Mary, had married Ralph Benson; one of their children was the future novelist Stella Benson.) The move freed Mary (the eldest) and her sisters from the many responsibilities which had been their lot at Hodnet and increased their contact with the literary figures of the time. The Cholmondeley sisters�� ‘at homes�� at Knightsbridge and later at Leonard Place, Kensington, to which they moved after their father’s death in 1910, are recalled by Percy Lubbock in his Memoir and by Lady Ritchie in one of her ‘notes of happy things��. Other regular guests were Henry James, Howard Sturgis (who became a particularly close friend and whose Belchamber is quoted admiringly in the title story of The Romance of His Life), Rhoda Broughton, and Mary and Jane Findlater. From 1907 on, Mary and Victoria Cholmondeley regularly spent their summers in an old cottage in the village of Ufford, Suffolk.��

Four of Mary’s novels, including Diana Tempest, were serialised in the Temple Bar literary magazine. Here is the opening segment of the novel as it first appeared in Volume 97 of Temple Bar in 1893.

Thanks so much for that excerpt, Trev! I'm a room guide at Lamb House, Henry James's home, and sent the url for that biography to the house manager.

I know that Jane and Trev are reading with me. Who else joining us with this read?

I´m not sure, Piyangie, as you mentioned the author was similar to Trollope whose two books I read weren´t so much to my taste. Obviously Diana Tempest is also sensational, and I´ve had too much of that in our last read, The Half-Sisters.

I'm sorry to hear that, Michaela. I hope the next read will treat you well.

Again from the biography I quoted above, this excerpt provides the contemporary Victorian view of Mary Cholmondeley.

�� Mary Cholmondeley’s contemporaries�� evaluation of her qualities as a writer is well summed up by her obituary notice in The Times:

“Her literary style is simple and unaffected, with admirably concealed art. A severe critic might object to an occasional touch of melodrama in her plots. But in her wit and wisdom, her vein of satirical humour, her resolute refusal to turn her novels into propagandist pamphlets, and her intensive cultivation in each story of one group of characters whose little closed world is made absorbing by her artistry, she reminds us of her great exemplar Jane Austen.��

A correspondent writes��

“Grave, quiet, low-voiced, with a kind of gracious and dignified angularity, Mary Cholmondeley looked exactly what she was—an Englishwoman of good old stock, with a long and decent “county�� history behind her. She was this, with everything that it implied; her seriousness, her fine courtesy, her deep sense of duty, were full of traditions of an honourable past. But she had added to these something entirely of her own, in quite another vein—her observant and ironic humour. (17 July, 1925)��

As her obituary suggests, Mary Cholmondeley is not a novelist to whom modern readers might turn for the sake of her direct involvement in the political or social issues of her day: her books reflect the conservative values of her county background . She shows no desire for changes in the structure of the society she examines at times with such penetration; her main concern is with the moral health of individuals within that society, with their degree of self-awareness and self criticism, with their sense of responsibility to themselves and to others. In this sense, the suggested resemblance to Jane Austen is something more than the affinity regularly claimed for any competent practitioner of the novel of manners.��

As a non-native speaker of English, I have a naive question to the natives: how do you pronounce 'Cholmondeley'?

wikipedia says "usually pronounced /ˈtʃʌmli/" - is that so?

sabagrey wrote: "As a non-native speaker of English, I have a naive question to the natives: how do you pronounce 'Cholmondeley'?

wikipedia says "usually pronounced /ˈtʃʌmli/" - is that so?"

It can be pronounced as the spelling to include all the syllables, but my understanding in the UK is that it is usually pronounced ‘Chumley��

Here is an audio pronunciation.

Trev wrote: "It can be pronounced as the spelling to include all the syllables, but my understanding in the UK is that it is usually pronounced ‘Chumley��"

thank you. yet another of the wonders of English pronunciation ;-)

good that I asked. It would not be the first English word I go on mispronouncing for decades - such as "midwifery".

Good question sabagrey, I wouldn´t have known either. ;)

I also checked the pronunciation while reading. :)

another question: does it say anywhere when the novel is set?

I thought it was contemporary, i.e. 1893 or a few years before that. Now I came across a detail (towards the end of the book) which would set it 10 to 20 years earlier (between 1871 and 1883) - if it is not an error by the author.

(view spoiler)[here is the detail: "The ruins of the scorched Tuileries pushed up against the sky" - the Tuileries burned down in 1871 during the Commune, and the removal of the ruins was completed in 1883 (hide spoiler)]