At times I had to check the date of publication of this book, for it seemed so thoroughly Edwardian or even Victorian in its sensibility and its depiction of lives rooted in faith and classical learning. It was a bit of a shock to encounter Kathy, a “modern woman”, with her slang and her cigarettes, otherwise I would have thought myself in Jane Eyre land. The Parsonage at Haworth was often in my mind.

The book is the life of Mary Jocelyn, daughter of a canon, plain, not young, socially awkward, prone to occasional outbursts. She lives with her widowed father in Dedmayne for almost all her life. (Like Lowick in “Middlemarch”, the name must be intentional.) Nothing much happens: she cares for her ailing sister until she dies, falls in love with a curate and briefly he seems to reciprocate – but his head is turned by Kathy, and Mary must endure disappointment and find her own path back to equilibrium. She longs for affection from her father, but he is – it seems – unintentionally a monster of selfishness. Here lies the subtlety (even slyness) of Mayor’s writing: Canon Joycelyn’s actions (or, rather, inactions) circumscribe Mary’s life and suppress her natural warmth, but he is not an unkind man. Mary’s life – to modern eyes – seems dull and wasted: it is a constant struggle for her to overcome and hide her unhappiness once her deeper feelings are engaged, but she is never presented as someone to be pitied. She has her inner life and resources. Towards the end, though, even her faith brings no lightness to her; she keeps herself busy, and in this she is valued and feels useful, but it seems that only nature and her memories offer her consolation. (And it is a life that needs consolation.) And then she dies. The epitaph for such an unmodern person is spoken by a bright young Bloomsbury atheist:

“She had a life so shrivelled it became absurd. She ought to have been married to that man and been happy. . . . [She] had a pull over us in a way . . . she cared, and we can’t care, not much, and never for long, not even for big things, and after a time they aren’t big, but quite, quite small.”

Perhaps it could have been a shorter and tighter novel, but it was a salutary pleasure to read it and be so thoroughly immersed in a whole different world.