'the shadow which I call pain': Mary Cholmondeley and the dilemma of bodily weakness

• Published in: Life writing 2009-12, Vol.6 (3), p.303-312
• Main Author: Oulton, Carolyn W. de la L.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: asthma; diaries; Mary Cholmondeley; Red Pottage
• ISSN: 1448-4528; 1751-2964
• DOI: 10.1080/14484520903082926

The article examines Mary Cholmondeley's response to her invalid condition at the fin de siècle, and its impact on her writing. Her relationship with her first publisher George Bentley, was sustained almost entirely by letter, but her empathy with him as a fellow asthmatic and her obligation to meet agreed deadlines, led her to confide in him about the details of her illness in ways that are not paralleled elsewhere in her correspondence. Cholmondeley's health was therefore linked to her status as a writer even before she was advised to undergo a rest cure in 1893, on the grounds that her literary efforts were threatening permanently to undermine her health. Over the next few years she began to posit an inter-connection between illness and creativity, according to which physical pain became the reverse image, or shadow, of her literary talent. This idea finds its clearest expression in the character of Hester Gresley, the fictional writer in Red Pottage whose dedication to her novel is seen as quite literally diminishing her life force day by day. However Cholmondeley distracts the readers' attention from this dilemma, making the destruction of Hester's manuscript, rather than her writing, the catalyst for her collapse.