An interesting book with Redmarley connections has been republished. Most of us know of Alice Roberts, Elgar’s wife, and her connection with Hazeldine (now Pfera Hall) but not many know that she wrote a 2 volume novel "Marchcroft Manor". It was published in 1882, some nine years before she married Elgar.
The book has been reset and published in one volume. It can be obtained at a price of £18.00 inclusive of P & P from:
Kevin Allen
2, Milford Court
Gale Moor Avenue
GOSPORT
Hampshire
PO12 2TN
"LOVE HAS GREATER POWER THAN EITHER YOU OR I"
Alice Roberts place this quotation from Boccaccio at the head of her largely forgotten two-volume novel, Marchcroft Manor first published in 1862. That faith in the power of love would famously be vindicated through her controversial late marriage to Edward Elgar, an ambitious but insecure musician of a social class and a religion different from her own, and her junior by nearly ten years.
Marchcroft Manor is a conventional love story featuring two pairs of lovers, set in an old- fashioned Arcadian world of picnics, flower shows, a friendly vicar and his wife, and some quaint rustics. It is in many ways a typical Victorian romance leading to marriage and domestic bliss, an “idyll of the affections”, as one reviewer said. But it deftly interweaves romance with questions of social and political progress, and of women’s education, with ideals of manhood, and with the nature of marriage and of rôles within it. Through it all it is possible to sense Alice asking herself, ‘what kind of man do I want to marry?’ and ‘what kind of marriage do I want?’.
So the story avoids a predictable finish t the sound of wedding bells. The characters do not simply ‘live happily ever after’; we glimpse their future lives. Marriage is seen as a beginning just as much as an end, and Alice makes clear that her recipe for success is one based on a wife’s essential importance as supporter and sympathetic encourager of her husband’s career, and the provider of a comfortable, welcoming home as a refuge from the trials of the world. Marchcroft Manor thus clearly prefigures the nature of the Elgars’ marriage and its achievements
With its well-paced handing of narrative and dialogue, and its many touching evocations of the beauties of the natural world and, not least, of the transformative power of Music, Marchcroft Manor deserves to take its place as a significant part of the story of a remarkable marriage and a great composer. This new reader-friendly one volume edition has been corrected and reset throughout, with a Preface surveying its writer’s life and work.
