When we lived in the Close at Salisbury, I was never tired of observing how much the beauty and character of the houses there affected the people who lived in them. This was the fundamental idea of The Seraphim Room. It came from Salisbury Close, though not one of the people in that book had ever lived there.
Then again, I have known a good many dwarfs in my life, and I have always noticed that there are certain mental and moral characteristics which seem to spring from dwarfishness. Then I have further observed that these characteristics are sometimes stronger in those members of a family who are not themselves dwarfs than they are in the dwarfs themselves. Seeing a dwarf appears to affect one more than being a dwarf. This is the idea at the root of Dwarf’s Blood, but again, none of its characters are portraits.
My father owned a collection of family papers which had at one time been carried off by a footman. Among them this man had discovered an ancient patent of nobility given to a member of the Olivier family. The adventurous footman adopted the title and travelled all over Europe as a marquis. This amusing idea was at the bottom of The Triumphant Footman.
Fiction is for me far easier to write than history or biography, for in fiction one generally escapes all the labour of research. It was almost by chance that I wrote two biographies. The first was the Life of Alexander Cruden, a name known to most people, though hardly anyone knows more about him than his name. People murmer: ‘Cruden’s concordance,’ though the phrase often conveys nothing at all to their minds.
I had always wanted to know more about Cruden. When I was a little girl, I was one day sitting on the floor in my father’s study, when my mother came into the room and took from the shelf an enormous tome. She studied it for a few moments and as she pushed it back into the shelf, she said, with a dramatic gesture:
‘Right as usual. That man never made a mistake. No wonder he went mad.’
I was profoundly impressed, and I knew the book was Cruden’s Concordance. Later on, I often remembered those words and wondered whether Cruden really had been mad, and if so, whether the Concordance had driven him out of his mind. At last I found his name by chance in the Dictionary of National Biography. There I learnt that Cruden did indeed go mad, not only once, but three times, and that each time it was a love affair which drove him demented. In the British Museum I read the long and elaborate journals which Cruden kept in the Mad House. I read of his instalment as Reader in French to the Earl of Derby at Halnaker Castle, and of how he had lost his situation because he could not pronounce a single French word. I read of his dramatic love affairs and of the superhuman effort by which he saved a poor sailor boy from the gallows on the very morning fixed for his execution. I found an account of the interview between the absurd yet inspired little bookseller and that most charming of eighteenth-century queens, Caroline of Anspach. There was certainly much more in the life of Alexander Cruden than the compilation of a Complete Concordance to the Scriptures. His was a most entertaining life to write.
And when Peter Davies asked me to contribute a volume to his series of short biographies I felt obliged to write the life of Mary Magdalen, which was not really a biography at all, but a work built up from a number of the beautiful imaginative and poetic lives of the Saint written during the Middle Ages.
The book has no value as history. What historical character it may possess lies in the picture it gives of the devotional mind in the Middle Ages. There I can declare that it is faithful and true; for every episode is taken from one or other of the old lives of the Saint which I had long loved to read. Mary Magdalen was fortunate in that her earliest biographers appeared in Provence, where her legend had persisted since the first or second centuries. Then, when these traditional stories began to be written down, the first springs of romance were already rising in the land of the Troubadours. Devotion and Beauty mingled with a simplicity and ease which has seldom been approached. In my Life of Mary Magdalen, I aimed at introducing this sacred Fairyland to those of my contemporaries who did not yet know it.
Most autobiographies make one wonder at the number of distinguished people known to their writers. Indeed they often seem to have no other acquaintances. Yet I have often thought that many of the humble and unknown people I knew in my childhood and youth are equally worth describing. More so perhaps; for some of these simple Wiltshire men and women were of a type which is fast disappearing. Their lives, their tastes, and their interests were limited in area as those of
