The Bohemian Girl Read Free Page A

psychiatrist not to end her life using pills he’d prescribed for her depression, Frances created a ‘herbal’ concoction, which she took, and then lay down to die, apparently calmly and peacefully.
    MICHAEL MARTEN: It wasn’t sudden, it was a continual worsening. It was a cloud over her and it grew blacker. She seemed less able to escape from the blackness. When it happened I was certainly shocked. But it was not in the least unexpected. And I felt thereafter that nothing would have saved her.
    SHEILA VERNON: I go over and over thinking how we might have done things differently, and probably we should have, you can’t help wondering. But … you just have to live with it as best you can. In a way it was rather like someone with a terrible illness that couldn’t be cured, and you don’t want them to go on and on suffering.
    MICHAEL MARTEN: A few months after Frances’s death I sent ‘A School Story’ back to Gollancz in its rewritten form but they turned it down. I got in touch with her agency Blake Friedmann and asked them to suggest other publishers who might be interested. They sent me a list of about twenty, to whom I sent copies, most of whom turned it down until André Deutsch accepted it. And I think it’s the best of Frances’s novels.
    The Fall of Doctor Onslow
was published finally in July 1994. Ben Preston for
The Times
called it ‘a searing indictment of the process of education … tersely written in a style that successfully
captures Victorian restraint and its stifling sensibilities’. In the
Tablet
, Jill Delay reflected that ‘it is difficult to believe when reading it that the author was a child of our times and did not actually live in the middle of the last century: she recreates that world so vividly, with such understanding of its characters, such an ear for its speech, such feeling for its attitudes and taboos’. Lucasta Miller for the
Independent
observed that the novel’s ‘posthumous appearance is both a tragic reminder of what she might have gone on to do, and a testimony to what she did achieve’.

 
    THE BLENTHAMS OF DUNSTANTON PARK

CHAPTER 1
A CHILDREN’S PICNIC, CHESHIRE 1880
    â€˜Nurse says your father is connected with Trade,’ said Diana. She had an audience of three younger children, who were picking at the remains of potted shrimps and ice-cream.
    â€˜He’s not, and I’ll pull your hair if you say it again,’ said Thomas.
    â€˜Nurse says your father is –’
    Thomas jerked a straggling piece of hair, but not hard enough really to hurt her.
    â€˜I was going to say something else!’ said Diana. ‘And now I shan’t tell you what.’ She grinned at him, showing a gap in her teeth, when he had expected her to cry.
    At that moment, Thomas’s fat governess came up.
    â€˜I saw, Thomas. I saw that you’re incapable of behaving like a little gentleman even for an hour.’
    â€˜He could be a gentleman, I s’pose,’ said Diana, with her head on one side.
    Miss Taplow hesitated, looked at the child, then said: ‘Apologise to Diana, Thomas.’
    â€˜I shan’t.’ The governess slapped his face, and Thomas turned white.
    â€˜You need not stay,’ she told him, and pressed her hands to her forehead as he ran off in the direction of the grown-ups’ picnic, on the other side of the tall Gothick folly which all had been taken to admire. Miss Taplow slowly followed him, and the nannies, who were guarding the food baskets under an elder tree, looked after her with pursed lips before they started to criticise her: not because of what she had done to Thomas, but because she was a governess and not a nanny.
    It was a very hot day, and party discipline had grown lax. At first, the twenty or so children had been arranged in neat circles, and food had been brought to them by the various nurses, and one under-footman from the house. Now, most had had enough to eat and were sitting in idle and irregular