Lucia in Mourning

 

Mapp and Lucia  by EF Benson

published 1931

 

[excerpt] Gradually, and in increasing areas, grey and white and violet invaded the unrelieved black in which she had spent the year of her widowhood; one day she wore a white belt, another there were grey panels in her skirt, another her garden-hat had a violet riband on it.

Even Georgie, who had a great eye for female attire, could not accurately follow these cumulative changes: he could not be sure whether she had worn a grey cloak before, or whether she had had white gloves in church last Sunday. Then, instead of letting her hair droop in slack and mournful braids over her ears, it resumed its old polished and corrugated appearance, and on her pale cheeks (ashen with grief) there bloomed a little brown rouge, which made her look as if she had been playing golf again, and her lips certainly were ruddier. It was all intensely exciting, a series of subtle changes at the end of which, by the middle of July, her epiphany in church without anything black about her, and with the bloom of her vitality quite restored, passed almost unremarked…

The hounds of spring were on the winter traces of her widowhood, and snapped up every fragment of it, and indeed spring seemed truly to have returned to her, so various and so multi-coloured were the blossoms that were unfolding. Never at all had Riseholme seen Lucia in finer artistic and intellectual fettle, and it was a long time since she had looked so gay. The world, or at any rate Riseholme, which at Riseholme came to much the same thing, had become her parish again.

 

 

comments: A blogpost from ten years ago explains a lot about the Mapp and Lucia books and has links to some other relevant entries. (eg Quaint Irene was, of course, one of my trouser-wearing women for a past Guardian article).

And someone kindly reminded me of this (Please tell me who it was, so I can give you credit), fitting in beautifully with our recent theme of mourning clothes, a wonderful description of Lucia rebuilding her life after being widowed. It is clear that one year is the key date here – she won’t even consider getting back to normal life and clothes until the first anniversary has passed. But then she can sit in her garden wearing a straw hat with a big black bow of crepe. Now, I couldn’t decide if this was a black hat or a straw-coloured hat? Not clear from context. But then I found this great picture and decided to use it anyway – no contest.

This is probably the best of the six Lucia books (though they are all very enjoyable) and it is packed with incident – learning Italian, callisthenics, the move by Lucia from Riseholme to Tilling. Also two separate pageant affairs – an Elizabethan one in Riseholme, and historical tableaux in Tilling. And, this is the book with lobster a la Riseholme, and the adventure with the kitchen table. Joy from start to finish.

Another Lucia book featured in the very early days of the blog, Lucia in Trouble. And there is a non-Lucia book by Benson here - one that I surprisingly did not enjoy at all.

 A lady in black by Francis Cadell

The 1920s fashion drawing is actually called  La promeneuse mélancolique - NYPL Digital Collections

and also Les cinq sens le gout - NYPL Digital Collections

Women dressed as Tudor queens, 1930s, from the wonderful Sam Hood collection at the State Library of NSW.