This is a guest post by the founder of Solar Press.
By rights, F.M. Mayor should be one of England’s most beloved novelists. The Rector’s Daughter was a bestseller upon its initial release and her other books were moderate successes. Virginia Woolf and John Masefield admired her work, Bertrand Russell was a friend, and her one and only short story collection for adults — released posthumously in 1935 — received a glowing endorsement from M.R. James, arguably the world’s greatest writer of ghost stories.
And yet, F.M. Mayor is not a household name. There have been no films made of her books, no BBC miniseries. Though everyone who reads her work seems instantly to become a fan and evangelist, she never seems to break through into the mainstream. Her relatively recent critical reappraisal, primarily within academic circles interested in early 20th century women writers, seems to be the closest Mayor has come to a mainstream breakthrough since the original publication of The Rector’s Daughter in 1924.
Despite many attempts over the years — from Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press to the Penguin Modern Classics series, Virago, and, most recently, the always wonderful Persephone Books — Mayor’s work seems destined for obscurity.
And none of Mayor’s work has proved more obscure than her final (posthumous) release: The Room Opposite & Other Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
There is little information available online about the collection, beyond a handful of blog posts and M.R. James’ endorsement of the work — notable as M.R. James, a noted reactionary and literary traditionalist, rarely praised (more often, he openly criticised) contemporary literature. Like many others, James’ endorsement of a work was enough to intrigue me; unlike most others, I became so fixated on the work that I wasn’t deterred by its unavailability and instead sought the work out at the British Library.
When I finally read the collection, James’ praise made complete sense. Not only are Mayor’s short stories a masterclass in the form, but, as has been noted by others, there is a definite conservative, almost reactionary, streak within Mayor’s work that James would certainly have appreciated.
Though Mayor associated socially with notable feminists, she herself does not seem to have identified as a feminist — much of her association with feminists seems to have stemmed from her status as a spinster. But, while many of her friends and associates were spinsters by choice, Mayor was a spinster through tragedy.
As is reflected in her work, Mayor was a romantic. She viewed love as something spiritual, sublime, superhuman, supernatural — variously with the power to revive or destroy those who fall under its spell. When her fiancé, Ernest Shepherd, far away in India, died suddenly in 1903, she was devastated — receiving word of his death by mail as she was closing down her life in England and preparing to join him.
Already sickly, for Mayor the loss was a blow from which she never recovered. After Shepherd’s death, she moved in with her sister and lived her remaining years quietly, splitting her time between writing and local charitable work. There is no record of her ever having another romantic relationship, and the residues of Ernest’s death are clearly visible in her writing — most notably in her story “The Unquiet Grave,” the story of a lover who loses his betrothed while trapped miles away, unable to visit her; and “Le Spectre de la Rose,” in which a woman is haunted by a man who is the image of perfection, immortal, distant, never ageing, and unattainable; her devotion to him gradually destroys her.
As noted, Mayor’s stories have a reactionary streak, often showing a clear distrust of “progress” in the political sense. In her stories, family and tradition are valued for their own sake; folk knowledge is respected and folk traditions are considered a logical extension of this knowledge. By contrast, social progressives, atheists, reformists, and rationalists are (at best) misguided utopians. There is never any contempt for these individuals — Mayor’s work is too inherently compassionate for that — but there is a fear that, in man’s rush to modernise himself and his society, his soul may be in danger. While this is most explicit in “Mother And Daughter” — the closest any of the short stories comes to open polemic — it’s a constant theme throughout.
Despite this, Mayor’s reactionary streak, much like M.R. James’, could hardly be labelled a one-note ‘of the time’ Christian conservatism. This same collection features stories where those fighting against tradition and society for a more spiritual kind of true love, those who murder righteously to protect or avenge, and those in the country still clinging to their ancient witchery and occult practices are presented at least compassionately, and frequently heroically.
Mayor’s morality is less obviously political than it’s often presented, more self-directed, spiritual, almost pagan—in contrast to her publicly expressed Anglican religious sensibilities. It’s hard to pin her down as having any worldview in particular, beyond being distrustful of the rapid, radical social change happening all around her, and an innate belief in the Chesterton’s Fence idea of tradition.
Despite its reputation and M.R. James’ endorsement, The Room Opposite is not, as it is frequently discussed, just another hard-to-find volume of Edwardian ghost stories. In fact, only around half of the sixteen stories are tales of ghosts or the macabre and the mysterious. The other eight are powerful, emotionally resonant dramatic pieces. Like many posthumous collections, The Room Opposite & Other Tales collects stories written across a period of Mayor’s life, covers various settings and genres, and often serves as a way to display the author’s own conflicted attitudes toward various elements of the world around her.
One of the more harrowing examples of this is “A Season At the Sceptre,” a highlight of the collection. It’s a story of sexual impropriety, harassment, and cruelty that takes place within an acting troupe. In it, a fast and loose modernity destroys innocence through the clash of world-weary city starlets and a naive aspiring actress from the country. The results are devastating. Reading letters Flora Mayor wrote while working as an actress herself, it becomes obvious that this particular tale was almost certainly inspired by her own experiences, first in Hastings (“Conversation in the dressing room is not inspiring … it really does seem to me rather immoral in places, and the tone is low throughout”) and later at the Lyric Theatre in London (“There is a great deal more pawing and squeezing from the managers than one is used to”).
Another dramatic highlight is “Christmas Night at Almira”, a beautifully written yet heartbreaking rumination on the cycles of life, from the freshness of youth, through to the decay of old age. It’s staggeringly honest about it all, and contains some truly haunting passages — not least during its climax, in which the story’s carefree icon of youth is brutally confronted with that ultimate endpoint of elderly decline: death.
As for the pulp macabre, while those tales tend to be rather more hit or miss, they do most clearly show Mayor’s development as a writer. This is most visible when looking at the stories which bookend the collection.
The title and opening story, “The Room Opposite,” while far from bad, is one of the collection’s weaker offerings. A relatively run of the mill, traditional mystery piece which does little to stand out. Though fun, it’s unremarkable. By contrast, the final story in the collection, “Le Spectre De La Rose,” is a masterpiece. Combining the “weird” and the Gothic with a more romantic, emotional, female-centric theming, rare for stories of this type — the result is something, which, while calling to mind no mythology in particular, feels distinctly mythological; it has an air of Wilde to it, without ever feeling like a riff or pastiche.
Other highlights of the macabre include the gloriously gothic “The Dead Lady,” and the almost cosmic horror “There Shall Be Light at Thy Death'” Both stories which I will highlight but not describe, to protect the impact of reading them.
And now, you can finally read them.
Inspired by what we’ve now come to believe is F.M. Mayor’s true masterpiece — and our desire to reprint other “lost”, scarce, and out of print books — we established our independent publisher, Solar Press, in early 2023.
We released this book, our first book, on April 5th of this year and we are extremely proud of the achievement.
This is the first reprint of the work since its original publication in 1935 — for the first time since 1935, you no longer have to pay for a rare collectable first edition (averaging £800 – £1500), or take a trek out to London to visit The British Library’s reading rooms.
Mayor is one of the unsung literary greats, and we’re thrilled to finally make such a wonderful collection accessible to a new generation of readers.
Solar Press is an independent publisher based in Bath, UK, focused on reprinting lost, out of print, and forgotten classics.
The Room Opposite is available for purchase for £12.00 at www.SolarPressBooks.com.