Sussex Gorse The Story Of A Fight Sheila Kaye Smith Books
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Sussex Gorse The Story Of A Fight Sheila Kaye Smith Books
heila Kaye-Smith (1887 –1956) was one of a number of early twentieth century rural novelists writing in what has become known as “the English regional tradition”. Like Thomas Hardy, from whom they took their inspiration, most of them set their novels in one particular part of the country. Others who can be regarded as belonging to the tradition include Mary Webb (Shropshire), John Moore (the West Midlands, particularly Herefordshire and Worcestershire), H E Bates (originally Northamptonshire, later Kent), and Hugh Walpole (the Lake District), and possibly also Henry Williamson (Devon), D H Lawrence (Nottinghamshire) and Winifred Holtby (the East Riding).In Kaye-Smith’s case her literary province included the Weald of Kent and her native county of Sussex (she was a native of St Leonards), together with the adjoining parts of Surrey. “Sussex Gorse” is an agricultural epic telling of the irresistible rise of Reuben Backfield, a farmer from Peasmarsh near Rye in Sussex. (Unlike Hardy, Kaye-Smith did not bother to disguise real places under invented names). The story spans the period between Backfield’s teenage years in the 1830s and his old age around 1906. When we first meet him he is taking part in a riotous protest against the Enclosure Acts. These were a series of measures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which enabled landowners to fence off what had previously been common land and to exclude other people and their livestock from it. These Acts were highly controversial; some defended them as necessary in order to feed a growing, increasingly urban, population; others bitterly criticised them as an attack on the rights of the rural poor. Young Reuben’s opposition, however, arises less from political principle than from the fact that, owing to a legal technicality, his father has been excluded and ownership of the newly enclosed land has been awarded to the local squire and another farmer.
This event marks the birth of the obsession which is to dominate the rest of Backfield’s life. When he inherits the family farm a few years later he forms the plan of gradually acquiring the whole of Boarzell, as the former common land is known. This seems like a useless ambition. Boarzell is a rough, stony heathland with poor, sandy soils which seem to support little but gorse. The two landowners who have acquired it use it for little except rough grazing. Armed only with his iron will and a huge capacity for hard work, however, Backfield is determined to built up his land, to acquire the capital necessary to buy Boarzell piece by piece and then to transform it into productive farmland.
Backfield’s ambition is not easily realised; the novel is subtitled, with good reason, “The Story of a Fight”. This is not, moreover, a fight without casualties. His brother Harry is terribly injured in an accident. His first wife Naomi dies young, worn out with childbearing. His second wife Rose leaves him for another man. He misses the opportunity to make Alice, the one woman he has really loved, his third wife because she is the only person with the courage to criticise his way of life to his face. (There are plenty who will criticise him behind his back). His many sons all desert him, in different ways and ostensibly for different reasons, but in each case the underlying cause is his lack of love and understanding and his inability to see them as any more than a source of free labour for his farm. Of his two daughters, one ends up as a prostitute and the other as the wife of a hated rival, and it is hard to say which fate Backfield regards as the more shameful. He never makes a friend, except perhaps for Alice, but makes plenty of enemies. His farm is named “Odiam”, and although there are farms of this name in East Kent its use here may be a deliberate pun on “odium”.
Kaye-Smith was only 29 when she wrote “Sussex Gorse”, but this is a very assured piece of work for such a young writer. Backfield is in many ways odious, but he is also a brilliantly memorable character whose determination and indomitable spirit can command our grudging respect. (He has something in common with Michael Henchard from Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge”; another similar character from European literature is Bjartur from Halldor Laxness’s “Independent People”). He may have spent his entire life surrounded by nature without ever noticing its beauty- all he can see in a piece of land is how he can turn it to his profit- but his creator is not so blind, and there are some striking descriptions of the Sussex landscape, especially the wild, untamed slopes of Boarzell. (Part of the attraction of her writing for me is that I am familiar with the places she is writing about. Rye is one of my favourite towns and Peasmarsh was for a long time the home of a great friend of mine). Kaye-Smith’s prose here is far more fluent than in earlier novels like “Isle of Thorns” where some passages are very over-written. There are also some humorous passages, such as the Dickensian account of a Victorian election and the satire aimed at the precious, pretentious literary friends of Backfield’s lawyer son Richard.
“One day when your pride shall have brought you to sorrow,
And years of despair and remorse been your fate.....”
These lines are taken from “The Song of Seth’s House”, an old Sussex folk-song quoted by Kaye-Smith in the novel. In the song they refer to a proud young woman who has deserted her poor but faithful lover in favour of a wealthier rival, but in the novel they have a double significance. On the one hand they refer to Naomi, who has likewise betrayed the man she truly loves only to regret bitterly her life with the overbearing Backfield, but on the other they also refer to Backfield himself, just the sort of character whom Kaye-Smith’s first readers in 1916, used to the moralistic conventions of Victorian fiction, would have wanted to see either humiliated by the physical failure of his schemes or tormented by a burden of remorse and grief.
So is Backfield “brought to sorrow” by his pride? The answer, rather surprisingly, is “no”. By the 1910s a younger generation of writers were starting to question Victorian literary conventions. When we last see Backfield it is as a contented, self-satisfied and complacent old man, the wealthiest landowner in the district and totally without regrets for the sacrifices he has had to make to achieve that position. He is not at all worried by the fact that he is widely disliked because he knows that he is even more widely envied on account of his success and even respected for the qualities which have made that success possible.
There is an interesting contrast between Backfield and Henchard, who is indeed brought to sorrow by his pride, stubbornness and bad judgement. Whereas “The Mayor of Casterbridge” is a tragedy of failure, “Sussex Gorse” is a tragedy of success. It is the tragedy of a man who gains the world and loses his soul. By this I do not necessarily mean that Backfield damns himself to eternal perdition in the afterlife, although the deeply religious Kaye-Smith may well have had this possibility in mind. I mean that he spends his whole life without ever having regard to love, friendship, beauty or anything more elevated than the selfish pursuit of material gain. This is the story of a man who loses his soul for a few acres of Sussex gorse but who remains happy with the bargain because he never realises that he has a soul to lose.
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Sussex Gorse The Story Of A Fight Sheila Kaye Smith Books Reviews
heila Kaye-Smith (1887 –1956) was one of a number of early twentieth century rural novelists writing in what has become known as “the English regional tradition”. Like Thomas Hardy, from whom they took their inspiration, most of them set their novels in one particular part of the country. Others who can be regarded as belonging to the tradition include Mary Webb (Shropshire), John Moore (the West Midlands, particularly Herefordshire and Worcestershire), H E Bates (originally Northamptonshire, later Kent), and Hugh Walpole (the Lake District), and possibly also Henry Williamson (Devon), D H Lawrence (Nottinghamshire) and Winifred Holtby (the East Riding).
In Kaye-Smith’s case her literary province included the Weald of Kent and her native county of Sussex (she was a native of St Leonards), together with the adjoining parts of Surrey. “Sussex Gorse” is an agricultural epic telling of the irresistible rise of Reuben Backfield, a farmer from Peasmarsh near Rye in Sussex. (Unlike Hardy, Kaye-Smith did not bother to disguise real places under invented names). The story spans the period between Backfield’s teenage years in the 1830s and his old age around 1906. When we first meet him he is taking part in a riotous protest against the Enclosure Acts. These were a series of measures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which enabled landowners to fence off what had previously been common land and to exclude other people and their livestock from it. These Acts were highly controversial; some defended them as necessary in order to feed a growing, increasingly urban, population; others bitterly criticised them as an attack on the rights of the rural poor. Young Reuben’s opposition, however, arises less from political principle than from the fact that, owing to a legal technicality, his father has been excluded and ownership of the newly enclosed land has been awarded to the local squire and another farmer.
This event marks the birth of the obsession which is to dominate the rest of Backfield’s life. When he inherits the family farm a few years later he forms the plan of gradually acquiring the whole of Boarzell, as the former common land is known. This seems like a useless ambition. Boarzell is a rough, stony heathland with poor, sandy soils which seem to support little but gorse. The two landowners who have acquired it use it for little except rough grazing. Armed only with his iron will and a huge capacity for hard work, however, Backfield is determined to built up his land, to acquire the capital necessary to buy Boarzell piece by piece and then to transform it into productive farmland.
Backfield’s ambition is not easily realised; the novel is subtitled, with good reason, “The Story of a Fight”. This is not, moreover, a fight without casualties. His brother Harry is terribly injured in an accident. His first wife Naomi dies young, worn out with childbearing. His second wife Rose leaves him for another man. He misses the opportunity to make Alice, the one woman he has really loved, his third wife because she is the only person with the courage to criticise his way of life to his face. (There are plenty who will criticise him behind his back). His many sons all desert him, in different ways and ostensibly for different reasons, but in each case the underlying cause is his lack of love and understanding and his inability to see them as any more than a source of free labour for his farm. Of his two daughters, one ends up as a prostitute and the other as the wife of a hated rival, and it is hard to say which fate Backfield regards as the more shameful. He never makes a friend, except perhaps for Alice, but makes plenty of enemies. His farm is named “Odiam”, and although there are farms of this name in East Kent its use here may be a deliberate pun on “odium”.
Kaye-Smith was only 29 when she wrote “Sussex Gorse”, but this is a very assured piece of work for such a young writer. Backfield is in many ways odious, but he is also a brilliantly memorable character whose determination and indomitable spirit can command our grudging respect. (He has something in common with Michael Henchard from Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge”; another similar character from European literature is Bjartur from Halldor Laxness’s “Independent People”). He may have spent his entire life surrounded by nature without ever noticing its beauty- all he can see in a piece of land is how he can turn it to his profit- but his creator is not so blind, and there are some striking descriptions of the Sussex landscape, especially the wild, untamed slopes of Boarzell. (Part of the attraction of her writing for me is that I am familiar with the places she is writing about. Rye is one of my favourite towns and Peasmarsh was for a long time the home of a great friend of mine). Kaye-Smith’s prose here is far more fluent than in earlier novels like “Isle of Thorns” where some passages are very over-written. There are also some humorous passages, such as the Dickensian account of a Victorian election and the satire aimed at the precious, pretentious literary friends of Backfield’s lawyer son Richard.
“One day when your pride shall have brought you to sorrow,
And years of despair and remorse been your fate.....”
These lines are taken from “The Song of Seth’s House”, an old Sussex folk-song quoted by Kaye-Smith in the novel. In the song they refer to a proud young woman who has deserted her poor but faithful lover in favour of a wealthier rival, but in the novel they have a double significance. On the one hand they refer to Naomi, who has likewise betrayed the man she truly loves only to regret bitterly her life with the overbearing Backfield, but on the other they also refer to Backfield himself, just the sort of character whom Kaye-Smith’s first readers in 1916, used to the moralistic conventions of Victorian fiction, would have wanted to see either humiliated by the physical failure of his schemes or tormented by a burden of remorse and grief.
So is Backfield “brought to sorrow” by his pride? The answer, rather surprisingly, is “no”. By the 1910s a younger generation of writers were starting to question Victorian literary conventions. When we last see Backfield it is as a contented, self-satisfied and complacent old man, the wealthiest landowner in the district and totally without regrets for the sacrifices he has had to make to achieve that position. He is not at all worried by the fact that he is widely disliked because he knows that he is even more widely envied on account of his success and even respected for the qualities which have made that success possible.
There is an interesting contrast between Backfield and Henchard, who is indeed brought to sorrow by his pride, stubbornness and bad judgement. Whereas “The Mayor of Casterbridge” is a tragedy of failure, “Sussex Gorse” is a tragedy of success. It is the tragedy of a man who gains the world and loses his soul. By this I do not necessarily mean that Backfield damns himself to eternal perdition in the afterlife, although the deeply religious Kaye-Smith may well have had this possibility in mind. I mean that he spends his whole life without ever having regard to love, friendship, beauty or anything more elevated than the selfish pursuit of material gain. This is the story of a man who loses his soul for a few acres of Sussex gorse but who remains happy with the bargain because he never realises that he has a soul to lose.
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