W. D. Howells - "Through the Eye of the Needle"

L. T. Meade - "Sue, A Little Heroine"

Glance Gaylord - "Culm Rock"

Charles Darwin - "The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Delia Blanchflower

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Delia Blanchflower




The English governess, a good girl, in spite of her accent, and the
unconscious fraud she was thereby perpetrating on her employers,
thought she had seldom witnessed a more agreeable scene.

"He treats them like princesses, and yet he makes them learn," she
thought, a comment which very fairly expressed the mixture of something
courtly with something masterful in the Englishman's manner. He was
patience itself; but he was also frankness itself, whether for praise
or blame; and the eagerness to please him grew fast and visibly in all
these young creatures.

But as soon as he had brought back Euphrosyne's smiles, and roused a
new and fierce ambition to excel in all their young breasts, he dropped
the lesson, with a few gay slangy words, and went his way, leaving a
stir behind him of which he was quite unconscious. And there was no
Englishman looking on who might have told the charmed and conquered
maidens that they had just been coached by one of the most famous of
English athletes, born with a natural genius for every kind of game,
from cricket downwards.

* * * * *

On his way to the eastern side of the pass on which stood the group of
hotels, Winnington got his post from the _concierge_, including his
nightly _Times_, and carried it with him to a seat with which he was
already familiar.

But he left the _Times_ unopened, for the spectacle before him was one
to ravish the senses from everything but itself. He looked across the
deep valley of the Adige, nearly four thousand feet below him, to the
giant range of the Dolomite Alps on the eastern side. The shadow of the
forest-clad mountain on which he stood spread downwards over the plain,
and crept up the mountains on the farther edge. Above a gulf of deepest
blue, inlaid with the green of vineyards and forest lakes, he beheld an
aerial world of rose-colour--the giant Dolomites, Latemar, Rosengarten,
Schlern--majestic rulers of an upper air, so pure and luminous, that
every tiny shadow cast by every wisp of wandering cloud on the bare red
peaks, was plainly visible across the thirty miles of space.
Rosengarten, with its snowless, tempest-beaten crags, held the centre,
flushing to its name; and to the right and left, peak ranged beyond
peak, like courtiers crowding to their king; chief among them a vast
pyramid, blood-red in the sunset, from which the whole side, it seemed,
had been torn away, leaving a gash so fresh it might have been ripped
by a storm of yesterday, yet older perhaps than Calvary....

The great show faded through every tone of delicate beauty to a starry
twilight,--passion into calm. Winnington watched till it was done,
still with the Keatsian tag in his mind, and that deep inner memory of
loss, to which the vanished splendour of the mountains seemed to make a
mystic answering. He was a romantic--some would have said a sentimental
person, with a poet always in his pocket, and a hunger for all that
might shield him from the worst uglinesses of life, and the worst
despairs of thought; an optimist, and, in his own sense, Christian. He
had come abroad to wander alone for a time, because as one of the
busiest, most important and most popular men in a wide country-side, he
had had a year of unceasing and strenuous work, with no time to
himself; and it had suddenly been borne in upon him, in choosing
between the Alps and Scotland, that a man must sometimes be alone, for
his soul's health. And he had never relished the luxury of occasional
solitude so sharply as on this pine-scented evening in Tyrol.

It was not till he was sitting again under the electric light of the
hotel verandah that he opened his _Times_. The first paragraph which
his eye lit upon was an obituary notice of Sir Robert Blanchflower
"whose death, after a long illness and much suffering, occurred last
week in Paris." The notice ended with the words--"the deceased baronet
leaves a large property both in land and personalty. His only child, a
daughter, Miss Delia Blanchflower, survives him."

Winnington laid down the paper. So the Valkyrie was now alone in the
world, and mistress no doubt of all her father's wealth. "I must have
seen her--I am sure there was a child about"; he said to himself again;
and his thoughts went groping into a mostly forgotten past, and as he
endeavoured to reconstruct it, the incident which had brought him for a
few weeks into close relations with Robert Blanchflower, then Major
Blanchflower of the--Dragoons, came at last vividly back to him.

An easy-going husband--a beautiful wife, not vicious, but bored to
death--the inevitable third, in the person of a young and amorous
cavalry officer--and a whole Indian station, waiting, half maliciously,
half sadly, for the _banal_ catastrophe:--it was thus he remembered the
situation. Winnington had arrived on the scene as a barrister of some
five years' standing, invalided after an acute attack of pneumonia, and
the guest for the winter of his uncle, then Commissioner of the
district. He discovered in the cavalry officer a fellow who had been
his particular protege at Eton, and had owed his passionately coveted
choice for the Eleven largely to Winnington's good word. The whole
dismal little drama unveiled itself, and Winnington was hotly moved by
the waste and pity of it. He was entertained by the Blanchflowers and
took a liking to them both. The old friendship between Winnington and
the cavalryman was soon noticed by Major Blanchflower, and one night he
walked home with Winnington, who had been dining at his house, to the
Commissioner's quarters. Then, for the first time, Winnington realised
what it may be to wrestle with a man in torment. The next day, the
young cavalryman, at Winnington's invitation, took his old friend for a
ride, and before dawn on the following day, the youth was off on leave,
and neither Major nor Mrs. Blanchflower, Winnington believed, had ever
seen him again. What he did with the youth, and how he did it, he
cannot exactly remember, but at least he doesn't forget the grip of
Blanchflower's hand, and the look of deliverance in his strained,
hollow face. Nor had Mrs. Blanchflower borne her rescuer any grudge. He
had parted from her on the best of terms, and the recollection of her
astonishing beauty grows strong in him as he thinks of her.

So now it is her daughter who is stirring the world! With her father's
money and her mother's eyes,--not to speak of the additional
trifles--eloquence, enthusiasm, &c.--thrown in by the Swedish woman,
she ought to find it easy.

The dressing-gong of the hotel disturbed a rather sleepy reverie, and
sent the Englishman back to his _Times_. And a few hours later he went
to a dreamless bed, little guessing at the letter which was even then
waiting for him, far below, in the Botzen post-office.




Chapter II


Winnington took his morning coffee on a verandah of the hotel, from
which the great forests of Monte Vanna were widely visible. Upwards
from the deep valley below the pass, to the topmost crags of the
mountain, their royal mantle ran unbroken. This morning they were
lightly drowned in a fine weather haze, and the mere sight of them
suggested cool glades and verdurous glooms, stretches of pink willow
herb lighting up the clearings--and in the secret heart of them such
chambers "deaf to noise and blind to light" as the forest lover knows.
Winnington promised himself a leisurely climb to the top of Monte
Vanna. The morning foretold considerable heat, but under the pines one
might mock at Helios.

Ah!--Euphrosyne!

She came, a vision of morning, tripping along in her white shoes and
white dress; followed by her English governess, the lady, as Winnington
guessed, from West Belfast, tempered by Brooklyn. The son apparently
was still in bed, nor did anyone trouble to hurry him out of it. The
father, a Viennese judge _en retraite_, as Winnington had been already
informed by the all-knowing porter of the hotel, was a shrewd
thin-lipped old fellow, with the quiet egotism of the successful
lawyer. He came up to Winnington as soon as he perceived him, and
thanked him in good English for his kindness to Euphrosyne of the day
before. Winnington responded suitably and was soon seated at their
table, chatting with them while they took their coffee. Euphrosyne
shewed a marked pleasure in his society, and upon Winnington, steeped
in a holiday reaction from much strenuous living, her charm worked as
part of the charm of the day, and the magic of the mountain world. He
noticed, however, with a revival of alarm, that she had a vigorous
German appetite of her own, and as he watched the rolls disappear he
trembled for the slender figure and the fawn-like gait.

After breakfast, while the governess and the girl disappeared, the
father hung over the verandah smoking, beside the Englishman, to whom
he was clearly attracted. He spoke quite frankly of his daughter, and
her bringing up. "She is motherless; her mother died when she was ten
years old; and since, I must educate her myself. It gives me many
anxieties, but she is a sweet creature, _dank sei gott_! I will not let
her approach, even, any of these modern ideas about women. My wife
hated them; I do also. I shall marry her to an honest man, and she will
make a good wife and a good house-mother."

"Mind you choose him well!" said Winnington, with a shrug. His eyes at
that moment were critically bent on a group of Berliners, men of the
commercial and stock-broking class, who, with their wives, had arrived
a couple of nights before. The men were strolling and smoking below.
They were all fat, red-faced and overbearing. When they went for walks,
the man stalked in front along the forest paths, and the woman followed
behind, carrying her own jacket. Winnington wondered what it might be
like to be the wife of any of them. These _Herren_ at any rate might
not be the worse for a little hustling from the "woman movement." He
could not, however, say honestly that the wives shewed any
consciousness of ill-fortune. They were almost all plump, plumper even
than their husbands, expensively dressed and prosperous looking; and
the amount of Viennese beer they consumed at the forest restaurants to
which their husbands conducted them, seemed to the Englishman
portentous.

"Yes, my daughter is old-fashioned," resumed the ex-judge,
complacently, after a pause. "And I am grateful to Miss Johnson, who
has trained her very well. If she were like some of the girls one sees
now! Last year there was a young lady here--_Ach, Gott!_" He raised his
shoulders, with a contemptuous mouth.

"Miss Blanchflower?" asked Winnington, turning towards the speaker with
sudden interest.

"That I believe was her name. She was mad, of course. _Ach_, they have
told you?--of that _Vortrag_ she gave?--and the rest? After ten
minutes, I made a sign to my daughter, and we walked out. I would not
have had her corrupted with these ideas for the whole world. And such
beauty, you understand! That makes it more dangerous. _Ja, ja,
Liebchen--ich komme gleich!_"

For there had been a soft call from Euphrosyne, standing on the steps
of the hotel, and her fond father hurried away to join her.

At the same moment, the porter emerged, bearing a bundle of letters and
newspapers which had just arrived. Eager for his _Times_ Winnington
went to meet him, and the man put into his hands what looked like a
large post. He carried it off into the shelter of the pines, for the
sun was already blazing on the hotel. Two or three letters on county
business he ran through first. His own pet project, as County
Councillor,--a county school for crippled children, was at last getting
on. Foundation stone to be laid in October--good! "But how the deuce
can I get hold of some more women to help work it! Scandalous, how few
of the right sort there are about! And as for the Asylums Committee, if
we really can't legally co-opt women to it, as our clerk says"--he
looked again at a letter in his hand--"the law is an ass!--a
double-dyed ass. I swear I won't visit those poor things on the women's
side again. It's women's work--let them do it. The questions I have to
ask are enough to make an old gamp blush. Hallo, what's this?"

He turned over a large blue envelope, and looked at a name stamped
across the back. It was the name of a well-known firm of London
solicitors. But he had no dealings with them, and could not imagine why
they should have written to him.

He opened the letter carelessly, and began to read it,--presently with
eager attention, and at last with amazement.

It ran as follows:

"From Messrs. MORTON, MANNERS & LATHOM,
Solicitors,
Adelphi,
London, W. C."

"Dear Sir,--We write on behalf of Lord Frederick Calverly, your
co-executor, under Sir Robert Blanchflower's will, to inform you that
in Sir Robert's last will and testament--of which we enclose a
copy--executed at Meran six weeks before his decease, you are named as
one of his two executors, as sole trustee of his property, and sole
guardian of Sir Robert's daughter and only child, Miss Delia
Blanchflower, until she attains the age of twenty-five. We believe that
this will be a complete surprise to you, for although Sir Robert,
according to a statement he made during his last illness to his sister,
Miss Elizabeth Blanchflower, intended to communicate with you before
signing the will, his weakness increased so rapidly, after it was
finally drawn up, that he was never able to do so. Indeed the morning
after his secretary had written out a clear copy of what he himself had
put together, he had a most alarming attack from which he rallied with
difficulty. That afternoon he signed the will, and was just able to
write you the letter which we also enclose, marked by himself, as you
will see. He was never properly conscious afterwards, and he died in
Paris last Thursday, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery at Mont
Parnasse on the Saturday following. The will which was in our custody
was opened in London yesterday, by Lord Frederick Calverly, in Miss
Blanchflower's presence. We understand from her that she has already
written to you on the subject. Lord Frederick would also have done so,
but that he has just gone to Harrogate, in a very poor state of health.
He begs us to say that he is of course quite aware that your
engagements may not allow you to accept the functions offered you under
the will, and that he will be in considerable anxiety until he knows
your decision. He hopes that you will at least accept the executorship;
and indeed ventures to appeal very strongly on that account to your old
friendship for Sir Robert; as he himself sees no prospect of being able
to carry out unaided the somewhat heavy responsibilities attaching to
the office.

"You will see that a sum of L4000 is left to yourself under the will."

We remain, dear Sir,

Your obedient servants,

MORTON, MANNERS & LATHOM.
"(Solicitors.)"

"MARK WINNINGTON, Esq., J. P.
Bridge End, Maumsey,
Hants."

A bulky document on blue paper, and also a letter had dropped to the
ground. Winnington stooped for the letter, and turned it over in
stupification. It was addressed in a faltering hand, and marked, "To be
forwarded after my death." He hastily broke the seal.

"MY DEAR MARK WINNIXGTON,--I know well what I am laying upon you. I
have no right to do it. But I remember certain days in the past, and I
believe if you are still the same man you were then, you will do what I
ask. My daughter ought to be a fine woman. At present she seems to me
entirely and completely out of her mind. She has been captured by the
extreme suffrage movement, and by one of the most mischievous women in
it; and I have no influence with her whatever. I live in terror of what
she may do; of what they may lead her to do. To attempt to reason with
her is useless; and for a long time my health has been such that I have
avoided conflict with her as much as possible. But things have now come
to such a pass that something must be done, and I have tried in these
last weeks, ill as I am, to face the future. I want if I can to save
Delia from wasting herself, and the money and estates I should
naturally leave her, upon this mad campaign. I want, even against her
will, to give her someone to advise and help her. I feel bitterly that
I have done neither. The tropics ruined me physically, and I seem to
have gone to pieces altogether the last few years. But I love my child,
and I can't leave her without a real friend or support in the world. I
have no near relations, except my sister Elizabeth, and she and Delia
are always at feud. Freddie Calverly my cousin, is a good fellow in his
way, though too fussy about his health. He has a fair knowledge of
business, and he would have been hurt if I had not made him executor.
So I have appointed him, and have of course left him a little money.
But he could no more tackle Delia than fly. In the knock-about life we
have led since I left the Colonial Service, I seem to have shed all my
old friends. I can think of no one who could or would help me in this
strait but you--and you know why. God bless you for what you once did
for me. There was never any other cloud between my poor wife and me.
She turned to me after that trouble, and we were happy till the end.

"I have heard too something of you from Maumsey people, since I
inherited Maumsey, though I have never been able to go there. I know
what your neighbours think of you. And now Delia is going to be your
neighbour. So, drawing a bow at a venture, as a dying man must, I have
made you Delia's guardian and trustee, with absolute power over her
property and income till she is twenty-five. When she attains that
age--she is now nearly twenty-two--if she marries a man approved by
you, or if you are satisfied that her connection with militant
suffragism has ceased, the property is to be handed over to her in full
possession, and the trust will come to an end. If on the contrary, she
continues in her present opinion and course of action, I have left
directions that the trust is to be maintained for Delia's life-time,
under certain conditions as to her maintenance, which you will find in
the will. If you yourself are not willing to administer the trust,
either now or later, the property will devolve to the Public Trustee,
for whom full instructions are left. And at Delia's death it will be
divided among her heirs, if she has any, and various public objects.

"I cannot go further into details. My strength is almost out. But this
one thing may I beg?--if you become my child's guardian, get the right
person to live with her. I regard that as all-important. She must have
a chaperon, and she will try to set up one of the violent women who
have divided her from me. Especially am I in dread of a lady, an
English lady, a Miss Marvell, whom I engaged two years ago to stay with
us for the winter and read history with Delia. She is very able and a
very dangerous woman, prepared I believe, to go to any length on behalf
of her 'cause.' At any rate she filled Delia's head with the wildest
suffragist notions, and since then my poor child thinks of nothing
else. Even since I have been so ill--this last few weeks--I know she
has been in communication with this woman. She sympathises with all the
horrible things they do, and I am certain she gives all the money she
can to their funds. Delia is a splendid creature, but she is vain and
excitable and they court her. I feel that they might tempt her into any
madness.

"Goodbye. I made the doctor give me strychnine and morphia enough to
carry me through this effort. I expect it will be the last. Help me,
and my girl--if you can--for old sake's sake. Goodbye."

Your grateful old friend,

"ROBERT BLANCHFLOWER."

"Good heavens!" was all Winnington could find to say, as he put down
the letter.

Then, becoming aware, as the verandah filled after breakfast, that he
was in a very public place, he hastily rose, thrust the large
solicitor's envelope, with its bulky enclosures into his coat pocket,
and proceeded to gather up the rest of his post. As he did so, he
suddenly perceived a black-edged letter, addressed in a remarkably
clear handwriting, with the intertwined initials D. B. in the corner.

A fit of silent laughter, due to his utter bewilderment, shook him. He
put the letter with all its fellows into another pocket and hurried
away into the solitude of the woods. It was some time before he had
succeeded in leaving all the tourists' paths and seats behind. At last
in a green space of bilberry and mossy rock, with the pines behind him,
and the chain of the Dolomites, sun-bathed, in front, he opened and
read his "ward's" first letter to him.

"DEAR MR. WINNINGTON,--I understood--though very imperfectly--from my
father, before he died, that he had appointed you my guardian and
trustee till I should reach the age of twenty-five, and he explained to
me so far as he could his reason for such a step. And now I have of
course read the will, and the solicitors have explained to me clearly
what it all means.

"You will admit I think that I am placed in a very hard position. If my
poor father had not been so ill, I should certainly have tried to argue
with him, and to prevent his doing anything so unnecessary and unjust
as he has now done--unjust both to you and to me. But the doctors
absolutely forbade me to discuss any business with him, and I could do
nothing. I can only hope that the last letter he wrote to you, just
before his death, and the alterations he made in his will about the
same time, gave him some comfort. If so, I do not grudge them for one
moment.

"But now you and I have to consider this matter as sensible people, and
I suggest that for a man who is a complete stranger to me, and probably
altogether out of sympathy with the ideas and principles, I believe in
and am _determined_ to act upon--(for otherwise my father would not
have chosen you)--to undertake the management of my life and affairs,
would be really grotesque. It must lead to endless friction and trouble
between us. If you refuse, the solicitors tell me, the Public
Trustee--which seems to be a government office--will manage the
property, and the Court of Chancery will appoint a guardian in
accordance with my father's wishes. That would be bad enough,
considering that I am of full age and in my right mind--I can't promise
to give a guardian chosen in such a way, a good time. But at any rate,
it would be less odious to fight a court and an office, if I must
fight, than a gentleman who is my near neighbour in the county, and was
my father's and mother's friend. I do hope you will think this over
very carefully, and will relieve both yourself and me from an
impossible state of things. I perfectly realise of course that my
father appointed you my guardian, in order to prevent me from making
certain friends, and doing certain things. But I do not admit the right
of any human being--not even a father--to dictate the life of another.
I intend to stick to my friends, And to do what my conscience directs.

"Should you however accept the guardianship--after this candid
statement of mine--you will, I suppose, feel bound to carry out my
father's wishes by refusing me money for the purposes he disapproved.
He told me indeed that I should be wholly dependent on my guardian for
money during the next three years, even though I have attained my legal
majority. I can say to you what I could not say to him, that I
_bitterly resent_ an arrangement which treats a grown person like a
child. Such things are not done to _men_. It is only women who are the
victims of them. It would be _impossible_ to keep up friendly relations
with a guardian, who would really only be there--only exist--to thwart
and coerce me.

"Let me point out that at the very beginning a difference must arise
between us, about the lady I am to live with. I have chosen my chaperon
already, as it was my moral, if not my legal right to do. But I am
quite aware that my father disapproved of her, and that you will
probably take the same view. She belongs to a militant suffrage
society, and is prepared at any moment to suffer for the great cause
she and I believe in. As to her ability, she is one of the cleverest
women in England. I am only too proud that she has consented--for a
time--to share my life, and nothing will _induce_ me to part with
her--as long as she consents to stay. But of course I know what you--or
any ordinary man--is likely to think of her.

"No!--we cannot agree--it is impossible we should agree--as guardian
and ward. If indeed, for the sake of your old friendship with my
father, you would retain the executorship--I am sure Lord Frederick
Calverly will be no sort of use!--till the affairs of the will,
death-duties, debts, and so on, are settled--and would at the same time
give up _any_ other connection with the property and myself, I should
be enormously grateful to you. And I assure you I should be very glad
indeed--for father's sake--to have your advice on many points connected
with my future life; and I should be all the more ready to follow it,
if you had renounced your legal power over me.

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