The First Violin - Jessie Fothergill

As I mentioned in my post on Helen C Black’s Notable Women Authors of the Day, I was pleased to discover that I had downloaded Jessie Fothergill’s novel, The First Violin, from Girlebooks some time ago. Reading about the Library Association’s disapproval of this novel made me determined to read it sooner rather than later. I’m glad I did because it’s a melancholy, romantic story of love & music in a small German town in the 1870s.

May Wedderburn is the 17 year old daughter of a country vicar. She is being pursued by Sir Peter Le Marchant, the owner of the big house in the neighbourhood but she loathes him & refuses his offer of marriage. May is befriended by Miss Hallam, a woman who is thought to be eccentric because she lives an independent life. Miss Hallam is losing her sight to cataracts & she proposes to take May with her to Germany as a companion when she goes to the town of Elberthal to consult a specialist. Miss Hallam has another motive in helping May escape from the pressure to marry Sir Peter. Her own sister, Barbara, had been Sir Peter’s first wife & she died in misery & fear. Miss Hallam blamed Sir Peter & wants to save May from the same fate.

On arrival in Koln, en route for Elberthal, May becomes separated from Miss Hallam at the railway station. Knowing no German & without her purse, May is almost frantic when she is rescued by a handsome gentleman, Eugen Courvoisier, who takes charge of her for the afternoon. They visit the Cathedral, he buys her dinner & they travel on to Elberthal together by a later train. May is smitten with Eugen & he seems equally taken with her. As May settles in to the boarding house with Miss Hallam, she expects to see Eugen every day. She had made him promise to visit her so she could repay him for her expenses. However, the next time she sees him, she snubs him in a moment of confusion & surprise. On a visit to the opera, May is amazed to see Eugen taking his place in the orchestra as Concertmeister, the First Violin. Eugen sees her in the audience & is insulted by her snub. She is remorseful but, even after she discovers his lodgings & tries to apologize, he is cold & dismissive.

May has been encouraged to take singing lessons as a way of making a living when she returns to England. Her teacher is the renowned maestro Max von Francius, conductor of the town’s choir & orchestra. Von Francius is a perfectionist, a solitary man who is respected but not really liked by many, although the ladies who sing in his choir like to flutter around him. He is, however, an exceptional teacher, & soon becomes May’s friend as well as her very demanding teacher,

I understood now how the man might have influence. I bent to the power of his will, which reached me where I stood in the background, from his dark eyes, which turned for a moment to me now and then. It was that will of his which put me as it were suddenly into the spirit of the music, and revealed to me depths in my own heart at which I had never even guessed.

May’s voice is exceptional & she becomes part of Eugen’s circle as a pupil of von Francius & occasional soloist with the choir. Miss Hallam returns home after the eye specialist tells her that he cannot help her & von Francius convinces May to remain as his pupil. He finds lodgings for May in a house opposite Eugen’s rooms & May spends many lonely hours watching Eugen with his son, Sigmund, & great friend, Friedhelm Helfen.

At this point, just as I was immersed in May’s story, the next chapter begins the narration of Friedhelm Helfen. The time is now three years earlier (although, disconcertingly, there’s nothing to indicate the change of narrator or time) & we meet Helfen, a melancholy, Romantically suicidal 22 year old violinist in Elderthal’s orchestra. Eugen arrives to take up his post as Concertmeister & takes rooms in Helfen’s lodging house. Helfen is immediately taken with Eugen & his little boy & they become great friends. Helfen is looking for a family & he finds it in Eugen & Sigmund. Eugen, however, is a man with a secret. He is reserved & secretive. He never mentions his past life or loves. Where is Sigmund’s mother? Were she & Eugen married? Is she alive or dead? Helfen is too sensitive to question Eugen & Eugen makes mysterious comments about the need to one day give up Sigmund before he begins to see his father as he really is. What has Eugen done?

Three years pass. Eugen meets May &, eventually Helfen becomes aware of the connection between Eugen & the beautiful young soprano, Miss Wedderburn. Eugen remains distant & reserved about their relationship & his own past until the day he receives a mysterious letter & reveals that the time has come for Sigmund to leave him. His emotion at parting from his son is very moving but he tells Helfen nothing. The narration has moved back & forth between May & Helfen several times now so we’ve also discovered that May’s sister, Adelaide, has married Sir Peter Le Marchant & they are coming to Elderthal to visit May on their wedding tour. May is shocked by Adelaide’s looks & behaviour. Only a few months of married life with the cold, sarcastic Sir Peter have made Adelaide thin, nervous & brittle.

To a certain extent she had what she had sold herself for; outside pomp and show in plenty – carriages, horses, servants, jewels and clothes. Sir Peter liked, to use his own expression, ‘to see my lady blaze away’ – only she must blaze away in his fashion, not hers. He declared he did not know how long he might remain in Elberthal; spoke vaguely of ‘business at home’ about which he was waiting to hear... He was in excellent spirits at seeing his wife chafing under the confinement to a place she detested, and appeared to find life sweet.

Adelaide falls in love for the first time & realises just what she has sacrificed with her marriage for security & position. Jessie Fothergill’s sympathetic portrayal of Adelaide & her lover is probably what upset the Library Association so much. It’s a beautiful portrait of restrained passion.

Eugen’s past is revealed by ill-natured gossips & he & Friedhelm leave Elberthal. May falls ill; her other sister, Stella, comes out to Germany to nurse her & to take her home. May, however, cannot forget Eugen & she instinctively feels that his disgrace is unmerited.

It was bad enough to have fallen in love with a man who had never showed me by word or sign that he cared for me, but exactly and pointedly the reverse; but now it seemed the man himself was bad too. Surely a well-regulated mind would have turned away from him – uninfluenced. If so, then mine was an unregulated mind. I had loved him from the bottom of my heart; the world without him felt cold, empty and bare – desolate to live, and shorn of its sweetest pleasures... He had bewitched me... I did feel that life by the side of any other man would be miserable, though never so richly set; and that life by his side would be full and complete though never so poor and sparing in its circumstances.

Miss Hallam dies, leaving May enough money to return to Germany to study & she returns to Elberthal, hoping to find some news of Eugen & discover the truth about his past.

The First Violin is a beautiful story of love in all its forms – romantic love, loving friendship, the love of a father for his son - with a yearning melancholy at its heart. It’s not a perfect novel. The frequent changes of narration are disconcerting & sometimes rather clumsy. There are several coincidences that are a little too remarkable for belief including two occasions when Eugen saves May from peril. These imperfections don’t detract from the overall experience of reading the novel. The atmosphere of Elberthal, a small town centred on its choir & orchestra, is beautifully evoked. The students, landladies & chattering young ladies of the choir are great characters. Jessie Fothergill lived in Germany for some time. She began writing The First Violin in a boarding house in Dusseldorf & she immersed herself in German language & music. All this experience comes through in the book which is full of an intense love of music. I only wish I knew more about the great German composers. This is the kind of novel that needs its own soundtrack CD so you can listen to the relevant pieces of music as you read. The First Violin is compelling reading. I’m so glad I was able to read it. Thank you Girlebooks!

The War Workers - E M Delafield

The War Workers is the story of a group of women working in the Midland Supply Depot during WWI. The Depot is run by Charmian Vivian, an upper class young woman of about 30 who finds it impossible to delegate the smallest task & runs the Depot on a mixture of resigned martyrdom & the hero worship she receives from her staff. Char’s parents, Lady Joanna & Sir Piers Vivian live at Plessing, a country house about an hour from the Depot in Questerham. Char & her mother have never been close. Lady Vivian devotes all her energy & time to her much-older husband. She has a very realistic idea of her daughter’s nature & has an ironic, sometimes exasperated way of trying to burst Char’s bubble of self-importance. When Sir Piers has a stroke, Char reluctantly goes home for a time but she insists on having a secretary bring work out to her every day as no one else could possibly be left in complete charge,


At Plessing only the faithful Miss Bruce gave her work the consideration to which she had become accustomed at the office. She was finding Plessing almost intolerable. There were no interviews, the telephone bell was not allowed to ring, no one urged her not to neglect the substabtial meals which were served for her with the greatest regularity, and Miss Jones daily assured her, with perfect placidity, that the whole work at the office was progressing with complete success without her... “I can’t desert my post at a time like this. Everybody must see that unless I had any extremely definite call elsewhere, my place is at the Depot. The work is suffering horribly from this piecemeal fashion of doing things.”


 After a few weeks, Char goes back to work, living in the Hostel alongside her staff, because her mother refuses to have her comings & goings disturb her father. Char is a very unsympathetic character but I had to feel sorry for her when she arrives at the Hostel & has to unpack for herself, eat the cold, basic food that her staff live on & listen to the water gurgling in the pipes all night as her room is next to the bathroom. Even this experience doesn’t soften her attitude to anyone she believes isn’t giving everything to the work in hand.

Char’s secretary, Miss Delmege, is one of the worshippers. She takes on the attributes of one who knows Miss Vivian intimately, understands all the worries of her position & takes it on herself to worry over Miss Vivian’s missed meals & dedication to her work at the expense of her own health. E M Delafield writes so well about the strains of a group of women living together, working & living with the same people day after day.  The squabbles & irritations, the friendships & the quarrels that are inevitable with any group of people of different backgrounds thrown together in wartime,


Grace hung up her coat and hat, and hastily made room on the already overcrowded peg for Miss Marsh’s belongings, as she heard Miss Delmege say gently “Excuse me,” and deliberately appropriate to her own use the peg selected by her neighbour. 
“Did you see that?” demanded Miss Marsh excitedly. “Isn’t that Delmege all over? After this, Gracie, I shall simply not speak to her till she apologizes. Simply ignore her. Believe me, dear, it’s the only way. I shall behave as though Delmege didn’t exist.” 
This threat was hardly carried out to the letter. No one could have failed to see a poignant consciousness of Miss Delmege’s existence in the elaborate blindness and deafness which assailed Miss Marsh when within her neighbourhood.


A newcomer to the Depot, Grace Jones, soon realises that Miss Vivian’s martyred sighings hide a lot of inefficiency & unnecessary work. As she says, would Miss Vivian work so hard on a desert island where there was no one to see her? Grace is the daughter of a clergyman, kind, thoughtful, popular with her co-workers & soon becomes friends with Lady Vivian through her daily visits to Plessing during Sir Piers’s illness.

Gradually the war workers’ attitude to Miss Vivian undergoes a change as they begin to see her less as an idol to be worshipped & more as a woman who uses devotion to duty as an excuse for selfishness & unkindness. Miss Vivian’s determination to be in charge of everything within her area causes some clashes with the hospital authorities, including her own family doctor, Dr Prince, who takes great delight in telling Char a few home truths,

It’s not the work you want to get back to, young lady; it’s the excitement, and the official position, and the right it gives you to interfere with people who knew how to run a hospital and everything connected with it some twenty years or so before you came into the world... you’re playing as heartless a trick as any I ever saw, making patriotism the excuse for bullying a lot of women who work themselves to death for you because you’re of a better class, and have more personality than themselves, and pretending to yourself that it’s the work you’re after, when it’s just because you want to get somewhere where you’ll be in the limelight all the time.

One of the funniest characters is Mrs Lesbia Willoughby, an old school friend of Lady Vivian’s who arrives on the scene with her complaisant, almost totally silent, husband & revoltingly spoilt Pekingese & proceeds to organise a Canteen for servicemen. Mrs Willoughby is gushing, insensitive & totally convinced that every young soldier she meets is just longing to pour his heart out to her. She meets her match in Char who insists on running the Canteen her way but Mrs Willoughby interferes as much as she possibly can,

They say the men don’t like talking about it; but I’ve had, I suppose, more experience than any woman in London, what with one thing and another, and they always talk to me. The dear fellows in the hospital I visit simply yarn by the hour – they love it – and it’s too enthralling for words. They’re so sweetly quaint. One dear fellow always talked about a place he called Wipers, and it ws simply ages before I realized that he meant Ypres! Wasn’t that too priceless?

Is Mrs Willoughby an early version of the insufferable Lady Boxe of Provincial Lady fame? I loved The War Workers, it was compulsive reading. I was able to read this wonderful book on my e-reader thanks to Girlebooks, my favourite source for free e-books.