Red pottage, By Mary Cholmondeley A NOVEL (Original Classics)

Red Pottage is a 1899 novel by English author Mary Cholmondeley. The subject of the novel-Red Pottage follows a period in the lives of two friends, Rachel West and Hester Gresley. Rachel is a wealthy heiress who falls in love with the weak-willed Hugh Scarlett after he has broken off an affair with Lady Newhaven (which he does not originally realize has been discovered by her husband). Hester, a novelist, lives with her judgmental brother, the pompous vicar of the fictional village of Warpington. Hester's brother disapproves of her writing and eventually burns the manuscript of a novel she has been writing. This leads Hester into a prolonged nervous illness. Scarlett who has not been entirely frank with Rachel about his past commits suicide when his dishonourable behaviour is revealed to her and she breaks off their engagement. History--Red Pottage caused a scandal when it was first published, in 1899, due to its themes of adultery, the emancipation of women and its satire of the clergy. It was adapted into a silent film in 1918 by Meyrick Milton starring C. Aubrey Smith, Mary Dibley and Gerald Ames.The novel has been republished several times since the 1960s. Mary Cholmondeley (8 June 1859 - 15 July 1925) was an English novelist.Mary Cholmondeley (usually pronounced was born at Hodnet near Market Drayton in Shropshire, the third of eight children of Rev Richard Hugh Cholmondeley (1827-1910) and his wife Emily Beaumont (1831-1893). Her great-uncle was the hymn-writing bishop Reginald Heber and her niece the writer Stella Benson. An uncle, Reginald Cholmondeley of Condover Hall was host to the American novelist Mark Twain on his visits to England.Her sister Hester, who died in 1892, wrote poetry and kept a journal, selections of both appearing in Mary's family memoir, Under One Roof (1918).After brief periods in Farnborough, Warwickshire and Leaton, Shropshire, the family returned to Hodnet when her father was appointed rector in 1874 in succession to his father. Much of the first 30 years of her life was taken up with helping her sickly mother run the household and her father with parish work, although she was debilitated with asthma. She entertained her brothers and sisters with stories from an early age.After her father retired in 1896, she moved with him and her sister Diana to Condover Hall, which they had inherited from Reginald. They sold it and moved to Albert Gate Mansions in Knightsbridge, London. After her father died, she lived with her sister Victoria, moving between Ufford, Suffolk, and 2 Leonard Place, Kensington. During the war she did clerical work in the Carlton House Terrace Hospital. The sisters moved in 1919 to 4 Argyll Road, Kensington, where Mary died on 15 July 1925. She never married....