Issue 20 - Winter 2003

Charlotte Graves-Taylor talks about
Tea with Mr Rochester

Some thirty years ago, in a second-hand bookshop in Bath, I found a 1952 Penguin entitled Tea with Mr Rochester. The title attracted me because, like Prissy in the eponymous story, the first man in my life had been Mr Rochester: I read it with a sense of coming home.

Ever since, I have longed for this selection to be re-published. They are brilliant stories which ignited my interest in the short story genre and led to my lecturing on it. No one seemed to have heard of Frances Towers – there was not a single reference to her in the critical literature of the Short Story. So I was delighted when Persephone Books announced this publication: no other writer is more deserving of the quietly distinguished grey covers and the unfailingly apt endpapers. Perhaps only Persephone Books would publish someone so gloriously unfashionable as Frances Towers: she is the antithesis of ‘Chick-lit’ with its attendant vulgarities. Among contemporary writers she does have something in common with Anita Brookner and Salley Vickers; but she is closer to Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth Bowen (with whom she shares a talent for depicting children).

But Frances Towers has her own unique voice: quiet, introspective, very English; very much of a certain class and period; appreciative of beauty and unafraid of emotion. She has characteristics of both the two familiar categories of the genre: the ‘well-told tale,’ and the story that HE Bates described as ‘an embellished hint of a life that lies outside it.’ She expresses sentiment without sentimentality; she excels in the evocation of place, providing small details- a polished mahogany table, a vase of flowers- from which in our imagination we can furnish a whole room. Similarly with characterisation: a few slight strokes in a sketch are as informative as an oil painting.

These characters inhabit a world between reality and dream- where so much of one’s life is spent. Frances Towers conveys the significance of the things that nearly happen, or might have happened; and the often painful clash between them and what does happen. She celebrates dailiness with a joy and a sorrow that ring profoundly true. It is difficult not to rush at these stories: but they should be read slowly, not more than one a day. Each, though immediately accessible, deserves concentration of thought and feeling. Each is like one of those exquisite Russian lacquer boxes, the delicately painted lid of which takes us, not into another world, but deeper into our own.