Issue 6 - Summer 2000

Elizabeth Bowen in 1946

Her review of Marjory Fleming by Oriel Malet appeared in the Tatler on 12 June.

Until I read Oriel Malet's Marjory Fleming, my ideas about Marjory were of the haziest. The little girl's Journals and her collection of verses, which could have given her substantiality, were unknown to me ­ possibly I shrank from the sentimental myth surrounding any wonder-child who has died young . . .

However, she was not 'too good for this world', which she loved, during her eight years and eleven months in it, with a sturdy and sometimes troubling passion. Lively, healthy, greedy and gay, though with interludes of savage contrary melancholy, she lived with intensity. . . Such, at least, is the Marjory whom Miss Malet (with what I instinctively feel to be a true, an almost psychic perception) brings to life for us. Or, rather, we are made conscious of the life that was Marjory Fleming's. That is Marjory Fleming's ­ for in these pages, undimmed by mists of the past, we enter the immortal 'now' of a child.

Isabella Keith ­ first met as the lovely, fashionable, seventeen-year-old Edinburgh cousin who came to visit at Kirkcaldy ­ was the love of Marjory's life: the separation from Isabella was one of those major tragedies which one cannot write off as a mere childish grief.

Marjory was born at Kirkcaldy in 1803; and died there ­ child to the last, of a childish illness ­ some months after her return from Edinburgh in 1811. She embraced sorrow with her whole nature, as she embraced joy. She was one of a family of three (a baby sister was born during the three years when Marjory was away with the Keiths in Edinburgh), and her parents were loving, intelligent and wise ­ though I think one must feel that they failed in judgement in insisting on her return home ­ being taken from Isabella tore the most delicate fibres of her nature. Mrs Fleming, though she did her best at once to conceal the fact, was jealous of Isabella: and, of course, it could be said that a fascinating young woman with her own life to lead ought not to be giving up all her time to the teaching and charge of a small child.

Marjory, for her part, did torment herself with the idea that she was wicked and unnatural in loving Isabella more than her own parents; her terrifying moods, which from time to time swept like tornadoes through the Keiths' Charlotte Square house, were the outcome of what would now be called conflict. Every scene of her happiness with Isabella ­ most of all Braehead, where the two spent summers visiting the Craufurds ­ was intensely dear to her.

Outside this association, however, was the love for Nature for its own sake ­ rivers, gardens, woods, windy seashores. The temperament of a poet, the vehemence of a lover, was carried round town and country alike inside the sturdy body of this little girl. No, Marjory, though she had an attractive young-animal grace, was not even pretty. She had a hearty appetite, was a bit of a bully (the terror of nice little girls who were asked to tea), and was, most human of all, by no means above showing off. In fact, it is her charm, to me, that she lacked the outfit of the idealisable 'romantic' child.

Marjory Fleming is a book I recommend to all those who are not afraid to know and love children as they are...I should like to thank Miss Malet: my life seems richer for knowing this little girl.