Family first? Or the Way of the Cross?

The second volume in the Catholic Women Writers series from Catholic University Press (full disclosure: I am on the series’ advisory board), Sheila Kaye-Smith’s 1923 novel The Fall of the House of Alard, may seem an odd choice to some. Written when Kaye-Smith was still an Anglo-Catholic, it deals with an old English aristocratic family coming to—no spoiler, given the title—its end as each of the six remaining Alard children make decisions about marriage or religion that make keeping the ancestral house impossible. But as the series editors, Cambridge professor Bonnie Lander Johnson and St. Patrick’s (Maynooth, Ireland) lecturer Julia Meszaros, note in their introduction to the volume, the Anglo-Catholicism to which two of the children move is regarded in a way similar to the Catholicism to which Kaye-Smith and her husband would convert in 1929. The Anglo-Catholic parish in the novel, they say:

…is depicted in ways that will be recognizably Catholic to readers today, and the novel’s characters perceive it much like how they would have perceived a Roman Catholic parish. It is impoverished and excluded from establishment privilege; its ornaments and furnishings, made by parishioners, are sentimental or gaudy; it is open to everyone regardless of social standing; its moral teaching remains firm against changing cultural attitudes to divorce; and it is ordered toward the worship of God rather than the social life of the parish.

Even if Kaye-Smith, like Chesterton before her (and whose place she and her husband had taken as leaders of the Anglo-Catholic movement after Chesterton’s 1922 conversion), would eventually become Catholic, this novel deals with the primal issues of Catholic and Christian faith necessary to the task of discerning where the fullness of that faith is found. As Johnson and Meszaros write, “Kaye-Smith demonstrates that the choices Christianity presents us with are no ethereal abstractions, but embody themselves repeatedly within the day-to-day reality of every human life.”

In Part One, “Conster Manor,” we are introduced to the Alard family who dwell there. The family traces its history far back to the days before St. Thomas á Becket and includes Admirals, ship owners, Anglican clergymen, and, since the 18th-century, men of business. The current Baronet, Sir John, is moving into his seventies and wants to begin to turn things over to his son Peter, the second of his seven children. Peter is the heir because, unlike his older brother, Hugh, he returned alive from the Great War. The next brother, George, is an Anglican priest in the doctrinally and theologically vague “broad church” tradition. Gervase, the final brother and baby of the family, is 18 years younger than George and interested in ordinary life. Rather than go to Oxford, he wants to work in an automotive garage. Of the three sisters, Mary is married, Doris has “hinted” at men who wanted to marry her, and Jenny, close in age to Gervase, is like him a child of her parents’ “middle age and the last of love.”

That ominous note about “the last of love” seems to be apt not merely for Sir John and Lady Rose. Little love exists among any of the siblings, save those final two. Peter “had two separate contempts for parsons and his brother George, now strengthened by combination.” Yet he has the possibility of love. Stella Mount, the local doctor’s daughter, is in love with him and he with her. But, as Jenny tells Gervase, Stella “hasn’t got a penny. Father will be sick if he marries her.” And indeed, Sir John’s own command to Peter is, “Manage the estate well and marry money.”

One might hope that Peter could overcome such attitudes, but there is in Peter himself a bit of the acquisitiveness and jealousy about the family property that characterizes his father. In a revelatory scene, Stella comes to visit with Peter at Starvecrow, the house on the estate that Peter will have for his own till his parents die, and makes clear her own intentions: “She hid her soft, glowing face in his neck—she was lying on his breast like a child, but deliciously heavy, her feet swung off the floor.” What is revelatory is Peter’s reaction to her simply repeating his secret name for the house: “‘Starvycrow,’ she repeated gently.”

“For a moment,” the narrator tells us, “he felt almost angry that she should have used his name—his private music.” Though we are told that “his anger melted into his love,” a warning sign has been flashed. Peter may well be capable of love for another, but the Alard estate is where his own emotional treasure lies.

It is the following Christmas morning, “celebrated at Conster in the manner peculiar to houses where there is no religion and no child,” where the tensions come to a head. Peter, who “hated Christmas” and “all those empty rites of a lost childhood and a lost faith,” is angry because Stella spends Christmas morning at church. “He did not at all object to religion in women as long as they kept it in its proper place. But Stella did not keep hers in its proper place—she let it interfere with her daily life—with his….” What is worse is that hers is not the broad church Anglicanism that can provide a religious sheen to an otherwise agnostic existence. It is true Christian faith of the Anglo-Catholic variety, more Roman than Rome in certain liturgical details, but heartfelt and embracing her whole existence with its “queer ways of denial and squander, exacting laws, embarrassing consecrations.”

She really means to be a disciple and partake in the “embarrassing mysteries” at the heart of life in Christ. And she does so, while maintaining an “attitude toward the family” that was “so casual, so unaware,” it “gave him almost a feeling of insult.” Stella believes in the extraordinary happiness of Christian faith and the possibility of it shining in ordinary family life—even if part of the Alard property might need to be sold off.

Ultimately, Peter sacrifices to the House of Alard and his repayment is misery. Like his father and his sisters Mary and Doris, he follows what the family wanted and finds that it does not repay. He breaks with Stella at the end of art One. He marries Vera, a rich Jewish woman, and fathers a child. It is no happy ending: “He saw his marriage as a mere tool of Alard’s use, a prop to that sinking edifice of the Squires.” He sees it as a mistake within months. And, because he has no possibility of getting Stella back (despite attempts), his story ends in despair and catastrophe.

Gervase and Jenny, however, manage to escape. Gervase first finds ordinary happiness in working with cars and not worrying about money. Though much younger than Stella Mount, he falls in love with her. Though she does not reciprocate romantically, she becomes his friend and introduces him to her own solid Anglo-Catholic faith. And it is through him that George, the Anglican parson, is introduced to a faith that is more than English cultural tradition—to the embarrassment of the rest of the family. But this embarrassment is nothing compared to Gervase’s decision to follow his faith in a way utterly alien to everything the Alards stand for. Meanwhile, Jenny’s decision to marry is one that scandalizes the family in a different way.

The novel could be seen as a tragedy. The novel’s final words go to Doris, lamenting the death of a parent and a sibling, the departure of several others, and her fate as the child who must now split up the ancient estate. She wishes she were dead. This is certainly one way of reading the novel. Lucy Maud Montgomery, the writer of the famed Anne of Green Gables series, recorded her own reaction to this book in a 1923 diary entry. Remarking that Kaye-Smith was a “favorite” who reminded her of George Eliot, Montgomery nevertheless lamented that “her work is tinged—I had almost said tainted—with the pessimism of most present day writers of power. They reflect their age. It is hard to be hopeful today when one looks at the weltering world.”

But “welter” can mean either to move amid turmoil and chaos or to be overwhelmed and pinned down by it. The world is always weltering in the first sense, and there are always parts of the world weltering in the second sense. Kaye-Smith’s world is one in which the House of Alard and many of its members collapse, but not all of them. There is hope aplenty within the 422 pages of this story. But it is Christian hope, which comes with a price.

The family is a great good but not the ultimate good. It is an ordinary, natural, and penultimate good that takes its meaning from the extraordinary, supernatural, and ultimate goods of Christian faith. Taking up one’s cross is necessary to experience the true crowning goodness of the family. This is the dilemma, the crossroads we might say, at which everyone must decide what to do. Sacrifice to the family as to an idol, and it will lead to destruction. Offer up the goods of family to the Lord, and they become an icon.

The End of the House of Alard was the first of Kaye-Smith’s bestsellers. That may be because it is not just tapping into the pessimism of her—or our—age. It may be because it taps into the drama of the soul in which every family is involved.

The End of the House of Alard
By Sheila Kaye-Smith
CUA Press, 2022
Paperback, 476 pages