“More songs about chocolate and girls,” The Undertones once sang. In which spirit, today’s Diary involves more gothic tales about chocolate, girls, and poison, with a sub-plot of sinister adult relatives up to no good.
Earlier this week, I mentioned the dilemma of a woman who has been haunted for half a century by a book she started reading in 1971, when aged eight. Ever since, she has been wondering how it ended.
But she couldn’t remember the title or author, only that “the story concerned a girl named Anastasia or Esmerelda or something like that, who was kept in a castle surrounded by a moat, at the behest of alleged relatives who fed her sweets or chocolates which turned out to be poisoned.”
I guessed the book might be Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), which doesn’t have an Anastasia, or Esmerelda, or chocolate, but does involve arsenic-infused blackberries and a weird uncle who keeps the children secluded.
Poison Pen – Frank McNally on the late-blooming Violet Needham, children’s novelist extraordinaire
From here to Timbuktu – Alison Healy on a byword for the most remote and distant place imaginable
Arsenic and Old Books – Frank McNally on a reader’s literary cry for help
Physician, soldier, explorer and naturalist – Marc McMenamin on Maj Richard WG Hingston
Since then, however, another reader has contacted the incident room with an alternative suggestion, which I believe may close the case. It’s by a writer of eccentric Anglo-Irish heritage. And – lo! – it does indeed feature a heroine named Anastasia.
I’ll let my correspondent Catherine Fahy herself explain:
“I read your column with even more interest than usual today as the memories of the book described by your enquirer reminded me very much of one of my own favourite childhood books, namely The House of the Paladin, which includes a scene where an attempt is made to feed poisoned chocolates to the young heroine Anastasia, Duchess of Ornowitza.”
Catherine’s email continues: “The book was first published in 1945 and is one of a series which began with The Black Riders, all set in a Ruritanian world, albeit based to some degree on the family history of the author . . .”
Alas, I can’t find the text of The House of the Paladin anywhere online and the National Library doesn’t have a copy. But I gather from reviews that the novel’s wealthy heroine is recently orphaned and at the mercy of an evil uncle, her guardian and heir.
So she definitely shouldn’t eat those chocolates. And if this is indeed our mystery book, The House of the Paladin would also fit with our original reader’s guess that in 1971, “it could well have been decades old”.
Not the least remarkable thing about Needham is that she herself was decades old – six and a bit – when making her literary debut. Born in 1876, in London, she was 63 by the time the Black Riders was published, whereafter she turned out children’s novels annually.
She had spent a long apprenticeship as an oral storyteller to nieces and nephews, however, which is where much of her material originated.
And her writings had been submitted to publishers as early as 1918, when Needham was a fresh-faced 42-year-old, but rejected then as too difficult for children.
That was still the reaction of William Collins in the 1930s until a director of the company brought the stories home and test-marketed them on his own offspring, to rave reviews.
Speaking of faces, Needham’s mother – the daughter of a wealthy Dutch aristocrat – is said to have been very beautiful. Unfortunately, suggests the Violet Needham Society, the author instead inherited her appearance from a grandfather who was MP for Armagh in the 1820s and who once described his own features as “injudiciously heaped together”.
This did not stop Francis Jack Needham (aka Viscount Newry, the Earl of Kilmorey, and “Black Jack”), when already married and a grandfather, scandalously eloping with a woman 36 years younger and legally his ward, in 1844.
Despite the age difference, she somehow predeceased him, and from a heart condition, when barely 30. Bereft, he built her an Egyptian-style mausoleum near their London home and joined her there decades later, in a similarly ornate coffin.
Like many Victorians with time on their hands, Black Jack was said to “dabble in the occult”.
He was certainly an enthusiast for Egyptology.
One of the stories about him is that in later years he rehearsed his entry into the afterlife by dressing in a shroud, lying in his coffin, and having servants push him from house to mausoleum via a low tunnel under what is now Kilmorey Road, near Twickenham.
The blog Habitats and Heritage, in its entry on the Mausoleum, speculates that he was “trying to recreate the sun] god Ra’s daily journey from darkness to light, from death to life”.
A product of the scandalous relationship, meanwhile, was Charles Needham, who spent his youth “labouring under the dual handicaps of illegitimacy and an eccentric father”.
He later became an incurable gambler, subsidised by his wealthy wife, but in the process visiting many changes of fortune – and of address – on his family (including daughter Violet), which moved between “comfortable, big houses and small, shabby ones” regularly.
The novelist spent her last years in Gloucestershire where she died, aged 91. She was still writing into her eighties, and still selling well, although as the Needham Society notes ruefully: “her last published works . . . show a falling off from her best and the unfinished novel] An Accursed Heritage is pathetically bad.”
