Almost everyone knows of the writer M R James (1862-1936), but time has drawn a veil over many a late Victorian and Edwardian female author, letting them slide into obscurity. Fortunately, recent scholarship is beginning to address this problem. As a result, today we are able to provide a rare introduction to Miriam Rose James (1863-1948?) younger sister to Grace, Sidney, Herbert ‘Ber’ and Montague Rhodes James, of The Rectory, Great Livermere, Suffolk. A vehement supporter of women’s rights, originator (and only practitioner) of the ‘haberdashery ghost story’, and a trial to the establishment – the ‘other M R James’.
Unlike Montague, who was born in a clergy house in Dover, his sister Miriam Rose first saw the light of day on the Great Eastern Railways stopping train to Aldeburgh, calling at Wickham Market, Saxmundham, Leiston and Thorpeness. Her mother Emily had insisted she was merely suffering from a touch of indigestion, a diagnosis which was proved to be incorrect, rather graphically, in front of the two elderly spinsters and the Thorpeness post mistress who were sharing her compartment that afternoon.
The inconvenience of Miriam’s delivery in 1863, a year after her more renowned brother’s birth, proved to be symbolic of her subsequent life. She was never popular with her parents, being an expressive child with strong views on everything from the nursery wallpaper to the dubious virtues of haddock lightly poached in milk. Following an incident at the age of seven which involved her father (the Reverend Herbert James) and the visiting Bishop of Colchester, her parents were no longer welcome at the local fishmonger – and this was the final straw. In the autumn of that year, 1870, she was despatched to live with an unmarried cousin, Elspeth Trayle; the other James children were told that their little sister had been donated to a church mission for needy Africans.
Trayle, a successful haberdasher, was then in charge of her late father’s business (after his unexpected demise in a beach accident where he choked on an old whistle), and was known as the Mad Button Lady in her native town of Lowestoft. In Miriam, this entrepreneurial woman saw a great future, most of which consisted of gaining an unpaid counter assistant for the shop.
Under the tutelage of Trayle – and that of an itinerant Portuguese governess wanted by Jesuits – Miriam grew to be an outstanding haberdasher and an outspoken young woman with distinctly atheistic views, a factor which further alienated her from her sedate Anglican relatives. Senhora Isabella Maria Luisa Almeida, the governess, provided the girl with the basics of natural history, geography, and how to defend herself from Papal assassins; Trayle provided a sound knowledge of accountancy and how to defend herself from men’s advances, armed only with a yard of Crêpe De Chine.
Contemporary descriptions have Miriam as a tall young woman with a slight facial resemblance to M R James, though possessing more hair and less pairs of glasses. A keen bicyclist, she could often be seen cycling slowly past Catholic and High Anglican churches in the company of Senhora Almeida, reciting scurrilous verse about St Ignatius of Loyola. The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould included both women in a first draft of Suffolk Characters and Annoying Events, but this was later abandoned in favour of his much safer book Devonshire Characters and Strange Events (1909).
Miriam was an avid reader of both fabric catalogues and Gothic literature, but soon became interested in more modern works. Entranced by Amelia B Edwards’ description of a Nile voyage, entitled A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877), the young Suffolkian became a frequent visitor to Edwards’ Westbury-on-Trym home, undertaking the long train journey there most weekends, and spent many hours on tapestry work whilst listening to her mentor discuss such subjects as the toilet habits of the Bedouin, and the best way to cook ostrich on a paraffin lamp.
It is during this period that Miriam engaged in her only known direct contact with the male M R James since childhood. Through Edwards, Miriam had become fascinated with the history and languages of the Nilotic lands; Montague, then at Eton College, was commencing his translation of the Book of Baruch from the original Ethiopic, primarily as a way to get out of playing rugger.
Made aware of the project through a friend of Edwards, Miriam wrote to her brother at Eton in January 1879, and asked if she could borrow ten shillings until Friday. There is no record of Montague’s response to this entreaty, though her letter must have come as a shock, as his parents had maintained throughout that Miriam was in Esa-Oke, Western Nigeria, knitting scarves for the somewhat puzzled Yoruba peoples.
The train fares between Lowestoft and Westbury-on-Trym, on the other side of the country, were having a serious impact on Miriam’s purse. Short of funds, and encouraged by Edwards’ companion (and possibly lover) Ellen Drew Braysher, Miriam began what she called ‘her idle scribbles’ around the same time that Edwards eschewed her own stories of the supernatural in order to concentrate more on Egyptological studies.
The ageing Elspeth Trayle supported this move. Miriam had developed the habit of badgering haberdashery customers, asking if they wanted the right to vote and to be trained as orthopaedic surgeons, along with their six-penn’orth of cotton trim. Few of the ladies of Lowestoft took these approaches well, and despite Miriam’s efforts, it was a Sussex woman not a Suffolk one, Eleanor Davies-Colley, who became the first female fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (in 1911).
GHOSTLY THOUGHTS ARISE
It was clear by now that Trayle intended to leave the haberdashery business to Senhora Almeida (who had a fanatical interest in the prototype zip fasteners of the period), and this prompted Miriam to commence a serious literary career. During the 1880s she became a regular correspondent of the American author Mary Eleanor Wilkins (later Mary E Wilkins Freeman), with whom Miriam shared a dislike of women being portrayed as drudges and mere help-meets. Wilkins, being supported only by her own writing at that time, found a sympathetic heart in her English correspondent, and though not sharing the younger woman’s love of button hooks, encouraged Miriam to writing more ghost stories, and to continue preaching feminist values. It is believed that Freeman’s story ‘The Hall Bedroom’ (1905) owes much to an anecdote of Miriam’s concerning a run-down boarding house near Lowestoft, though Freeman wisely removed mention of the sailor and the one-legged rabbi.
Few of Miriam’s early writings survive, although the North Suffolk Literary Archive retains a copy of her pamphlet ‘An Immodest Proposal’, an uneven satire based on Swift’s original essay, in which she suggests that surplus clerics might form part of the national diet, and a very bad ghost story entitled ‘Boo to Men!’ (1886).
Little is know about her life from 1890 to 1901, though she certainly continued both her writing and her involvement with women’s suffrage. Miriam entered the record books more prominently again in 1902, when she was arrested following the first performance of Elgar’s ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Miriam had attended in the hope of meeting A C Benson, the lyricist for the piece, and gaining an introduction to his brother, E F Benson, author of Dodo (1893). There is conjecture that E F Benson’s discrete homoerotic activities made Miriam believe he might be sympathetic to furthering her career, though it is unlikely their religious differences could have been surmounted.
In the event, Miriam ended up throwing a strawberry ice-cream at A C Benson, kissing the soloist Clara Butt on the lips in full public view and being ejected from the auditorium. Having failed in her venture, Miriam broke the windows of a nearby gentlemen’s club with a toffee hammer, and was arraigned before the magistrates for the seventh time that year.
The fine for this and other acts in support of the women’s movement caused Miriam to return to Lowestoft, where she began drafting further ghost stories in order to pay her debts. Unsuccessful at placing these tales with the more popular London magazines, she managed nevertheless to have several published in organs such as the Bury St Edmund’s Angling Weekly, the Lowestoft Advertiser, and the Suffolk Haberdasher’s Monthly, most of which folded a few months after running her work.
In 1906, Miriam travelled to Finland to celebrate the universal suffrage act passed that year by the Finnish Parliament. She funded her trip by borrowing monies from Lady Cynthia Asquith (then the nineteen year old Cynthia Charteris), who was twenty four years junior to Miriam but who had already conceived of a career as a writer and anthologist. Cynthia was an admirer of her views, but kept that aspect private, having already decided to marry Herbert Asquith four years later and wishing to avoid scandal.
As can be seen, Miriam was neither a shy girl, nor a shy woman. From chaining herself to mackerel in support of votes for women, to writing screeds on the virtue of men black-leading the stove instead of starting wars, she was in every way anathema to her family. If Montague Rhodes James was a man of his time, Miriam Rose James was a woman in quite the wrong era altogether. Both held strong moral principles, but rarely the same ones; it is hard to imagine Montague spending an evening discussing atheism and tent-stitch with a group of inebriated women from the herring gutting sheds. As for literary technique, Montague had the upper hand; Miriam had a perverse view of punctuation, altered tense mid-sentence to suit her mood, and used adjectives and adverbs interchangeably. In addition, she believed the paragraph to be a construct of the patriarchy, and refused to employ it.
Miriam never returned to England – or even to Lowestoft. Today, the only clue to what may have happened to her in later years is in a small cemetery outside the Finnish capital Helsinki, in the plot of the Hämäläinen family. Aallotar Hämäläinen was a prime mover in the Finnish suffrage movement of the period, and a writer herself, one known to have Sapphic tendencies. In one corner of the plot is a marker dated December 1947, inscribed “To our beloved sister Aallotar, and that English woman, Miriam Something.”
As for any physical meeting between the two siblings, it is certain that Montague only toured Suffolk when Miriam was in Westbury-on-Trym, or preferably even further away, and he never wrote a story specifically set in Lowestoft itself for obvious reasons. It has been suggested that, in a late spirit of rapprochement, he considered his sister when seeking an indexer for his work Suffolk and Norfolk (1930), but finding her to be residing permanently in Finland, settled instead on his cousin Margaret Helen James, author of Bogie Tales of East Anglia (1891).
Some Jamesian scholars have suggested that the continual – if peripheral – knowledge of his younger sister’s activities and peculiarities contributed to Montague James’ limited use of female characters in his fiction. And Michael Cox wrote in M R James: An Informal Portrait (1983), “One need not be a professional psychoanalyst to see the ghost stories as some release from feelings held in check.” Whilst most take this as a reference to Montague’s platonic relationships with men, others see the shadow of his feelings about Miriam’s unfettered behaviour.
Interestingly, David G Rowlands noted in Ghost & Scholars 15 (1993) that when Montage does include a female character:
“Dr James has particular use for the strong-minded, determined woman who has triumphed – for good or ill – over the restrictions of sex, Society, the Establishment or the Law: not least those required to manage feebler men… Mrs Anstruther, Miss Denton, perhaps Lady Wardrop and possibly even the aubergiste at St Bertrand de Comminges.”
Which does leave open the possibility that Montague never quite forgot his younger sister.
THE FICTION OF M R JAMES (MISS)
In terms of Miriam’s literary output, few stories survive to be assessed. Her protagonists are often unmarried women, “unfettered by the stultifying effects of masculine bondage or the price of lamb cutlets – sevenpence ha’penny, and most of that was gristle!” (letter to Amelia B Edwards, 1891) and are frequently amateur haberdashers. In addition, her tales are laced through with the sort of female moral fibre which made her kick condescending policemen at political rallies.
Notable amongst her known supernatural output are ‘The Woman in Taupe’ (Lowestoft Advertiser, 1903), and her tale ‘The Tricycles of the Auvergne’ (Ipswich Bugle & Amateur Bicyclist, 1904), no doubt inspired by her brother Montague’s own tour of France some twenty years before.
The former tale, only four thousand words (with a rare male protagonist), concerns a solicitor’s clerk who is sent to a village in the Lowestoft Marshes to negotiate the sale of an abandoned haberdashery, only to find that a woman in a greyish brown coat keeps standing in front of him in the post office queue and buying all the stamps. The locals will not speak of the woman and so, frustrated, he returns to the decrepit haberdashers. There he pulls down the blinds, reads Montague Summers (a pointed mention of that first name, we feel) whilst sewing elbow patches on his jacket, and goes completely insane. The story ends with a thin, hair-covered creature, “its eyes smouldering a dim red”, slinking into the house, where it finds – to its disappointment – that the plot is over and its presence is entirely superfluous.
It should be noted that aspects of ‘The Woman in Taupe’ were utilised, with greater success, in The Woman in Black (1983), a horror novel by British author Susan Hill. Hill often expressed an interest in the traditional English ghost story, including those of Montague James, and there is little doubt that she was acquainted with his sister Miriam’s work.
‘The Tricycles of the Auvergne’, a novella, is Miriam’s longest story still extant, and is the almost interminable tale of an elderly seamstress, Letitia Batchel, who is drawn to a disused convent in the Massif Central of France whilst on a cycling holiday in the area. There she discovers a ruined chapel dedicated to the Teutonic Knights, who had fled there centuries before with the secrets of Latvian cross-stitch – but the chapel is not without its guardian! Despite the many suggested horrors around her, Miss Batchel is undaunted. Even when blankets in the local auberge undulate with disquieting animation, all the protagonist can think to do is to sew up the hems properly and give them a good going over with a flat iron, much to the annoyance of her host. To say more would be spoil the story for the eager reader.
H P Lovecraft, in an addendum to his essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ (addendum published posthumously by Arkham Bargain Remainders, 1940), considered this novella to be a turning point in women’s supernatural writing:
“The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Miriam James’ work seems to demand a detachment from literature itself, and quite frankly, I could be shot of female writers altogether after this.”
Despite their friendship, Lady Asquith never did include any of Miriam’s stories in her popular anthologies. Unsurprisingly, she chose a piece by Elizabeth Bowen for her Second Ghost Book (1952) over Miriam’s draft of ‘Suffolk Fancies’, the story of a woman who finds a tiny, mysterious button in one of her eclairs. When an antiquarian schoolteacher and part-time church canon claims that the button belongs in his niece’s doll-house, a strangely shifting photograph at the local cake shop explains all…
And there you have it, dearest listener. The other M R James. An admirable and principled woman, and triumphant in her own way – though not the most accomplished supernatural writer of the time.
Editor’s Note: For those who find the history of ghostly literature of enduring interest, almost everyone above existed. Not only that, but some of this tale is true. Apart from the bits relating to Miriam Rose James, of course.
More fascinating (and more reliable) facts can be found at the Ghosts & Scholars Archive:
http://www.pardoes.info/roanddarroll/GSArchive.html
