An ex-maid’s maid.

December 8, 2010

"Why, she's going to ask me down there, too, to one of her week-end parties!"

“A Romance of Love and Fortune,” that is the subtitle of a light romance about a woman who becomes the maid of her ex-maid. The book is Miss Million’s Maid (1915) by Berta Ruck (Mrs. Oliver Onions).  In addition to love and fortune, it includes class snobbery, Irish royalty, theater, crime, and the Great War.

My story begins with an incident that is bound to happen some time in any household that boasts—or perhaps deplores—a high-spirited girl of twenty-three in it.

It begins with “a row” about a young man.

My story begins, too, where the first woman’s story began—in a garden.

It was the back garden of our red-roofed villa in that suburban street, Laburnum Grove, Putney, S.W.

Now all those eighty-five neat gardens up and down the leafy road are one exactly like the other, with the same green strip of lawn just not big enough for tennis, the same side borders gay with golden calceolaria, scarlet geranium, blue lobelia, and all the bright easy-to-grow London flowers. All the villas belonging to the gardens seem alike, too, with their green front doors, their white steps, their brightly polished door-knockers and their well-kept curtains.

From the look of these typically English, cheerful, middle-class, not-too-well-off little homes you’d know just the sort of people who live in them. The plump, house-keeping mother, the season-ticket father, the tennis-playing sons, the girls in dainty blouses, who put their little newly whitened shoes to dry on the bathroom window-sill, and who call laughing remarks to each other out of the window.

“I say, Gladys! don’t forget it’s the theatre to-night!”

“Oh, rather not! See you up at the Tennis Club presently?”

“No; I’m meeting Vera to shop and have lunch in Oxford Street.”

“Dissipated rakes! ‘We don’t have much money, but we do see life,’ eh?”

Yes! From what I see of them, they do get heaps of fun out of their lives, these young people who make up such a large slice of the population of our great London. There’s laughter and good-fellowship and enjoyment going on all up and down our road.

Except here. No laughter and parties and tennis club appointments at No. 45, where I, Beatrice Lovelace, live with my Aunt Anastasia. No gay times here!

Thus begins the tale of the great-granddaughter of Lady Anastasia. In the days of her great-grandmother the family lived in Lovelace Court. Since that time, the family has “come down in the world” and our heroine lives with her aunt as hermits, because the aunt believes “Better no society than the wrong society.”

Beatrice’s only friend is a naive maid. So when the maid inherits a fortune from a distant relative, our heroine decides to flee her hermitage by entering the employment of her maid. What follows then is a series of adventures as our heroine tries to protect her friend and show her the advantages of her new-found wealth. And, of course, what follows is also romance and plenty of humor along the way.

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Come Out of the Kitchen

October 9, 2010

One of the joys of proofreading for Distributing Proofreaders is finding a book that keeps you proofreading beyond your daily goal because you want to find out what happens next. Come Out of the Kitchen by Alice Duer Miller was one such book. Even more fun was post-processing the book later on because then I got to read the whole book and I got to see the illustrations and photos that were missing during the proofreading phase.

 

Scene from Act I of the 1916 play

 

Apparently, this story first appeared in Harper’s Bazar in 1915. It was then made into a comedy by A. E. Thomas that became a hit on Broadway, opening on October 1916 at the Cohan Theatre and playing for 224 performances. The play starred Ruth Chatterton, who twenty years later played the selfish wife in William Wyler’s classic film Dodsworth.

The novel was published in 1916, with photos from the play and illustrations. Later, there was also a film version of Come Out of the Kitchen in 1919, and a 1925 musical called The Magnolia Lady (47 performances) with Ruth Chatterton and her newly-aquired husband (Ralph Forbes).

The story is of a rich young man from the North who rents a Revelly Hall in the South. One condition that he made in renting the mansion was that servants be provided. The servants that came with the house included “an excellent cook, a good butler, a rather inefficient housemaid, and a dangerous extra boy,” none of whom were what they appeared to be, as shown in this segment early in the book:

On her the eyes of her future employer had already been fixed since the door first opened, and it would be hardly possible to exaggerate the effect produced by her appearance. She might have stepped from a Mid-Victorian Keepsake, or Book of Beauty. She should have worn eternally a crinoline and a wreath of flowers; her soft gray-blue eyes, her little bowed mouth, her slim throat, should have been the subject of a perpetual steel engraving. She was small, and light of bone, and her hands, crossed upon her check apron (for she was in her working dress), were so little and soft that they seemed hardly capable of lifting a pot or kettle.

Mrs. Falkener expressed the general sentiment exactly when she gasped:

“And you are the cook?”

The cook, whose eyes had been decorously fixed upon the floor, now raised them, and sweeping one rapid glance across both her employer and the speaker, whispered discreetly:

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What is your name?”

And at this question a curious thing happened. The butler and Reed answered simultaneously. Only, the butler said “Jane,” and Reed, with equal conviction, said “Ellen.”

Ignoring this seeming contradiction, the cook fixed her dove-like glance on Mrs. Falkener and answered:

“My name is Jane-Ellen, ma’am.”

Add to this mix: an amorous real estate man, a lecherous lawyer (who wanted to get the cook fired so she would work for him), Mrs. Falkener (who wanted the cook fired because she was too beautiful to have around the man she wanted as a son-in-law), at least one hat, and a cat. The result was a nice, fun read.

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