'Lost Paradise' - Francesca Claremont

I looked out for Lost Paradise (1933) by Francesca Claremont after I read a publisher’s announcement in the London Mercury for December ’33, which described it as ‘for the connoisseur of old legend, myth and superstition', which is pretty much my entire CV. 

It is an epistolary novel. A Provencal woman, just over 30, married for convenience and mild affection to an Englishman, writes letters about the estate where she grew up to the wife of a cousin, who may be going to live nearby. It is in the Camargue, that mysterious estuarine region of Southern France, and she lived in a medieval citadel above a river and on the edge of the marshes.

She recalls the ancient history and the legends and folklore of this realm, and also describes the members of her large extended family who lived there. Richly colourful, vivid, often describing brutal and barbarous customs with a certain savage relish, the text memorably evokes a world utterly different to Cedar Lodge, her respectable Home Counties residence, and indeed to that of metropolitan France.

At first the proliferation of relations mentioned in the letters is a bit tricky to track, though there is a family tree that helps. But as the book progresses we sort out who are the important individuals and get a sense of them refracted through the candid opinions of the narrator. These are often distinctly bracing.

The effect is of a vast historical epic glimpsed through chatty anecdotes, with many digressions and interludes: a clever experiment that works well. We feel we come to know both the forceful individuals whose lives she evokes and the proud, semi-independent enclave where they belong. The technique of deploying curious, intricate detail to convey historical verisimilitude precedes that found in the much later historical novels of Peter Vansittart or Alfred Duggan.

The old family to which she is heir have as their emblem the Bull, after a local, distinctive breed, and they also display the Star of Balthazar, the sign of the magnates with whom they have often been allied. This symbol derives from a legend that Balthazar, one of the Magi, came to this coast after the journey to the crib, or that it was his son or grandson that came.

As I recall, this tradition was later alluded to by Lawrence Durrell in his Avignon Quintet, and the strong dualist and Gnostic influence in the region that he explores is hinted at in Claremont’s book too. There is also in these parts a special devotion to Mary Magdalene, from another legend that she too came to this part of the world.

Lost Paradise is an unusual, strongly imagined, deceptively well-structured novel. The author also wrote The Book of the Cat Jeremiah, a selection of animal folk tales (1929), poetry, a biography of Catherine of Aragon (1939), and four other novels, Magical Incense (1932), Turn Again, Ladies (1934), Dead Waters (1936) and the last, The Shepherd’s Tune in 1960. There is not much biographical information about her readily to hand, other than that she was at one time an assistant to Montessori, the educational reformer.

(Mark Valentine)

Image: P Rulton Rare Books