reviews_and_ramblings | Esther Wyndham (July 31, 1908

MARY LUTYENS, who became the acknowledged world expert and writer on the Indian spiritual philosopher Krishnamurti, was only two years old when her mother, Lady Emily Lutyens, became a theosophist.

In 1911 Annie Besant, president of the Theosophical Society, which based its teaching on Hindu ideas and philosophy, brought Krishnamurti, a brahmin child named after the Hindu divinity, and his brother Nitya, to England. Lady Emily took the two boys "under her wing" and the young Mary grew up knowing them well.

Although in later life she was not a strict theosophist, she was interested in psychic matters and remained dedicated to Krishnamurti, writing several books about him, including Krishnamurti, a three- volume biography (1975-88), and The Life and Death of Krishnamurti (1990). Her determination to preserve Krishnamurti's good name extended to her writing a secret rebuttal of an Indian woman's derogatory account of his life.

Lutyens remembered Annie Besant as being the only person in her life for whom she felt any hero worship, and from her childhood encounters with theosophy she gained a respect for the beliefs of others which stayed with her throughout her life.

She was born in London in 1908, the youngest child of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and his wife Emily, the daughter of Edward Robert Lytton, Viceroy of India and first Earl of Lytton. At an early age Mary appreciated her vivid imagination and was never bored with her own company. She was naturally secretive, her motto aged 10 was "Know all but be known of none", and she later wrote in her autobiography To Be Young (1959) that she aimed to cultivate a deliberate hardness. This was not however apparent when she fell in love with Krishnamurti's brother Nitya and was much hurt when he seemed to ignore her.

Taking her younger children, including Mary, with her, Emily Lutyens travelled to both India and Australia many times with Krishnamurti, who was proclaimed in 1925 by Besant to be "the coming Messiah". Edwin Lutyens was not a theosophist but was in India every winter watching his city, New Delhi, being built. Mary Lutyens recalled being proud of her father and his work, but she did not have a close relationship with him, although she looked very like him. He loved gaiety and so hated the idea of any silence at mealtimes that he designed a large round blackboard top for the dining table, so that noughts and crosses could be played if the conversation became sticky.

In 1930 Mary Lutyens married Anthony Sewell. The marriage was unhappy from the start as she was in love with his brother, who came with them on the honeymoon. The marriage was dissolved in 1945 and Sewell subsequently died. They had one daughter. In 1945 Lutyens married the art historian J.G. Links, whom she had met through her brother Robert during the Second World War and to whom she remained very happily married. She looked on Links as her rescuer from what had been a rather rackety life and said, "He made me nice again." She objected to their first honeymoon spent on a troopship to New York and so they went on to Venice, a city about which they both became passionate.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Mary Lutyens had written many novels, among which were Forthcoming Marriages (1933), Perchance to Dream(1935), Rose and Thorn (1936) and So Near to Heaven (1943). She went on to write many books, including Effie in Venice (1965), a collection of unpublished letters from Effie Ruskin written between 1849 and 1852, Lady Lytton's Court Diary (1961), Millais and the Ruskins (1967), The Ruskins and the Grays (1972), The Lyttons in India (1979) and a biography of her father, Edwin Lutyens (1980).

She was an agony aunt and a contributor to the TLS, Apollo, Royalty Digest and the Cornhill. Her last book was a privately printed history of the Lyttons and the Lutyens families. Her first books were published by John Murray and she became a family friend of the Murrays, her later books also being published by them. She was very helpful not only during the Edwin Lutyens exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1985 but also during a recently made television programme on Lutyens in which she appears as a voiceover, having refused to appear in person.

Her research was meticulous; she listened to all Krishnamurti's lectures on tape and she had an original, rather lateral way of looking at things, seeing Ruskin and Effie's relationship differently from other writers. Although her self- discipline and the way she corrected people's grammar could be intimidating, she had a lively twinkle and was good company. She was insatiably curious about everything and was particularly intrigued about people's sex lives, asking very direct questions.

She and her husband Jo Links were very supportive of each other's work. She wrote everything in bed in pencil in an exercise book and he typed all her manuscripts, being the the practical one in the marriage - and the only person who could read her handwriting. Together, until his death in 1997, they created a strong partnership and unit, and from this core they were known for their generosity to others. Mary had a particularly large circle of friends and was a great letter-writer; they had both led very social lives and had entertained many people at their house in Sussex.

Under the pseudonym Esther Wyndham she wrote numerous serials, including Black Prince, a romance for Mills and Boon (a romance she submitted was rejected for being "too middle-class"). She was a star author for Mills & Boon with a large following among magazine readers. She offered nine novels to Mills & Boon via her agent, Curtis Brown. Such was Wyndham’s popularoty – and the quality of her novels - that she was closely identified with the Mills & Boon imprint in a 1953 advertisement:

“Author + imprint = profit. An imprint that your readers know, like “Mills & Boon”, bring you profit, so does a leading author like Esther Wyndham. Put the two together and you get something you should buy.”

Wyndham was indeed a money spinner: her first novel for Mills & Boon, Black Charles (1952), was a best-seller. Mills & Boon spent £140 on advertising this title in the Sunday Times and Woman’s Weekly (“Black Charles awaits your order to bring readers to your library and profit to you”), and in 31.000 special inserts in North Country editions (given the novel’s Northumberland setting) of Home and Country, the magazine of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes. The fuss for this title was deserved, as readers had contacted Mills & Boon (assuming they were Wyndham’s publisher) for copies after the serial was published in Woman’s Weekly in 1948.

Published by Mills & Boon in March 1952, Black Charles sold out its initial print run of 4.700 copies by July, when Alan Boon informed Lutyens, “It has not made a duck in any week since publication. Under the very difficult conditions which obtain today for the selling of novels, we think you may be perfectly satisfied with these figures. I expect this edition to sell steadily until early 1954, when we shall plan a cheap reprint.”

On 1 April Boon could confidently tell Lutyens that, according to W.H. Smith, Black Charles was selling better in Leeds than the latest Agatha Christie novel and in Hull, the book was more popular than The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monserrat.

Black Charles contains one of the best hero characterizations in the canon: Charles Pendleton, 40, known as “Black” Charles due to his dark features and temperament. The heroine, Audrey Lawrence, 25, who works for an antiques firm in London, has no trouble spotting him at a crowded drinks party:

“There was no mistaking him. He stood out like a full grown oak in a grove of saplings. There was boredom and contempt written in every line of his strong dark face, and a sort of fury that took possession of her. He has no right to look like that, he had no right to think himself so superior… He was just the kind of man who had brought down the prestige of the aristocracy in England – proud, arrogant, conceited. She hated him with her whole heart.”

But soon Audrey is a guest at the Pendleton castle in Northumberland, and she falls for Charles – literally. On a fox hunt, Audrey is thrown from her mount and sprains her ankle. In a dramatic scene, she lies down close beside Charles to watch the stars and “listen to the night” until help arrives:

“She was lying on her face again now, and Charles, also lying on his face with his hands under his chin, was not more than a foot away from her. She did not know at what moment it was that she became conscious of his nearness, his magnetism, but suddenly all at once it was present with her like an overwhelming electrical force drawing her towards him. She did not stir a muscle but her whole being yearned to move closer to him, to touch him, to lie against his side and encounter the living warmth of his body.”

Soon thereafter Charles proposes, pledging, “You will be my queen.” Wyndham continued to be a top author and seller, and had a ready series of titles on hand for Mills & Boon to publish. For her next novel, Man of Steel (which had nothing to do with the Superman myth), 30.000 dust jacket copies were inserted in major trade magazines.

By far the strongest editorial presence of the 1950s was Winifred “Biddy” Johnson, editor of Woman’s Weekly and recognized by Alan Boon as having a major influence on the genre. Johnson began her career on another Amalgamated Press title, Forget-Me-Not, and edited Woman’s Weekly for over twenty years before she retired in 1961 at the age of 69.

“The dominant note throughout is usefulness,” Johnson told her troops. “Out one desire is to please the average woman.”

Esther Wyndham, who had ten serials published in Woman’s Weekly and Woman and Home (including her best-seller, Black Charles) recalled Johnson as demanding and precise, insisting the hero and heroine conforms to her own romantic formula:

“Lady Diana Spencer would never have qualified as a Johnson Heroine, except that she was a virgin and loved children, for she was far too beautiful, too rich, and had too easy a life… The spirited heroine must not only have a wonderful way with children and old people but some previous tragedy or hardship in her life. And, of course, she had to work hard for her living. It was her character rather than her looks that attracted; she became beautiful only at rare moments, preferable when the hero was looking at her without her knowing it. Naturally, she became permanently beautiful at the end when irradiated with requited love.”

The Johnson Hero, Wyndham added, had to be strong, brave, “frantically busy” and rich, “best if he was self-made”. Prince Charles would have passed muster: “In spite of being a prince he worked hard, had had rumoured involvements with other girls, and had not declared himself until the last instalment; however, there was a quality of mystery lacking in him.”

The Johnson heroes reign supreme in the story and dominate the heroine, not vice versa. Esther Wyndham recalled that Johnson made her rewrite her first serial because the hero portrayed weakness.

“I had made the hero say that he was feeling ill in order to get away from a party,” Wyndham said. “She wrote indignantly, “Who can have respect for a man who feels ill at a party?””

What was perhaps Johnson’s greatest (and most pervasive) contribution to romantic fiction was a plot situation nicknamed “MINO”. In this case a man and woman could live together in a contrived but unconsummated marriage, for a variety of social or professional reasons. This was a “Marriage In Name Only”, or MINO. This created a potentially “sexy” situation, as the reader waited anxiously for the moment when love would blossom and thaw the frost between the characters. As such, it broadened storyline possibilities within the acceptable moral line. According to Esther Wyndham, the Irish market convinced Johnson to remove the slightest hints of improperty. MINO did that; situations outside of marriage did not:

“In one story when my hero was in Washington with the heroine, his secretary, and I had allowed her to sleep in the sitting room of his hotel suite because all the hotels were full (a situation helpful to romance), Miss J. sent me a telegram, for I had fone abroad between instalments: “Please make another effort to find Elizabeth a room of her own.”

She was famous for her dry martinis and her elegance and, although unmusical, danced alone to Cole Porter for exercise.

Mary Lutyens, writer: born London 31 July 1908; married 1930 Anthony Sewell (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1945), 1945 J.G. Links (died 1997); died London 9 April 1999.

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituaries-mary-lutyens-1086928.html

Source: Passion's Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon