Lucinda Brayford by Martin Boyd

First published: 1946

Type of work: Family chronicle

Time of work: The mid-1800’s to the early 1940’s

Locale: Melbourne, London, and southern France

Principal Characters:

• William Vane, an early English migrant to Australia
• Frederick (fred) Vane, William’s son
• Julia Vane, William’s wife
• Lucinda, the daughter of Frederick and Julie, who marries Hugo Brayford
• Arthur Brayford, the eldest of three brothers in England
• Marian, Arthur’s wife
• Paul Brayford, the second of the brothers, who is somewhat eccentric
• Hugo Brayford, the youngest of the brothers
• Mr. Straker, an influential Australian entrepreneur living in England

The Novel

Lucinda Brayford is an expansive novel spanning the lives of two families over four generations. It follows the movements of the Vanes and the Brayfords across England, France, and Australia. The novel begins in the mid-1800’s, in an England ruled by tradition and a proud aristocracy, and concludes in England during World War II, with tradition replaced by expediency and pragmatism and the aristocracy besieged in their rather depleted manors by businessmen and industrialists.

In a sense, the novel is the biography of Lucinda Brayford; descriptions of the generations preceding hers serve to establish the context of her life. As well, various social conflicts are expressed in her life when she marries into a titled family and her wealth and prestige give way to the changing times.

Lucinda’s grandfather, William Vane, was expelled from Oxford for various breaches of honor. Faced with disrepute in England, he sailed to Australia, where he became a well-to-do landowner. After his death, his son, Frederick, discovered that much of the family’s wealth had been lost to his father’s return to dissolute living. Frederick, then, set about rebuilding the family holdings in the new world. In so doing, he became an effective, if heartless, businessman. His drive for respectability through hard work and wealth was, on one level, so successful that his wife, who had been soft-spoken and sensitive, became infected in like manner, parading through social circles and using her wealth to re-create an aristocratic life-style meant to restore, however falsely, that which had been lost and left back in England. In fact, all of Melbourne social life, it seems, was built to re-create in the new world, however disreputable family origins may have been, an aristocracy of form (if not of blood) based on the English model. Unfortunately, although the trappings were correct, there was no sense of social responsibility or personal morality. These would-be aristocrats were parvenues, nouveaux riches brought to their station by ambition rather than by history, breeding, and education. Melbourne knew this subconsciously.

Therefore, when Lucinda, the youngest daughter of Frederick, is to be married to a titled young gentleman from England, Hugo Brayford, an aide-de-camp for a term in Australia, the family excitedly anticipate a new feather in their social cap. As a governmental employee, Hugo earns a modest wage. It is understood that Lucinda will be bringing more wealth to the union, but this is reasonable, considering the rise in social fortunes to be enjoyed by the Vanes.

The married couple live happily in England until Hugo begins making excuses for long absences from Lucinda. He takes to prolonged hunting excursions and business trips, which Lucinda later discovers to be pretexts for assignations with an old love. Lucinda requests a divorce, but is denied. Hugo fears what a divorce could do to his reputation and to the considerable allowance he gets from Lucinda’s family.

World War I intrudes. Hugo joins a regiment and goes off to fight. Given the opportunity, Lucinda cultivates her own budding romance with Pat, Hugo’s close friend, who has remained in England. Things change briefly when Hugo returns. His face has been disfigured by an explosion. Lucinda sees that he can no longer flaunt his social superiority and pities him. In time, however, Lucinda returns to Pat. When Hugo dies and Pat rebuffs her proposal of marriage, Lucinda receives comfort from Hugo’s eccentric brother Paul. She recovers and settles into an aristocratic life of somewhat humbler dimensions. Her fate mirrors a more general retrenchment of the aristocracy following the war.

Consequent to her time spent with Paul, an attachment develops between her son, Stephen, and the curious brother-in-law. Stephen grows to be artistic and independent, romantic in his sensibilities. When naive devotion to an Australian cousin portends a difficult marriage, Lucinda offers some practical advice, warning him of what she calls the “rosy mists.” Nevertheless, Stephen is married, and soon after is divorced, the victim of his kind, unsuspecting heart: His wife has run off with a young capitalist. When World War II erupts, Stephen refuses to join in the fight. He mopes about disconsolately until a friend persuades him to aid in the evacuations from Dunkirk. His experiences temporarily jolt him out of his rather indulgent life of art and self-pity, forcing him to confront the rest of humanity. When he is assigned to a regular regiment, however, he reverts to an eerie inactivity, refusing to take orders. After six months of detention and six months of imprisonment, he receives flowers from his former wife, which appears to heal a deep and long-standing wound. He is released from prison and returns to the care of Lucinda. Gradually he fades and dies. His funeral returns the novel to Oxford, where the Vane family saga began four generations earlier. Lucinda attends King’s Chapel, where she listens to the choir, as Stephen had so often done. She sits alone in the small enclave of culture and tradition, rapt with the richness that so unexpectedly holds out against the gloom.

The Characters

Lucinda Brayford is primarily the story of its namesake. Although several characters step briefly to the forefront—including William, Frederick, Julia, Stephen, Arthur and Marian Brayford of Crittenden Manor, and Paul—it is Lucinda who links them all. The others are important insofar as they reveal something about Lucinda. As Stephen says on one occasion, “I know a lot more about mum than she thinks I do.” In like manner, other characters consciously or unconsciously reveal to the reader facets of Lucinda of which she herself is often unaware.

Frederick and Julia, Lucinda’s parents, became hard-bitten in an effort to restore the Vane fortunes. Emerging from this atmosphere, Lucinda was targeted for her parents’ social goals without being of requisite stock. She was the sweetest of the Vane children, but almost of necessity she took on her parents’ stamp. Lucinda shows a mercenary aspect when leaving a devoted admirer for the more favorable match with Hugo. This aspect is developed further when she pays back her husband in kind by having an affair. When pushed to the wall, Lucinda will see to her interests. Throughout the travail of Hugo’s war wound and Pat’s departure, Lucinda demonstrates that she is made up of equal parts of compassion, romance, vulnerability, and resolve. She learns from her experiences and reacts to her environment. With age, Lucinda is required to take on the role of arbiter and executor in family matters. Compelled to become a diplomat as well as a businesswoman, and having been battered and scarred in her emotional life, Lucinda takes on those roles with insight. She advises and comforts, manipulates and negotiates. At the conclusion of the novel, Lucinda sits in a chapel listening to religious music. For the moment, the unscarred center of her heart responds and memories of sunny, innocent days stir inside. She retains the capacity to shudder with wonderment.

Among the brothers of the Brayford family, Arthur is the oldest and, therefore, Lord of Cittenden. He appears as a rather nondescript character at first, ruled by his brash and opinionated wife, Marian. Through brief glimpses of him, however, the reader learns that he is a character of depth and discernment. At his death, it is discovered that his penury, mocked at times by Paul, fortified the estate against the falling tide of the aristocracy enough that Paul could assume the role of lord as something other than pauper and fool. It is therefore Arthur who represents the best of the aristocracy of the time, honorable and quietly effective.

Paul is a reflective, artistic, but ultimately frivolous character. He is an articulate spokesman for various themes and ideas in conversations throughout the novel, yet he seems to have little staying power—a man of some interest but no persuasion, an anachronism, an insubstantial shadow when compared to the likes of Mr. Straker. He is laughed out of the House of Lords and mocked by his circle of artist friends. The best that can be said of him is that he was sincere and caring in his idealistic support of the nobility.

Critical Context

Martin Boyd’s early novel The Monforts (1928), a social chronicle detailing the lives of an aristocratic family in Victoria from the 1850’s to the end of World War I, won the Australian Literature Society’s gold medal and received critical acclaim. Boyd returned to similar themes and characters in writing Lucinda Brayford after an almost twenty-year hiatus during which he wrote such divergent novels as Scandal of Spring (1934), a rather mawkish story of adolescent love crushed by society, and Nuns in Jeopardy (1940), a study in human nature involving a group of nuns shipwrecked on a deserted island.

Lucinda Brayford was Boyd’s ninth novel; its return to the sure ground of the Anglo-Australian aristocracy and notions of family heritage assured his return to literary prominence. The novel, written during World War Il, while Boyd was posted in Cambridge, achieved noteworthy success in America as well as in England and Australia. It was greeted with favorable reviews and was called by one generous critic “one of the three greatest books of the century.”

Unlike The Monforts, Lucinda Brayford was written with a slightly elegiac, rather than sarcastic, tone. It focuses on a saddened spirit rather than the follies of the well-to-do. It exhibits the fall from grace of an entire class of people by studying the life of a single character in context. Without sacrificing the expansiveness of The Monforts, it manages to offer secondary characters with depth and substance, a feat only partially achieved in the novels of the 1930’s.

There is a religious element in Lucinda Brayford which Boyd developed without much success in his subsequent novel, Such Pleasure (1949). What strikes one as profound in the earlier novel because it rings true in the life of a hurt and lonely woman seems contrived and imposed in the later novel.

After Such Pleasure, Boyd returned for the second time in his career to his Australian past and his interest in family histories to provide material for the Langton tetralogy: The Cardboard Crown (1952), A Difficult Young Man (1955), Outbreak of Love (1957), and When Blackbirds Sing (1962).

In The Cardboard Crown, Boyd’s narrator interviews an older member of his family. In recording and pondering a rather biased account of past events, the narrator discovers not only history, but its dubious nature as well. The narrator questions what he writes as he writes. This was a significant shift from the prosaic narrative strategy of Lucinda Brayford.

Although the first two novels of the tetralogy are recognized as some of Boyd’s finest writing, the latter two are less successful, the third marred by passages less lucid and fluid than what readers had come to expect, while the fourth suffered from a shift in scope from something quite broad to something narrow and intense—a shift not developed to its full potential in this instance.

The importance of Lucinda Brayford in Martin Boyd’s career is evident in the lack of critical attention his work garnered in the 1930’s after such an auspicious start with The Monforts. Lucinda Brayford secured Boyd’s position among Australia’s literary elite, establishing for him an international reputation. It remains his best treatment of the subject he wrote about most confidently and convincingly.

Bibliography

Green, Dorothy. “The Fragrance of Souls: A Study of Lucinda Brayford,” in Southerly. XXVIII (1968), pp. 110-126.

Hope, A. D. “Knowing When to Stop: Martin Boyd’s Lucinda Brayford,” in Native Companions: Essays and Comments on Australian Literature, 1936-1966, 1974.

The New Yorker. Review. XXIV (February 28, 1948), p. 86.

Ramson, W. S. “Lucinda Brayford: A Form of Music,” in The Australian Experience: Critical Essays on Australian Novels, 1974. Edited by W. S. Ramson.

Reynolds, Horace. Review in The New York Times. February 22, 1948, p. 6.