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The Hangman's Daughter and Other Stories
The last two stories, written in the early 1890's when the author was twelve to fourteen years old, from the pen of an Englishwoman who died in 1972 at the age of ninety.
234 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1983
About the author
Daisy Ashford
23 books15 followersDaisy Ashford, full name Margaret Mary Julia Ashford (later Devlin) was an English writer who is most famous for writing The Young Visiters, a novella concerning the upper class society of late 19th century England, when she was just nine years old. The novella was published in 1919, preserving her juvenile spelling and punctuation. She wrote the title as "Viseters" in her manuscript, but it was published as "Visiters"
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 9, 2023
I read The Young Visiters earlier in the year and was struck by its charm. As story for adults, written by a nine-year-old, there’s a wonderful incongruity between what she was attempting and what she achieved. The Hangman’s Daughter and Other Stories contains a number of Daisy Ashford’s other stories, including two examples of her later, more mature works, at thirteen and fifteen.
The first, however, is her earliest, The Life of Father McSwiney, which she dictated to her father at the age of four. It tells the life of a priest, from his early life to acceptance into the priesthood, his training, becoming a monk and meeting the Pope.. also his wariness of ‘smelly potatoes’.
It doesn’t feel like the work of a four year old at first, the language has certainly been beefed up and smoothed out. At first, it also doesn’t feel like a story structured by a four-year old, it lacks that ‘and then’ quality - but then it does.
The strangest part was the beginning with the little boy almost falling in love with the priest and his ‘scrurfy head’ (a word I only know because of the Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band song, ‘King of Scurf’). When the boy breaks into the priest’s house at night and ‘touched his biscuit’ - it’s all a bit odd. However, Father McSwiney then goes to a monastery and it’s a bit like a boarding school, he and the Pope go on a spree to the Drury Lane theatre and the Pope makes a drunk waiter ‘un-drunk’ with blessed water, that’s all very charming and has that same dynamic of the young Daisy trying to imagine an adult world with what she knows.
The next, Where Love Lies Deepest was written by Daisy when she was thirteen and it shows. There’s a teenage angst/yearning in the book, a desire for big, unreachable love which the young author can’t convey.
The main problem is that Ashford is now very concerned with trying to write lyrically and as a result overdescribes the external element of everything. It’s clear that she’s also getting into fashion and lot of the book is about what everyone is wearing.
As for the yearning love, it starts with a woman giving a negative answer to a marriage proposal because she finds the man in question intimidating. It turns out, that the rest of the story is about how she should have said yes and that her life was significantly poorer for not doing so - even if he was a creep.
The book then comes to The Hangman’s Daughter, written when she was fifteen (and I think, into her sixteenth year). it tells the story of a man who wants to get out of the hustle and bustle of the world and becomes a hangman in a sparsely populated county. He does this because he reckons he won’t have to hang people that often and so can live peacefully. He has a daughter who has a blossoming relationship with a family friend called Cyril, but things fall apart when the father is murdered. Something which happens shortly after the visit of a cousin and her clearly evil fiancee, James Paisley.
It’s still not a mature work but there are some elements that, if you squint, are almost Dickensian. Particularly Cyril, a seemingly harmless buffoon with a ‘silly sort of expression all over his face’. He seems to be a bit too undynamic to be Helen’s husband but his amiable roly-poly-ness hides a more dangerous figure. Yet, when his villainy is discovered, it’s partly a result of the weakness we are first drawn attention to. With a bit of shine and Dickens pizzaz, Cyril could really have worked as a character.
James Paisley, however, has no mask to his evil. His wife Gladys grows suspicious when he says things in his sleep like, “Why did I do it? Murder! Robbery!” He gets a comeuppance, but sadly not at the hands of the wonderfully names trio of detectives; Slag, Tix and Rennet.
The Hangman’s Daughter is not as charming as The Young Visiters, she doesn’t have the same innocence as before, but not yet the maturity needed to properly develop the work. People have a habit of shrieking and screaming in this book where ordinary people would just talk. Yet, I still found the ending quite touching, so to call it a failure is unfair.
The first, however, is her earliest, The Life of Father McSwiney, which she dictated to her father at the age of four. It tells the life of a priest, from his early life to acceptance into the priesthood, his training, becoming a monk and meeting the Pope.. also his wariness of ‘smelly potatoes’.
It doesn’t feel like the work of a four year old at first, the language has certainly been beefed up and smoothed out. At first, it also doesn’t feel like a story structured by a four-year old, it lacks that ‘and then’ quality - but then it does.
The strangest part was the beginning with the little boy almost falling in love with the priest and his ‘scrurfy head’ (a word I only know because of the Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band song, ‘King of Scurf’). When the boy breaks into the priest’s house at night and ‘touched his biscuit’ - it’s all a bit odd. However, Father McSwiney then goes to a monastery and it’s a bit like a boarding school, he and the Pope go on a spree to the Drury Lane theatre and the Pope makes a drunk waiter ‘un-drunk’ with blessed water, that’s all very charming and has that same dynamic of the young Daisy trying to imagine an adult world with what she knows.
The next, Where Love Lies Deepest was written by Daisy when she was thirteen and it shows. There’s a teenage angst/yearning in the book, a desire for big, unreachable love which the young author can’t convey.
The main problem is that Ashford is now very concerned with trying to write lyrically and as a result overdescribes the external element of everything. It’s clear that she’s also getting into fashion and lot of the book is about what everyone is wearing.
As for the yearning love, it starts with a woman giving a negative answer to a marriage proposal because she finds the man in question intimidating. It turns out, that the rest of the story is about how she should have said yes and that her life was significantly poorer for not doing so - even if he was a creep.
The book then comes to The Hangman’s Daughter, written when she was fifteen (and I think, into her sixteenth year). it tells the story of a man who wants to get out of the hustle and bustle of the world and becomes a hangman in a sparsely populated county. He does this because he reckons he won’t have to hang people that often and so can live peacefully. He has a daughter who has a blossoming relationship with a family friend called Cyril, but things fall apart when the father is murdered. Something which happens shortly after the visit of a cousin and her clearly evil fiancee, James Paisley.
It’s still not a mature work but there are some elements that, if you squint, are almost Dickensian. Particularly Cyril, a seemingly harmless buffoon with a ‘silly sort of expression all over his face’. He seems to be a bit too undynamic to be Helen’s husband but his amiable roly-poly-ness hides a more dangerous figure. Yet, when his villainy is discovered, it’s partly a result of the weakness we are first drawn attention to. With a bit of shine and Dickens pizzaz, Cyril could really have worked as a character.
James Paisley, however, has no mask to his evil. His wife Gladys grows suspicious when he says things in his sleep like, “Why did I do it? Murder! Robbery!” He gets a comeuppance, but sadly not at the hands of the wonderfully names trio of detectives; Slag, Tix and Rennet.
The Hangman’s Daughter is not as charming as The Young Visiters, she doesn’t have the same innocence as before, but not yet the maturity needed to properly develop the work. People have a habit of shrieking and screaming in this book where ordinary people would just talk. Yet, I still found the ending quite touching, so to call it a failure is unfair.
Displaying 1 of 1 review