Moth and Rust Together with Geoffrey's Wife and The Pitfall

by Mary Cholmondeley

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

107 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 22, 2012

About the author

Mary Cholmondeley was an English novelist.

The daughter of the vicar at St Luke's Church in the village of Hodnet, Market Drayton, Shropshire, England, where she was born, Cholmondeley spent much of the first thirty years of her life taking care of her sickly mother.

Selected writings
* The Danvers Jewels (1886)
* Sir Charles Danvers (1889)
* Let Loose (1890)
* Diana Tempest (1893)
* Devotee: An Episode in the Life of a Butterfly (1897)
* Red Pottage (1899)
* Prisoners (1906)
* The Lowest Rung (1908)
* Moth and Rust (1912)
* After All (1913)
* Notwithstanding (1913)
* Under One Roof (1917)

Reviews

[Ilse Wouters · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is great that Amazon makes it possible to read out-of-print books, in a cheap edition, but they might make the print a bit more reader-friendly IMO. Anyway, this is a really enjoyable novel (Moth and Rust) by a late 19th century writer, and 2 short stories are added in this edition.
I particularly like the introductory quote to each chapter, making a sometimes extremely appropriate summary of what´s to follow, often by her contemporaries, like our only Belgian literary Nobel price winner, Maurice Maeterlinck.
In comparison to more famous female English novelists before her, the author gives a satirical view on the country life so present in the work of her well-known predecessors. Here, the morality might well be that swearing an oath to keep someone else´s secret safe is the best way to destroy one´s own future.

[sabagrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

As in Red Pottage, Moth and Rust features two heroines whose stories run both in parallel and in contrast, intersect at certain points, and go on. It is more of a novella than a novel, just long enough to hold these two different destinies in the short timespan that decides on the women's future. We know Cholmondeley for her sharp, satirical pen which nevertheless draws the characters with warmth and understanding. It is quite a feat to have both a happy and an unhappy ending in one story, one for each heroine respectively, turning upside down the happy/unhappy beginning for each of them.

Again we find the leitmotif of Cholmondeley's work: promises kept, promises broken - promises of happiness, promises of doom. The theme is subverted here, because there is deception conducive to happiness on the one hand, and loyalty that leads to ruin on the other. An interesting variation on the theme that highlights the danger of looking for easy moral in Cholmondeley's work.

With The Pitfall the moral question is put back on its feet. The short story sets conventional morality against goodness, with jealousy playing in the team of convention. The other story - Geoffrey's Wife - is something else, an early work, and very much a "modern" short story in its putting the spotlight on all the details of a short tumultuous scene: that single stroke of fate that destroys lives without anyone being responsible.