The Story of a Year is the narrative of one Fulvia Derwent who was the happiest of girls until she was ten. Then ‘came the tidings which were to change our happy life’ and the Derwent home has to be broken up, Mr Derwent has to leave and poor Mrs Derwent is thrown ‘suddenly on her own resources’.

Mr Derwent must go away and attend to his ‘good deal of property in the West Indies, which had come to him from a godfather.’ A letter, one of those fatal Victorian letters, announces the ‘exceedingly bad news from St. Benito – in fact as bad as it well can be. The manager of my property, the head man, has decamped, leaving things in the direst confusion, and carrying off all he could lay hands on … and the friendly neighbour who writes to me says I must go out at once, if I don’t want to be utterly ruined.’

In the subsequent discussion and shock Mr Derwent explains why he cannot take his wife and daughter with him. ‘You see it is some way from Jamaica and the more civilised parts of the West Indies. It would be terribly rough – in short, I don’t know what it would be! I have never been there you know. I trusted this fellow completely. Perhaps I should have gone out to see for myself, but my work here has tied me so. And … there is the money to consider! I gather that none will be forthcoming from St. Benito – none’.

The Derwents’ backstory is obvious even with Mrs Molesworth’s always delicate handling, and their ruined inheritance is some kind of plantation and almost inevitably associated with slavery. The novel was first published in 1910 but, from internal evidence, set much earlier. The illustrations in my edition were by Gertrude Demain Hammond and were hazily somewhere between the 1870s and 1880s. Mr Derwent goes off to Jamaica to do the manly task of recovering the family fortune, despite its horrific origins, and leaves his family behind. Mrs Molesworth does not mention whatever happened to the money they (or perhaps more likely his godfather) must have been awarded under the Slave Compensation Act 1837 but she is concerned more with the family left behind in England.

Like Charlotte M. Yonge in Heartsease; or, The Brother's Wife (1854) Mrs Molesworth examines obliquely the legacy and dynamics of enslavement and exploitation through the fate of Fulvia and her mother. They are taken in by a distant elderly and rich relative a Miss Leinster. Mrs Derwent and Fulvia travel to 27 Montagu Gardens, Northborough and their new home. It is a long train journey and Fulvia longs for ‘some hot tea, and bread-and-butter, or cake’ but as her mother whispers, ‘of course it costs two or three shillings.’ Miss Leinster will have tea ready for them mother is sure.

Ominously, they are not met at the station by Miss Leinster, there is no waiting confidential maid and ‘There was no one at all to meet us!’ But Miss Leinster never intended to meet them, she has a ‘dried-up heart’ and Montagu Gardens is a ‘house of cold and gloom’ where they have to unpack for themselves, Mrs Derwent overpays the driver of the fly much to Miss Leinster’s horror, there was just a ‘small bit of candle’ , a damp bedroom for Fulvia, a tiny fire in the drawing-room (more than begrudgingly provided) and some kind of milk pudding ‘of which the predominant liquid ‘must certainly have been water’. This is only the beginning of her two guests being subjected to unnecessary straightened circumstances, encompassed by petty rules and regulations, neglected and having to subsidise their own survival to stave off physical illness and worse. Miss Leinster has taken ‘elegant economy’ to a dangerous almost inhuman level being a thorough miser. Throughout their uncomfortable stay the unforgiving Miss Leinster blames Mr Derwent for the financial disaster in Jamaica. ‘Why, his criminal carelessness is the cause of it all!’

Plot spoiler alert! The Derwents are aided but in a delicate way that Mrs Molesworth borrows directly from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford – through female friendship and agency and the intervention of Miss Guise. Here is Mrs Molesworth’s description of her, ‘a small, middle-aged woman, dressed so neatly, though plainly as almost to look like a Quakeress.’ Her dwelling is pure Cranford being ‘of grey stone, the windows small-paned and not very large – something demure and “old-maidish” … one felt their inhabitants were scrupulously neat and tidy; the doors were painted bright green, as were the window frames, the brass knockers sparklingly polished.’

The borrowing from Cranford is not unexpected as it occurs in The Cuckoo Clock (1877) too. Remember also that Mrs Molesworth was educated by the Rev. William Gaskell and told to write down her stories by Elizabeth Gaskell herself when she lived in Manchester in her youth. There we will leave The Story of a Year because we can’t tell the ending and whether Mr Derwent is of any use at all. His travails in Jamaica are a subplot but one steeped in the story of empire and looking the other way, and while Mrs Molesworth does not tussle with it, she does survey empire’s sister arts of capitalism, the accumulation and maintenance of wealth, exploitation and the dangers of too little money in this compelling and highly recommendable novel.