Download Kevin Allen, Gracious Ladies: The Norbury Family and Edward Elgar

Kevin Allen, Gracious Ladies: The Norbury Family and Edward Elgar. A
Chronicle with Documents. Volume One: Genius Has Its Own Rank
Alverstoke, Hampshire: Kevin Allen, 2013. £25, ISBN 978-0-9531227-6-9
(hardback), pp.v + 957
Reviewed by Cheryl Law
Independent Scholar
Evidently consumed with a passion for the mystery that surrounded the English
composer Edward Elgar (1857-1934), Kevin Allen has published extensively on Elgar’s
life and music. In his lifetime, many stories circulated about the women, known and
rumoured, in Elgar’s life, and for our purposes it is significant that Allen features the lives
of the women in the Norbury family and their social circle. This 957-page tome is the first
volume of Gracious Ladies; the second part will provide the index for both volumes, a
distinct disadvantage when trying to negotiate this first convoluted volume. The book is
self-published and follows the tradition of subscription publishing that originated in the
18th century that may partly account for its lavish size, and the generous number of
photographs. Self-publishing also affords Allen the freedom to abandon the constraints,
but also the discipline, of length, usually dictated by publisher and editor.
Allen does not explain in this volume that the primary link between Elgar and the
Norbury family lies in the initials ‘W.N.’ that Elgar attached to the eighth of his fourteen
Variations for Orchestra Op.36, more famously known as the Enigma Variations, which
referred to Winifred Norbury. Each of the fourteen Variations were named for Elgar’s
wife, his friends and lastly, himself. Allen does recount that Elgar wrote that Winifred’s
family home, Sherridge, had ‘suggested’ this particular Variation. Allen sets out to
document a biography of the Norbury family from the marriage of Gertrude and Thomas
Norbury in 1828 through the birth and childhood of their five daughters and three sons,
whilst paralleling the childhood of the young Edward Elgar until he made incursions into
the Norbury household’s orbit. Using this structure, Allen is able to weave the separate
social spheres using music as the sustaining thread. Elgar apart, this book stands as a
painstakingly researched and recorded account of the social history of a Victorian upper
middle-class family. It also contributes to the history of women’s participation in regional
music making during this period; for whilst ranked as ‘amateurs’, the dedication,
knowledge and proficiency of the women included here seems impressive. Much of the
book consists of substantial extracts from the letters and diaries of the massive archive
of the Norbury family, apparently an under-researched source for middle-class women’s
social and domestic history.
Allen sketches a portrait of Gertrude Norbury as a somewhat enlightened
matriarch, ensuring that her children enjoyed regular musical experiences, attending the
concerts of Worcester’s Three Choirs Festival, as well as the Cathedral’s offerings.
Significantly, she also allowed her daughters greater physical freedom than was the
norm, and they sometimes accompanied their mother on London visits to their Aunt
Fanny (Frances-Arabella O’Grady) who was to become a suffragette. Yet the two central
figures in the narrative, Winifred (1861-1938) and Florence (b.1858), were to eschew
radicalism, although they were politically active for the Conservative party in the 1885
and subsequent elections. Education was a priority for Gertrude’s daughters. At fifteen,
Winifred took part in her first public concert, singing and playing the piano, a prelude to
‘the beginning of a lifetime of all kinds of music-making…and service to music in her
community’ (p.254). As a violin teacher, composer and conductor at local events, Elgar
drifts in and out of the Norbury narrative. But his presence increases in relation to his
success when the author traces the Norbury women’s lives and Elgar’s in parallel, until
by 1897 with Elgar’s success, they conjoin.
Whatever letters, diaries, autobiographies and newspapers Allen investigates,
the minutiae of his characters’ lives is picked over and laid before us as a continuous
narrative, without the benefit of either selection or prioritisation in relation to its
contribution to the central subject. Dental difficulties and dead ducks receive as much
attention as an Elgar composition. A reader might feel the need to be one of the Norbury
leisured ladies to possess sufficient time for Allen’s peregrinations. Immersion may have
been Allen’s intention, but without an introduction to delineate his purpose, it is difficult to
judge, although the title is A Chronicle. The reader is left to isolate the material of
interest and use, such as the focus on the 1896 bicycling craze taken up so fervently by
the Norbury sisters and their circle. Also, recounting every step in Elgar’s career does
inculcate an appreciation of what a protracted and soul-sapping journey his rise to
success was, as well as an understanding of how the barrier of his lower class denied
him swifter recognition and access to essential social connections such as the Norbury
family. For although Winifred and Elgar moved in the same musical circles for many
years, and Winifred had ‘taken tea’ with his wife who was from a higher rank, by the end
of this considerable volume they seem not to have been ‘introduced’. In the style of the
best serials, we are left to anticipate this connection, as Volume I concludes with a group
of influential county ladies instigating a new Musical Society and deciding to invite
Edward Elgar to be its conductor. To be continued…