Flora Macdonald Mayor was an English novelist and short story writer. She pursued an acting career terminated by illness.
Background
Flora MacDonald Mayor was born on 20 October 1872, in London, at Kingston Hill. She was the fourth child of Grotto (1830-1927) and the Rev. Joseph Bickerstet-Mayor (1828-1916), and the youngest of the identical twins of Alexandria and Jesse Mayor.
Jesse Mayor was a gifted musician and linguist who studied Italian and German in Trieste and then taught herself Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Gaelic and translated Icelandic legends and Zulu grammar from Danish into English; she was already over forty when her twins were born. Joseph Mayor was a professor of classical philology, and then moral philosophy at King’s College, London. On both sides of the family were important intellectuals and clergy.
Education
Flora studied at home, then attended Surbiton High School, where Flora played an important role in theatrical productions, and in 1890, she was sent to the strict Moravian school in Monmirail, Switzerland, to improve her knowledge of French language. After returning home, Flora attended Newnham College in Cambridge, where she studied history and found an academic life in which women only tolerated.
After her graduation, Mayor plunged into social life, played in an amateur theater and read - to the annoyance of her parents - such novels as Olive Schreiner, A History of a South African Farm, in which the position of a woman in one is addressed to men.
Frustrated with her life as a "Victorian Lady," she sought a way out, hoping - as the great admirer of actress Ellen Terry - to find happiness in the theater. Except for her brother Robin the whole family was against it. Nevertheless, in February 1897, she seized the opportunity to accompany an insignificant theater group on her trip to Hastings, then went to various theater agencies and tried to get theater roles through relationships; numerous setbacks and rejections did not prevent them from playing in amateur performances, always hoping to be discovered. Eventually, she was able to work for one season at F. R. Benson's Shakespearian Company, where she took on minor interpreting roles, but at the end of the season, in April 1901, she was not renewed. Although Benson had suggested concentrating on writing, she continued to search for theater opportunities, got a few extras in the years to come, toured with a provincial theater, and finally realized that a successful theater career was not in the realm of theater Possible was.
She also volunteered as a Latin teacher at Morley Memorial College for Working Class Men and Women, one of the first adult education institutions, at the invitation of her friend Mary Sheepsbanks. To improve her health, she spent the first three months of 1904 with her sister on the Riviera or visited Switzerland in 1905 with her brother Robin, where they made a walk around Chamonix together with Meynard Keynes. She now lived with her brother Henry Bickersteth Mayor in Clifton, gave occasional tutoring, as a permanent teaching was not possible because of their changing health, worked in a health organization, learned Italian and tried to write: in April 1905, she published in the women's magazine Queen one she wrote three - not very successful - one-act plays about the life of a behind-the-scenes actress, and she worked on her childhood, youthful memoirs "Reminiscences," which were never published and their manuscript was lost. Always sick and depressed from everyday life, she withdrew more and more into herself. From 1911, she lived with her unmarried brother Robert (Robin) John Grote Mayor.
In 1915, she wrote the novel "Miss Brown's Friend - A Story of Two Women," which was published in episodes in the pacifist journal Free Church Suffrage Times. Only in 1919, did she begin to work on the draft of a new novel, which she called "Dedmayne"; Her main work was to become "The Rector's Daughter". The book had a surprisingly good sales after a few months appeared a second edition and Flora Mayor had their investment back soon; It was not a loss for the publisher, nor a special gain - and Leonard Woolf never did that kind of commission again.
Her third novel, "The Squire's Daughter," appeared in 1929 under Constable in London, was unsuccessful and influenced by Flora Mayor's late conservatism; the changing post-war society and the disintegrating values she believed in were causing her class fears she used in the novel.
After her mother died in 1927, and Queensgate House was sold, Flora Mayor lived together with her sister Alice in London (7 East Heath Road). She suffered from frequent asthma attacks and became increasingly thinner and weaker. After an operation she became even more vulnerable, twice got pneumonia and finally died in January 1932 in the presence of her brother Henry and his wife Kitty. She was buried at West Hamstead Cemetery in the immediate vicinity of her seven aunts.
Flora Mayor believed in immortality since the death of her fiancé, and this belief inspired her to write ghost stories (such as "Letters from Manningfield") in which the living were able to connect with their beloved deceased. Most of these stories were written in and immediately after the war, at a time when the interest in spirituality was great. In Floras opinion, these stories were among her best prose works.
Membership
Mayor was a member of the National Union of Suffrage Societies.
Personality
Often compared to Jane Austen, Flora Mayor focuses on the plight of a figure suffering in the margins of society and literature: the English spinster. Remaining unmarried after the loss of her fiancé, Ernest Shepherd to typhoid fever in India, Mayor spent much of her life living with family members. After the death of Shepherd, Mayor left England to recover her health abroad, spending time observing lonely women haunting the Riviera. Equipped with models of women gleaned on her travels, as well as the examples of no fewer than seven maiden aunts, Mayor set out to explore the inner life of the “unnecessary female:” an unwanted, alienated woman of comfortable means who wanders in search of love. The fruit of her exploration, The Third Miss Symons was well received.
As a stage name she used the pseudonym Mary Strafford and also published under this name.
Connections
In 1903, Flora became engaged to Ernest Shepherd, a young architect, who died in India of typhoid. She never married, and lived closely with her twin sister Alice MacDonald Mayor.
In Cambridge, she also met with human rights activist and pacifist Mary Sheepsbanks (1872-1958), with whom she had been friends all her life. Another friend was Florence Melian Stawell of Australia, who studied classical literature in Newnham.
Her acquaintances also included Bertrand Russell, then mathematics student who had a definite influence on Flora and Mary Sheepsbanks with his progressive approach to liberation, love and faith.