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Moth and rust appeared in 1902, some three years after Mary Cholmondeley's most celebrated work, Red pottage.
"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal."
A promise made to a dying woman, a lost IOU, and the destruction of illicit love letters in order to keep a secret: these may all be staple devices in the novels of Mary Cholmondeley's contemporaries. But Janet's moral dilemma in keeping her word to Cuckoo Brand, the melancholy and undramatic ending to her own love affair, and the less than happy ending to the story, are all characteristic of Mary Cholmondeley's slightly different perspective. She, as she points out, is writing about real life, and this is how real life tends to be:
I wish life were more like the stories one reads, the beautiful stories, which, whether they are grave or gay, still have picturesque endings. The hero marries the heroine, after insuperable difficulties, which in real life he would never have overcome or the heroine creeps down into a romantic grave, watered by our scalding tears. At any rate, the story is gracefully wound up. There is an ornamental conclusion to it. But life, for some inexplicable reason, does not lend itself with docility to the requirements of the lending libraries, and only too frequently fails to grasp the dramatic moment for an impressive close.
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Page created 18 February 2002 and last
updated 25 April 2003
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