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young woman, in pathetically shabby clothes, whom he assumes to be a governess, alone in the world. It is sentimental, with a little twist at the end, and lacks the force of ‘The House of Beauty’; there are no dreams and no deaths; and, unlike the description in her first story of the heroine’s breakdown at the piano, nothing that appears to be based on Agatha’s direct experience.

      As ‘Mac Miller’, ‘Nathaniel Miller’ and ‘Sydney West’ Agatha followed Madge’s example and sent her stories to various magazines, from which they were all promptly returned. Other early efforts have remained among her papers. They are all in purple ink and on the two submitted under the pseudonym of ‘Sydney West’, she wrote ‘Both these written when I was about 17.’ One, called ‘In the Marketplace’, reads like a parable. A man comes to the Salesman in the Great Marketplace of the World and, when asked what he desires, replies ‘Everything.’ He goes away, laden with rich gifts but unsatisfied, and twice returns for more. Only when, ‘after long years’, he passes through the Marketplace untempted and answers the Salesman’s question, ‘What do you desire?’ with the one word ‘Nothing’, are all the Market’s stores and treasures brought out and laid at his feet. This moral tale has a biblical ring, but what the moral is remains obscure.

      It is interesting to compare ‘Sydney West’s’ other offering, ‘The Choice’, with ‘Callis Miller’s’ ‘Mrs Jordan’s Ghost’, the tale Clara had written years before. Superficially the two stories are much alike. Both have at their centre the figure of a woman, most likely a projection of the author herself, who has ‘sinned and suffered’ but is ennobled by pity and repentance. Both are written in a deliberately naïve and declamatory style, with consciously rhetorical sentences (‘it is in truth a smooth way …’) and phrases repeated like an incantation (‘The second shadow is like the shadow of a child, though not like that of any earthly child that I have ever seen’). Agatha’s and Clara’s stories also have deeper similarities. Both sound, or are written so that they sound, as if they originated in dreams. They are pure metaphor, their meaning wrapped in the fogs of sleep and the subconscious; the stories themselves attempt to expose the authors’ hopes and anxieties. But there is a difference. Agatha’s tale is more artful than her mother’s. She cannot resist giving it a tweak: in ‘The Choice’, for instance, her narrator consciously makes the ‘wrong’ decision and, because that choice brings complacency, knows it to be the ‘right’ decision. In an otherwise prissy parable, Agatha has a joke at the narrator’s expense.

      Agatha next tried her hand at a worldly novel. Set in Cairo, it recalled three people she used to see in the dining-room of the Gezirah Hotel – an attractive-looking woman and the two men with whom she had supper after the dance. ‘One was a short broad man, with dark hair – a Captain in the Sixtieth Rifles – the other was a tall fair young man in the Coldstream Guards, possibly a year or two younger than she was. They sat, one on either side of her; she kept them in play.’ This, and the overheard remark, ‘she will have to make up her mind between them some time,’ was enough to give Agatha a start but, after going a certain distance, she became dissatisfied and turned to a second plot. Again, it was set in Cairo but this time the heroine was deaf, a grave mistake, as Agatha soon realised, because ‘once you have done with what she is thinking and whatever people are thinking and saying of her, she is left with no possibility of conversation with anyone.’ Undaunted by her difficulties in bringing either novel to a close, Agatha ingeniously merged the two, called the resulting mixture Snow Upon the Desert, and despatched it to several publishers, using this time the pseudonym ‘Monosyllaba’. Not unexpectedly, they sent it back. Clara now hesitantly suggested that Agatha might ask the advice of their neighbour Eden Philpotts, a well-known writer himself, then at the height of his reputation, and a friend of the family. Adelaide, Eden’s daughter, had attended the same dancing class as Agatha, who had once made her a pink frock. Eden Philpotts was gouty and kept to himself, so the Millers did not bother him with invitations, though they visited him occasionally to admire his garden. Shy though Agatha was about her writing, she asked him what he thought.

      His reaction was splendid. He took her request seriously, reading her work and writing a careful, encouraging letter, which started with a word of praise and ended by giving her something to do:

      Some of these things that you have written are capital. You have a great feeling for dialogue. You should stick to gay natural dialogue. Try and cut all moralisations out of your novels; you are much too fond of them, and nothing is more boring to read. Try and leave your characters alone, so that they can speak for themselves, instead of always rushing in to tell them what they ought to say, or to explain to the reader what they mean by what they are saying. That is for the reader to judge for himself.… I should like to recommend you a course of reading which I think you will find helpful. Read De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater – this will increase your vocabulary enormously – he uses some very interesting words. Read The Story of My Life, by Jefferies, for descriptions and a feeling for nature.

      Warning her that it was difficult to get a first novel accepted, he nonetheless sent her an introduction to his own literary agent, Hughes Massie. Agatha was sufficiently encouraged to go to see him; she found this ‘large dark swarthy man’ terrifying. Her recollection indicates how appalling that interview must have been for a nervous eighteen-year-old: ‘“Ah,” he said, looking at the cover of the manuscript, “Snow Upon the Desert. Mmm, a very suggestive title, suggestive of banked fires.”’ Hughes Massie returned her manuscript some months later, saying that the best thing for her to do would be to put it out of her mind and start again.

      Magazine editors might reject Agatha’s early stories and Hughes Massie be dauntingly dismissive, but she pressed on. Amongst her next efforts was ‘Vision’, a story inspired not only by May Sinclair’s A Flaw in the Crystal but also by a detective story only recently published in English, Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Although Agatha put ‘Vision’ on one side after it was done, she was to make important use of it later on. Another offering was sent to Eden Philpotts for scrutiny, a story called ‘Being So Very Wilful’. It has vanished, but his report, written on February 6th, 1909, survives. Again, his letter was shrewd and constructive.

      Dear Agatha,

      I need not go into technical detail with your story ‘Being So Very Wilful’, but I am glad to say that in its own plane it shows steady advance. You have worked hard & you have a natural sense for construction and balance. In fact all is going exceedingly well with your work & should life so fall out for you that it has room for art & you can face the up-hill fight to take your place & win it, you have the gifts sufficient. I never prophesy; but I should judge that if you can write like this now you might go far. However life knocks the art out of a good many people & your environment in the time to come may substitute for the hard road of art a different one.… However these considerations are beside the question of the moment.

      For the present you must go on writing about these people and no doubt the more you learn of them the more interesting you will make them. But always remember the worth of people is to be judged by their aims, and this class will never lift you to anything really fine.

      They will do to practise on, but presently you will probe deeper into human nature & seek beautiful character & find it.

      Your own bent is to the fine & distinguished, & ‘Society’ of the sort you have so far written about is neither the one nor the other. The average crowd of English abroad is just as you paint it. In fact you are lenient.

      But if you go on you’ll soon sicken of them & seek other themes & finer issues.

      Never be flippant in the first person. Let your flippant characters be; but don’t be yourself. And avoid all first-hand moralising. It is bad art. Of course great artists have done any amount of it; but not the greatest. If you are to take my advice you must go to the school of Flaubert for your models. The artist is only the glass through which we see nature, & the clearer & more absolutely pure that glass, so much the more perfect picture we can see through it. Never intrude yourself.

      Presently re-write this story but not just yet. Don’t put poetical quotations at the top of the chapters.

      Make

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