Life
?1855-1926 [née Kathleen Caffyn; Mrs Mannington Caffyn]; b. Co.
Tipperary; ed. England and Germany by governesses; trained as nurse at
St. Thomas’s, London; m. Stephen Mannington, a surgeon, in 1879;
lived in Australia, where her husband wrote his successful Milne and
I (1889), and A Poppy’s Tears (1890); sensationally successful
with A Yellow Aster (1894), dealing with love, marriage, and free-thought
in fashionable setting; Children of Circumstances (1894) has a
married hero who falls in love with a London social worker, discussions
between the three parties ensue, and the wife nobly arranges for her rival
to take over after her death; A Comedy of Spasms (1895); A Quaker
Grandmother (1896), another female tract; Poor Max (1898),
with a dominant wife and a weak, artistic husband; Anne Mauleverer
(1899), wildly feminist novel, in with the emancipated half-irish heroine,
sculpturess and horse-woman advises the King of Italy on horses; she adopts
the child of the man she loves, whom she nurses at his death; Caffyn shows
a preference for Irish heroines; her recreations incl. horse-riding and
watching polo; member of ladies Army and Navy Club. SUTH OCIL OCIL
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Works
A Yellow Aster (1894); Children of Circumstances (1894);
A Comedy of Spasms (1895); A Quaker Grandmother (1896);
Poor Max (1898). Also, [Mrs Mannington Caffyn], ‘Lenchen’,
in Lala Fisher. ed., By Creek and Gully, Stories and sketches mostly
of Bush Life (London: Unwin 1899). COMM, Gail Cunningham, The New
Woman and the Victorian Novel (1978).
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Notes
John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction
(Longmans 1988; rep. 1989), call her ‘one of the most powerful, if
soft centred, of New Woman novelists’. A separate entry on The
Yellow Aster (1894), characterises it as one of the most popular of
the New Woman novels and summarises the plot: Waring children, Gwen and
Dacre, brought up as stern agnostics; the local rector Mr. Fellowes, employed
to illustrate the folly of religion, has the opposite effect of fanning
her spirituality; she marries aristocrat Humphrey Strange, and separates
lovelessly after the birth of a boy; couple reconciled as he lies at death’s
door from strain; slangy, free-talking heroine affronted some reviewers.
Entry on Poor Max (1898) describes a variation on New Woman
formula, in which Judith, the Irish wife of Jewish Max Morland, married
after whirlwind courtship at Ballybruff, becomes involved with another
man when reduced to insecurity by her artist husband’s impulsive
generosity; at his death from diphtheria, she leaves her loves for a rich
debauchee, with ‘every vice that Max hadn’t’, looking after
her own interests. Iota’s usual wispy obliquity. See also ‘New
Woman Fiction’ (Sutherland, op. cit., p. 460), in which she is associated
with George Egerton and Sarah Grand as one of the leading exponents of
the genre.
Eggeling Books (Catl. 44) lists As Mrs Mannington Caffyn, ‘Lenchen’, in Lala Fisher, ‘By Creek and Gully, Stories and sketches mostly of Bush Life, told in Prose and Rhyme by Australian Writers in England (Unwin 1899), an orig. short story.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)