Ayot Rectory: A Family Memoir

by Carola Oman

In AYOT RECTORY Carola Oman leads the reader into another world -- the world, specifically, of the pleasant well-to-do Sneade family in Shropshire, Bath and the small rural community of of Ayot St. Lawrence in the latter years of the eighteenth-century and the first half of the nineteenth. Miss Oman discovered an enchanting treasury of papers and letters with which Ellen Olive proposed to write the life of her mother after her death in 1858. In the hands of such a superlative craftsman these documents bring to life a whole galaxy of characters whose travels and love affairs, troubles and happiness, illnesses and deaths and births, views and meditations on all subjects under the sun are recorded in the most faithful and truthful way -- in their own words. Another world, and yet one remarkably congenial to our own -- these busy, charming and quietly confident pre-Victorians speak immediately to us in their preoccupations and habits of mind and behaviour. The life of Mary Sneade Brown, Ellen's husband John Olive, the Rector of Ayot St. Lawrence, and her many relatives and friends, could be compared with Gwen Raverat's PERIOD PIECE: parts are pure Trollope and others equally pure Jane Austen.

219 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Daughter of Sir Charles William Chadwick Oman.

As a child Oman wrote several plays that were performed by friends. Another early interest was photography. She was sent in 1906 to Miss Batty's, later Wychwood School in Oxford.She would have liked to have gone to boarding school, but her parents would not agree, and she continued at Miss Batty's until the spring of 1914.

The family moved in 1908 into Frewin Hall, now part of Brasenose College, Oxford.

Carola Oman worked as a VAD in England and then in France in 1918-19: soon after her 1919 discharge she met Gerald Foy Ray Lenanton (1896–1952) a soldier returning from France who would join his family business as a timber broker: married to Lenanton 26 April 1922, Oman became Lady Lenanton when her husband was knighted in 1946 for his World War II service as director of home timber production. The couple - who would remain childless - would from 1928 reside at Bride Hall, a Jacobean mansion in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire. In 1965, Oman produced Ayot Rectory – A Family Memoir, about the Sneade family, who had lived in the village from 1780 to 1858.

The novelist Georgette Heyer was a lifelong friend, who even took the time to compile a 16-page index for Oman's Britain against Napoleon, published in 1942 by Faber and Faber. Another writer friend in Oxford was Joanna Cannan, who dedicated her 1931 novel High Table to Oman.

She died at Ayot St Lawrence on 11 June 1978.There is a memorial to her and her husband in the village church.

From Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

On making the surprising but pleasing discovery that my local library system holds every Dean Street/Furrowed Middlebrow edition of works by Stella Gibbons, I immediately set about plugging every author published by that imprint into the library's search bar, because really, isn't this sort of thing the most valuable use of one's time? Sadly, there were no other copies of that publisher's books, but a search for Carola Oman did turn up this oddity: an obscure family memoir published only in England -- how did it end up in Queens, NY?

Oman lived in the village of Ayot St. Lawrence in Hertfordshire, and one day a friend shared with her a trove of family papers. In 1858, the friend's great-grandmother, Ellen Olive, had decided to write the life story of her mother. The attempt was incomplete, and the box also contained a jumble of confusingly disorganized letters and diaries. Oman was captivated, and made a monumental effort to piece the material together to create this book.

I have to say that the gushing jacket copy (which I reproduced faithfully when I created the goodreads listing for this book) greatly exaggerates Ayot Rectory's charms. Indeed, though Bath in the Regency period, and Lyme appear, I detected little of the wit of Jane Austen, and though clerical life colors the later chapters set in Victorian times, it was not much like reading Trollope either. Basically, I didn't find the family that interesting. Apart from being extraordinarily privileged, the Sneade/Brown/Olive clan wasn't all that remarkable. The story is mostly a chronicle of births, marriages and deaths, with some of the male offspring going off to seek their fortunes in India, and others taking orders. The family is so sprawling, with many different branches, that I found it hard to keep track of who everyone was. It seems that Oman chose to reproduce the style of the existing memoir in her own writing (there's no indication of which passages are hers and which Ellen's). This lends the book a quaint antique style that makes the characters seem like rather distant and not quite vividly alive.

All that said, I did get through it painlessly. I'll give this one a low three.