From the beginning, problems of identity hovered around the figure of Mary Cholmondeley, especially after it became fashionable to read Red Pottage, and to discuss it both in literary circles and beyond. Readers had to become familiar even with that new and exceptionally long surname: a tantalizing code to be deciphered, a name difficult to pronounce correctly except by those of a certain class and tradition who knew thus that the ancient Cholmondeley name had been passed down through the generations since the time of William the Conqueror. William Hogarth had painted a family portrait in 1732 and from that time on the members of the family established the hereditary custom which traditionally saw them become reserved and learned men of the church. They belonged to that landed gentry which over the centuries had given form and empowerment to an exquisitely English way of life and thought: stubbornly – but elegantly – insular, lovers of tradition and eccentric, they were the sturdy backbone of English civilization. The family home was in Shropshire: it was there that Cholmondeley grew up, one of the eight children of the rector of Hodnet, heir of a collateral branch of the old family. In her memoirs, his daughter remembers him as a figure similar to the Reverend Adolphus Irwine in George Eliot's Adam Bede, ‘one of the last representatives of a by-gone class of clergymen of whom probably not one survives now’. And in that only apparently peaceful rural life Cholmondeley lived until the moment she moved to London with her father and sisters in 1896 and quietly changed her identity.

In capturing a certain spirit of the times through the new itineraries of taste, there is nothing more significantly symptomatic than this ‘change of address’ which is so evident in turn of the century writers: from the old country house in which generations of Cholmondeleys had lived to the anonymity of a city flat looking over the crowds of the end of the nineteenth century.