1974: “The Blandy Delusion: Or, Notes on Three Decorative Brains and One Paternal Smirk”
by Cassandra Duvernay, B.A. (failed)
Let’s all curtsy first, shall we, before the Reverend Doctor Blandy, that fragile custodian of the gentry’s family furniture and female reputations. He approaches his subject—the “Mallard Women”, mind you, a marvel of anthropological taxonomy—with such trembling awe it’s a wonder the paper didn’t wilt from the humidity of his reverence. We are told he was a “servant”, though one suspects it was the moral sort of servitude beloved of insecure male chroniclers: bound to the drawing room, not the mop.
What pricks me most is that adjective of his—“astonishment”. He cannot quite believe, even in 1930, that women might think themselves into substance rather than faint prettily into fate. Astounded! The fool acts as though the Mallards were a natural phenomenon: three cerebral hurricanes passing through Surrey, threatening to tear the roof off the Anglican order of things. And of course, to a man whose idea of scholarship is “genealogical studies” (translation: counting who begat whom across the centuries of inbreeding), these ladies must have looked like dangerous modern art—terrifying and incomprehensible.
Euphemia is “unencumbered by matrimonial fetters”. What a phrase! One imagines poor Blandy’s pen quivering with moral restraint, tempted to add “tragically barren of issue”. Elspeth, bold enough to study “social control, religion, and politics”—topics reserved for gentlemen smoking in committee rooms—is presented as an oddity, an intellectual sideshow attraction. And sweet Hermione! Capable, practical Hermione, whose twenty thousand acres he finds both “rare” and “amusing”. I picture Blandy, wringing his soft clerical hands, trying to reconcile her capacity for estate management with his belief that the female brain overheats near numbers.
He calls his tone “exasperated admiration”. How convenient. The learned man can neither condemn nor truly praise, so he disguises envy as amusement, respect as distance. The women, for him, are symbols. Decorative gargoyles perched upon the edifice of family history—monstrous enough to be fascinating, but never permitted the privilege of being human. He believes he has been fair-minded. He has, in truth, embalmed them.
This is how women die in print—slowly, under layers of genteel surprise.
As for me, a black Englishwoman in 1974, queer, Catholic, and terminally unastonished, I read this sort of paternal obituary with the same weariness I reserve for sermons on chastity and Empire. Blandy’s type still stalks our universities, still publishes his mild ejaculations about “female autonomy” as if each were a revelation. He thinks faith means obedience, scholarship means custody, and admiration excuses appropriation.
What Blandy forgot, and what the Mallards might have whispered among themselves after tea, is that intellect was never his to grant or observe. It was theirs to live. The grand tapestry he pretends to see them woven into was, more likely, being unpicked by their own clever fingers.
And so, in memory of the Mallard sisters—and in contempt of every Arthur Frederick Blandy who ever called women “compelling curiosities”—let us fold away his trembling prose, drop it into the parish paper shredder, and send the remains to fertilise Hermione’s fields. The soil, unlike Dr Blandy, can handle strong women.
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