Little-known author's works are republished

Article Last Updated; Sunday, September 13, 2009 12:01AM

Charlie Langdon

Recently, I have been reading works by the novelist Ann Bridge, author of Illyrian Spring and Peking Picnic.I know of one other book of hers, The Ginger Griffin. Her works are long out-of-print, but I'm able to order them through Maria's Bookshop.

Bridge was a fairly popular writer in the 1930s, particularly among the English. Bridge was her pen name. Her real name was Mary Ann Sanders, known to her friends as "Cottie."

Her family was well-to-do before her father was declared bankrupt. She then went to work as a shop assistant in Woolworth's.Along the way, she began writing, and later became a best-selling novelist and went about the world telling stories about the places she visited. She married a diplomat, Sir Owen O'Malley. He was chancellor to the British legation in China.

Her novels are wonderfully written. Her language is exquisite and precise. You can tell she chose her words carefully and expertly. As minor classics, her novels preserve worlds long gone. This is particularly obvious in Peking
Picnic, a vivid portrait of the English aristocracy among Chinese peasants and servants. The warlords control much of the country, but the coming Maoist revolution and war with Japan loom in the background. It's a sunset story.

Critic Linda Kelly said, "to this day, knowledgeable visitors arrive with a copy of Peking Picnic in hand.

"Some things have changed beyond recognition, others are instantly familiar from her descriptions. The wheeling pigeon orchestra, each bird with a pipe playing a different note attached to its pinion feathers, the shock of excitement as the roofs and walls of the Forbidden City first come into view, the two great temple complexes outside the city, Chieh T'ai Ssu and T'an Chueh Ssu, where most of the action of the novel takes place; the masterly geometrical flatness of the plain beyond the city, the bare, brown earth and blossoming trees in spring, recalling the brown silk background to the masterpieces of Chinese flower painting."

It was a time when the foreign Concessions were still in place, and Europeans led a seemingly privileged existence, waited on by numerous servants, and backed up by Legation troops, but uneasily aware of the fragility of their position when civil war approached the capital or a fresh warlord captured or purchased the city from a rival.

"Against this troubled background, the conventions are maintained, hospitality given and returned, less for pleasure than in order to ease transactions within the business and diplomatic community."

One other feature of Mary Ann Sanders is of interest.

She was a close friend of the family of George Leigh Mallory, the legendary mountaineer lost on Mount Everest in 1924. She died in 1974, at age 86.

Charlie Langdon is the Herald's senior critic. He can be reached at langdons@gobrainstorm.net.