Original Manuscript of "We Two".
MANUSCRIPT
Lyall, Edna [i.e. Ada Ellen Bayly]. Luke Raeburn’s Daughter [i.e. We, Two]. Ca. 1882-84.
Foolscap; 506 leaves; rectos, with some additions and corrections on versos and extensive authorial and editorial notes and revisions in the text, in the margins, and on leaves pinned to pp. 179, 232, 297, 465; pp. 1-399 handwritten, pp. 407-506 typescript, a mixture of top and carbon copies (the text is continuous despite the gap in pagination); half-title with epigraphs from [James] Hinton and John Stuart Mill, replaced in the published text by quotations from Spinoza and Ovid; first and last leaves frayed with minor loss of text; typescript occasionally faint but legible (except p. 446).
Unbound draft of the second novel by the author of Donovan, a modern Englishman (1882), written under her usual pseudonym Edna Lyall (a partial anagram of her name). Here titled Luke Raeburn’s Daughter, this was ultimately published as We Two in 1884 by Hurst and Blackett.
Born in Brighton, the daughter of a barrister, Bayly became the ward of an uncle after the early death of her parents, and after leaving school she lived successively with her three older sisters, one of them married to a canon of Lincoln cathedral. She developed strong religious feelings and a lifelong belief in political and social liberalism, characteristics that inform both Donovan and We Two.
Donovan Farrant, the eponymous hero of her first novel, repelled by his mother’s hypocritical church-going and encouraged by a tutor to profess no faith, is confirmed in atheism when he attends a lecture by the eloquent free-thinking lecturer, Luke Raeburn, who reappears as a central figure in We Two. The rest of the novel charts Donovan’s movement away from atheism under the influence of a kindly Cornish doctor and a saintly and liberal East End clergyman.
Although Donovan sold only 320 copies, it attracted the admiration of Gladstone and an intelligent review in the free-thinker Charles Bradlaugh’s National Observer. This led to a correspondence with Bradlaugh, president of the National Secular Society who was barred from the House of Commons when he refused to take the oath on the Bible. He was an effective and popular lecturer, ‘one of the best orators’ in Victorian Britain (Oxford DNB). Bayly’s ‘liberal sentiments resented Bradlaugh’s exclusion on religious grounds’ and despite their religious differences she subscribed three times to the fund to defray his electoral expenses (Oxford DNB).
Bradlaugh in turn provided some notes which she used in We Two. The secularist Luke Raeburn here even more than in Donovan resembles Bradlaugh, although the novel centres on the conversion of his daughter, Erica, to Christianity.
Donovan was written at intervals during three years of great mental conflict, when Bayly entered deeply into the theological questions of the day. ‘No one can regret … having been forced to face the problems which “Donovan” had to face, and I am very thankful to have had that struggle’, she told Helen Black, who interviewed Bayly in later years at Eastbourne. “We Two … which is a distinct story, is yet in a sense a continuation of the former, and was an outcome of all that she had lived through in the preceding years. It was so well reviewed in all the leading journals, and became so much talked about, that people began to ask for Donovan so extensively, that it took a new lease of life” (Black, pp. 137-8).
A private note on the verso of f. 417 suggests that the typescript pages represent a revised text of most of the third volume. “My object in writing this book is to instruk the minds of maidens wo have knot yet ataynd the wrypeag off syzteen … This is a very great trouble but I suppose z I … z musr go on to the nbutter end.” The first misprints were perhaps inadvertent, the trailing off into nonsense as a humorous or frustrated response to the earlier mistakes (Bayly was not the most accurate of typists). If
Print Inquire