Delafield's Devon Double-Scapes

       Also   See Women Write in the Devon Landscape

Northernhay Gardens, Exeter, where EM Delafield wrote her first novels, in 1915.

         Almost a year ago, as the last day of the past year fast approached, aware that 2015 was to be a special time of commemoration for past war events, I'd decided I should also give particular attention to Devon women writers during World War One. Somewhat un-enthusiastically, I'd downloaded E. M.Delafield's The War Workers on my Kindle, and with the start of the first day of the New Year, began to flick over the pages. It might be a cliché but, within a few page-swipes and a rare occasion nowadays, this was a book I could not put down. As yet, my fastest Kindle read.
        I knew that this year, 2015, was to be the 125th anniversary of E M Delafield's birth; this was part of my reason for catching up on her novels. She'd completed her first novel Zella Sees Herself, in 1915, just a year after she'd moved to Exeter as V.A.D. worker. Zella quickly gained public acclaim and whilst she was in Exeter Delafield was prompted to draft her second novel, The War Workers, which was also soon much admired.
         A quick plot resume of the second book may help here:

Published in EMD's second novel, The War Workers, centres on a community of female war workers, in particular a triangle of women: Charmian Vivian, upper-class daughter of the squire of the local country estate, 'Plessing'; Grace Jones, daughter of a Welsh clergyman and a new recruit to the Midland Supply Depôt, of which Charmian is Director; and Lady Joanna Vivian, the squire's wife. Charmian controls the operation of the depot; she is ruthless, an  autocrat and her apparent self-sacrifice as she works all the hours God has provided attracts admiration from all those who work for her. These women, mostly young and middle-class, live near the Depôt in a rather uncomfortable hostel, sharing bedrooms and providing each other with early morning tea. Grace Jones is kindly, charming, excellent at her job, and soon becomes popular with all the other women; however, she does not join in the adulation of martyred Miss Vivian. Charmian's father suffers a stroke, and eventually dies;  Charmian is conflicted with her double duties of war work and  home. Grace, meanwhile is drawn into the orbit of Char's ostensibly charismatic mother, Lady Joanna; she also becomes close to Char's cousin John Trevellyan, who's recovering from his war experience and injury.

       Even in these early novels, EMD was adroit at portraying slight alterations of emotional perception and nuance in person to person inter-relationships. During the opening chapters Charmian Vivian, female protagonist in the The War Workers, and autocratic Director of the Midland Supply Depot (rumoured to be cast as an unflattering portrait of the real Dame Georgina Buller), sits up and takes notice of her new recruit, Grace Jones; the realisation gradually dawns on Char that her newly recruited Welsh secretary, unlike all the other fawning staff who surround her, providing her with the adulation her self-martyring, attention craving persona demands, is not necessarily going to be at her beck and call. The mirroring and gradual reversal of situational roles in the two women's awareness of each other is captured in a series of subtle conversations. The novel's narrative closely pursues the playing out of the dynamic between Char and Grace, gradually drawing into its orbit Char's own fraught relationship with her mother, Lady Joanna Vivian.

"Who is the little dark-haired girl I've been working with, Char? The one at that table..."

"Oh, a Miss-er-Jones," said Char languidly.

"You never told me you had any one of her sort here. I want to ask her out to Plessing. Couldn't we take her back in the car tonight?"

"My dear mother!" Char opened her eyes in an expression of exaggerated horror.

      The resulting denouement between the three women unfolds throughout the book, providing the novel's emotional crux; set against a background context of war, it gradually reaches its culmination after Char's father's stroke and eventual death:

"Excellent!" said Joanna callously. "I shall be delighted to see Miss Jones. I wanted to ask her here, but Char nearly had a fit at the idea. She'll certainly think I've done it out of malice prepense, as it is. She's got a most pigheaded prejudice against that nice Miss Jones."

"Lady Vivian!"

Lady Vivian laughed.

You'll have to break if to her, Miss Bruce, that it's Miss Jones who is coming. And don't let her think I did it on purpose!"

"I am sure she would never think anything of the sort."

"Perhaps not. But Char does get very odd ideas into her head, when she thinks there's any risk of lėse-majesté, to her Directorship. I must say," observed Joanna thoughtfully preparing to go upstairs for her night watch, I often wish that when Char was younger I'd smacked some of the nonsense out-"

But before this well-worn aspiration of Miss Vivian's parent, Miss Bruce took her indignant departure.

          
        As I read I find myself thinking of character duplications and splittings, of landscape and place-swaps in fiction. I'm also remembering my own three idyllic months spent here, in the midst of the Devon capital, some 45 or so years ago.

       A few weeks later, early Spring, I go to Exeter to wander up near the castle ruins, at Northernhay gardens, where EMD is said to have written the manuscripts of her first novels.

      'Double-Take' is the expression that comes to mind.

      Today is the day I've been aware of a coming to terms with that long ago time. Around every corner and in every street, this city brings up places, endlessly self reflecting mises en abeyne, halls of distorted mirrors. A site then; a site now. They are the same; yet utterly different.

       E.M. Delafield's time in Exeter during WW1 was just over fifty years before my adult life began there. At that time I was light-years away from considering myself as writer. But looking back at those few months I can see how for a young author the bildungsroman is an ideal genre. A way of burying the hatchet of one's pre-adult years. Both of EMD's early books seem replete with doubled and redoubled character or personality re-inventions and deliberately, deliciously encoded name twists. The writer is evidently writing out her own past in her fictional recreations of Zella, in Zella Sees Herself and perhaps of Grace, in The War Workers. Both novels are peopled with a panoply of real characters EMD knew commingled with those she created, who were apparently based on them.

       Delafield references her own concern with real versus imaginary characters, when in the Foreword to The War Workers she states a disclaimer:

The Midland Supply Depot of The War Workers has no counterpart in real life, and the scenes and characters described are also purely imaginary.

          We can take EMD's statements with a large dose of salt. From the onset of first publication of War Workers there were rumours that Char was the real larger than life Dame Georgiana Buller, the only woman appointed as Administrator in a military hospital during World War I. EMD's biographer, Violet Powell commented, 'Elizabeth admitted that she had got into trouble over The War Workers, and, even more candidly, that she deserved to do so'. Powell adds that even years later, faced with meeting Delafield at social occasions, the Buller family were still uneasy. That might account for the prefacing waiver at the opening to The Way Things Are, a novel written twelve years later, when, the author, now writing in her prime, was able to view her own writing peccadilloes with a certain wry detachment:

A good many of the characters in this novel have been drawn, as usual, from persons now living; but the author hopes very much that they will only recognise one another.

          Although ultimately, to do so raises more question than answers, it is fascinating to consider the splittings and doublings of character and place which frequent this novel, and that of the earlier Zella Sees Herself, with regard, both to the author's own personal life, and in terms of the fictional echoes or reflections apropos real events of live war-time Exeter. One local war event which the novel appears to pick up on is the handing of food bags to soldiers on a troop-trainpassing through Exeter station. By February 1915, the then new mayoress, who, like Georgiana Buller, became known as a formidable woman organiser and fund-raiser, had raised £400. Accompanied by 4 other women the mayoress doled out, to every soldier, a large sandwich, two pieces of cake, an orange or banana, and a pack of cigarettes. In the novel, this scene's fictional transference zones in on Char, who, suffering from an extreme bout of influenza, still revels being in the limelight as the object of mass adoration:

Char moved up and down the length of the train.

She never carried any of the laden trays herself, but she saw to it that no man missed his mug of steaming tea and supply of sandwiches and cake, and she exerted all the affability and charm of which she held the secret, in talking to the soldiers. The packets of cigarettes with which she was always laden added to her popularity and when the train steamed slowly out of the station again the men raised a cheer.

"Three cheers for Miss Vivian!"

           If we explore the doubled or duplicated fictional/real lives hinted at in fiction we can often open up lost links and connections that once existed between individuals and families of the past. Both of Delafield's early novels apparently sail close to the autobiographical winds of her early years. In the first, Zella's childhood home, Villetswood, 'where there is not another house in miles', is sited somewhere in Devon; was the author picturing the house at Butterleigh, where she had spent many happy childhood summers? Boscastle, the novel's other unspecified family house, home of her aunt and uncle might be based on her real-life aunt's home at Penstowe, near Bude, on the Devon Cornwall border. Zella also sets a literary Devonshire context, as, in an early conversation with her cousin, Zella, the girl heroine, who 'sometimes thought of herself as a Devonshire maid', soon establishes Lorna Doone as 'the Devonshire story' whilst declaring her own loyalties that, 'of course I am from Devonshire'.
           In the second novel, Charmaine's fictional ancestral family home, in War Workers, named Plessing, is likely to be based on Downes near Crediton, the real-life estate of the Buller family and Dame Georgiana's actual childhood home. Was EMD so taken with Georgiana, that she found herself inscribing her contemporary in her early fiction? Indeed, the first stirrings of text may have made its first appearance because of the author's initial fascination with this striking and powerful woman, possibly, to such an extent that the real person could not really be separated from that of the fictional character. The doublings of real and imaginary split selves in this novel replicate phantasmagorically, for it is not only Char, but also, her fictional mother Lady Vivian, who appears as an embodiment of her real-self model, Charmaine's mother, Lady Audrey Buller. One commentator describes that

In various archival references Lady Audrey Jane Charlotte Buller, Georgiana's mother is always referred to as an exemplary woman who certainly on the surface level seems to mirror exactly the fictional Lady Vivian.

          
       In the novel, as war-fever crescendos and Char's displaced work-ethic effort increases, her already complicated relationship with her mother Lady Joanna Vivian decidedly worsens, whilst, in a neatly plotted change-over, Grace's bond with Joanna grows in warmth and intensity. By the time the novel finishes, Grace has supplanted Char and become Lady Vivian's substitute daughter.
         I have no way of knowing if Audrey Buller's relationship with her daughter, the real Georgiana, was as difficult and negative as the pair's fictional counterparts in War Workers, but it is possible they were, and that if so during her early weeks and months as VAD in Exeter there may have been occasions in which could observe EMD mother and daughter together. Given the problems she had with an overbearing mother herself, she may have been drawn to and susceptible to the signals of such a relationship and what it might reflect back to her of her own. EMD's interest in Buller mother and daughter may have been even more likely because of similarities between their and her own social status, backgrounds and life-events.
         The women also had a formidable family military man in common. Although there is no obvious link between Sir Piers Vivian and his fictional counterpart in the novel, Lady Audrey's real-life husband, Sir Redvers Buller, was one of Devon's and the country's most famous, exemplary war heroes, whilst EMD's (step) uncle, Colonel Algernon Thynne, became a prominent World War One army figure. Her step-father, Sir Hugh Clifford, also had a distinguished diplomatic record; all three were eminent men who must have created quite a stir in the lives of the women to whom they were related.
       The most puzzling and fascinating of all the possible doublings in EMD's first novels however is that of Grace Jones, the other main female character, in The War Workers. Does Grace represent another facet of the author's own personality? Grace is also from an upper class background and is Welsh (Delafield's childhood included several years in Llandogo, in Wales). Grace's main achievement in War Workers is her deployment of a dose of inner integrity, which gives her the strength to disrupt and disarm Char's control freak nature. Did EMD, newly arrived in Exeter, similarly, and really, manage to challenge the authoritative Georgiana Buller? Or, as she observed the dominating Director steam-rollering her way through the cowering other workers at the War Depot, was she projecting, harbouring a fantasy of wishful thinking through the creation of her own imagined character? Of course, we shall never know, but the possible interconnections between real-life and fictional-lives in these Devon-set novels provides us with a kaleidoscope of new material upon which we can mull ...

At Northernhay Gardens, Exeter

The 'White Queen's' 'Devon' daughter; Katherine of York, Countess of Devon.

Also see Women Write in the Devon Landscape

The south-east tower of Tiverton castle.

        Katherine Courtenay, Countess of Devon (1479-1527), born Princess Katherine Plantagenet, youngest daughter of Edward IV and his wife Elizabeth Woodville, (the so-called 'White Queen'), sister in law to Henry VII, aunt of Henry VIII and relation of Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, spent much of her adult life at Tiverton or Colcombe Castle. Sometimes the Countess also paid visits to check on the management of her other estates,which included Topsham, Exeter, Poltimore, Cullompton, Seaton and Marshwood Vale.

        Katherine married Sir William Courtenay, in 1495, when she was about sixteen. His death occurred in 1511, when she was only thirty three.

Shute:Umborne Brook looking south south-east towards Colcombe
© Copyright Martin Bodman and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

           For the remainder of her life, as a principal landowner in the county Katherine, whose self-styled seal presented her as ‘daughter, sister and aunt of kings’, therefore had continued strong links with Devon.

            She seems to have been a proud and pious woman, who was rightfully aware of her prestigious social position. There are glimpses of the Countess’ participation in literary ventures, such as reading and letter-writing: she sent letters to the king and cardinal from her Colcombe castle; in her castle chapel at Tiverton an inventory after her death found ‘manuscripts and printed books’, which included ‘The Apposteler’, (an Epistolary), ‘Catholicon’ by Johannes Balbus, ‘Ortus Vocabulorum’, (Latin-English Dictionary first printed c. 1500 by de Worde), a law book and a copy of ‘Legenda Aurea’ (Golden Treasury) by Jacobus de Voragine. Also in the chapel were four printed mass books and the Countess’ Book of Matins; one of these was covered with tawny velvet, had silver and gilt clasps; another was black velvet with engraved silver and gilt clasps. Account books of 1523 show that a ream of paper was purchased, as well as ink, copperas, used in making ink. Legal documents provide a sense of the Countess’ own voice as her concerns were transcribed on to the page: she made an elaborately worded vow to remain celibate and not marry again after her husband’s death – and survived him for some sixteen years:

‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I, Catherine Courtenay, Countess of Devonshire, 1 widow, and no wedded, ne unto any man assured, promise and make a vow to God, to our Lady, and to all the company of heaven, in the presence of you, worshipful father in God, Richard, Bishop of London, for to be chaste of my body, and truly and devoutly shall keep me chaste for this time forward, as long as my life lasteth, after the rule of Saint Paul. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.’

         Katherine Courtenay seems to have been an avid record-keeper. Accounts of her magnificently kept Devon estates run into many pages; they detail her daily-life with such precision that occasionally it seems almost possible to gaze at her as she goes about her life. The best source to look for to demonstrate this is the book Tudor and Stuart Devon: The Common Estate and Government : Essays Presented by Todd Gray Margaret Rowe and Audrey Erskine.

          I have often wondered if Katherine, with her literary interests and ability may have translated texts in her chamber at Tiverton castle, like her older kinswoman Margaret Beaufort, who had stayed just along the road at Sampford Peverell,  Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby, mother of Henry VII, whose wife was Katherine's elder sister Elizabeth of York, appears to have spent a lot of time at her Sampford Peverell estate. Margaret Beaufort's death took place in 1509 when Katherine, Countess of Devon was about thirty, so, given that they may have been in their respective estates during the same years, it is quite possible that the two women did have social contact and share their literary pursuits.

 

Sampford Peverell; Church behind the canal. The site/house which Margaret Beaufort probably stayed in is to the right of the church.

       Katherine Countess of Devon died in 1527. She was buried in St Peter's Church Tiverton and the town is said to have witnessed an elaborate funeral, perhaps fitting a once Princess. It must have been quite a spectacle.

---

Some of my information On Katherine Countess of Devon comes from the following:
Tudor and Stuart Devon: The Common Estate and Government : Essays, Presented by Todd Gray Margaret Rowe and Audrey Erskine, University of Exeter Press, 1992.
See also Sampson, Mike. Katherine Courtenay, Tiverton's Royal Princess (1479-1527). Tiverton: Tiverton Musem (1993).

Boniface's Other Women; A Saxon Quest at Crediton

The following extracts are taken from a longer piece I've written, about  forgotten scholarly Anglo-Saxon women connected with mid-Devon:

Crediton Church

... Every time I hear the church bells loop their rounds out over the town I think of the buried cathedral and of how the history of this place is largely mysterious, sacred, sunken, lost to view ...

        Many are familiar with the life and importance of Saint Boniface (known as Wynfrith) and of his roots in the mid Devon town of Crediton. The church’s own web site says of him:

Boniface has had an enormous impact on English and European history, far beyond the simple conversion of people to Christianity. His guidance of the early church in Germany, his establishment of structures which allowed it to co-exist with monarchy, were massively important, and the educational and literary influence from his monasteries and churches in his lifetime and over the next centuries was very significant. He is described as the Apostle of Germany and is greatly revered in Holland.

Boniface's statue in Newcombe's Park

Locally there are many places, including houses, named after Boniface and places linked with his famous life, including a sprinkling of houses named ‘Dokkum’. There is a popular Boniface town trail here, a commemorative window in the Holy Cross Church and the Boniface National Shrine is in the Catholic Church.        
       Not so many will be aware of the importance of a group of literary women who shared Boniface’s passion, commitment and intelligence. If we can put together even a fragment of a lost narrative we are beginning to assert the case for an alternative canon to the reported chronology of that of the male clerics and missionaries of the early Devon church. There is almost certainly a forgotten her-story of women missionaries, possibly centering on this part of Devon, whose pagan Nymeds (sacred groves) conjured its ancient sacred ambiance and connection with female spiritualities. Mid Devon’s links with sacred forces did not die out with the transformations carried out by its early Christians. On the contrary, although our modern day mid-Devon landscape does not easily give up its sanctified secrets, they are there and reminders are dotted all across the area, whose earlier pagan associations are thus extended forward into an equally rooted affiliation with early Christian visionaries, many of whom were women. Before the period of Boniface and his circles' sway, there were even earlier Celtic missionary-saints roaming this area, traces of whose influence are still to be detected in surviving local church dedications. A cluster of these were female ...

    ...  We can imagine those women wandering through the Wessex territories towards Cornwall on the old pilgrim ways. In Cornwall and Devon names such as St Ite/Ide, St Julietta, St Bridget, St Christina, St Morwenna, St Ia, St Breaca, are laced with associative identity at the various places whose names recall them. As one historian noted, they ‘have passed their names intertwined with those of native British Celtic Christians down to our time' and the ‘presentation of a shadow of an extinguished dedication in the name of a place is far more frequent than commonly expected’ (Richard Kerslake, The King of Englishmen and his Territory, 31-4)

      If one could magic a coloured hologram into the C8 Anglo-Saxon era, only a stone’s throw of centuries after Brychan’s children came across the sea and stamped their early Christian identity over much of the county, one might see a thriving community of vibrant women who, working on behalf of the new church, wrote and breathed their life-essences as pious visionaries into the geographical heart of their community. Travelling from place to place, they may have paused to pray and preach at wooden crosses; stopped to reflect at a particular inscribed stone set in place with a chi-rho, in memory of a relative; set up and founded local schools and chapels; or sanctified a particular pagan well, which then became established in their own name. Though there is nothing confirmed about the birth origins of these women, reading between the fragmented lines of lost herstory provides the imaginative researcher with a keen sense of the essence of ghostly presences still pervasive within the bare bones of the cultural landscape’s skeleton today.

Wynfrith's (Boniface's) Well, Crediton)

       One or two Anglo-Saxon historian researchers have initiated theories gesturing in that direction. These take as their starting point the fact that until recently the rather limited study into the Boniface archives has described and emphasised the women in his circle only as far as their connections with the eastern and midland reaches of the country - especially Kent and Hwicce - were concerned. This is to the detriment of the just as likely – though not so easily proven – links between these religious women and west of Wessex, a part of the country for which there is perhaps surprisingly little documentation re early religious communities, particularly those with women; although most agree that they must have existed.

       In her study, The Bonifacian Mission and female religious in Wessex, Barbara Yorke has acknowledged the likelihood of individuals within Boniface’s female coterie having originated from the western reaches of Wessex: ‘Many of the women who worked with him on the continent also seem to have come from Wessex and so it might be expected that many of the women associated with the monasteries would be West Saxons as well’(2).

       However, even Yorke has not gone as far as to identify locations. The study does not even suggest where any sites of women’s religious institutions may have been, other than that of the famous Wimborne community herstory.

      But at least Yorke has identified names of women in Boniface’s network who she believes had connections with and ‘fitted into the context’ of the ‘western Wessex’, or ‘West Saxon’ region. They include Leoba, (Abbess and later Saint); Eadburg or Edburga (Leoba’s teacher and possibly Boniface’s pupil from time before he left Wessex; may have been abbess at Wimborne; Boniface asks her to send him Epistles of Peter in gold); Ecgburg (Boniface’s pupil; locality of Glastonbury?); Cyneburg (Abbess of royal descent; Lull’s abbess; ‘Cyne’ was a prefix used in west Saxon royal families); Bugga, (Abbess, built an unidentified church, praised by Aldhelm; daughter of King Centwine of Wessex); Cuthberg/Cuthberga or Cuthburh (foundress of Wimborne; sister of King Ine); her sister Cwenburg (King Ine is said to have founded Glastonbury Abbey and a fortress in Taunton); Tetta (a nickname; Abbess at Wimborne; teacher of Leoba; sister of a king of Wessex; probably a kinswoman of Cuthberg and Cwenburg or may have been one of them; or may have been one and the same as Edburga); Lulle (nun; possibly an Abbess; sold lands to Glastonbury and her community seems to have bordered lands belonging to Glastonbury); Sulce (nun; recorded as having granted lands at Culmstock and Culm Davey sometimes after 760); Walburga (related to Boniface; siser of Willebald and Wynnebald); Hugeburc or Huneberc (wrote biography of Willebald and Wynnebald; seems to have been their kinswomen and therefore related to Walburga); Thecla (kinswoman of Leoba); Cynehild and her daughter Berhtgyth or Berhthyo (mother and daughter; learned in the liberal arts; aunt and cousin to Lull – (who was probably a west Saxon and received part of his education at Malmesbury).

        I am not trying here to prove that all, or indeed any, of these religious women did come from or live in Devon/Dumnonia. The information about most of them is too disparate to be able to ascertain any home-base with certainty. But there is every reason to suppose that at least a handful of them were in some way closely allied with this part of the west country and if this can be assumed, then their influence as literary, spiritual and scholarly individuals should be acknowledged for their revelation of just a little about a missing chunk of our heritage ...

     ...  Making a stab in the dark. I’d reiterate that not only did some of the women correspond with Boniface, whilst a few of them may have accompanied or followed him on his travels abroad, but it is likely that a cluster of the women originated from the western reaches of the west country, as, the consensus is, did Wynfrith himself. If as suggested, the women were his kinswomen, it is surely probable that they were familiar with the land of his birth, either as visitors or as themselves inhabitants there. Looking at the names, one is struck at how many of them appear to have been inter-related and so, if one of them had connections with the Devon lands, then presumably so did the others. During this period the ties of kinship were more powerful than those of friendship or spirituality, and the fact that Wynfrith himself is reputed to have originated in the mid-Devon region allows the equally valid possibility that his women colleagues and correspondents also led at least part of their lives there ...

      ... Any attempt to repatriate these women’s lives within the folk and cultural literary memory of Devon and the west country must consider their own writings and scholarship, fragments of which are still retained in archives. The women round Boniface need to be recognised, remembered for their work on and understanding of different genres, including letters, poetry, cryptography or ‘enigmata’ and biography. Although it can not be confirmed that any of their work or study took place in mid-Devon, neither can it be concluded that it did not, for the archival information about the whereabouts of the sites of Scriptoriums as well as imprecision about the women’s own lived locations leaves a very fluid situation. Just as the writing of the Saxon missionaries of this period is typified by runic games, plays on words and cryptic puzzles, the circumstances and stories of their lives have only left remnants; little tasters: tantalising names or snippets of narratives which need deciphering, as do the texts themselves ...

     ... Although they are sparse, reading their letters provides a sudden sharp sense of identity in a way that no accumulated facts could ever do. Leoba’s presence as feeling, sensual being is immediate when she writes to Boniface from Wimborne, sometime between 725-32, telling him she is ‘filled with breathless longing to hear from you’. She pleads with him, to ‘remember the friendship you once had in the West Country, with my father, Dyyno who died eight years ago’ and asks him ‘to remember my mother Ebbe, your kinswoman, who is still alive, but ailing’. Somehow the lived intensity of Leoba’s life comes right through to us in the C21, although formally her writing makes rhetorical use of devices typical of her time ...

... Lyrical lines rise over and above the church. All that and all of them are still near and here. For centuries others’ live-journeys passing across and through this place. Pausing to stop and consider the paths. Another’s past. Perhaps to pray. This is the way. My road.

Crediton Church from the park

copyright Julie Sampson

Royal Women in Devon; Margaret Beaufort in Sampford Peverell

I'm busy working on my book at the moment and consequently do not have much time for long blog posts. But rather than stop completely I'll instead blog a shorter fragment, or a poem (or part of) and notes, probably taken from the present focus of writing or research.

At present a preoccupation is with royal women and  their links with Devon; so here, as a start is the first section of a  poem about the Countess of Richmond, Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, who owned large estates in Devon and lived for a while at Sampford Peverell  - whose church retains and presents its links with her.

Margaret Beaufort; Imagining Translation

(Click, double click click, click click click.) Moving
through space virtually frame by frame, tubular
tunnels, phrase by phrase, through textual palimpsests
year by year to the void of the past, where spatially
her story perhaps began. Even the Book
was then as good as new.She lived and worked
with Latin texts; once dissected,
selected the equivalent felicitous phrase. Manuscripts
      meticulously set
by the first print press were stored in vaults at old
archival sites. They’re ISP lit up from that
original source. Now, imagining translation
her textual lines are sifting in, snatched
from gaps in this shifting chimera,
its parchment pages, rich medieval illumination
words written between the covers of her book of blacke velome.


The poem was published several years ago in The Exeter Flying Post.  It was on the web, but I can't track it down just now.
Notes
lines 6-10:  Printing was still a new art; William Caxton set up his printing press under her protection and printed books at her request and expense. One of the earliest of these was Blanchardine and Eglantine.
lines 12-16: Margaret Beaufort had a love of literature and herself translated several texts. These included The Mirroure of Gold.

You can find a little more about Beaufort on my web-site South-West-Women-Writers and there are several web-sites about her, including Tudor history. This page from Tudor-history is about her books