Maxwell Gray

Life

Tuttiett was born and brought up in Newport, Isle of Wight, the daughter of the surgeon Frank Bampfylde Tuttiett and his wife Elizabeth née Gleed.

Largely self-educated, in early adulthood she visited London, various other parts of England, and Yverdon-les-Bains in Switzerland; but for the majority of her working life as a writer suffered constant debilitating illness from asthma and rheumatism —reports described her as "a confirmed invalid"—that left her unable to leave her bed for more than two to three hours a day. She wrote lying on a sofa.

For much of her life she lived and worked confined to her home in Newport, first at Pyle Street (where works up to The Last Sentence were written ) then at Castle Road, only making occasional trips out by carriage or bath-chair. On one such trip she visited the American writer Wolcott Balestier, whose sister married Rudyard Kipling, when he and his family were staying at Blackgang. Her 1893 novel The Last Sentence was dedicated to Balestier after his early death.

She was strongly interested in women's rights, being one of a number of writers who petitioned in support of the Women's Suffrage Bill, and such themes appear in a number of her novels.

After her father's death in 1895, she moved to West Richmond, remaining in London until her death in 1923, aged 76, at Ealing.

Works

Mary Tuttiett began her literary career by contributing essays, poems, articles, and short stories to various periodicals including Atalanta.

Her first novel, The Broken Tryst, was published in 1879 to lukewarm reviews, but Tuttiett achieved critical and popular success with the 1886 The Silence of Dean Maitland ("a powerful and impressive story, which was appreciated both by critics and by the public" ). This tells the story of a churchman who gets a young woman pregnant and kills her father in a fight, then allows the wrongful imprisonment of his friend for the manslaughter. On the eve of his accession to bishop, he is forced to face his guilt when that friend returns, released from prison on ticket of leave.

The reader for the publisher Kegan Paul, Alfred Chenevix Trench, initially thought The Silence of Dean Maitland "a little too unorthodox" for his religious clientele, but on the second reading decided it was "too good to refuse". The release saw a deal of speculation about the authorship, including theories that it has been written by a well-known ecclesiastic or the daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The poet Tennyson praised the book, driving to Newport to meet Miss Tuttiett as her illness prevented her visiting him at his winter home near Freshwater.

The Silence of Dean Maitland and a number of Mary Tuttiett's other novels are set in a fictionalised Isle of Wight, in which Newport, Calbourne, Swainstone, Brading and Arreton appear as "Oldport", "Malbourne", "Swaynestone", "Barling" and "Arden".

She also wrote a number of poetry anthologies.

In 1910, Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton's The World's Greatest Books said of The Silence of Dean Maitland that it had immediately and permanently established her name in the front rank of living novelists. The obituary in The Times described her works overall as "characterised by a delicate grace and charm, and generally suggested a serious purpose, but she can never be said to have equalled her first success".

The Silence of Dean Maitland became a successful stage play, and was filmed three times: in 1914 by Raymond Longford, in 1915 (under the title Sealed Lips) by John Ince, and in 1934 in Australia by Ken G. Hall. The Reproach of Annesley was filmed in 1915, and The Last Sentence in 1917.