Alfred Richard Orage

Summary

Introduction

Only one of KM’s letters to A. R. Orage, the influential editor of the British periodical the New Age, survives. As Antony Alpers notes in his biography of KM, Orage ‘was almost violently opposed to the keeping and publication of private letters’. The fact that he decided to keep this letter of thanks and ‘love’, sent by KM at a time when she was receiving significant praise in the press following the publication of Bliss and Other Stories, indicates the value Orage attached to the sentiments of ‘admiration and gratitude’ which the letter conveys. Desmond MacCarthy’s review of Bliss, printed on 21 January 1921 in the New Statesman, had opened with the observation: ‘Miss Mansfield’s master in the art of fiction is Tchehov.’ This is a claim that few critics of KM’s work are likely to dispute, but her letter to Orage below can be seen as a direct riposte to this review, which she knew Orage would have seen. KM writes: ‘My dear Orage, I cannot tell you how often I call to mind your conversation or how often, in writing, I remember my master.’

Orage was not born ‘Alfred Richard’ but, in fact, ‘James Alfred’ (for some reason, his nickname since childhood had always been ‘Dickie’). He was born on 22 January 1873 at Dacre, near Bradford, Yorkshire, the last of four children. Soon after his father’s death in 1875, the young Orage moved with his mother and siblings to his maternal grandparents’ village, Fenstanton, twelve miles outside Cambridge. The son of a widow, Orage grew up in very modest circumstances, but his keen intellect quickly caught the attention of the village schoolmaster, George Hicks, and the local squire’s son, Howard Coote, who gave Orage not only the run of his library but also the financial support which enabled Orage to enrol on a teacher training programme in Oxfordshire. In 1893, at the age of twenty, Orage returned to Yorkshire to take a job at Chapel Allerton elementary school in Leeds. This was also the year in which the Independent Labour Party was formed.