Book review: The Wry Romance of the Literary Rectory by Deborah Alun-Jones

THE Anglican rectory is often assumed to be a bastion of rectitude, but as this book reveals, there’s another side to them.

To illustrate this, and the “long tradition of writers who have been associated with clerical livings,” Deborah Alun-Jones has matched eight English rectories with their resident authors.

Each chapter offers a potted biography not only of the writer’s family, but of the rectories themselves. For those fascinated by architectural history, that makes for happy reading, as does the quick clarifying run-down of clerical history offered in the introduction. The authors, some of whom grew up in rectories, others who inhabited them as adults, and not all for ecclesiastical reasons, are: Sydney Smith, Alfred Tennyson, Dorothy L Sayers, Rupert Brooke, John Betjeman, RS Thomas, George Herbert, and the Benson and deWaal families, who lived in the same building roughly 100 years apart.

I cannot resist the temptation to call this book a curate’s egg – it’s just too apt. Strong, absorbing chapters stand out against flimsier ones. I found myself asking, where’s this going? There are dots, but are they really joining up?

On the other hand, there’s a wealth of fun literary trivia to revel in, and some of these stories are terrific and edifying. Sydney Smith is my new favourite person – so funny, so life-affirming. I wish he was alive now, dispensing his joie de vivre. And I knew absolutely nothing about Dorothy L Sayers – bar her reputation and the TV and radio adaptations. She turns out to have been a precociously intelligent only child, with an iconoclastic mother. My curiosity piqued, I shall seek out her work. Rupert Brooke, on the other hand, comes off as the most obnoxious snob.

Overall, this was an enjoyable reminder about some of the idiosyncratic personalities who have greatly enriched our cultural life. I do, however, remain unconvinced about whether Alun-Jones achieved her goal of proving that “these structures mirror the stereotype of the national psyche: the cool, calm exterior concealing the turbulence and drama of the inner self.” Surely that’s true of most homes, and life inside a rectory is only as rich and varied, as good and as bad, and as creatively inspiring as life in any other dwelling?