I'm too sad right now, from my brother dying from covid-19, to write a review. You have my strong rating: 4/5. I liked it very much for the strong feminist themes in it, especially for the time when it was written, and for its showing of hypocrisy of the clergy and religion in general. Here's a synopsis from wikipedia:
Red Pottage follows a period in the lives of two friends, Rachel West and Hester Gresley. Rachel is a wealthy heiress who falls in love with the weak-willed Hugh Scarlett after he has broken off an affair with Lady Newhaven (which he does not originally realize has been discovered by her husband). Hester, a novelist, lives with her judgmental brother, the pompous vicar of the fictional village of Warpington. Hester's brother disapproves of her writing and eventually burns the manuscript of a novel she has been writing. This leads Hester into a prolonged nervous illness. Scarlett who has not been entirely frank with Rachel about his past commits suicide when his dishonourable behaviour is revealed to her and she breaks off their engagement.

Here's a couple of quotes that spoke especially to me.
Doughty Library Hardcover edition 1968
Rachel's ex-fiance:
P.135-6:
" 'we shall never meet again,' he said, holding her hand and looking very much the same without his illusions as he did when he had them on. he had read somewhere a little poem about 'a woman's no', which at the last moment meant 'yes.' and then there was another which chronicled how after several stanzas of upgrading 'we rushed into each other's arms.' Both recurred to him now. He had often thought how true they were.
'I do not think we shall meet again,' said Rachel who apparently had an un poetic nature; 'but I am glad for my own sake that we have met this once, and have had this conversation. I think we owed it to each other and to our - former attachment.'
'Well, goodbye,' he still held her hand. if she was not careful she would lose him.
'goodbye.'
'You understand it is for always?'
'I do.'
he became suddenly livid. He loved her more than ever. would she really let him go?
'I am not the kind of man to be whistled back,' he said fiercely. It was an appeal and a defiance for he was just the kind of man, and they both knew it.
'of course not.'
'that is your last word?'
'my last word.'
He dropped her hand, and half turned to go.
She made no sign.
then he strode violently out of the wood without looking behind him. at the little gate he stopped a moment listening intently. No recalling voice reached him. Poets did not know what they were talking about. What a trembling hand he slammed the gate and departed."

Weak little men who let faithful dogs drown, plague Rachel.
P.143:
"...Hugh put out his whole strength in the Endeavor to raise himself somewhat out of the ice-cold water. But the upturned boat sideled away from him like a skittish horse and after grappling with it he only slipped back again exhausted, and had to clutch it as best he could.
As he clung to the gunwaly he heard a faint coughing and gasping close to his ear. Someone was drowning. Hugh realized that it must be Crack, under the boat. He called to him, he chirruped as if all were well. He stretched one hand as far as he could under the boat feeling for him. But he could not reach him. Presently the faint difficult sound ceased, began again, stopped, and was heard no more."

P.156:
" 'if I were given another,' said Hugh. 'if I might only be given another now in this life, I should take it.'
he was thinking if only he might be let off this dreadful, self-inflicted death. She thought that he meant that he repented of his sin, and would Fain do better.
There was a sound of voices near at hand. Sybell and Mr gresley came down the grass walk towards them....
...that night as Rachel sat in her room she went over that half-made, ruthlessly interrupted confidence.
'he does repent,' she said to herself, recalling the Careworn face. 'if he does, can I overlook the past? Can I help him to make a fresh start? if he had not done this one dishonorable action, I could have cared for him. can I now?' " ( )

I truly wish Mary Cholmondeley had given this book another name. It might have enticed more people to read it now, when the phrase “red pottage” has literally no meaning to our society, and it is a book that well-deserves to be read.

I became completely engrossed in these characters and the moral quagmire of their time. Talk about a cross-section of society, we have the very wealthy and shallow, the very wealthy and titled, the rather poor and ordinary, the rather poor but exceptional, the finest kind of moral beacon in the guise of a bishop, and the very worst of a sniveling, narrow-mindedness in a clergyman. In truth, Cholmondeley makes it clear that where you are born or what profession you choose is not what determines your value in the least.

I felt the punishment did not fit the crime in the case of Hugh Scarlet. He is guilty of cuckolding a gentleman and, in the days when a duel was a matter of honor, he is called to a duel of a kind, but in my view much worse. In a book that is replete with the need for redemption, he desperately tries to find his so that he can measure up to Rachel West, the woman he comes to love. What I found especially moving is that Rachel, while a very decent person, is not a paragon of virtue herself, as she judges men too harshly based on one past experience.

In a parallel story, we become acquainted with Hester Gresley, Rachel’s best friend, and a woman who has her own crosses to bear. She is a spinster living with her brother, a low-ranking clergyman. This pious pontificator made my blood boil. He is everything that causes people to question religion and its worth and the kind of man whose example might well push anyone farther from God if they considered for one instance that he might be God’s chosen representative. Hester, of course, is kinder in her thought of him than I am, but I am proved right.

In fact there are a few characters who cannot be loved, they are just too horrid, but the three main characters are unerringly human and I felt greatly for each of them. Cholmondeley addresses many important themes in this work, not the least of them being the position of unmarried women in society and the struggle for independence they are forced to constantly battle. I felt her writing was reminiscent of George Eliot...and I do not compare anyone to George Eliot lightly.

If you have not read this book, and you have any affinity for 19th Century classics, please do yourself the favor of putting it on your TBR toward the top.
( )

Un libro que a pesar de su modernidad y su feminismo, o el de su autora, bien asentado por mucho que haya sido escrito a finales del siglo XIX, no se sumerge en los estándares por los que, a veces, navegan determinadas historias que sólo quieren cubrir la agenda del momento. Hasta las citas iniciales de cada uno de los capítulos están bastante bien elegidas.
En fin, una maravilla de la que no voy a repetir todo lo que ha comentado antes Marta Sanz en esta reseña:
https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/07/04/babelia/1562258329_435539.html ( )

«El hombre ha pronunciado muchas palabras sarcásticas sobre la amistad de las mujeres, y no a causa de los celos. La opinión consolidada de la mayoría de los hombres sobre este tipo de devoción podría resumirse en las palabras "mantente ocupada hasta que yo llegue"». Así arranca uno de los capítulos de esta novela cuya publicación, en la Inglaterra posvictoriana, causó un escándalo por plantear cuestiones como la emancipación de la mujer.
A la manera de una Jane Austen al alba del siglo XX, esta discípula de Henry James narra un episodio de la vida de dos amigas desde la infancia cuyos diferentes rumbos --la una es escritora y la otra, joven heredera-- se enfrentan al provincianismo del entorno rural, así como al esnobismo de la sociedad londinense a través del amor a la escritura, por un lado, y la búsqueda del amor verdadero, por otro.

Oh, what a book this is! It has a wonderfully diverse cast of characters, it is full of drama and intrigue, it has plenty to say, and every single thing in it is so cleverly and vividly drawn that I found myself living and breathing the story.

It begins with Hugh Scarlett, who is set on breaking his relationship with his mistress, the married Lady Newhaven, even as he is travelling to a party at her home. He realises that his position is invidious, but he is set on his course.

He is even more certain that he is doing the right thing when, soon after his arrival, he catches sight of young woman he has never seen before. He is struck, not by her beauty but by the expression in her eyes, and he decides there and then that he must make her his wife. She leaves though, before he even learns her name.

Meanwhile, Lord Newhaven is delighted to see Richard Vernon, a friend who has been overseas for a very long time, and who has come to the party purely by chance. He is also drawn to that woman, and his friendship with his host allows him to learn her name – Rachel West – and a little of her story.

Lord Newhaven is preoccupied thought; there is something that he knows he must do. As Hugh is leaving he invites him into his study for a moment. He gives Hugh to understand that he knows of his affair with his wife; and he offers him, not a duel, but a drawing of spills. With the man who drew the shorter of the two undertaking to end his life within five months of that night.

Hugh drew, without stopping to think that he might refuse.

It was a wonderful beginning: Mary Cholmondeley wrote beautifully, balancing narrative, drama, character drawing and story possibilities with such skill. I felt compassion for each of the ‘duellists’; I was intrigued by Rachel; I even felt sympathy for the spoiled Lady Newhaven.

The next day, Hugh was a dinner guest at the home of Doll Loftus and his wife Sybell, a lady eager to establish herself as a society hostess. Rachel was there too, and though his mind was crowded with thoughts of his encounter with Lord Newhaven, he was still drawn to her. They found themselves united in in defence of Rachel’s friend Hester Gresley, whose novel of London’s East End is a critical and popular success. It was said that she could not know, could not possibly understand the world she wrote of, but Rachel knew that she could and she did.

Rachel had been the daughter of wealthy parents. Theirs wasn’t old money, her father was a self-made man. He lost everything he made though, making bad decisions, and when her parents died Rachel had nothing. She was determined to be independent and to support herself, and so she took lodgings in the East End, and made a meagre living as a typist. She lived like that for years, until she inherited a fortune from her father’s former business partner.

She and Hester had been friends from childhood, and it is the drawing of that friendship that raises this book so high. The two of them were quite different in character, but they complemented each other so well, and Mary Cholmondeley illuminates that beautifully as she show them meeting for the first time.

“Such a friendship, very deep, very tender, existed between Rachel West and Hester Gresley. It dated back from the nursery days, when Hester and Rachel solemnly eyed each other, and then made acquaintance in the dark gardens of Portman Square, into which Hester introduced a fortified castle with a captive princess in it, and a rescuing prince and a dragon, and several other ingredients of romance to the awed amazement of Rachel—stolid, solid, silent Rachel—who loved all two and four legged creatures, but who never made them talk to each other as Hester did. And Hester, in blue serge, told Rachel, in crimson velvet, as they walked hand in hand in front of their nursery-maids, what the London sparrows said to each other in the gutters, and how they considered the gravel path in the square was a deep river suitable to bathe in. And when the spring was coming, and the prince had rescued the princess so often from the dungeon in the laurel-bushes that Hester was tired of it, she told Rachel how the elms were always sighing because they were shut up in town, and how they went out every night with their roots into the green country to see their friends, and came back, oh! so early in the morning, before any one was awake to miss them. And Rachel’s heart yearned after Hester, and she gave her her red horse and the tin duck and magnet, and Hester made stories about them all.”

The characters of the two women are drawn so very well; they had such depth, they had such life, that I couldn’t help being drawn in and caring so much about them.

Hester had was brought up by an aunt who was protective of her, who encouraged her ambition to write, and was proud when her niece’s first novel was a success. Her aunt’s death left her with very little money, and she found that she had no alternative but to make a home with her brother and his family.

That was a problem. James Gresley was narrow-minded, self-righteous, and utterly incapable of seeing any view point but his own adoring wife will never challenge or change that. He was supported by an adoring wife, a loyal congregation, and a social circle quite unlike the one to which his sister was used. He though his sister’s writing trivial, far less important then his tracts; and, try as she might, Hester could never manage to follow the path her family expected her to follow; she had to live as a writer.

The story moves between the two friends.

The relationship between Hugh and Rachel grows; but their situation is complicated by his duel with Lord Newhaven, by Lady Newhaven’s unwillingness to let go, and by their understanding of – and honesty about – that situation.

A chain of circumstances has terrible consequences for Hester.

Mary Cholmondeley plotted her story so cleverly, twisting it again and again; and making my heart rise and fall so many times as I followed the fortunes of a cast of characters who became so very real to me.

(There’s so much I could say, there are so many talking points; but I don’t want to say too much because I’d hate to spoil this story for anyone who has yet to read it.)

The two storylines are separate, meeting only as the two friends meet, but the book works because each storyline is so good. There are echoes of great authors, there is glorious satire and wit, there is passionate advocacy of a woman’s right to set the course of her own life; and that is all held together by the most compelling of human dramas and writing that is full of heart and intelligence.

It feels like a Victorian novel, but it also feels wonderfully subversive. ( )