‘God Tempers the Wind to the Shorn Lamb’
Mary Mason could not forgive herself for a past misdeed.
1862
Mary Mason could not forgive herself for a past misdeed.
1862
Lady Mary Mason inherited Orley Farm from her husband, Joseph Mason of Groby Park, Yorkshire, who was forty-five years her senior and had a son of his own. A bitter, damaging court-case ensued. The Will was upheld, but later on Mary privately admitted she had forged it, and she never forgave herself.
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I MAY, perhaps be thought to owe an apology to my readers in that I have asked their sympathy for a woman who had so sinned as to have placed her beyond the general sympathy of the world at large.
But as I have told her story that sympathy has grown upon myself till I have learned to forgive her, and to feel that I too could have regarded her as a friend. Of her future life I will not venture to say anything. But no lesson is truer than that which teaches us to believe that God does temper the wind to the shorn lamb.*
To how many has it not seemed, at some one period of their lives, that all was over for them, and that to them in their afflictions there was nothing left but to die! And yet they have lived to laugh again, to feel that the air was warm and the earth fair, and that God in giving them ever-springing hope had given everything.
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* ‘God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb’ (i.e. God is especially gentle towards those who are very vulnerable) is a proverb originally from French, but popularised in the English language by Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) in his novel A Sentimental Journey (1768).
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
Why does Trollope feel the need to apologise to his readers?
His heroine had behaved badly, indeed criminally.
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
Sir Joseph’s Will had a codicil. It was in his wife’s handwriting. She inherited Orley Farm.