ABSTRACT
Trusty in Fight had Freddy Thorburn as a ‘a highly romanticised version of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s adolescence’, and ‘Hatty, the sister-figure, receives the hero’s flagellatory confidences during his vacations from school and also observes the punishments unwillingly inflicted by his benign and kindly father.’ Interpolated is a correspondence between fictional characters Frank Dilston and Reginald Clavering from The Sisters, and Freddy, Dick, Sig Thorburn and the Revd E. Thorburn from Mary’s novel Trusty in Fight. The dive into the lake is a symbol of the confrontation with death. The diver survives the plunge and Swinburne closes the poem by saying that to all our questions about death, ‘Deep silence answers: the glory/We dream of may be but a dream’. Swinburne was an idol to many of the writers of the 1890s, among them Arthur Symons, who visited The Pines several times.
