More than 60 years ago, while browsing the shelves of the Johannesburg City Library (in the days when Johannesburg actually had a city library) I came across a book with the rather odd title Expiring Frog, so I pulled it from the shelf, and discovered that it was written by Elizabeth Charlotte Webster, and was about a (fictional) community of Anglican nuns in the (fictional) City of Geldersburg, which could have been the whole Witwatersrand or any town or city within it.
I knew of two communities of Anglican nuns in Johannesburg at that time: the Order of the Holy Paraclete (OHP), who ran the St Benedict's Retreat House, and whose mother house was at Whitby in England; and the Community of St Mary the Virgin (CSMV). who ran St Mary's Diocesan School for Girls in Waverley (and another similar school in the Diocese of Pretoria). The CSMV mother house was at Wantage in England, and they were sometimes known as the Wantage Sisters.
The Anglican chaplain at Wits University, where I was a student, was Father Tom Comber, and he was also the chaplain of St Mary's School. Father Comber recruited male university students who lived in the vicinity of the school to function as altar servers in the school chapel on Sundays. Back in those days in the Anglican Church the girls could carry candles in processions as acolytes, but they could not serve within the altar. As servers, we were chastely clad in white albs and amices, and black shoes were obligatory, so our appearance was largely uniform, other than the fluorescent orange or green socks we wore, to the tittering of the girls in the congregation.
In reading Expiring Frog, however, I pictured neither the CSMV nor the OHP sisters, or their dwellings, but rather the Roman Catholic Convent of the Good Shepherd, whose grounds formed the view from our flat in Cheltondale. Expiring Frog begins with Sister Lilian who fed the fowls at the Convent of Serapha of Sicily, and the view from my desk was over a green field on which Friesland cows grazed, which were fed, and for all I knew, milked, by an ancient sister bent over double like the Greek capital letter gamma, carrying two buckets of feed for the cows. The sisters there also ran the Good Shepherd Home, a kind of orphanage, and that seemed closer to the function of the Convent of St Serapha of Sicily in providing a home for fallen women.
I read the book and thought it was OK, but nothing outstanding. I occasionally thought about it and the quite at the beginning, from The Pickwick Papers
Can I view thee panting, lying
On thy stomach, without sighing
Can I unmoved see thee dying
On a log
Expiring frog!
And clearly, in the book, the "expiring frog" was a symbol of the Anglican Church.
The book belongs in a general category of novels about the Anglican Church, its clergy and monastics, by authors like Anthony Trollope, Ernest Raymond and Susan Howatch. One of the best written in a South African setting is one I recently reviewed, A Sin of Omission by Marguerite Poland.
A few years ago I saw a street bookstall selling second-hand books, and found there a copy of Expiring Frog, and bought it, just in case I should ever want to read it again, because I'd never seen another copy anywhere. And it's sat, unread, on my shelves for the last 20 years or so. A previous owner was R.J. (or R.G.) Jabobs. There appears to have been another owner before that. but it has been rubbed out, and I can't read the name. But having the book, with publication details, I was able to enter it into GoodReads, and mark it as read.
But in GoodReads there is no information about Elizabeth Charlotte Webster. She apparently wrote a couple of other books, one of which could be a different edition of this one, with a different title, and possibly other changes as well, but there seems to be no biographical information about her. Web searches reveal nothing. So who was she? That is something of a literary mystery.
There was an Elizabeth Charlotte Webster who married Richard Anthony Hulley in Trinity Church in Grahamstown, Cape Colony, on 17 November 1880, and her signature in the marriage register looks quite similar to that of the author of the book, and the differences could be explained by the gap of 46 years. But the Elizabeth Charlotte Webster who married Richard Hulley appears to have died in Southern Rhodesia in 1901.
There is also a Wikipedia article:
Mary Morison Webster (1894 – 1980) was a Scottish-born novelist and poet who came to South Africa with her family in 1920. She lived in Johannesburg, where she was an influential book reviewer for The Rand Daily Mail and Sunday Times for 40 years. She wrote five novels, including one in collaboration with her sister, novelist Elizabeth Charlotte Webster, and several collections of poetry.
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