Bentley: Manhold: 2 Economics and Psychology

The Economic Background.

Sam Horsfall’s drive to produce shalloon cloth for export imitates that of Samuel Hill.

  He ran his business from here [Making Place Hall] from 1706 to 1759, and it was an example of

  early or proto- industrialisation of the wool process in the Upper Calder valley. Hill was rich and

  internationally famous, exporting different types of cloth throughout Europe and as far afield as St

  Petersburg.   Phyllis Bentley's book "Manhold" is based on his life. https://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/search/controlservlet?PageId=Detail&DocId=101770

A ‘fulling mill’ was an important factor in the wealth of the Horsfall family.  One of the earliest was a mill built at Sowerby Bridge to take advantage of the water power of the Calder: https://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/timeline/1400-1500/1400-1500-1.html  

There was another at Ripponden: 

Ripponden Mill: Stands on the banks of the Ryburn by the modern road bridge. 

 This may be the successor of a mill mentioned in 1429, and is probably the oldest mill in the Ryburn Valley. It was mentioned explicitly in 1624. In 1782, it was a fulling mill. Around 1800, it was a 4-storey mill.

http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~calderdalecompanion/m408_r.html

The real Bridge Inn in Ripponden is Bentley's Ring o’ Bells 

Only a bridge separates the pub from the churchyard: or pic bridge?

‘they slipped across the bridge and going under Sam’s yews found themselves in the graveyard,’ (IV.11.386)   

Inheritance  takes up the economic thread and depicts the next stage in the process when the skill of the independent weavers, such as the Gildersomes, will be replaced by machines and it will not only be one woman who protests.   The Horsfall wealth gets sub-divided, with Richard, despite his preference for design work, running Kelroyd Mill: ‘He preferred writing letters, designing patterns, copying accounts; but his  father told him impatiently that those were clerks’ work,’ (III.1. 150).   Bentley seems to base this on archival material a  'Book of Patterns from Richard Hill to his much esteemed friend Mr Francis Bequerel of Boulogne Sur-mer, Merchant, 1770' survives

http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/09c388f8-3fbe-440c-8530-3db684ac32b6

The father’s class conscious exertion of will eventually compromises the business.  Richard is bad at bargaining and economics.    Kebroyd remained a centre for mills into the early 20th century but there is little evidence left now. 

Kebroyd Mill site .

The silk-spinning mill of 1905-6 is merely a site: http://yorkshire.u08.eu/soyland/62720/

  Kebroyd were destroyed by fire in 2006, and have since been partially demolished, so there is little    

  to see of the mills which were successors to those run by Sam and his son Richard. 

  In 1739 Sam Hill bought the Kebroyd estate which consisted of 2 fulling mills; one friezing mill; one   

  raising mill (both finishing processes), one house, one barn, & closes etc. He also built warehouses

  and a counting house there. Tim Bobbin, a school teacher from Milnrow, famous for his Lancashire

  prose and engravings, stayed at the Counting House during the time he worked as Head Clerk for

  Richard Hill in the early 1750s.  http://www.fustianopolis.co.uk/page.php?id=23

A certain poetic licence has been taken with the geography of ‘Hoyland’, ‘Manhold’ and ‘Kebroyd’.  Ann and Ned walk to Manhold in Hoyland, in reality Making Place Hall in Soyland:

Making Place Hall

  There is little left to see of the grand mansion that Sam built.   Plans and drawings from the mid

  19th century suggest that it was to the left of the present building (probably where the car park is

  now).    

Remnants of the original house may still survive in the left hand wing of the present Making   

  Place building, but the whole site was so greatly altered and extended during the time of Mr Dove’s

   Academy that it is impossible to know exactly what Sam Hill built. http://www.fustianopolis.co.uk/page.php?id=23

Bentley’s ‘Manhold’ is a building with classical symmetry a ‘square stone structure’ with a ‘broad curving path’ with ‘huge windows’ (I.5.49-50).    This is intended to be a ‘hall’ in the sense of a ‘stately-home’ but the word ‘hall’ has a loose application in this part of the Pennines.    Across the valley around Norland is the 1634 Lower New Hall, an old manor house, one of the ‘long low structures with gables and small mullioned windows’ (I.5.49) that Manhold makes look old-fashioned,

Another ‘hall’, ‘Norland Hall’ has large windows and a taller aspect but is simply a large farmhouse:

  Norland Hall   

Coming away from Manhold Ann and Ned reach an identifiable place:

   They came out into the road at Wyburn Bridge; there was the lane coming down from Hoyland,  

    there was the road climbing the other side of the valley  towards Norland, there were houses and

    horses and carts, there was the arched bridge over the river, there was the church just the other

     side.  (I.5.55)

The Ripponden-Triangle Area

Key

1= Approximate location of Ellershaw Clough, where Ann is brought up, near Soyalnd (Hoyland)

2 = The Ring O'Bells [The Bridge Inn]

3 = Kebroyd Hall {Kelroyd Hall]

4=  Triangle 

Severnhill Beck is the blue line running from above Making Place Hall to Kebroyd. 

They appear to be standing on the west bank of the Ryburn (‘Wyburn’) on what is now the A672, looking south.   On their right hand side rises a steep road to Soyland Town to the west, on their left, over the river, a road to Norland, to the north east.   The name of ‘Norland’ has not been changed.  The problem is that Kelroyd Mill (Kebroyd Mill) is on the same side of the river and Sevenhills Beck as they are.    To reach the mill from Ripponden requires no crossing of water.   It appears that Bentley has used poetic licence to place Kelroyd Mill on the east not west side of the River Ryburn.   This would make sense of Ann’s plea, after they have been turned away from the mill, ‘We’d better go back by Wyburn Bridge,’ (I.5.62).   Instead, in a drunken parody of the triumph of the will, her father insists on crossing the water.    When they go to the mill the ‘stepping-stones’ lead ‘across the stream to the fulling-mill’; ‘the beck at this point just above its junction with the Wyburn…being sizeable,’ (I.5.54).

Sevenhills Beck at Kebroyd.

Sevenhills Beck, even if Kelroyd mill were on the far side of it, does not look big enough to accommodate the necessary number of stepping stones.    Instead Bentley seems to imagine Ned and Ann crossing the Ryburn itself when it is swollen by a flash flood, reinforced by becks like Sevenhills.

River Ryburn.  

There are many places where natural stepping stones make the crossing of the river possible in normal circumstances.

According to an image that looks like an early 20th century postcard the Ryburn had some artificial stepping stones as well as natural ones.     

River Ryburn

https://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/search/controlservlet?PageId=Detail&DocId=101786

House of Horsfall

‘Manhold’ is literally the house being constructed by Sam Horsfall as a statement of his prestige.   Even before it is finished it has the desired effect on Ned and Ann; they are: ‘intimidated by its size, newness, and difference in style from the clothiers’ houses they were used to see,’ (I.5.49).  Symbolically it is the expression of Sam’s manhood; the words are only one letter different.  It is the foundation of the house of Horsfall in the sense of dynasty: ‘he meant Richard to be the richest lad in these parts – the richest lad in the West Riding, perhaps before he’d done,’ (I.3.29) 

Two ironies attend this expression of will.  The first is Richard himself who is, as Ann takes in at first glance ‘sweet and good and soft’ (I.5.51), a being too lacking in will to maintain let alone expand his father’s fortune.     The second is that ‘Horsfall’ is an ominous name in local history.  It was William Horsfall who was assassinated by Luddites in April 1812; his family withdrew from the textile business probably as a consequence.     When Bentley draws on the incident in Inheritance, she changes the name to ‘Oldroyd’ but goes out of her way to use the name here.  As with the Horsfalls of history, the involvement of the fictional Horsfalls with the textile trade will not last long.   When Richard returns from the continent via Hull he visits Halifax ‘and found the new Piece Hall there, in place of the old Cloth Hall,’ (IV.9.372).  It is to be opened that day ‘with processions and speeches’ but Richard will not be part of either. 

 Piece Hall

This gives readers a precise date; the Piece Hall was opened on 1 January 1779, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piece_Hall) but precise dates are not what the novel wants.   If Ned is drowned in the flood that destroyed Ripponden Church, Richard is about six or seven years old in 1722.  This would make him about 63 in 1779, actually old rather than ‘seeming’ old: ‘seemed old to have so young a girl as his only child’ (IV.6.342).  It is necessary for the psychological concerns of the text that Richard is frozen in a physical and psychological late adolescence.    Consequently Richard simply drifts in and out of visible history without becoming part of it.  His monument will not be the flourishing Piece Hall but the decayed shell of Manhood.  The first words of the book depict a ‘gaunt and decaying structure, roofless and blackened,’ (ix).  It is the product of the failure of Richard’s will and manhood.  Though the house of Horsfall may have decayed the ‘young man’ who visits the site promises a new role for the ruin.   The words of the opening are echoed but the year is now 1805 and the tense is now present: ‘So this gaunt and decaying structure, roofless and blackened, hollow to the moorland wind, he thought, is mine, it seems,’ (V.1.409).  It is to be rebuilt not as a private place but as a ‘school’ (V.1.410). 

In theory this gives the book a happy end similar to Wuthering Heights.   In Emily Bronte’s text the destructive passions of the first Cathy and Healthcliffe have run their course and the second Cathy shows the maternal, nurturing side of love as she educates Hareton.   However, history has returned to the narrative of Manhold with a vengeance.  The optimistic final narrator hails ‘the new dawn of the French Revolution …. helping roll away the night of ignorance and wrong,’ (V.1.410).  He is determined that ‘these decayed halls and passages, hitherto the scene of tyranny and misery, shall now echo with cheerful young voices’ (V.1.410).     The narrator seems to have conveniently forgotten the Terror phase of the French Revolution and readers of history, or indeed of Inheritance, know that the book ends a mere 6 years before the Luddite revolt against the economic tyranny of the machine and the mill.  

At this point the text anchors itself in a more optimistic strand of history.  Making Place Hall became a school:

   The house was used in the early 19th century as a 'dame school' - a private school for young     

   children taught by women. By 1832, the building was used by William Dove and his wife for their

   commercial college Making Place Academy, initially with only a few pupils, but later with 200  

    pupils and 20 staff’

Its most famous pupil was ‘Herbert Henry Asquith (born in 1852 and Liberal Prime Minister 1908-1916)’, who is seen in Sleep in Peace forming a ‘coalition government’ in WWI (IX.V.305).

https://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/search/controlservlet?PageId=Detail&DocId=101770

Making Place Hall with cottages 

Freud vs. Nietzsche

Nevertheless the text as a whole is far from optimistic.  Manhold was first published in 1941. At first glance the text looks as if it might appeal to a readership nostalgic for an open pre-world war; instead the ‘Hell’ of ‘Hellstone’ is stressed.   Crossing Hellstone drops characters and readers in a strange liminal arena which seems to be placed almost outside the operation of history, a territory in which the will struggles against the dark forces of the unconscious and some of Bentley’s most self-destructive characters exist.   To the west is a recognisable geography of Rochdale and Bury, to the north proper names resume at Sowerby Bridge and Halifax.  In between two kind of psychologies compete; Rank’s adaptation of Nietzsche’s ‘Triumph of the Will’ versus Freud’s meditation on the possibilities of humans having a death drive.     Given the Nazi’s use of the phrase ‘Triumph of the Will’ as propaganda Bentley’s meditations on the implications and limitations of ‘will’ have an ironic contemporary edge.  

The book is dominated by the will and the Will of Sam Horsfall.  His living will asserts his dominance over rival manufacturers and his own family.  He intimidates his brother-in-law Ned Gildersome to the extent that Ned dare not face him sober and drowns after an argument (I.5). 

His dead Will prevents his son Richard from marrying Ann, the daughter of Ned.   As Freud might expect both living and dead wills collude in trying to control Richard’s sex life.  The consequence is not what Sam intends.  Ann rightly identifies Richard as ‘soft’: ‘sweet and good and soft’ (I.5, 50).  The culminates in the word ‘soft’, a word with multiple meanings.  Richard’s will is ‘soft’ compared to Sam’s, Richard proves easily manipulated by Ann.   The sexual connotations of ‘soft’ might be confirmed by the one daughter Richard and Ann have; Bentley’s way of showing a low instance of sexual activity between the couple.   

Even with the passive and non-manipulative Betty, Richard finds it hard to be sexually assertive; ‘Richard’s passion was not so urgent that it could not be controlled,’ a fact noted with a ‘sardonic eye’ by his father, who nevertheless ‘left his son to find his own manhood,’ (III.1.149).   They too have only one child.  

Manhold may be ruined but readers are left to presume that the places of work and business the Horsfalls one owned continue to profit: the Triumph of the Will is displaced by the Triumph of the Mill…

 Compared to Sam’s  interpretation of business as the exercise of commanding will, Richard’s skills appear to be passive and lowly: ‘He preferred writing letters, designing patterns, copying accounts; but his father told him impatiently that those were clerk’s works, ‘ (II.1. 150).  Sam’s ultra-masculinity makes Richard’s creation of a ‘pattern book’ that his father ‘scoffs’ at (II.3.108) seem feminine; it seems suitable work for ‘Ann’s delicate hand’ (II.3.109).   Some of the original pattern books of Samuel and Richard Hill survive (http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/09c388f8-3fbe-440c-8530-3db684ac32b6).  In the world of 18th century business they seem unexceptional tools of the trade but in Manhold pattern books have been made into a site of conflict between will and obedience, masculinity and femininity.  This equation adds an extra Freudian twist; Richard’s passivity and domestic talents make him look more like the absent wife/mother than a son competing with the father.   Richard appears to have lost not just his mother but the will to compete for her.    He ends up marrying Ann where a more assertive man might have used his social position to make her his mistress.   Even here he is far from assertive, which allows Sarah, Ann’s mother, to declare her granddaughter illegitimate and her daughter a ‘trollop’ (IV.11.390).

Sam’s will is parodied by the will of his sister Sarah.    It is she not Ned who is the boss of her house.  It is she not Ned who is ambitious and feels Ned should be Sam’s partner.  It is she, not Richard, who ends up in possession of Sam’s manhood (Manhold).     Sarah’s marriage is the most passionate of the book, brought about by Sarah’s ‘lust of the flesh’ (I.2.21) for Ned and it creates the largest family in the book.    The analysis of the relationship appears simple, Sarah is made to reflect: ‘’if he had struck the nagging from her mouth she would have loved him more.  He was not man enough for that, she thought contemptuously,’ (I.2.21).     On the surface it looks as if Bentley is trying to reconstruct 18th century gender assumptions about masculinity and mastery but the remark draws attention to a masochist strain in Sarah.  What appears to be the highest point of victory for her will, the possession of Manhold, involves her living in a decayed , comfortless, wrecked building: ‘The spacious handsome hall was now a mere barn, ‘(IV.13.397).   

Ruin: Hollin's Lane, near Marsden

Her trajectory symbolises the way in which the conflict between Nietzsche and Freud is gradually and pessimistically resolved in favour of Freud.   ‘Will’ in any sense is shown to be compromised by irrationality.   In Manhold attempts to exert will often turn into self-destruction, as if, in Freud’s terms, the life-drive can easily become the death-drive.    This is most plainly shown in the women of the text who are considered to have no will by contemporary society; they are removed from the commanding areas of society where will is exercised, such as  politics and economics.    The position is exacerbated by class.  Ann and Leah are of a class considered economically useful as servants whereas the first Betty comes from a class where a woman is merely an obedient daughter until she becomes an obedient wife.  Women are expected to operate in the domain of emotions alone.    In this society any woman like Sarah or Ann who has ambition has to find a man to realise this ambition for her.     Sarah and Anns’ attempts to do so warps them emotionally and inadvertently destroys the men they choose to realise their aims.    

 Nevertheless the very restrictions of women in this society allow Bentley to pursue her interest in Freud’s ideas about the relationship of daughter and father.   Bentley’s autobiography ‘O Dreams, O Destiny’ finds Freud most useful in explaining her feelings for her father and her tension with her mother:

  I saw that my love for my father had had a sexual basis which was however quite normal, and that

  my anger against my mother and hers against me had often been the unconscious fruit of jealousy;

  in a word that my mother’s feelings and mine had the same source and resembled each other.

[emphasis in the original] (VIII.I. 141)

In the psychological space opened up by Manhold  Bentley can investigate the love of daughter for father in conditions of extremity.  The text creates a pattern of family stress in which father (Ned) or mother (the first Betty, Richard’s wife) die young, or whilst the child is relatively young (Ann).  This means that the relationship with dead or living father can dominate a girl’s life and fathers may look for the love they cannot get from a wife in their daughter.    The simplest example is that of Harriet.  

   Richard, after offering to Ann for so long a love that left her indifferent, found it inexpressibly

   soothing to have love offered to him.  He loved Ann still, would always love her, but Harriet loved

    him; it was endearing, one turned to it; when one had a generous nature, it made claims. (IV.3.324)

Even allowing for the fact that the scene is being observed by Collier who is trying to generalise, the grammar of the last sentence is odd.    It moves from the personal ‘he’ and ‘her’ to ‘one’ and ‘it’ and it is far from clear what ‘it’ is.  Grammatically ‘it’ could be either Richard’s love for Ann or Harriet’s for Richard.  The latter is more probable ‘it made claims’ but it looks as if the situation is to be regarded as typical rather than extreme.

This is despite the fact that on the next page Harriet’s mother Ann drowns herself.    It looks as if this has fulfilled an unconscious wish on Harriet’s part that she has long hoped for:

   Already she knows how to console as a woman, thought Collier, with a sudden agonising sense of

   all he had missed in losing Ann; she pressed Richard’s head against her breast, stroked his hair and

   kissed his cheek. (IV.3.326-7) 

Seen through Collier’s eyes the sexualisation of the scene is made apparent.   He always wanted Ann to press his head ‘against her breast’, to stroke his hair and to kiss his cheek and now he watches as father receives these ‘consolations’ from a daughter not a wife.

When her father Richard dies, Harriet is brought up by the man she calls ‘Uncle Tim’.  Even before the death of her father Harriet teases Collier in terms that carry an unconscious sexual charge:

    “If I were a horse, I should throw you off, you wouldn’t be able to ride me, Uncle Tim,” she

     suggested, her blue eyes sparkling.

   “Oh, yes, I should,” replied Collier firmly.  (IV.3.315)

‘Suggested’ has kinship with ‘suggestive’…  This is the chapter which ends with her mother’s death, the woman who has been loved by both Richard and Collier. The field is left clear.

After Richard’s death Collier literally continues the tasks of fatherhood:

          “Papa taught me Latin,” announced Harriet proudly.  Uncle Tim seemed pleased, and asked

           whether Harriet would care to continue this study, (IV.9.361 )

Though he takes her to Milnrow (Milne Row in Manhold) in ‘rational’ Lancashire, the irrational compulsions of Manhold accompany Harriet. 

Milnrow Cottages

This builds up to the point where Harriet proposes to Tim:

        “Uncle Tim,” wailed Harriet again: “I don’t want to marry any of them but you?”

       There was a question in her voice, and she looked up at him very earnestly.

       For a moment Collier was sorely tempted.  With her auburn curls in a tangle, her lovely

       shoulders not as adequately wrapped as they would have been if Harriet had been less innocent,

 (IV.10.375)

The ‘innocence’ of Harriet’s mind is belied by her body: ‘Yes, Harriet was a severe temptation,’ (IV.10.375).  Collier points out the difference in their age ‘I am forty years older than you are,’  (IV.10.375) but all that eventually puts Harriet off is Collier’s declaration: ‘I loved your mother,’ (IV.10.376).   The rivalry of daughter and mother is consciously exposed and the daughter retreats defeated but alive.

In the other major women of the text the desire for the unobtainable father moves, literally in Ann’s case, into darker waters.    Like Freud Bentley is forced to speculate on whether humans have a death-drive or whether it is a distortion of the life-drive.    Betty, the daughter of Richard and Betty thinks that if she dies it will help her father.  Collier is the one to realise the truth:

   “By heaven,” he thought: “The child loves Richard; she wishes to die before she reaches full age, in order to benefit her father!’  (IV.2.311)

Mrs Kay is inclined to see Betty’s illness in terms of witchcraft, a curse launched by Ann.  In this she is supported by no less a man than John Wesley, another historical character being drawn into the ominous psychological world of Manhold.   Belief in witchcraft was a tenet of early Methodism, based on their literal response to the Bible; as Wesley says: ‘To doubt witchcraft is to doubt the Bible,’ (IV.2.310).   Bentley sets up Collier to oppose every movement towards the irrational; the ‘enthusiastic’ in 18th century terms; that Wesley takes.   It is Collier who saves Betty at this juncture by telling her to live for her father not for God (the father): ‘  “When you are twenty-one your money is your own, you will be able to share it with your father,” ’ ((IV.2.312) .

However, when Betty is twenty-one she becomes convinced that her father does not love her: ‘life had faded in her ever since that day when she was disappointed about her father,’ (IV.5.338).  Consequently she dies.  Earlier in Part IV Collier is allowed to anticipate a Freudian account of Betty’s affliction: “She murdered herself by her own fears!”  (IV.2.310).    Readers are not shown Betty’s death: ‘when Roger returned, his mother told him that poor Betty was dead,’ (IV.5.338).  Betty’s desire to be loved by her father has turned into a desire to die because this love is unobtainable.  If this action is partly designed to punish her father it fails.  Richard does not long survive Betty; by the end of part 6 he is dead.   Throughout part 6 he is too obsessed with the obtaining of Manhold, the loss of Ann and the love of his other daughter Harriet to mourn Betty or even say anything about her death.

The most destructive obsession with a father is that of Ann Gildersome for her father Ned.  It begins, as expected in childhood.    One of the first things Collier notices about Ann is her protective stance towards her father: ‘she stood beside her father primly, erect and grave, with an air rather protecting than protective,’ (I.1.12)   Two words in this sentence will acquire ironic resonance.  The first is ‘erect’.  Ann is already more masculine and assertive than her father and she will end up being obsessed with obtaining Manhold, so close to ‘manhood’.   The other is ‘grave’.  The ‘grave’ side to Ann’s devotion to her father will become evident in the manner of her death.  In Freudian terms it is not unusual for a girl of around 6-7 years old to feel as Ann does: ‘ Her father was the object of her passionate loyalty, her dearest, her most cherished, her best; she was jealous even of her own thought if it diminished him,’ (I.2.23).  Ann however has manoeuvred herself into a position where she imagines herself to have displaced her mother as the chief carer: ‘No!  She could not leave Ellershaw while her dear father, and simple Leah, and the helpless baby were there to be cared for,’ (I.2.23).   She finds it easy to mentally exclude her mother from the family: ‘Her mother was well able to care for herself, herself being indeed her chief care; Ann felt no concern for her,’ (I.2.23).

Ann never grows out of these feelings because her father is drowned trying to carry her across a flooded beck (1.5). 

The River Ryburn flows calmly through Ripponden beside the churchyard where Anne is finally buried.  

Though the text talks of crossing a stream it also mentions ‘the fierce current of the river’ as affecting her father’s body (1.5.63); the stepping stones appear to lead over both Wyburn and beck.

The scene has a strange beginning.  When Ann leaves the house her mother insists she wears a white dress, almost as if she were to be a bride: ‘the only white dress in the household,’ (1.5.48).   It is part of her mother Sarah’s plan that she should attract her cousin Richard but it ends up adding a grotesque air of a wedding to the father’s death.  He strides out ‘manfully’ but falls ‘headlong into the roaring waters,’ as the frock gets ‘draggled’ (1.5.62).    As Ann grows up she uses her mature beauty to seduce Richard in an attempt to take revenge on the man she thinks murdered her father.   The first glimpse we see of her as a young woman contrasts her sister Leah’s ‘full breast’ and ‘warm smiling face’ with Anne’s ‘tiny scar on her upper lip,’ (I.6.66).   The scar ‘throbs’ as if it was an organ of the body and Ann ‘exulted in this secret reminder’ (I.6.66) for it is a scar left by the beck stones on the day her father drowned.  To ram the point home part 6 of I is short and simply shows the Gildersome sisters looking at Manhold on the anniversary of their father’s death.  Ann remembers ‘It’s the day our father was drowned,’   (I.6.66); Leah does not.

From this point on it is clear that Ann’s will is powerful chiefly because it is reinforced by irrational forces from her subconscious.    Collier rightly detects that Ann is attracted to him but she claims a vision of her dead father stands between them: ‘My father came to warn me not to listen to you,’ (III.4.199).  Symbolically she is right and Ann rededicates herself to ‘revenge’ ‘Richard’ and ‘Manhold’ (III.4.199).   At the end of Part 4 she sleeps with Richard, not through desire but to bind him to her cause. 

Despite opposition from all around, she manages to marry Richard but it is always unclear about whether she wants possession of Manhold or acknowledgement that Sam could have saved her father but chose not to.    She chooses to interpret the bridge-building clause of Sam’s Will as an acknowledgement of guilt: ‘Yes, Uncle Sam was guilty; he always knew it, he admits it here; I was right to exact vengeance, I was right’ (III.14. 273).  However Sam’s Will prevents her from inheriting Manhood through Richard.  When Betty reaches the age of 21, Ann chooses to drown herself in the same place as her father drowned.  Significantly Collier mistakes drowned daughter for drowned father: ‘he thought he saw Ned Gildersome’s dead face staring whitely up at him,’ (IV.3.325) before he realises it is Ann.  Once more the dress she wears is symbolic ‘scarlet silk’ though it becomes ‘black in this light and draggled,’ (IV.3.325).     The scarlet woman has become a little girl in a ‘draggled’ dress again and has merged with her beloved father.  

Great Manshead Hill  

The name may have inspired the title of Bentley's  novel.