Brympton (Setting)

The Brympton House at the Brympton Place is the overall setting of “The Lady's Maid's Bell”. The story starts when Mrs. Railton recruits Hartley as a lady's maid for Mrs. Brympton. To reach the Brympton House from the train station, Hartley has to pass through the Brympton Place woods “for a mile or two”¹ until she comes out “on a gravel court shut in with thickets full of tall black-looking shrubs”.²

Mrs. Railton describes the house as a “big and gloomy”³ and “not [very] cheerful” ⁴ place. It is also “a quiet place, with country air and wholesome food and early hours”,⁵ which should be the perfect place for Hartley to recover from the aftermaths of her illness.

The Brympton House itself has more than two floors. When Hartley arrives at the place, she follows Agnes upstairs and sees, “through the door on the upper landing, that the main part of the house seem[s] well furnished, with dark paneling and a number of old portraits”.⁶ Going up, “[a]nother flight of stairs”⁷ leads to the servants' wing. At the end of the passage is Hartley's room which is opposite of Emma Saxon's room that Mrs. Brympton wishes to keep locked. Hartley's room is “neatly furnished, with a picture or two on the walls”.⁸

Edith Wharton tries to create an atmosphere of isolation by choosing the Brympton House as the setting. The country house is surrounded by gardens and woods, far away from town. It is possible to say that Mrs. Brympton decided to isolate herself since she cannot “stand the fatigue of town life”,⁹ however, although she might live more isolated than others, the home and her married life that she has ought to give her comfort, which they ironically do not since Mr. Brympton is “almost always away”,¹⁰ and though she has Mr. Ranford to visit her, the servants are actually the only people who surround her. Moreover, at times when Mr. Brympton does come home, Mrs. Brympton does not feel comfortable around him (“she was white, and chill to the touch”¹¹, and “I found my mistress lying very weak and still”¹²), and according to the servants, it has been “an unhappy match from the beginning”.¹³ The home and the marriage that are supposed to comfort Mrs. Brympton and give her happiness or the feeling of being loved are actually giving her a hard time and rather feel like a prison that she cannot escape from. She is trapped by her circumstances. Talking about prison, one could come to the assumption that Emma Saxon feels imprisoned as well since it seems that she cannot let go and leave the place to the next realm of the afterlife.

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1 Lewis, R. W. B. The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton. (Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968. 457-474, Print.), 458.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., 457.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., 458.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., 459.

9 Ibid., 457.

10 Ibid., 458.

11 Ibid., 462.

12 Ibid., 466.

13 Ibid., 462.