Eden Phillpotts | Biography

Eden Phillpotts, writer of more than 250 works ranging from verse to detective stories, is also known for twenty-odd plays, particularly two comedies of Devonshire country life, The Farmer's Wife (1916) and Yellow Sands (1926).

Phillpotts was born at Mount Aboo in Rajputana, India, where his father, Capt. Henry Phillpotts, was a political agent, but he received his education in England, at Mannamead School, Plymouth. In 1880, when he was seventeen, Phillpotts went to London, where he worked as a clerk in the Sun Fire Insurance Company. He also enrolled at a school of drama but, deciding that he was unfitted for acting, he turned to writing in his free time. By 1890 he was earning enough from his writing to leave the insurance office and embark on a full-time literary career. A shy, withdrawn man, he left London to settle in Devon, first in Torquay, then at Broad Clyst near Exeter, where he lived and worked for the remainder of his life. Phillpotts married Emily Topham, and they had a daughter, Adelaide. After his first wife's death in 1928, he married Lucy Robins Webb.

Phillpotts's reputation probably rests on his Dartmoor series of novels, of which he wrote eighteen (notably The Three Brothers, 1909) and which have earned him the not entirely undeserved accolade as the Thomas Hardy of Devon. "I still reckon," his sometime collaborator Arnold Bennett would write him in 1923, "that you know more about constructing a novel than anybody else in this country, and I still wish to God I could invent plots as you do." However, his contribution to British theater in the first quarter of this century cannot be disregarded, in that his plays are important to his Devonshire canon, to the history of the Birmingham Repertory Company, and to British folk drama in general. Phillpotts is recognized as having translated Hardyesque rural tragedy to the stage, as well as having created a climate in which D.H. Lawrence could write plays paralleling his fiction.

Phillpotts's first plays were collaborative efforts. He wrote The Prude's Progress (1895) with Jerome K. Jerome and A Golden Wedding (1898) with Charles Groves. These two slight comedies were produced on the London stage. George Bernard Shaw, then drama critic for the Saturday Review, accorded The Prude's Progress a friendly notice.

A joint effort with Bennett, "Christina," written in 1903-1904, was neither produced nor published, and after he and Bennett quarreled over it and other collaborative work, they were estranged for twenty years. Phillpotts wrote no plays for nearly a decade. When he returned to playwriting in 1912, with a dramatization of his novel The Secret Woman (1905), he was brought up short by the overcautious stage censorship of the time. Though he regretted it in later years, Phillpotts refused on principle to expunge two sentences and the play was banned. Controversy flared; fellow writers, Shaw and Henry James among them, signed a letter of protest to the London Times. Six private performances were permitted. The Secret Woman scarcely merited the rumpus. A laboring melodrama about illicit passion and murderous revenge, it is, in Allardyce Nicoll's tersely dismissive phrase, a "stupid piece." Phillpotts continued to write peasant drama for a while, but with scant financial and critical reward, even though The Shadow (1913) and The Mother (1913) were presented in London after seasons in repertory in the provinces. It was only when he returned to comedy, at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1916 with The Farmer's Wife, that he achieved substantial success.

Phillpotts's daughter, Adelaide, is occasionally credited with having worked with her father on The Farmer's Wife, but available evidence points to Phillpotts's having written it alone, drawing the plot from an incident in his novel Widecombe Fair (1913). Although the play was well received in Birmingham, no London theatrical management was interested. Barry Jackson, founder of the Birmingham Repertory Company, then mounted a new production at the Court Theatre, London, in March 1924. The reviews were mixed. Hubert Griffith of the Observer slated it as "a play so bad that its worst moments, combining boredom and bad taste, are intolerable." The Times and Daily Telegraph viewed it favorably, though with reservations. Only James Agate of the Sunday Times came near to sensing the public mood. "This farmer's search for a wife is one of the most joyous excursions the theatre of to-day affords." But even he did not foresee the play's extraordinary box-office attraction. It ran for more than three years, achieving a total of 1,329 consecutive performances, at that time one of the longest runs in theater history. Several factors contributed to this success. An advertising jingle, "The Farmer's Wife/Is the laugh of your life," attributed to Cedric Hardwicke, appears to have caught the public's attention. Hardwicke's portrayal of the hired man Churdles Ash, one of the central roles, was well received. Applegarth Farm and the wholesomely uncomplicated characters of the play must have struck a nostalgic chord in disillusioned postwar London. Moreover, Phillpotts's play, while little more than a loosely constructed anecdote about Farmer Sweetland's search for a new wife in the local community, is marked by well-observed humourous characterization and charm. The Farmer's Wife was revived successfully by the Birmingham Repertory Company in November 1942. The play formed part of the Chichester Festival Theatre program for 1967, and criticism, especially the Times review that was headed "Rural and durable," indicates that it has worn well. On the other hand, The Farmer's Wife had a lukewarm reception when it opened at the Comedy Theatre, New York, in October 1924. The New York Times conceded that it was "highly amusing," but found fault with its weak story. Playgoers were not attracted and the run soon ended.

Phillpotts tapped the vein of bucolic humor several times after The Farmer's Wife, but only Yellow Sands, written in collaboration with his daughter, had anything approaching the same success. Hardwicke was again in the cast, which included young newcomer Ralph Richardson. The critics liked the play and foretold a long, successful season. It ran 610 consecutive performances. The action revolves around the disposition of Jennifer Varwell's estate, with every predictable reversal taking place, including the defeat of a fiery young socialist by a bequest of property. Thomas Kemp argues in The Birmingham Repertory Theatre (1943) that Yellow Sands is superior to The Farmer's Wife: "The plot is [more] trim, tidy and probable: the characters are wholesome, and the wit springs easily from situation." Nevertheless, the resolution of the socialism-capitalism dispute is complacent, to say the least, and the play, though occasionally revived, does not seem to have endured as well as its forerunner. Yellow Sands was produced at the Fulton Theatre, New York, in 1927, but without notable success. Phillpotts's plays have generally not found audiences in the United States.

In 1924 the renewal of Phillpotts's friendship with Bennett led to a collaboration the next year on a comic opera, "The Bandit," with music by Frederic Austin. The work was never produced, but the new warmth between the writers would last the remaining seven years of Bennett's life. By then Phillpotts was greatly dependent upon his daughter Adelaide, who had begun a writing career--and whom Bennett called (the title was honorary) his "sweet niece." Phillpotts continued to write plays into the 1930s and beyond and ventured into dramatizations for radio. The work of this final phase is unmemorable. He was nearly ninety years old when he wrote his last play, The Orange Orchard, in collaboration with Nancy Price. The work was produced in 1950 in London and published the following year.

A minor playwright, Phillpotts had a sharp but kindly eye for human weaknesses and a gift for distilling charm. He had a special flair for party scenes. His contribution to the repertory movement in provincial England was substantial. But his craftsmanship tended to be mechanical, and the blandness, the steadfast genteelness with which he viewed his dramatic creations vitiated his art.