Still, those of us who never made it past “Chopsticks” can watch it and breathe a sigh of relief.j.romney independent.co.uk. Christabel Burniston is probably the first person in the history of fiction have a first novel published at the age of 92. The Brass and the Velvet makes the famously late beginner Mary Wesley look like a youthful upstart. Even Sybil Marshall was only seventysomething when she initially made her mark as a novelist.Christabel Burniston MBE has spent a lifetime in education. Her passion is the (often unacknowledged) importance of the spoken word. So she founded the English Speaking Board in 1953 to promote oral communication – not the stilted straitjacket of “elocution”, but clear, vibrant, fluent speech in whatever local accent comes naturally to the speaker. Today the ESB, of which Burniston is now life president, provides syllabuses and examines children, young people and adults worldwide in spoken English for different purposes and at a range of levels.

It also trains and supports teachers.
Burniston has a whole string of books about teaching speech, poetry and drama to her name. Life in a Liberty Bodice, recollections of her Yorkshire childhood, was published in 1991 and reissued in 1995. But The Brass and the Velvet – which thematically visits late Victorian women’s education, poetry, love, votes for women, Yorkshire mills, music, science, international medicine and the treatment of the mentally ill – is her first foray into fiction.Felicity Hargreaves is the daughter of a gruff and prosperous mill owner who maximises profits by methods best not enquired into too closely by his sensitive, progressive daughter. She and her school friend, the doctor’s daughter Belinda Bennett, want to study science at Bradford College and then go to Edinburgh to read medicine. This they eventually do, via what Henry James might have called a “loose, baggy monster” of a story. On her leisurely way to a traditional fairy-tale ending, Burniston treats us to the time-honoured device of characters turning out to be not quite who they think they are.Burniston’s mother, Annie Hyde, was a suffragist.

She knew Christabel Pankhurst and named her youngest child after her. Burniston is describing the burning urge for enlightened female education, only a few years before her own birth in 1909.All fiction has autobiographical elements. Burniston must have known in her 1920s Yorkshire childhood chaps like Simon, the self-improving dispensing chemist’s son, and Mr Dawson, the station master who directs amateur Shakespeare in his spare time. Not to mention Hilda the household servant, who is really quite a good friend to Felicity: she drops all pretence of the mistress-maid relationship when Felicity’s died-in-the-wool parents are out of earshot.Burniston the educationist has done her homework thoroughly. Her impeccably researched social history underpins many of the novel’s gentle digressions. The subplot about Felicity’s stigmatised aunt incarcerated in an asylum does not really go anywhere, but it’s a shocking insight into what “showpiece” institutions were like a century ago.

The social position in the community of Felicity’s rich father, Arthur, is telling too, as is the family attitude to Grace – the “flighty” aunt – and her shadowy past.The prose is well-honed, unpretentious and refreshingly old-fashioned, shot through with nonagenarian observation. Occasionally, the over-use of adjectives and adverbs is self-indulgent; and I suspect that, for most readers, Burniston – whose head is evidently brim-full of poetry learnt in youth and added to over seven decades – quotes too many poems at length. And too much music is painstakingly detailed, which doesn’t add much to the thrust of the novel. But how hard it must be hard to resist a bit of over-writing when you have spent your whole, long life working with words and then, at last, you arrive at the blissful blank canvas of fiction.That’s enough of minor gripes The Brass and the Velvet entertains and educates It’s moving and, in places, funny. Most of us would be pretty pleased to have written it at any age.. Busan: Better known as Pusan, South Korea’s second city and largest port is at its south-eastern tip. Japan is just three and a half hours away by hydrofoil; Seoul is four hours 20 minutes by train.