The Master of Mrs. Chilvers

The Master of Mrs Chilvers is a play by Jerome K. Jerome, first performed in 1911 and published the same year. It was one of his later theatrical efforts and is one of the few plays of his that has stayed in print, partly because the subject he chose was so directly topical and partly because the writing is among his sharpest.

The play is a political comedy. Geoffrey Chilvers is a young Liberal Member of Parliament with progressive views on most issues. His wife Annys is also a Liberal in her own right and is the secretary of a suffrage society. When Geoffrey’s constituency falls vacant and a by election is called, Annys announces that she will stand against her husband as a candidate. The party agents are appalled. Geoffrey is appalled. His mother is appalled. Annys insists that her right to stand is identical to his and that her platform of women’s suffrage is more important to her than the marriage’s convenience.

The play turns the situation into a serious comedy of manners about gender and politics. There are scenes of campaign management where the women’s organisations are out maneuvering the regular party machine. There are scenes between Geoffrey and Annys in private where Jerome lets the marriage itself become the subject and where the affection between them is real even as the political disagreement is also real. The resolution is not the easy one a more conventional playwright would have used.

The play sits in interesting company. It came out three years before the First World War, at the height of the suffragette campaign in Britain, and Jerome was openly sympathetic to women’s suffrage. The Master of Mrs Chilvers is one of the few English plays of the period that handles the subject as a serious comedy rather than as a melodrama or a propaganda piece. It runs about a hundred and fifty pages in the published form and reads well even without staging. It pairs naturally with Bernard Shaw’s plays of the period, particularly Press Cuttings and Mrs Warren’s Profession, which handle related political subjects in a more abrasive key.