Details
Mrs Bosenna fits two categories commonly found in Q’s stories.
1. The woman of humble origins who through her own sagacity marries into wealth and prospers in the role.
2. The younger woman who marries an elderly man.
The first can be seen in Shining Ferry. Lady Killiow of Damelioc (Boconnoc) in Cornwall had been before her marriage to the second Lord Killiow a London actress called Polly Wilkins. When Lord Killiow died in 1850, she ran Damelioc through her steward John Rosewarne of Hall and on his death Peter Benny of Troy— who also appears in Hocken and Hunken. As an actress she was more than capable of acting the part as Lady Killiow. Mrs Bosenna was not an actress but the daughter, it appears, of a landless labourer.
Linnet Lewarne of Troy in Q’s last and unfinished novel Castle Dor married the elderly landlord of the Rose and Anchor. The result is less successful as she falls in love with young Amyot Trestane. The problem of the younger woman marrying the ageing man is also found in the short story The Haunted Dragoon, where Madam Noy falls for a dashing dragoon and poisons her husband, Mrs Bosenna, however, tolerates her husband, who kills himself, enabling her to marry at her own wish, although it is still more for money than love.
In Chapter IV the reader learns that Mrs Bosenna had been reared at Holsworthy in north-west Devon and had churned ‘many hundredwights of butter’ with her own hands. In other words, she had been a dairy maid, possibly on the farm of Sir Brampton Goldsworthy of Halberton Court. Mrs Bosenna had gone up in the world as Mrs Bowldler had gone down. How she had encountered Robert Bosenna is unknown, but it was probably at Holsworthy market.
On the death off Robert Bosenna, Mrs Bosenna had taken over the running of the farm, something that caused less stir at Troy than Bathsheba Everdene encountered when she took on the farm in Dorset. Widows running a farm in Cornwall were far from rare.
Q indicates that marriage to Robert Bosenna was not altogether easy, at least initially. Presumably the service took place in Holsworthy. On repairing to Rilla Farm the climbing roses greeted her, ‘an old man’s bride’, smoothing ‘some rebellion of young blood and helped to reconcile her to a lot which, for a shrewd and practical damsel, was, after all, not unenviable.’ (p. 200).
Her looks must have attracted Bosenna, but a farmer’s wife also needs to be ‘shrewd’ and ‘practical’. When conducting Caius Hocken around Rilla Farm, in Chapter III, she exhibits knowledge of animal husbandry, field drainage and the work of the dairy. This reveals her upbringing in farm-work. She was well able to run the establishment following the death of her husband. No farm manager is indicated, although there possibly was one. A good, practical intelligence is suggested, along with a degree of reading in current agricultural literature. Bosenna must have been a good farmer, leaving the establishment in a prosperous state, but she had taken over in a seamless transition.