BROOKE, Lady Sylvia [née BRETT], SYLVIA OF SARAWAK, second Ranee of Sarawak. Persecuted Parents … A Play about everybody else's Children, every Mother will tell every other Mother to go and SEE.

Two of Three Surviving Plays by the Ranee of Sarawak

BROOKE, Sylvia Leonora, Lady, 2nd Ranee of Sarawak. Persecuted Parents … A Play About Everybody Else’s Children, Every Mother Will Tell Every Other Mother to Go and See. Kuching, Sarawak: W.J. Chater, Acting Government Printer, for the Government Printing Office . 1935.

[with :]

BROOKE, Sylvia Leonora, Lady, 2nd Ranee of Sarawak. The Merry Matrons. Kuching, Sarawak: Government Printing Office . 1935.

Two volumes, 4to. Publisher’s tan morocco-backed boards with dark blue cloth sides, upper boards lettered directly in gilt within blind-embossed cartouches; old paper reinforcement to spines of both vols. Persecuted Parents : pp. [4], 77, [1 (blank)]; Merry Matrons : ff. [2], 11, [1 (blank)], text to rectos only; pinhole wormholes to upper corner of Persecuted Parents with small wormtrack to rear pastedown and upper corners of last few ff. (not touching text); Merry Matrons with small wormtrack to upper corner of front pastedown and a few marginal pinhole wormholes elsewhere in the text; Persecuted Parents : front flyleaf inscribed ‘Yours Sincerely | Sylvia of Sarawak | 1936’, ‘My Pe…o | with much love […] xx’, and ‘To my darling Hubby. | from his loving Wife – Elizabeth Brooke’; Merry Matrons : title-page inscribed ‘Yours Sincerely | Sylvia of Sarawak’, with mounted silver gelatine photo of a stage scene tipped in facing title.

Extremely rare sole editions of two of the three published works for the stage by Sylvia of Sarawak – a ‘passionate and principled defender of the rights of the many occupied, displaced and marginalised peoples in the British Empire’ (Zellen) – inscribed by the author and printed and performed in the Malaysian state of Sarawak in present-day Borneo.

Sylvia Brooke ( née Brett, 1885–1971) was consort to Sir Charles Vyner de Windt Brooke, the third and last of the White Rajahs of Sarawak, the British family who ruled the state from 1841 to 1946. She had studied under George Bernard Shaw and J.M. Barrie and ‘published early, and often, amassing an impressive publications list by any measure in the genres of novel, short story, stage play, film treatment, and essay throughout her life.

‘She was an impassioned voice in defense of those marginalised from society, from London’s impoverished working class to the many disenfranchised natives and minorities of the British Empire […] This relative paucity in numbers of copies of her works available in libraries around the world, particularly her older works, reflects less the literary and historic value of her work, and more her gradual marginalisation from history due to efforts (such as [Philip] Eade’s) to emphasise her outrageousness and/or eccentricity as Ranee, while de-emphasising her many contributions as a writer. Indeed, getting to know Lady Sylvia from her written works, one encounters a passionate and principled defender of the rights of the many occupied, displaced and marginalised peoples in the British Empire, and a noteworthy author of the colonial world who had a front-row seat to colonial administration’ (Zellen).

Persecuted Parents acerbically dissects double standards of family life and motherhood, set in an upper-class household supported by a mostly absent father, a top surgeon. Lady Balfour was played by Sylvia, the mother of three daughters, the eldest considered a spinster. The two younger, spoilt ones were played by Sylvia’s daughters, the RADA-educated singer and actress Dayang Elizabeth ‘Didi’ Brooke (later Vidmer), previous owner of this copy; and Dayang Nancy Valerie (known for her role in the 1936 film The Charge of the Light Brigade ).

The mother idolises her absent husband as a lover, and the youngest daughter is full of a sense of entitlement (‘Hurrah […] I’m the first. I always adore being first, don’t you […] it makes you feel so superior’, p. 13). One can imagine the electrifying atmosphere in the Sarawak Club on the evening of February 23, 1935, when the Ranee and the two princes are washing dirty linen about hypocrisy and double standards of upper class family life, and scrutinise the role of women in society, in front of an audience of white Colonials. This copy has been affectionately inscribed by Elizabeth to her first husband, British jazz musician Harry Roy (m. 6 August 1935, divorced 1947), and is also signed by Sylvia of Sarawak. Loosely inserted is a finely printed folding flyer announcing the staging of the play at the Sarawak Club and the playbill, which states that an autographed, limited first edition of the play was to be sold during the performance for $2.50.

Persecuted Parents is here offered with Brooke’s stage play The Merry Matrons , a rare survival of a light entertainment performed on Christmas Eve, 1935, inscribed by the author to the title-page and with an original, mounted silver gelatine photo of a stage scene tipped in opposite the title-page. Brooke’s daughter, Dayang Valerie, appears on the cast list. Loosely inserted is a six-page advertisement for the full programme of A Christmas Stocking , the variety programme to be performed by the Kuching Amateur Dramatic Society at the Sarawak Club, of which Merry Matrons was the concluding piece of the evening, following Half-an-Hour by J.M. Barrie, two further plays, and musical entertainment. This play is set in ‘any Club House anywhere in the Far East’, and is described as ‘a Comedy of 1940 when Young Men May Be Scarce’ (p. 10). It is a short farce of Colonial women, old and young, eagerly expecting the arrival of a young cadet to be stationed in the town. Disappointment all around when he appears with his wife and two children.

The two plays offered here are the only plays to be written and performed by Sylvia in Sarawak, and the last plays she wrote. They are of utmost rarity and no copy has ever appeared on the market, as far as we could trace. Her other stage play, also very rare, was The Heels of Pleasure (1932).

Provenance : Elizabeth Brooke Vidmer (1913–2002), Sylvia’s daughter, who performed in Persecuted Parents, with her gift inscription to front flyleaf; thence by descent.

Persecuted Parents: no copies on OCLC or Library Hub; Zellen has traced copies at the archives of Rhodes House, Oxford and the State Library of Sarawak. Merry Matrons: OCLC and Library Hub find a single copy, at the British Library.

See Zellen, ‘The “Forgotten Hemingway” of Sarawak’s Literary Borderlands: Rediscovering the Prolific Literary Oeuvre of Ranee Sylvia Brooke, in Sarawak Museum Journal ( 2018 ).

SKU: 2120220