“Ross Poldark” by Winston Graham (post 3): Demelza is described as having a split personality, but it seems to disappear

Demelza is the girl that Ross Poldark first meets when she is thirteen. He takes her into his household as a maid and thereby rescues her from abuse by her father. Later, when she is seventeen and he is twenty-seven, they marry. And the title of the second novel in the Poldark series will be Demelza.

Winston Graham said it was when writing Ross Poldark, and especially when writing Demelza, that he felt he had become a real novelist:

“These people [the characters] had come alive and clamoured for attention…It was a remarkable experience…In writing Demelza I knew myself with conviction to be a real novelist. What I was writing was not a planned thing, it was organic, with the characters working out their own destiny” (1, pp. 83-84).

And since Demelza seems to be the character that most represented to Graham what it meant to be a real novelist, it is noteworthy that he gives her both the traumatic childhood and the puzzling changes in behavior that are typical of a person with multiple personality.

“Often he [Ross Poldark] wished he could separate the two Demelzas…There was a matter-of-fact, daytime Demelza…But the second was still a stranger…Two not-quite-distinct persons, the stranger and the friend…He wished he could separate the two. He felt he would be happier if he could separate them entirely. But as the weeks passed it seemed that the reverse of what he wanted was taking place. The two entities were becoming less distinct. It was not until the first week of August that a fusion of the two occurred” (2, pp. 290-291).

As I have said in many past posts, it is usual in undiagnosed multiple personality for the alternate personalities to be hidden and incognito. Thus, what Poldark calls a fusion of personalities may only be a reversion to their usual camouflage and secrecy.

1. Winston Graham. Memoirs of a Private Man. London, Macmillan, 2003.

2. Winston Graham. Poldark: Ross Poldark [1945]. Naperville Illinois, Sourcebooks Landmark, 2009/2015.