Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  She is made of the heroic stuff that knows not what defeat means. Women’s Penny Paper on Lady Dixie

  Florence Douglas was born in Cummertrees, Dumfriesshire, the youngest daughter of the eighth Marquess of Queensberry. The family history was tragic and incorrigibly dissolute: her father committed suicide (by shotgun) as did her twin brother (by knife) in 1891. Her eldest brother was the brute who accused Oscar Wilde of being a ‘somdomite’ [sic], provoking the trials that, with the treachery of her nephew ‘Bosie’, destroyed the writer. Florence’s upbringing was disrupted at the age of nine when her widowed mother abruptly converted to Catholicism, imposing the faith on her young children and taking them off to Paris. It was an unhappy episode. Meeting her on the Continent, Bulwer-Lytton wrote a poem for the sad young girl, ‘Little Florrie Douglas’. Precocious Florrie could write her own verse, thank you very much, Lord Lytton, and published a volume of childhood effusions, under the pseudonym ‘Darling’. She went on to publish a bloody dramatic tragedy, Abel Avenged, at the age of twenty.

  In 1875, aged nineteen, she married Sir Alexander Beaumont Churchill Dixie, nicknamed ‘Beau’ for his good looks. An inveterate gambler and a heavy drinker, he was in severe financial distress within the decade. There were two sons, George Douglas and Albert Edward Wolston, godson of the Prince of Wales. As Lady Dixie, Florence, with her husband, three brothers and a friend, explored ‘the unknown wastes of Patagonia’ from 1878 to 1879. There she shot, and ate, wild animals and composed a travel book, Across Patagonia (1881). She was war correspondent for the Morning Post during the Boer conflict of 1880–81, and the only female. Among other causes she agitated for the rights of African Zulus and English women. She believed in, and designed, rational dress, hated the sexually restricting side-saddle, and was an early advocate for women’s soccer, becoming President of the British Ladies’ Football Club. It is not recorded what her position was – probably striker.

  In 1883, Dixie became the focus of sensational news coverage when it was alleged that at Windsor, where she and her husband were living, she had been the target of a dastardly Fenian murder attempt. Doubts as to the veracity of the incident were raised, questions were asked in the House, and Queen Victoria dispatched John Brown to look into the matter. Her faithful Highlander caught a chill while investigating and died. Dixie sent a wreath of African immortelles to his funeral, and insisted her kidnap tale was true. The Queen graciously responded with a Landseer print. The actual facts of the case were never ascertained.

  Dixie’s first published novel was Redeemed in Blood (1889). An absurd melodrama of high life, centred on the marital trials of Lord and Lady Wrathness, the novel has some vivid Patagonian scenes. Dixie’s other fiction includes Aniwee, or, the Warrior Queen (1890), a tale of the Patagonian Araucanian Indians. Her best-known work is Gloriana, or, the Revolution of 1900 (1890). In this bizarre fable, Gloria of Ravensdale disguises herself as a boy, Hector D’Estrange (based on Oscar Wilde), attends Eton and Oxford, and eventually gets her/himself into Parliament. The narrative ends with a visionary panorama of a regenerated London as seen from a balloon in 1999.

  In 1902, Dixie published a drama in verse on the persecution of women entitled Isola, or the Disinherited. Although she was a good shot, a horsewoman and a strong swimmer, she loathed blood sports in later life (whether it extended to boxing, as regularised by her brother’s Marquess of Queensberry’s rules is not clear). She published a tract on the subject, The Horrors of Sport (1891), but she did not mention the big game hunting which had been one of her early passions. Not a lover of the male sex, apparently, she claimed that ‘horses and dogs were her best friends’. Her fiction is unremembered, but in the wastes of Patagonia the three-star Hotel Lady Florence Dixie hospitably keeps her name alive, as do various encyclopaedias of soccer.

  FN

  Lady Florence Caroline Dixie (née Douglas)

  MRT

  Gloriana, or, the Revolution of 1900

  Biog

  ODNB (Dorothy Middleton)

  81. Olive Schreiner 1855–1920

  Ralph Iron.

  Schreiner was born in Wittebergen, Basutoland, the sixth of ten surviving children of a Methodist missionary of German origin. Her father, Gottlob Schreiner, had come to the Cape in 1837 under the auspices of the London Missionary Society. Her mother, Rebecca (née Lyndall) was English and of respectable working-class background. She was brought up, as one her biographers puts it, ‘in a context of parental, certainly maternal, severity and the brooding presence of a wrathful God’. A precocious girl who wanted above all else ‘to be clever, to be wise’, Schreiner educated herself and later claimed to have become a free-thinker at the age of twelve, after her little sister Ellie died and God did nothing about it. Her childhood was unhappy, unhealthy (she suffered from lifelong asthma) and unsettled. Gottlob was forced to move to another part of the country in 1869, following accusations of financial impropriety. In 1872 a broken engagement (and perhaps seduction) wounded Schreiner emotionally and coincided with more attacks of her chronic illness.

  In 1873 she left her parents’ home to live with a sister in Fraserburg. She had medical friends and evidently considered becoming a nurse and possibly a doctor. But her health was not up to such demanding vocations and instead, in 1874, she took up employment as a governess. Over the next seven years, working for a succession of families, she contrived, painfully, to save up the £60 she needed for her passage to England. Now a proclaimed ‘heretic’ she was alienated from her family (irreparably when, after her father’s death in 1876, her mother converted to Catholicism). While a governess Schreiner had begun to write fiction, initially the autobiographical Undine. The author came to think ill of this work and it was not published until well after her death, in 1929.

  In 1879 she began serious work on the composition of The Story of an African Farm (1883), whose heroine Lyndall’s experiences are also clearly autobiographical. The novel has surreal moments, for example, when Gregory Rose disguises himself as a female nurse to tend, in physical intimacy, the dying Lyndall, whom he loves. It ends pessimistically and enigmatically. George Meredith, her publisher’s reader, helped her revise the manuscript which was published as by the male writer ‘Ralph Iron’. The novel attracted praise, attention and confusion. African farming, many baffled rural readers must have felt, was sadly neglected. It went through three editions in its first year.

  In the two years’ interval between arriving in England and the publication of her novel, Schreiner once again considered nursing. But the success of The Story of an African Farm established her as an author and brought her into contact with Eleanor Marx, who was to be a close friend and influential fellow feminist. As a literary celebrity, Schreiner also made the acquaintance of the sexologist, Havelock Ellis, in 1884. The couple had an intimate if strained relationship in which Ellis took it on himself to psychoanalyse Schreiner. His liberated sexual doctrines were wholly at variance with her puritanism but he introduced her to the new ideas transforming English intellectual life – including Fabianism, the literary world’s favoured brand of socialism.

  At this period Schreiner received an offer of marriage from her doctor, Bryan (later Sir Bryan) Donkin and entered into a long correspondence with Karl Pearson the brilliant mathematician, and later eugenicist, at University College London. Their relationship, like others in Schreiner’s life, seems to have broken down just at that point where it might have become sexually physical. Despite the intellectual stimulus, she was always unhappy and chronically unwell in England. Nor could she capitalise on her early success as a novelist. Other than The Story of an African Farm the only literary publication to emerge from the London years was a collection of ethereal allegories, Dreams (1890).

  In 1889 Schreiner returned to South Africa. It was a period of extraordinary political ferment in the country, much of it stirred up by Cecil Rhodes. After an initial infatuation (which may have been based on a close personal relationship), Schreiner became violently disillu
sioned with the ‘Colossus’. This antipathy was heightened by the 1896 Jameson Raid, designed to take over the Transvaal republic for Britain. In the aftermath, which led to the downfall of Rhodes as Prime Minister and led the way to the Boer War, Schreiner wrote Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), a polemical allegory. Peter is an English soldier engaged in ‘pacifying’ Rhodesia for the British South Africa Charter Company. Christ appears to Peter in a vision to upbraid him for the atrocities committed by his comrades.

  In 1894 Schreiner had married a politician and ostrich farmer, Samuel Cron Cronwright, a man eight years her junior. The couple went to live in Kimberley where a daughter was born in 1895, dying almost immediately. The experience, despite the overwhelming pain, helped formulate some of the ideas which were to appear in Schreiner’s feminist polemic, Women and Labour (1911). Cronwright devoted himself to promoting Olive’s literary and political career, even adding her surname to his own. During the 1890s and early twentieth century Schreiner was influential in the struggle for women’s rights. But by the date of her return to England in 1913, she was exhausted and lonely. Her marriage had all but fallen apart. Cronwright remained farming in South Africa until 1920, when he joined her in London. But a month later she left for South Africa alone, dying there a few weeks later in her sleep. She had asked that her body be buried on a karoo at Cradock in the veldt, with the bodies of her daughter and pet dog. Cronwright did as requested.

  FN

  Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner (‘Ralph Iron’)

  MRT

  The Story of an African Farm

  Biog

  R. First and A. Scott, Olive Schreiner (1980)

  82. William Sharp 1855–1905

  William Sharp defies biography. William Sharp’s biographer

  A London-based man of letters, William Sharp was, as the world saw him, a man’s man. The publisher Arthur Waugh (Evelyn’s father) recalls that ‘With his Olympian stature, bright complexion, full head of hair, and well-kempt beard, he attracted attention at once, and took good care to retain it. His manner was a mixture of suavity and aggression … He knew all the big men.’ Among whom he too was big and manly. This epitome of manliness none the less created the novelist ‘Fiona MacLeod’ and passed her off as a real person, as different from William Sharp as boiled beef is from haggis. Fiona, the world was told, was a Hebridean maid who lived and roamed among the hills and burns of her native Iona. Miss MacLeod often promised to appear in public, but never quite did. Sharp arranged for her to have a bona fide entry in Who’s Who, where her ‘Recreations’ are listed as ‘sailing, hill-walks, listening’ – to which might be added, ‘pulling (English) legs’. Towards the end of their lives, when Sharp was feeling the pinch, there was the possibility that MacLeod might have got a Civil List pension – thus rendering her creator the first welfare cheat in English literature.

  Sharp occasionally intimated that Fiona was a cousin, or a loved one, or both. ‘She’ wrote sixteen ‘mythic novels’ with titles like Pharais: a Romance of the Isles (1894), Green Fire (1896), The Sin-Eater and Other Tales (1895). The last, incidentally, is the distant inspiration of a dire 2003 movie, starring Heath Ledger. The story’s opening paragraph will give some idea of why MacLeod’s effusions might appeal to Hollywood:

  A wet wind out of the south mazed and moaned through the sea-mist that hung over the Ross. In all the bays and creeks was a continuous weary lapping of water. There was no other sound anywhere.

  Thus was it at daybreak; it was thus at noon; thus was it now in the darkening of the day. A confused thrusting and falling of sounds through the silence betokened the hour of the setting. Curlews wailed in the mist; on the seething limpet-covered rocks the skuas and terns screamed, or uttered hoarse rasping cries. Ever and again the prolonged note of the oyster-catcher shrilled against the air, as an echo flying blindly along a blank wall of cliff. Out of weedy places, wherein the tide sobbed with long gurgling moans, came at intervals the barking of a seal.

  The ‘big men’ of the Celtic revival – W. B. Yeats, Ernest Rhys, George Meredith, ‘The Prince of Celtdom’ – were all taken in by Fiona and the barking seals. Sharp never offered any convincing explanation for his deceptions.

  As his/her biographer despairingly puts it, around him are a series of ‘vacua’ – an unresounding emptiness. The shilling facts are barely worth that sum, though MacLeod’s might be. Sharp was born in 1855, in Paisley, the son of a prosperous businessman. Holidays in the Hebrides left a lifelong mark and by adolescence, he claimed, ‘I had sailed up every loch, fjord, and inlet in the Western Highlands and Isles.’ At eighteen, he ‘took to the heather’, joining a band of gypsies for three months. Thereafter, the prison door clanged shut. First Glasgow University, which he dropped out of, then a lawyer’s office. He was released by being transported to Australia for a year, ostensibly for his lungs. It was also the standard way of dealing with offspring who had got a servant pregnant, or done some other embarrassing thing.

  He returned, aged twenty-three, to work in a London bank, before becoming a full-time man of letters. He wrote poetry, which was politely admired, and a moderately successful sensation novel. In 1884, he married his first cousin, though there would be no children – and, it is delicately hypothesised, there may have been no sex to produce one. ‘Don’t despise me,’ he once said, ‘when I say that in some things I am more a woman than a man.’ In 1889, Sharp (under his own name) wrote his best work of fiction, The Children of Tomorrow. An ‘art novel’, it climaxes with the sculptor hero and his lover struck by a single bolt of lightning, their blasted bodies remaining ‘so tightly knit that they seemed as one’. Symbolic, perhaps – fused and intergendered.

  It was in 1891 that he conceived Fiona MacLeod, coinciding with a trip to Italy and his falling in love with the beautiful Edith Wingate Rinder whom he, and the less impressed Mrs Sharp, met on holiday. Rinder was one of the noli me tangere beauties who wafted, breaking hearts on the way, through the Celtic literary coterie. She would be Sharp’s Maud Gonne. His wife Elizabeth seems to have borne up under these amorous complications better than him. He came to the brink of nervous breakdown in1897, and died in Sicily in 1905, only fifty years old – psychically exhausted, one assumes, from the effort of bottling two selves in one frame.

  FN

  William Sharp (‘Fiona MacLeod’)

  MRT

  (WS) The Children of Tomorrow; (FM) Pharais.

  Biog

  F. Alaya, William Sharp – ‘Fiona MacLeod’, 1855–1905 (1970)

  83. L. Frank Baum 1856–1919

  Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile. Baum’s argument in favour of the fairy story

  Lyman Frank Baum was born in New York State, one of nine children of a barrel-maker, enriched in the 1860s by the Pennsylvania oil business – a tin-man of a kind. The Baum family circumstances were comfortable, verging on splendid. Young Frank, timid by nature and afflicted with a chronically weak heart, was prohibited boyish rowdiness and physical activity and would never enjoy robust health. His sheltered upbringing may explain the otherwise odd fact that the central figure in his most famous story is ‘Dorothy’ not ‘Don’, ‘Dick’, or ‘Dave’. On the subject of names, he disliked ‘Lyman’ and went by ‘Frank’ through life. In his early years he loved fairy stories and developed a passion, with the rest of America in the 1870s, for Dickens whose ‘Christmas Books’ – notably that about Ebenezer Scrooge’s imaginary voyages – made a manifest impression. He was less taken with the German gothic school (the Grimms’ tales, specifically), which contained ‘horrors’. Easily frightened himself, he believed that children should not be terrified with their bedtime entertainment.

  Worried that their son was becoming a cissy, his parents, wrong-headedly, sent him off to a military school. This brought on a heart attack which nearly killed him, and he was educated at home thereafter. His first productions as an author were on a printing press his father bought him
. By the age of seventeen he was editing, and producing, his own magazine for fellow philatelists: stamp-collecting was one of his passions. The rearing of fancy chickens, oddly, was another. His favoured breed was the ‘Hamburg’. Baum’s first book, published in 1886, was entitled: A Book of Hamburgs: A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs.

  A third passion was the stage. Benjamin Baum, his father, was an oil-man, with an interest in theatres in New York and Pennsylvania. Frank’s first literary efforts were musical plays which he wrote, directed and starred in. It was on tour that Baum met his future wife, Maud Gage. She was a college student at Cornell when he met her, an ardent feminist, beautiful and strong-minded. The couple married in 1882. The union was happy, although Baum was generally believed to be henpecked. After his marriage he ran the family firm, despite suffering another string of heart attacks. It was a troubled few years. Trade depression and embezzlement had brought the business to the verge of bankruptcy. His father now dead, Frank sold off the Castorine oil company and went west to Dakota where, for a year or two, he ran a general store. In 1890, in another spell of hard times, that business collapsed as well.

  Baum tried journalism for a year or two. His provincial newspaper, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, was notable for the virulence of its editorials (some written by Baum), arguing for the extermination of the local Sioux Indians – something that has embarrassed his admirers. (In 2006, his descendants issued a formal apology to Native Americans.) Again Baum went bankrupt, and in 1893 the family moved on to Chicago where Frank scraped a living as a travelling salesman, selling crockery. It was his mother-in-law – like her daughter a fervent feminist – who, hearing him tell bedtime stories, advised him to put them into print and make some real money. His first Mother Goose book for children came out in 1897. This coincided with another collapse in his health – he could no longer handle the arduous salesman’s life. Thereafter, writing for the children’s market was his principal activity. To this end he teamed up with the illustrator, William W. Denslow. After a successful run with the ‘Goose’ tales, they collaborated on the even more successful The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900.