FN
Silas Weir Mitchell
MRT
Hugh Wynne
Biog
Richard D. Walter, Weir Mitchell, M.D., Neurologist: A Biography (1970)
96. Amanda Ros 1860–1939
The Authoress.
On 26 September 2006, one of the smallest literary festivals ever organised was held in the John Hewitt pub, Belfast. Small attendance was in order. The festival’s mission was to celebrate ‘The World’s Worst Novelist’. Amanda Ros has always had a loyal band of what, in other circumstances, might be called ‘admirers’. Anna Margaret McKittrick was born in County Down. ‘By birth,’ she later proclaimed, ‘I am an Irishwoman, though a dash of German blood piebalds my veins.’ A clever girl, Miss McKittrick trained as a schoolteacher, and, aged seventeen, married Andrew Ross, stationmaster at Larne Harbour. For authorial purposes she later knocked an ‘s’ off her married name and borrowed ‘Amanda’ from the gothic fiction she loved.
Ros’s novels and verse were vanity-published; the first of them with a donation from her husband, on their tenth wedding anniversary. Her vanity, it must be said, was more than adequate to her talent. The Ros oeuvre comprises the novels Irene Iddesleigh (1897); Delina Delaney (1898); Donald Dudley (1900); and Helen Huddleson (unfinished at the time of her death, in 1936; as was the similarly promising The Lusty Lawyer). There were also two volumes of verse: Poems of Puncture (1912) and Fumes of Formation (1933). In later life, ensconced in a house she called ‘Iddesleigh’, she was widowed and well enough propertied from small inheritances to concentrate on her writing.
Though Amanda Ros was generally beneath reviewers’ notice, the humorist Barry Pain picked up Irene Iddesleigh and was humorous at the author’s expense. Amanda struck back by describing the London literateur as a ‘cancerous irritant wart’. She composed a celebratory poem on his death in 1928, rejoicing that there was one less pain in her life. The authoress, as she always termed herself, had the last laugh.
A club of men of letters, including such luminaries of the London literary world as Lord Beveridge, Desmond MacCarthy, and the Punch-man, F. Anstey, met regularly to compete with the most ludicrous passages from her work they could come up with. In Oxford, the ‘Inklings’ – donnish fellows in every sense, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams – would meet in their favourite pub, the ‘Bird and Baby’ in the dark days of the 1940s, for readings from the Ros Gesamtwerk. The victor ludorum was judged to be he who could read longest while keeping the straightest face. Aldous Huxley also ran a Ros-club, which met to savour the lady’s stylistic flights and felicities. The author of Brave New World was, the deluded lady declared, ‘the only critic who understands my writing.’ Too true, if she but knew it.
Her most devoted reader, she fondly believed, was King George V, who had, she claimed, no less than twenty-five copies of her work in his library. The reverse fandom has continued, cultishly, to the present day. A contemporary website dedicated to the search for the world’s worst writers (www.nickpage.co.uk/worstweb) confidently raises Ros’s writing arm, winner and still champion, well ahead of her only serious rival, the laureate of cheese, James McIntyre (1827–1906). McIntyre, a Canadian dairy farmer, unsurprisingly, was the author of such works as ‘Ode on the Mammoth Cheese’. It opens: ‘We have seen thee, queen of cheese, / Lying quietly at your ease,’ and gets cheesily worse. But not worse enough to rival Ros’s prose sublimities.
Nick Page, host to the above website, hazards that Ros’s Delina Delaney ‘begins with possibly the most baffling opening sentence in any literature’:
Have you ever visited that portion of Erin’s plot that offers its sympathetic soil for the minute survey and scrutinous examination of those in political power, whose decision has wisely been the means before now of converting the stern and prejudiced, and reaching the hand of slight aid to share its strength in augmenting its agricultural richness?
The authoress made a late-life marriage in 1922 after the death of Andy Ross in 1917, and died Mrs Thomas Rodgers.
FN
Amanda Ros (Anna Margaret Ross; née McKittrick; second married name Rodgers)
MRT
Irene Iddesleigh
Biog
J. Loudan, O rare Amanda (1954)
97. Owen Wister 1860–1938
The great playground of young men. Wister on the West
It is ironic that so many pioneer writers of Westerners were Easterners. Jack Schaefer, author of Shane, wrote what is considered by many to be the best example of the genre ever, without having gone any further west than Ohio. Owen Wister was born and bred in Pennsylvania, where his father was a wealthy physician. The Wisters were upper-class Philadelphians and well connected. Owen’s mother was a member of the Kemble acting dynasty. He was educated in the best schools in America and Europe before going on to Harvard where he formed the most important friendship in his life, with Theodore Roosevelt. Like the future president, Wister had a mystical reverence for American wilderness.
After shining at university, Wister intended to devote himself to musical composition and studied in European conservatories. His ambitions were frustrated, however, partly by lack of parental support. He returned, disconsolately, to America where he worked for a while in the law. But his health was also failing. On the advice of S. Weir Mitchell (the physician-novelist later demonised by Charlotte Perkins Gilman), he went west. Mitchell’s advice worked better than for the author of ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’. Wyoming was both therapeutic and inspirational.
A physically revived Wister returned to Harvard and took a degree in law, setting up practice in Philadelphia in 1888. But the West called him, irresistibly. After several trips he began producing cowboy romances, which proved popular in magazine form and were collected in volumes with brand-name titles such as Red Men and White (1896). The work of Wister’s which had the longest lasting impact, and effectively reformed the dime-novel Western into something resembling a respectable genre was The Virginian (1902). The work sold powerfully and the play adapted from it, starring Dustin Farnum, ran for ten years. The Virginian was further popularised by the six movie versions, notably the 1929 version starring Gary Cooper.
It is a polite novel, which endorses politesse. The most famous words in novel, play and film – ‘when you call me that, SMILE’ – are rendered forever mysterious by the fact that in none of them is the verbal insult specified. In deference to his patron, Theodore Roosevelt, Wister further toned down a description of a horse sadistically having its eye gouged out. The episode appeared in the magazine version but not in the book version – which is dedicated to Roosevelt, with the note: ‘some of these pages you have seen, some you have praised, one stands new-written because you blamed it’. ‘Teddy’ represented Wister’s ideal politician. For both of them the West (‘this great playground of young men’) was a necessary testing ground for the American race, where those fittest to survive and carry American civilisation forward would ‘select’ themselves by struggle. The unfit would not survive. Indians (Native Americans) fell into the second category.
As is often noted, Wister’s conception of the cow-puncher is a reincarnation of the medieval ‘very parfit’ knight, with the attendant code of chivalry and honour. The cowboy was ‘the last romantic figure upon our soil’, Wister claimed. The setting is the plains of Wyoming and the foothills of the Tetons, in the period 1874–90. Even at the time Wister was writing, the pristine West was, as he lamented, ‘a vanished world. No journeys, save those which memory can take, will bring you to it now … Time has flowed faster than my ink.’
The narrator (like the Virginian, unnamed, but evidently Wister himself) comes from New York to Medicine Bow in Wyoming, by train; he is visiting the ranch of a friend, Judge Henry. He is met at the station by the laconic cow-puncher, the ‘Virginian’, who will conduct him to their destination. The men have various adventures in town before leaving, including the gambling scene, which features the legendary ‘smile’ instru
ction. The narrator is impressed by the physical grace and homespun eloquence of his guide, who later becomes his mentor during his ‘tenderfoot’ stage of apprenticeship into the ways of the Wild West. Insofar as the random episodes have a plot, they revolve around the Virginian’s growing love for the easterner schoolmarm, Molly Wood, whose heart he wins when he rescues her from drowning. She in turn educates him, giving him good books to read – Hawthorne, George Eliot (‘she talks too much’ is his not inapt comment) and above all, Walter Scott, who confirms the Virginian in his sense of what honour is.
That honour is tested in the last scene of the novel when he has to choose between Molly and duty. He has been called out by a bad man. It is the eve of his wedding and the peace-loving Molly tells him if he loves her, he will turn his back and not fight. But the Virginian has to do what he has to do. He goes out and shoots his man. ‘New England conscience’ – in the form of Molly’s anxiety – ‘capitulates to love’.
Wister himself had capitulated in 1898, marrying a cousin, Mary Channing. He wrote only one other novel of any interest after The Virginian – My Lady Baltimore (1906), which was not a Western. His later years seem to have been generally frustrated. He was rabidly patriotic in the First World War. Nothing he wrote had anything like the effect of The Virginian, whose narrative is still plundered, time after time, by Hollywood.
FN
Owen Wister
MRT
The Virginian
Biog
D. Payne, Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East (1985)
98. Amy Levy 1861–1889
A Jewish Jane Austen. Lisa Allardice
Levy was born at Clapham into a cultured and orthodox Jewish family, generally relaxed on matters of religion, who actively encouraged their daughter’s precocious literary talents. Her father, Lewis Levy, was a stockbroker. She was educated, from fifteen, at school in Brighton and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she was the first Jewish woman to matriculate. This pioneer status was, apparently, stressful and she left after her first year, without a degree.
Levy had been publishing verse since her thirteenth year. At university in 1881 her first volume of poetry came out under the distinguished imprint of Grant Richards. Entitled Xantippe and Other Verse, after Socrates’ fabled shrew of a wife, the work proclaimed the independence of spirit which had been latently evident, even in childhood. The style is markedly Browningesque – the intellectuals’ favourite poet at the time. In the title poem, Xantippe ends her melancholy monologue with what looks like imminent defenestration – following her suicidal husband.
The details of Levy’s subsequent life are tantalisingly mysterious. She may have taught, or even have worked in a factory from idealistic motives. She was a close friend of novelists Olive Schreiner and Clementina Black; and of socialists such as Eleanor Marx. There was an informal coterie of these progressive women formed around the British Museum Reading Room, in Bloomsbury and in the newly formed University Club for Ladies. She is plausibly claimed by modern admirers, and close readers of her verse, as having been lesbian. In 1884 she published another volume of poetry with the typically self-deprecating title A Minor Poet and Other Verse. The minor poet of the title poem commits suicide with the final words – ‘Too heavy is the load. I fling it down.’
In 1886, she is known to have travelled to Italy, where she met the poet, feminist and novelist, Vernon Lee. Her first published novel, Reuben Sachs (1888) is the story of a sexually unscrupulous would-be politician, and the woman Judith he sacrifices. Its depiction of Jewish life in London as grossly materialistic caused a furore and was widely taken as a race libel, as had been Julia Frankau’s similarly anti-Semitic Dr Phillips (1887). In an earlier essay, in the Jewish Chronicle in 1886 on ‘The Jew in Literature’, Levy had made crystal clear that she wished to deromanticise the image projected by philo-Zionist works such as Daniel Deronda.
Her subsequent novel, Miss Meredith (1889) was less tendentious. It is the story in autobiographical form of an English governess, Elsie Meredith, who falls in love with the son of the Italian household, where she is employed as an ‘upper servant’. Its lightness of tone suggests it may have been written some time before its actual publication. Levy also wrote the shorter fiction The Romance of a Shop (1888), in which four Lorimer sisters (based on Clementina Black and her sisters) set up their photography business in Baker Street.
Prey to depression, Levy committed suicide in her parents’ London home, in an upstairs room, by suffocating herself with charcoal fumes, having just corrected her fifth and final volume of poems for press and dedicated it to Clementina Black. Oscar Wilde was an admirer and published Levy in his magazine Woman’s World, and wrote a gracious obituary for her. She was, he said, ‘a girl who has a touch of genius’. Aged twenty-seven at the time of her death, ‘girl’ is not – as it might otherwise have been – offensive. And recent advocates have detected more than a ‘touch’ of genius in her work. She is recorded as the first Jewish woman to be cremated in England. Her family burned her private papers, leaving the details of her life as forever inscrutable as her corporeal ashes.
FN
Amy Judith Levy
MRT
Reuben Sachs
Biog
L. H. Beckman, Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters (2000)
99. Florence L. Barclay 1862–1921
All work was ‘spiritual work’ to my mother. Florence Barclay’s daughter
Florence Charlesworth was born and spent her early years in a country rectory at Limpsfield, Surrey, one of a number of daughters of a well-off clergyman. Florence’s family nickname – tender but double-edged – was ‘Benny’, because her parents ‘so wanted a son’, a Benjamin. It was a writing family. Her aunt, Maria Louisa Charles-worth, published pious tales for the young, notably the perennially popular Ministering Children (1854). A semi-invalid, Miss Charlesworth lived with her brother Samuel’s family, and was a permanent fixture in Florence’s domestic circle.
A man of a ‘reserved, undemonstrative nature’, who had married late in life, the Revd Charlesworth was excessively high-minded. When Florence was seven, he gave up his comfortable living in Surrey to take up one in Limehouse, the most deprived area in the East End of London (where, one may recall, Wilde’s Dorian Gray goes for his illicit pleasures of the night).
Precocious, even by Victorian standards, ‘Benny’ taught herself to read by the age of three. The New Testament was among the first things she read. She later underwent a number of religious crises in childhood. Governess-educated, she gave evidence of a remarkable singing voice from her earliest years and was performing publicly at the age of twelve, assured that she would go to the Royal Academy of Music. But it was not to be. ‘Florrie’ (as Benny now was) married the Revd Charles W. Barclay in 1881; a family friend, he had singled her out as his future wife, when she was just eleven. The couple married in her father’s Limehouse church, in front of a crowd of 2,500 loyal parishioners. Florence had always yearned to visit the Holy Land, and tread where ‘He’ had trod. Before returning to his ministry, her husband indulged his young bride with a four-month wedding trip to Palestine. It was a formative experience in her adult life.
Already pregnant (she would have five children in as many years, eight in all), Florence returned to Hertfordshire to assume the duties of an Anglican clergyman’s wife. Her husband was rich – there was a second home in the Isle of Wight and family holidays in Switzerland – but the Revd Barclay was also clerically dutiful to a self-martyrising degree, and imposed the same stern discipline on his wife. Florence (named after the heroine of the Crimea) was willing, and in the intervals that child-bearing allowed, conducted Bible classes, undertook district visiting and trained the choir. But it was too much and in 1891 she suffered a breakdown, brought on by peritonitis, and was an invalid for a year. In this unwonted (and wholly unwanted) leisure she began writing fiction under the male pseudonym ‘Brandon Roy’. In 1905 she was again stricken by illnes
s – her heart being strained by an energetic bicycle ride to Cromer (she was a staunch believer in physical exercise for women and the ‘Bloomerism’ rational dress associated with it). She was confined to bed for nine months and it was during this weary time that she wrote The Rosary, although the work was held back for three years, until 1909.
Florence was fascinated, insofar as an orthodox country parson’s wife decently could be, by telepathy and believed, like Christ, that she could perform miracles. She was discreet about her powers, but it seeps, thematically, into The Rosary – which manifestly contains other elements of Barclay’s own life. The narrative opens in the full glory of a summer afternoon at an English country house, seat of the Duchess of Meldrum. She has a niece, Jane Champion, who is twenty-nine, and who has, all her life ‘filled second place very contentedly’. Jane is first encountered by the reader playing a bracing round of golf. At the same weekend party is a young aristocrat, Garth Dalmain (‘Dal’), an atheist. At his country seat (there is a lot of country sitting), Castle Gleneesh, he overhears Jane singing a song, ‘The Rosary’, whose theme is that life should be a string of devotional beads, ‘each hour a pearl, each pearl a prayer’. On the spot Dal falls in love with Jane and is converted to Christianity. When Jane refuses his offer of marriage he rushes off. She regrets her harshness (‘Oh my God, send him back!’) and the scene shifts to Egypt. What should she do? Jane asks the Sphinx. She returns to Castle Gleneesh, only to find that Dal has been blinded in a shooting accident. All ends well, with (tuneful) marriage in a little Episcopal chapel in the hills.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 37
