25 June 2026

Back to the Gypsy That She Was


The Baronet's Bride; Or, A Woman's Vengeance
May Agnes Fleming
Chicago: Donahue, n.d.
250 pages

Not to suggest that he didn't deserve it, but has there ever been a more tortured soul in all of Canadian literature than Sir Jasper Kingswood?  The first words of this novel – "And there is danger of death – for mother and child?" – are his. The mother is wife Olivia, who is struggling greatly to give birth. Doctor Godroy is sympathetic, but is "sorry to say...." Sir Jasper calls to a servant: "Ride to the village – ride for your life!... fetch the Reverend Cyrus Green here at once."

The baronet is certain his wife is going to die. I was certain his wife would die. Yet Lady Olivia survives as does the newborn, the future baronet.

Sir Jasper receives the blessed news in his library, but the joy is short-lived. He is soon arrested by the sight of a man in the swirling snow standing outside looking in one of the room's many windows. With heart warmed by a miraculous birth, he bids the mysterious figure take shelter in the Kingswood family seat.

An old man, yet tall and upright, wearing a trailing cloak of dull black, long gray hair flowing over the shoulders, and tight to the scalp a skull-cap of black velvet. A patriarchal beard, abundant and silver- white, streamed down his breast, and out of a dull, white face, seamed and wrinkled, looked a pair of eyes piercing and black.

Identifying himself as Achmet the Astrologer, the visitor informs the baronet that he has come to "look into the future of your newborn son."

To prove his otherworldly abilities, Achmet takes Sir Jasper's hand. The baronet's palm tells of a troubled childhood in which the early deaths of his parents figure. Brief mentions of Rugby and Cambridge follow, after which Achmet describes in great detail a grand tour of the continent that followed Sir Jasper's studies:
“It is in Spain – glowing, gorgeous Spain – and she is one of its loveliest children. The oranges and pomegranates scent the burning air, the vineyards glow in the tropic sun, and golden summer forever reigns. But the glowing southern sun is not more brilliant than the Spanish gypsy’s flashing black eyes, nor the pomegranate blossoms half so ripe and red as her cheeks. She is Zenith, the Zingara, and you love her!”
   “In the fiend’s name!” Sir Jasper Kingsland cried, “what jugglery is this?”
After looking up the definition of "jugglery" in my OED, I couldn't help by agree.

Achmet continues:
She is beautiful as the angels above, and as innocent, and she loves you with a mad abandon that is worse than idolatry – as only women ever love. And you? You are grand and noble, a milor Inglese, and you take her love – her crazy worship – as a demi-god might, with uplifted grace, as your birth right; and she is your pretty toy of an hour. And then, careless and happy, you are gone.
The baronet is spooked: “No living mortal knows what you have told me this night!” Though tempted to toss the old man out into the the snow, Sir Jasper simply must know what is to befall his newborn heir. And so he leads the visitor up sweeping staircases to the battlements atop Kingswood Manor, leaving the astrologer alone to study the stars. Achmet descends in the approaching dawn, handing over the horoscope of Sir Jasper's infant son.

It was all an act.

Once out of sight, aged Achmet becomes spry, striding toward a hovel on desolate Hunsden's Heath where he is welcomed by the "dark face lighted up into the splendor of absolute beauty" of a woman named Zara. The astrologer Achmet is in reality her husband Pietro. Of more importance to the plot, he is Zenith's son-in-law. Zara is the result of that hour of pleasure some two decades earlier.

Meanwhile, back at the manor, Sir Jasper lies unconscious on the library floor clutching Achmed's horoscope. That paper – astrological calculations on one side, French script on the other – will haunt Sir Jasper throughout his remaining twelve years.

In what is the first of the novel's five – five – deathbed scenes, Sir Jasper Kingswood confesses to "one hour of mad, brief bliss" with Zenith. In doing so, he acknowledges that the woman he denied knowing in his own church – on the occasion of his son's christening – not only saved his life, but had been his lover. He also acknowledges that Zara, whom he has seen only once – again, on the occasion of his son's christening – is in fact his daughter. 

That's a lot for Lady Olivia to take in, but I'd argue that it is even more for his twelve-year-old heir Everard.

This is not Sir Jasper's story – he dies not one-fifth of the way into the novel – rather the results of the seed he has sown. The Baronet's Bride; Or, A Woman's Vengeance concerns two women, the first being Harriet Hunsden, a sporty young thing who looks every bit as lovely and at home in a ball gown as she does her fox hunting garb. Lady Louise, sister of Lord Carteret, likens her to Diana Vernon in Sir Walter Scott's Rob Roy.

Rob Roy
Sir Walter Scott
Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1893
Lady Kingwood desires Lady Louise as a daughter-in-law. At twenty-two, Everard (now Sir Everard), is so taken by Lady Louise's beauty, charm, poise, and intelligence that he comes within a minute of proposing marriage. Lord Carteret's sister is expecting it, I was expecting it, but just as the words are about to leave his lips the nearly-betrothed are intruded upon by jealous rival George Grosvenor. This is just as well, as seventeen-year-old Harriet Hunsden, whom Everard has only just met, is waiting in the wings. The baronet is so smitten by "Harrie" that at their second meeting he proposes to her instead. 

Harriet Hunsden is The Baronet's Bride. The woman of the alternate title, A Woman's Vengeance, is not Zenith, rather her daughter's daughter, known affectionately as "Sunbeam." She'll later appear onstage as the enchanting "La Sylphine." As "Sybilla Silver," she saves the life Sir Everard by shooting an assailant. She could've just as well killed the baronet, but that would not have been enough. She must fullfil the prophesy left by her father Pietro two decades earlier: Sir Everard Kingswood will be convicted of murder and die by hanging, bringing disgrace upon the family.

I've spoiled little in that last sentence. The faux horoscope left by Achmet the Astrologer, known only by Sir Jasper and Lady Olivia, is kept secret for pretty much the entire novel. But that is of little consequence, the reader knows that A Woman's Vengeance involves nothing so simple as murder.

The Baronet's Bride; Or, A Woman's Vengeance is typical of May Agnes Fleming novels in that female characters are the strongest. Lady Kingswood not only survives giving birth to her husband's heir, but but guides his young life. Such is her influence that young Sir Everard is perfectly happy to propose to Lady Louise. Though just seventeen years of age, I might consider Harriet, later Lady Harriet, the most remarkable of the author's women were it not for the woman who has no name: Sunbeam, La Sylphine, Sybilla Silver... 

Sins of the father visited upon the children and all that, but the women rule.

Bloomer:

"I do admire a spirited lady rider, and I do think a pretty girl never looks half so pretty as when well mounted."

Object: An attractive yet cheap hardcover, the last eight pages are devoted to adverts for other Donohue books. I found the one devoted to G. Harvey Ralphson's Boy Scout Series to be the most interesting, not only because only because Ralphson didn't exist, but for its nods to American imperialism. Of lesser interest, but only slightly, is the inclusion of of Black Rock by our own Ralph Connor in Donohue's Choice Fiction Library. 


Access: The Baronet’s Bride was first published from 3 October 1868 and 26 December 1868 in Philadelphia Saturday Night. It first
appeared as a book published that same year by Donohue. Several more Donohue editions followed. It was first published in the UK as Heir of Kingsland Court; Or, The Baronet’s Bride (London: Henderson, 1887). In 1891, New York publisher George Munro included the novel in paperback as volume #41 in his Library of American Author's series. Nine years later, Street and Smith followed with its own paperback edition. My guess is that the novel last saw print in 1910 in a volume shared by Who Wins? published by the New York Book Co.

Ignoring all print on demand vultures, there are just three copies of the novel listed for sale online. At US$18.50, a 1909 New York Book Co edition – this one without Who Wins? – is the least expensive. It's on offer from a Yankee bookseller. A Nova Scotia bookseller offers a Donohue edition with pictorial cover at US$25.00.


A second Yankee bookseller has listed a third Donohue edition at US$28.00. It's in excellent shape, but the cover features only text.


Posted by Brian Busby at 6:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: ,

24 June 2026

Monument aux Patriotes: 100 Ans

In Montreal, a city blessed with so very many works of public art, the Monument aux Patriotes stands as one of the most poignant. It was unveiled one hundred years ago today by nonagenarian Marion Cardinal-Marion. This and other St-Jean-Baptiste Day events were covered on the front page of the 24 June 1926 edition of the Montreal Daily Star, the city's afternoon Anglo newspaper.

The reporting begins: 

For all its coverage, the Star did not include a photograph of the newly installed monument that day. No Montreal newspaper did, which I expect had much to do with time constraints imposed by the technology of the time. The image at the top of this post comes from the following morning's edition of La Presse. That afternoon, the Star featured further reporting on the previous day's festivities, along with this:

Also featured is a photograph of Marion Cardinal-Marion herself, lone surviving child of notary Joseph-Narcisse Cardinal, the first of the twelve men hanged for their roles in the Lower Canada Rebellion.

The past may be a foreign country, but not entirely.

On this day, we honour those who fought for our rights in the Rebellions of 1837 and 1838, just as Manitobans celebrate Louis Riel every February. My daughter is a graduate of École secondaire Gabriel-Dumont, named for the man who was Riel's number two in the North-West Rebellion. That school is in London, Ontario, a few kilometres from the Canadian Thames. Visit the Veterans Affairs Canada website and you will find it includes a page devoted to the Gabriel Dumont Memorial.

One hundred year ago today, Quebec's Lieutenant-Governor Narcisse Pérodeau represented King George V in honouring the men who were hanged for treason under the monarch's grandmother Queen Victoria. 

Montreal's Bureau d'art publique has a very good webpage about the monument. One hundred years ago, de Lormier was a bustling thoroughfare. It is less welcoming today, but that's only due to poor city planning and the rise of the automobile. Still, I encourage a visit.

The Montreal Daily Star, 25 June 1926
Posted by Brian Busby at 12:00 AM 0 comments
Labels: ,

01 June 2026

Mist of Morning on a Monday Morning


Mist of Morning
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1919
407 pages
"We're piling up fireworks all around — just suppose that some one, with a screw loose, should take a fancy to see them go off?"
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's longest novel, Mist of Morning meanders, but I enjoyed the meandering. It begins with a Dickensian scene. Young David Greig is brave enough to deliver a parcel to stern Widow Ridley's house. A little girl in bright red turban and Persian shawl answers:
“You boy!” said the little girl. “What do you mean by coming to the front door? Go round to the back directly!”
David stands his ground; he's been sent by the minister.

The boy isn't at the door a minute, but his presence echoes. Frances, the little girl's much older cousin, worries about the disruption it has caused. The old woman is already calling down from her upstairs room, certain that the mirror in the front parlor has been broken. 

The little girl's name is Rosme. It is a name her aunt, Widow Ridley, dislikes intensely, but then she doesn't care for the girl herself. Like Frances, Rosme is someone she's been saddled with, all because their respective parents died. 

David reappears later that afternoon, peering at Rosme over Widow Ridley's high garden wall. The girl has been pretending to be Joan of Arc, but together they become pirates, sail the waves of long grass in the unkempt grounds, plundering ships, and burying treasure until one is called in for dinner. Pirate David returns home to be told by the man he'd believed was his father that his real father has died. And so a Dickensian bookend to a childhood encounter.


Isabel Ecclestone Mackay isn't Dickens of course, but I've enjoyed her novels just the same. She wrote five in total. Mist of Morning, her third, was the only one I'd not read. As I say, it meanders. Though more than a decade passes before David and Rosme meet again, anyone up on Dickens or Mackay will know that the relationship between the two characters is key. By this point, both are living in Toronto. David is a newly-graduated engineer. Rosme, the very example of the New Woman, is the brains of a small advertising firm.

The dialogue between the two as young adults is endearing and every bit as playful as it was all those years ago in the Widow Riley's overgrown garden. What a shame then that their paths hadn't crossed a month or two earlier, before David became engaged to raven-haired Clara Sims, a fellow boarding house tenant. This is how his fiancée is first described:
Clara was ready for bed and the loose kimono she wore had slipped back from her white shoulders leaving them bare above the filmy nightdress which clung to her supple figure with less than classic scantness. Seen so she was superbly young, beautiful, virile, and quite without a soul.
Though she very much has the look, Clara isn't quite the classic femme fatale. She'd set her sights on David not for love, lust, revenge or fortune, but because she'd recognized in him a man who would become a stable provider. Their engagement is the resulted of a clever trap, with David as rube. It would read like a Leacock short story were it not for tragic consequences. It begins during a dark and stormy night when Clara enters David's room on the pretence that a burglar is in hers:
Still dizzy with dreams he turned, only to feel sure that he was dreaming still. The door, the door into the hall, had opened and was just closing, while inside it and bright against it’s dark panels, her hand still on the door-knob, stood a girl in a red kimono. David in his first dizziness thought he had never seen the girl before. She was startlingly strange — all red and white with black hair tumbled about her shoulders. White face, red lips, red drapery over something white, from beneath which a white foot peeped. A midnight dream of a girl, with dark eyes and —.
There's that kimono again. While reading the novel I became entangled in women's clothing. There are so many descriptions providing clues as to just when the novel takes place. A discussion over at Clothes in Books was of great help. Another indication is David's work on making an aeroplane engine that would enable commercial air travel. We learn eventually that it is the autumn of 1913 when Rosme and David reconnect. Storm clouds of the coming Great War begin to gather, casting a gloom over the last quarter of the novel, introducing elements of intrigue and betrayal. A man is shot to death.

The murder didn't come as a shock – not after the author's previous novels. The plot of The House of Windows, her debut, involves the abduction of a child. In Up the Hill and Over, her second novel, it's drug addiction. Reducing Mackay's novels to short strokes doesn't do justice. They are not message novels, nor are they thoroughly dour. Her characters are for the most part perfectly pleasant and kind. There are more moments of levity than gloom and despair. I'm just sorry that there aren't more Isabel Ecclestone Mackay novels to read.

Mist of Morning isn't her best – that would be Blencarrow – but it was a happy place to land. What's more, it has a happy ending, with Rosme and David uniting in the end, just as we knew they would.

Will they live happily ever after?

Well, let's just say that the novel ends in the final days of July 1914 and leave it at that.

Favourite passage: Two women in the novel run Toronto boarding houses, the most interesting being Rosme's Madam Ramses, an unfortunate woman cursed with a masculine appearance and a sixth sense. She's described in entertaining detail, but this picture of Mrs Carr, David's landlady, takes the cake:

She was a frosty person with a grim eye. Her aspect was calm, her mouth tight and her nose suspicious. Long ago there had been a Mr. Carr but he had departed to a better world and left no traces. Perhaps he realised that Mrs. Carr had been intended by the discerning fates to be the widowed keeper of a select city boarding-house. Her eye alone had marked her out for this.

Trivia: Late in the novel, David invites Rosme to accompany him on a canoe excursion on Toronto's Humber River.

These words were published six years after Pauline Johnson died. Mackay was a close friend of the poet and oversaw publication of the posthumous Legends of Vancouver. 

Object and Access: A block of a book in grey cloth with black type and design. Sadly, my copy lacks the dust jacket. It was purchased online in 2020 from an Ottawa bookseller. Price: US$23.00. The front free endpaper features a the address label of Helena Jones. 


I remember these labels from elementary school. They were like tape and came in a red transparent plastic case that wasn't much different than a tape dispenser except that one had to lick the labels like a stamp.

16 Powell Street, Ottawa in 2024

As I write, no copies are listed for sale online

Related posts:

Posted by Brian Busby at 6:30 AM 3 comments
Labels: , , ,

25 May 2026

Of Problem Children and Adolescent Angst



Sunburst
Phyllis Gotlieb
New York: Fawcett, 1964
160 pages

Sorrel Park is no place to live, but this wasn't always so. A smallish city not far from Chicago, it was once a place of industry and well-paying jobs. During the "Open-The Door-In-Eighty-Four" policy, immigrants from Western Europe flooded in until it all went horribly wrong. First came the 1994 nuclear reactor explosion and resulting deaths. The federal government was quick to impose a press ban, the city was sealed off, martial law was imposed, the old coal plant was fired up, and the rest of the country continued on as before.

Shandy Johnson was born in Sorrel Park on June 3rd, 2011 to second generation Americans. Her father's family came from Denmark, changing their surname from Jensen along the way. Shandy's mother was named Mary O'Brian; as might be supposed, her family immigrated from Ireland. Until the explosion, Mary cleaned the offices at the nuclear facility, after which she was transferred to the coal plant. Shandy's father worked in both, even after being being struck on the back of the head with hot material. The wound would never close.

Shandy's birth, seventeen years after "the Blowup," came as a surprise. Her parents had assumed they'd been rendered sterile, but here they were in their forties with a baby girl. The joy they experienced as parents was short lived: "I was three and a half when they died, and since I can't remember much that happened before I was eighteen months old, that means I can't have really known them for more than two years..."

The novel begins on Shandy's thirteenth birthday. A strong-willed, savvy girl, she spends much of it evading capture. It didn't begin this way. Shandy had been celebrating the day with a vanilla cone and licorice stick when spotted. Shandy is a target because she is unusual. "I can't remember much that happened before I was eighteen months old," suggests something, don't you think?

New York: Berkley, 1983
Years earlier, not long after Shandy was born, dozens of Sorrel Park teens, offspring of the men and women exposed to radiation from the explosion, went on a violent rampage. It lasted no more than a few hours, but was devastating just the same. Much of the downtown lay in ruins, thanks entirely to newly awakened telepathic and telekinetic powers. It was only through dumb luck in the form of a freak accident that authorities were able to round them up. They've lived ever since in "the Dump," a prison compound equipped with a device that shields the outside world from their abilities. What sets young Shandy apart is that her mind cannot be read by those imprisoned in the Dump. She is a mutant amongst mutants, and thus of great interest to the government. 

I've never been one for stories in which radiation exposure brings the superhuman – something to so with having seen film footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at an early age, I suspect. It's probably the reason why the Hulk, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four never really appealed. 

The Hulk #1, May 1962
Yet Sunburst did appeal. It would be enough to say this all comes down to Shandy, but all the characters are brilliantly drawn. There's Jason Hemmer, who first spots the girl. He is the one mutant who cooperates with the authorities, and so is tasked with finding others. Colonel Prothelo was assigned to Sorrel Park in the aftermath of the Blowup. The son he fathered in Sorrel Park instigated that night of destruction. Cigar store owner Ma Slippec is a fleeting character, but just as fully formed. It was she who took in the orphaned Shandy, provided a modicum of stability, and introduced her to bootlegging in what is a dry city.

Of course, at the centre of it all is Shandy, a tall, awkward looking girl who is bothered by her flat chest. She longs for adolescence to really kick in, all the while worrying that she'll also develop abilities that will lead her to incarceration the Dump.

Sixty-two years ago, Fawcett positioned Sunburn as "A Science Fiction Classic of Tomorrow," and here we are in that past's tomorrow. While we don't have superhuman mutants, we do have government and corporate surveillance, suppression, manipulation and brutality. Sunburn is a classic of today.

About the author: 

Phyllis Fay Gotlieb (née Bloom)
Phyllis Fay Gotlieb (née Bloom) was born in Toronto one hundred years ago today. She attended the University of Toronto (BA, 1948; MA, 1950) where, I'm guessing, she met her husband (see: Dedication).

As far as writing goes, she was known first a poet. In 1961, John Robert Colombo's Hawkshead Press published her a pamphlet of verse. Sunburst landed in 1964, the very same year as Within the Zodiac, her first book of poems.

Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964
Phyllis Gotlieb is remembered more as a writer of science fiction than as a poet. Her bibliography features twelve books in the genre, including A Judgement of Dragons for which she received the inaugural Aurora Award. 

New York: Berkley, 1980

Phyllis Gotlieb died in Toronto on 14 July 2009 at the age of eighty-three.

Dedication:


Kelly is the author's  husband, Calvin Carl Gotlieb, CM FRSC (27 March 1921 - 16 October 2016), considered the father of Canadian computing.

Of Phyllis Gotlieb's twenty other books, the one I'm most interested in reading is Phyllis Loves Kelly, (Toronto: University of Toronto Libraries, 2014), a posthumous collection of poems written to her husband over the course of their sixty year marriage.

Object and Access: A typical Fawcett Gold Medal mass market paperback original in excellent condition, it showed no sign of having been read before I got to it. I took good care.

The novel first appeared, abridged, in Amazing Stories (March - May 1964). 


Two years after the Fawcett, Coronet published the first British edition. 


When cropped, the image looks like a 'sixties LP I'd buy in a second.


Other editions followed in Australia from Eclipse (1969) and the United States from Berkley (1978). In 2002, Insomniac Press published the only Canadian edition to date as part of its Bakka Books series. 


The novel is currently available from Wildside Press of Cabin John, Maryland.

The six-decade-old Fawcett first edition is cheap in more than one way. Prices listed online range from US$6.00 to US$19.00. Condition is not a factor. At under twenty-one dollars, two signed copies of the Insomniac edition tempt, but the one you really want is a copy of the Fawcett the author inscribed to Miriam Waddington (and was subsequently owned by Maurice Forget, OC). It is being sold for $36.00 by a Gatineau bookseller.

Sunburst has been translated into French (Psycataclysme) and German (Die Geißel des Lichts).

Related post:

Posted by Brian Busby at 4:37 PM 4 comments
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)