Of a Petite Prima Donna (and her pretty little feet)

Judith Moore; or, Fashioning a Pipe
Joanna E. Wood
101 pages

A very slim paperback printed on demand at Amazon's Bolton, Ontario fulfillment centre, I'm to blame for this book's existence. It was ordered in the Covid spring of 2022, just after I'd finished Joanna E. Wood's debut The Untempered Wind (1894), a book I described on the Lost Ladies of Lit podcast as the only novel, ever, where I actually wept." You can hear me begin to go on about it at 36:45.

Had it not been for The Untempered Wind, I might never have read Judith Moore. Had I read Judith Moore first, its unlikely that I would've read The Untempered Wind or anything else by Joanna E. Wood.

Judith Moore is the author's second novel. It shares something with The Untempered Wind in being set in rural Ontario, yet features little of the small town cruelty, hypocrisy, dogmatism, and pious conceit that makes the earlier work so involving and affecting.

The titular character, a literal prima donna, has completed her first European tour to great success and requires rest before taking on the United States. She finds room and board with Mr and Mrs Morris, whose homestead is nestled in a hollow outside fictional Ovid, Ontario.

Why Ovid? Why the Morrises? How had Judith Moore so much as heard of Ovid? These are questions left unanswered. Mrs Morris is of no help in solving the mystery:

"She and a little black-a-vised chap came driving up the lane one day last week, and before I just rightly could make out what they were, he was driving off and she was there for keeps. Next day there came a whole waggon [sic] load of trunks."

The need of such a respite – an entire summer – is concerning in one so young and at the very start of an exciting and promising career. Might it be because Judith Moore, petite, pale, delicate, and fragile, lacks the physique of the diva commonly associated with what Mrs Morris calls "the opry?"

No, the cause of Judith's fatigue is something else entirely, and is worth quoting at length:

Blind fools who could not see it was the passion of an empty heart, the yearning of a solitary soul, the unutterable longing of a woman's nature for love, that rendered her marvellous voice so passionately and painfully sweet. She herself never suspected it; only she believed what the doctors had told her manager and teacher, the good man who wore such big diamonds and used such bad language, that she must have rest, quiet, complete and absolute change. So she and this man had come to Canada, and had driven on and on into the heart of the country till they came to this village in the valley, and there she had elected to stay – a caprice not nearly so extravagant, and certainly more sweet and wholesome than the freaks indulged in by some others of her ilk. So here she was, lying perdu, whilst her picture was in every paper in the country, with marvellous tales of her triumphs abroad and whispers of the wonderful treat in store for the music-lovers of America. And her little, good-hearted manager flashed out his biggest diamonds, swore his worst oaths, hoped the child was getting strong, and never dreamed he was killing her.

Enter handsome Andrew Cutler, healthy, wealthy, young, and of Loyalist stock, his land borders the Morris homestead. Andrew is literally sowing seeds when "assailed by a succession of the sweetest sounds he had ever heard – note after note of purest melody, flung forth unsyllabled, full-throated to the air, inarticulate but eloquent. Again and again it came, liquid, rich, and with that pathos which perfection always touches."

Assailed again the following day, he follows the call:

"I have come," he said, half dreamily – stepping out from the shelter of the trees.

   The pale-faced singing siren changed to a startled, blushing girl, and in swift sequence Andrew's rapt gaze altered to one not altogether without daring. "Oh, so I see," she half gasped, then laughed outright, looking at him with shy eyes, but mutinously curving lips. The laugh robbed the scene of its last illusion of mystery.

This fin de siecle meet cute begins well, but is spoiled by Judith's habiliment. Not being "up in chatelaines," the farmer's "masculine horse sense and the instinct of protection" gets the better of him:

"Why in the world do you wear shoes like these?" he asked. "And such stockings! and standing on that damp moss! You had better go right into the house and get on decently heavy shoes."

   This was too much. Miss Judith Moore fancied her own feet, and fancied open-work silk hose, and high-heeled wisps of shoes. Most of all, she liked the combination. In fact, in a harmless little way, she rather liked people to have a chance to appreciate these beauties, and at the very moment Andrew spoke, she had noted his downward glance and felt a righteous peace settle upon her. To be well shod is such moral support, and, lo, this heathen, this wretch, this abominable, conceited, brazen young farmer, had actually dared to suggest a change; more than that, he had spoken of "stockings"—disgusting!

   So, with a dignity that reduced Andrew to despair, even whilst it roused his ire (she was so slight to be such a "defiant little cat" he told himself), she drew herself up, in a manner to do the traditional Duchess credit, and left him, saying: "Since you don't approve of my feet I'll take them out of your way."
   "You mean they'll take you," said Andrew, wrathfully conscious that she was, to use a good old figure of speech, "turning up her nose at him."
   "You are extremely rude," she called back.
   "And you are a bad-tempered little thing," he answered.

Focus on footwear, flaunting of feet, and pride of pieds aside, Judith and Andrew's contentious early exchange is conventional, as recognized by Elvis Costello:

          Chapter One, we didn't really get along

          Chapter Two, I think I fell in love with you

Judith and Andrew's romance is a touch different in that their first encounter takes place in the second chapter. They have no contact in the third, but are very much in each other's thoughts. In Chapter Four, Andrew rescues Judith from an apple tree, setting their relationship on a firmer footing. 

Pacing aside, what makes Judith Moore an unconventional romance novel is also what makes it so tedious. From the moment Andrew returns Judith's high-heeled wisps to terra firma, they walk a path free of obstruction, falling further in love with each meeting. It isn't until the ninth of the novel's eleven chapters – the last taking the form of a very brief epilogue – that anything occurs to threaten Judith's happiness.

She has only herself to blame.

Judith writes a letter to her manager asking to be released so that she may marry Andrew.

Released from what exactly? There is no contract, but innocent Judith feels an obligation towards this "little black-a-vised man with big diamonds [and] profane tongue" for recognizing her talent and taking her under his wing after her widowed father died . She writes that she will understand if he wishes her to return to the stage.

The manager shows up at he Morris homestead the very next week, accompanied by a French maid "of the real Parisian stripe," and Judith is whisked away without Andrew knowing.

There is no spoiler in sharing the conclusion; it's pretty much as one would expect. Judith is sent out on out on the American tour singing her little heart out. In New York, she surprises with a song, unaccompanied by orchestra, seemingly of her own composition:

                    For the peace which you crave;

                    For the end of your quest;

                    For the love which can save;

                        Come! Come to me!"

Hundreds of kilometres away, "in the silent spaces of a virgin forest,"a  heartbroken Andrew is thinking of Judith:

Where was she? It was not her wish that he should know. He hoped her little feet trod pleasant paths. Oh, Judith, Judith! Then, explain it as we may, or leave it still a mystery, there came to him, faint, aëry, bodilessly, the words of a song—a song that ended in a plea, "Come! Come to me," and when it died away, Andrew Cutler sprang to his feet with a cry that echoed far between the icy tree trunks of the forest, "I come, I come." And that same night, at the same hour, at the same pulse of the hour, Judith Moore, with a look of ineffable joy upon her face, fell fainting upon the stage.

Judith Moore has a remarkable, entirely avoidable flaw in that Andrew is portrayed as a reader. "He's got a crank on books–took that off his mother," Mrs Morris says to Judith after the meet cute gone bad. And yet Andrew has no idea what has become of his love, despite her tour being covered by the papers.

Andrew returns from the virgin forest to Ovid, where he learns, quite by chance, that the swarthy manager lives in New York. And so he purchases a train ticket:

As the Canadian trains reach New York, the morning papers come aboard. Andrew bought one of each, and sat down turning them over with tremulous hands to search for a sign. He had not far to seek—"JUDITH MOORE DYING, THE END APPROACHING." That was what he read in big "scare head" type; that, and its narrations in the other papers, with the usual platitudes telling of the "short but bright career," and so on. With the calm of despair he searched for definite information as to where she was. It seemed every one knew so well that definite detail was superfluous. But at last, in a different part of the paper, he found: "In the corridors of the Brittany Hotel last night, Miss Moore's manager, who had just left her bedside, said all hope was gone." The train was in New York, slowing up in the Grand Central station by the time he found this.

Andrew reaches Judith with hours to spare. 

Marriage follows.

FIN

I laid down my cheap print on demand paperback with a sigh. The Untempered Wind, the author's first novel, is so very good, as is her third, A Daughter of Witches (1899). Judith Moore lands between the two with a dull thud. The disappointment is made all the worse with the knowledge that Wood produced just one more novel, Farden Ha' (1902). Apparently, it takes place in the Scottish mining town in which the author was born.

Types of Canadian Women
Henry Morgan, ed
Toronto: William Briggs, 1903

"Meteor-like, her career plunged into obscurity after 1902," writes Barbara Goddard in Wood's Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry.

Perfectly put, I remembered those words from when I first read them. What I did not recall is Goddard's discovery of two Wood novellas published in the New York pulp magazine Tales from Town Topics. The earlier, A Martyr to Love (1897) "recounts the adventures of a femme fatale ironically wounded in her heartless conquests." The later, Where Waters Beckon (1902) "draws symbolically on Niagara’s whirlpools and local Indian legends as the setting for a dark tale of a woman married off to a madman by her father and later destroyed with her lover, an engineer developing hydroelectricity."

I'd purchase print on demand editions of either in a flash.

Farden Ha', too.

About the epigraph:

Elizabeth Barrett Browning never wrote a poem titled 'Fashioning a Pipe,' the words are taken from her poem 'A Musical Instrument' (1860) beginning with the first two lines of the second stanza. From there, we skip to the second word of third line of the third stanza, ignoring the opening "And."

The epigraph includes twenty of the poems forty-two lines (in whole or in part), ignoring structure, adding and deleting punctuation, touching down here and there. It reminded me of nothing so much as a K-tel album track.

Object and Access: A floppy paperback, so poorly designed that the spine is blank. 

Judith Moore was first published in 1898 by the Ontario Publishing Company. It has been out of print ever since. The novel entered public domain in 1978. It is available for download here courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

I've never come upon a copy of the Ontario Publishing Company edition in the wild. As I write, two are listed for sale online at $160 and $250 respectively. Judging by the sellers' descriptions, the least expensive is the superior copy.

Related posts:

May Agnes Fleming: Lost Lady of Lit
A Woman Who Did
The Witch is Back

Look Who Showed Up This Harlequin Halloween!

Daughter of Satan
Jean Plaidy
Toronto: Harlequin, 1952

Must say, she's much more attractive than I would've imagined.

Related posts:

A Harlequin Halloween

Another Harlequin Halloween

It's Harlequin Halloween Time!
The Horror! The Harlequin Horror!

The Harlequin Horror That Just Won't Die!
The Most Horrifying Harlequin Halloween Ever!
Night of the Living Harlequin Halloween Horror
Harlequin Halloween Horror Confusion

Will Harlequin Halloween Horror Never End?

No, Harlequin Halloween Horror Will Never End
Who Can Deny the Harlequin Halloween Horror!
An Unholy Harlequin Halloween

A Harlequin Halloween Hobo

A WTF Harlequin Halloween
Harlequin Halloween Horror: So Much Satan!
This Harlequin Halloween, a Dick in a Box
You Only Die Twice on a Harlequin Halloween

Oh, Little Man!

Chipmunk
Len Peterson
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1949
299 pages

Claude Widgewood specializies in buns at Toronto's Modern Baker. He's an expert at adding just the right amount of cinnamon. The other bun-makers aren't so exacting. They don't care. There's no better employee than Claude, and yet he's afraid of being dismissed. Proulx is the problem. Claude considers this co-worker a Communist intent on spreading the Red Octopus's tentacles into his workplace. Leaving for home at the end of his shift, a notice of a union meeting is thrust into Claude's hand. He hides it in his coat pocket, fearful that Mr Cadenza, the bakery owner, is watching. Is he? What about Mr Spidafora, the Assistant Manager?  

Claude tries to rid himself of the notice on the crowded streetcar home. Sliding it from his coat, he lets it loose to drop on the floor. It does not. The sheet is wedged between himself and an elderly woman with purple hair. She gives him a look when he tries to shimmy it loose.

Chipmunk may be a comedy, but its humour is dark. The eyes of Messrs Cadenza and Spidafora are a definite concern, but Claude's greater worry is the tall man in trench coat standing idly outside the bakery cleaning his fingernails with a comb. Claude is almost certain that he's with the Special Branch of the Mounties investigating subversive activities. 

The chill of the Cold War permeates. Whether at the bakery, traveling to and from the bakery, or drinking in a tavern with his friend Mott Kilsoonski, Claude is on edge. It is a mistake to drink so much:

When sober, Claude idolizes Kilsoonski. The man fought in Italy, the man was wounded in Italy, while Claude never even made it overseas:

The first Medical Officer who examined him said he had shoulders like a bird, and all those who examined him afterwards agreed; he had the narrowest shoulders they had ever seen.

The war three years in the past, Mott is a rising talent in the boxing world. He defeated Andy Anzopoulis in his most recent fight at the Gardens.

Mott is one of the three most important people in Claude's life. His friendship with the boxer extends back to pre-war years when the big man rescued him from a bunch of mean-talking thugs. Claude's relationship with young tough Nick Yakyuchuk, the most recent, came about when he volunteered with the "Great Big Brothers." The baker is meant to provide moral guidance and an upstanding male role model. Nick has just returned from a juvenile detention centre. Nick's mother, a prostitute, is intimidating because she is such a good looking woman. Claude is ever wary, thinking that she will make some sort of move. Besides, he has a wife.

This is the novel's most unbelievable ingredient.

The marriage between Claude and Faustina Widgewood is unlike any other I've encountered in Canadian literature. He's as small as she is large, but that isn't it. Faustina is cold and distant, sometimes pushing him away. Then there are times she draws him so close that her knitting needles poke. They wrestle in their marital bed – brutally and violently – but slight Claude always wins and Faustina is satisfied.

It's tempting to dismiss Claude as so many do – as a weakling – but there is strength in his imagination. This muscle he has exercised since childhood in picturing his father, a soldier passing through on way to the Great War... or so his mother told him. As a child, he came up with a believable story about his "widowed mother." It has served him well. Though he has altered it slightly over the years, this is the one Faustina knows.

Of course, it is that same imagination that is the greatest source of torment.

Chipmunk is a first novel. After publication, Len Peterson spoke of his plans for a second novel, but it never appeared.

I can see why.

In a 16 August 1955 letter to Norman Levine, Jack McClelland responds to a the former's Times Literary Supplement piece titled 'Canadian Writers Come into Their Own.'

McClelland has this to say about Levine's praise for Len Peterson: "as a novelist in the Canadian scene, [Peterson] is hardly worth mention. He hasn't produced a book-length script for about seven years, and even at that he probably showed more promise than anything else."

Chipmunk does show promise. It is one of the strongest debuts I've ever read.  

Len Peterson was first and foremost a playwright. At thirty-two, his age when Chipmunk was published, he was also English Canada's leading radio dramatist. The CBC paid so much better than McClelland and Stewart. 

A man has to make a living.

Claude Widgewood would tell you as much.

About the title:

About the novel:

Trivia: A Len Peterson-scripted CBC Radio adaptation aired in March 1950.

Object: An attractive hardcover in navy blue cloth. The jacket design, superior to most published in 'forties Canada, is credited to German immigrant Robert Langstadt (1912-1987). Nearly everything I know about the artist is found on this McMaster Museum of Art page. It is well worth a read.

My copy was purchased online two years ago from an Ontario bookseller. Price: US$15.00. 

Access: McClelland & Stewart did not reprint. There have been no other editions. Seventy-seven-year-old copies are listed online for as little as fifteen Canadian dollars. At $100, the most expensive is inscribed by Len Peterson to author and academic Sylvia De Vrenet. If you have the money, this is the one to purchase.

Read for the 1949 Book Club hosted by Karen and Simon.

Other titles from 1949 covered at the Dusty Bookcase:

Arctic Rendez-vous - Keith Edgar

The Cannibal Heart - Margaret Millar

Crazy to Kill - Ann Cardwell [Jean Makins Pawley]

Death Be My Destiny - Neil H. Perrin [Danny Halperin]

Dirty City - Michael Young

Frustration - Henry C. Clayton

The House in Brook Street - Ronald Cocking

The House on Craig Street - Ronald J. Cooke

He Learned About Women - Ted Greenshade

The Invisible Gate - Constance Beresford-Howe

Love is a Long Shot - Alice K. Doherty [Ted Allan]

Mr. Ames Against Time - Philip Child

No Place in Heaven - Laura Warren

Pagan - Jack Romaine [Tedd Steele]

Perilous Passage - Arthur Mayse

Sin for Your Supper - Milton Douglas

Soft to the Touch - Clark W. Dailey

Strange Desires [Strange Desire] - Alan Malston [Alan Marston]

Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street - Al Palmer

This was Joanna - Neil H. Perrin [Danny Halperin]

Torch of Violence - Gerald Laing [Tedd Steele]

Toronto Doctor - Sol Allen

The Winter of Time - Raymond Holmes [Raymond Souster]

More than any other year! 

From Tangled Torment to Tepid Romance

Carried by Storm
May Agnes Fleming
New York: Carleton, 1880
400 pages

The first sentence holds a promise of things supernatural:

Miss Ventnor is Olga Ventnor, fairest of all the beautiful women in Carried by Storm. The house, known as "the red farm-house," is just one of many rentals on John Abbott's vast estate. His home, "Abbott Wood," is far more lavish:

A grand Elizabethan manor, with turrets, and peaked gables, and quaint, vine-clad stone porches, and painted windows, with stone mullions.
   It is new, and it looks three hundred years old at least, and reflects some of its seeming grandeur and antiquity upon its master, perhaps. And Mr. Abbott needs it. He is painfully new.

A novel could be written about John Abbott.

At first, Carried by Storm looks to be Olga Ventnor's story, reaching back in time to when she was a girl of ten living outside the New England town of Brightbrook. The only child of Colonel Ventnor and his fragile yet exquisite wife Mrs Ventnor, Olga is "the very last daughter of the house, born, if ever embryo belle and heiress was yet, with a golden spoon in her mouth." The colonel is adamant that his inherited riches remain in the family, so arranges for his pre-adolescent daughter to wed her artistic post-adolescent cousin Frank Livingston. Oh, and aren't his parents proud! Says Frank's mother:

"You need never lower your family, nor slave yourself to death painting pictures now, my dearest, dearest boy! Olga Ventnor’s fortune must be simply immense – immense!"

Age eighteen, Frank doesn't take it too seriously:

“All right, mother,” says Frank, still grinning; “and when is it to be – this week or next? Or am I to wait until she grows up? I am on hand always; when you want me please to ring the bell."

Nevertheless, flippant Frank has no issue with being dispatched to Brightbrook for the summer to woo his ten-year-old Olga. Once there, he acts as a babysitter, playing games and drawing pictures to amuse his pretty little cousin.

The following summer is very different. Olga, now eleven, is irritated by Frank. Her cousin doesn't spend nearly as much time with her, breaks promises, and stumbles into Ventnor Villa in the wee hours. Frank tells her that he's been spending time in town when in fact he has been partying down at the red farm-house. Frank is sweet on eighteen-year-old Lora, one of the two shapely dark-haired daughters of violent, ne're-do-well drunk Giles Sleaford. There's music and dancing and lager and whisky and codfish chowder and barbecue rabbit and more lager and more whisky.

A third girl, an awkward twelve-year-old redhead, also lives in the red farm-house. The townsfolk refer to her as "Sleaford's Joanna," taking her to be the man's youngest. The name could not be more appropriate; Sleaford considers her as his property, Sleaford's property, supposedly rescued from a gutter somewhere. Sleaford's Joanna is nothing more than an unpaid servant, a slave, and is beaten daily:

That he has not killed her outright in one of his fits of fury is not due to him, one of the Sleaford boys or girls generally interfering in bare nick of time. Their drudge is useful, they do not want her beaten to death, or the prying eyes of the land brought to bear on their rustic household.

How different her life is from Olga Ventnor's!

Later that same summer, the two girls cross paths in the woods one particularly dark evening Olga is lost and frightened. Seeing Olga, so pretty, her hair so golden, dressed in such fine and expensive clothing, Joanna is consumed by jealousy. That the Ventnor girl, raised in such privilege, is so weak, so helpless, and so fearful breeds hatred.

Twelve-year-old Joanna comes very close to stabbing eleven-year-old Olga to death that night. It's a good thing she doesn't because the woodland encounter sets in motion a series of events that change Joanna's life for the better. Thanks to kindly Geoffrey Lamar, John Abbott's stepson, she receives a private education from Miss Rice, the tutor at Abbott Wood. Leonora Abbott, Geoffrey's dainty, very pretty young half-sister, endears herself to the gutter waif such that Joanna feels no desire to murder her. Mrs Abbott praises Joanna's lovely singing voice and bestows a steady stream of adornments, most of which are appropriated by Lora and her sister Liz. John Abbott avoids her like the plague – which one I'm not sure – but why? Geoffrey and his mother wish Joanna to live with them at Abbott Wood, but Giles Sleaford will not allow it. John Abbott is relieved by the refusal. Again, why? Might the answer also solve the mystery as to why Brightbrook's wealthiest man allows such a disreputable man as Sleaford on his land? Where is Sleaford getting his money from, anyway?

Joanna reaches adulthood, despite all the beatings. Newspaperman George Blake has fallen in love with her, proposes, and suggests they run off to New York to get married. Joanna accepts, but only because she sees elopement as a means of escape.

In 1906, pulp publisher Street & Smith severed Carried by Storm in two, then sold the second half as Love's Dazzling Glitter, "a sequel to Carried by Storm." Being twenty-six years dead, the author had no say in the matter.

  

A very clean cut, I regret to say that it makes perfect sense. Love's Dazzling Glitter opens with a chapter titled a 'The New Life Dawn' ('In Which Joanna Finds Her Fortune' in the original). Here, Joanna, newly arrived in New York, rises and then descends from her rented attic room:

Joanna's new dawn is so bright as to be disappointing. She has run away from kind, supportive fiancé George Blake and has taken lodging with washerwoman widow Mrs Gibbs and her shoe-shining son. She has no money, but manages to cover room and board by handing over an expensive crimson wool shawl she'd stolen from Liz. At first, Mrs Gibbs dismisses the young woman as yet another come to New York with dreams of becoming a star of the stage. But Joanna surprises:

“I intend to work,” she says steadily, “there is no kind of housework, I think, I cannot do. I am very strong, and very willing. I can wash, iron, cook – I have done it all my life.”

Joanna never washes, irons or cooks, again.

While ironing, Mrs Gibbs hears Joanna singing to her infant, fatherless daughter and decides that she must introduce her new tenant to Prof Ericson, whose bedding she washes. Not only is Prof Ericson "a teacher of music and singing," his bother is a theatre empresario!

Joanna is an immediate sensation. No longer "Sleaford's Joanna," as "Jenny Wild" she tours North America and Europe, receives a second marriage proposal, inherits a vast estate, and most happily, is reunited with the long-suffering mother she had never known.

Disappointingly, the red farm-house is not haunted. One character is stabbed to death in an upstairs bedroom – no points for guessing who; a half-point for guessing the murderer – but no apparition appears. A weak case may be made that Carried By Storm features something of the supernatural in the form of an otherworldly guiding hand. Might this explain the remarkable series of coincidences in the final chapters? 

Joanna's second marriage proposal comes from Frank Livingston. In a different way, it is also his second marriage proposal – the first was rejected by Cousin Olga. Frank sees Joanna off on another tour and is returning to his studio in Manhattan when a young woman is struck down at his feet by two runaway horses. Though he doesn't recognize her at first, the victim is little Leonora Abbott, now all grown up. In rescuing her, he is reunited with his old friend Geoffrey Lamar... who is now a physician, which is handy considering, you know, his sister. John Abbott now dead, the doctor, his mother, and his sister, abandoned Abbott Wood long ago, having learned that Sleaford's Joanna is the true heir to the man's fortune. They've been searching for her ever since! Frank Livingston brings that hunt to an end. That very same day, Joanna just happens to spot one of Sleaford's sons working for the railroad; it is through him that se learns she is an heiress.

An odd novel from an unconventional novelist, I do recommend Street & Smith's Carried by Storm. Love's Dazzling Glitter is a definite pass. 

Of the eight Fleming novels I've read to date, this is by far the most disappointing; not that this dissuades me from reading the remaining thirty-nine.

Trivia (not really): It is mentioned in passing that Colonel Ventnor (ret'd) "had served with distinction in the far West." Those familiar with the history of the American West in the mid-nineteenth century may take issue.

Object: A well-constructed hardcover purchased two years ago for ten American dollars from a bokseller in New York State. The novel itself is followed by eight pages of publisher adverts for volumes by A.S. Roe, Allan Pinkerton, Augusta J. Evans, Celia E. Gardner, Josh Billings, Julie P. Smith, M.M. Pomeroy, Violet Fane, Miriam Coles Harris, Marion Harlon, Mary J. Holmes, Mrs E.P. Miller, Capt Mayne Reid, and others. Not one name was familiar to this reader, but I am intrigued. Ten May Agnes Fleming novels also feature.

Access: According to Susan Dorward's invaluable 'A Working Bibliography of Texts by May Agnes Fleming,' Carried by Storm was first published in 1878 and 1879 editions of the New York Weekly and the London Journal. It first appeared as a book in 1879, published in New York by Dillingham. My Carleton edition followed the next year. As far as I can tell, Street & Smith's 1906 two volume Carried By Storm/Love's Dazzling Glitter marks the last time the novel was in print.  

Related post;

Falling Hard for May Agnes Fleming

A Nellie McClung Manitoba Mystery

The Black Creek Stopping-House and Other Stories
Nellie L. McClung
Toronto: William Briggs, 1912
224 pages

We have here a collection of short stories by a writer best known as a novelist.

Scratch that.

Nellie McClung is remembered today as a campaigner for women's rights. I learned this in 1973 when my mum brought home a sheet of newly issued postage stamps bearing her portait.

My mother was born at a time when women in Canada were not considered persons under the law. Strange but true. She wasn't recognized as a person until the month after her second birthday. Nellie McClung worked to made that possible.

I don't remember my mum mentioning that Nellie McClung wrote fiction and am not certain that she knew, though McClung had once time one of the country's bestselling novelists. Her 1908 debut, Sowing Seeds for Danny, sold over 100,000 copies.

Toronto: William Briggs, 1908

The Black Creek Stopping-House and Other Stories was the author's third book and the first of her two short story collections. It was published fifteen years before my mother's birth, sixty-one years before that stamp was issued, and one-hundred-and-thirteen years before today. 

There are eight stories in all. They are interesting enough, though much of that interest has less to do with prose or clever plot than as snapshots of the time in which they were penned. Nowhere is this more true than with 'The Elusive Vote,' which takes place on the final day of the 1911 Canadian federal election:

The story centres on John Thomas Green, "a gentle soul in ill-fitting armor," and attempts by local Conservative Association to secure his vote – or, failing that, preventing him from casting a ballot. It reminded me of Stephen Leacock, as did 'The Runaway Grandmother,' in which a bachelor farmer hires an tenacious elderly housekeeper, bends to her will, and finds his life much improved. Then I remind myself that Prof Leacock was fairly new on the scene as a humorist.

I'm more confident that 'A Short Story of a Rabbit' was influenced by by Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts. A young rabbit disregards the warnings of his mother and so learns a valuable lesson.

'The Return Ticket' is also timestamped. The narrator has a chance encounter with a woman who is accompanying her daughter's body back from Rochester, Minnesota to Manitoba's Rose Valley. The only the only truly dark story, it is also the very best.

But it is the title story that dominates:

'The Black Creek Stopping-House' begins with John Corbett strolling into a Salvation Army meeting at Winnipeg's Victoria Hall. He has for no other reason to be there other than the fact that "he would do anything once, and if he liked it he would do it again." Corbett is very taken with the music, the camaraderie, and more than anything Maggie Murphy, the pretty young thing seated by the door selling War Cry: "When he went in he bought one; when he came out he bought all she had left."

Corbett is a card shark. He loves the life, the challenge, the money, and may be the very best. But he gives it all up, ill-gotten gains included, for pretty Maggie Murphy. The two wed and with the aid of oxen move more than 200 kilometres west to what would become Brandon, Manitoba. There they set up a "stopping house," feeding hungry men traveling east and west. The railway comes the following year, thus securing their future.

 
Early in the story, John and Maggie Corbett cede their positions as protagonists to twin Brydon brothers Reginald and Randolph. Are they remittance men? They don't do much of anything apart from waiting for wealthy, appropriately-named Aunt Patience to die. As they mess about, making money tighter, Randolph comes up with an idea to tide them over. Why not encourage young half-brother Fred to come out West?

“Wot’s the matter with us gettin’ out Fred for our farm pupil? He’s got some money—they say he married a rich man’s daughter—and we’ve got the experience!”

Fred sends money, then follows with his elegant, delicate, doll-like wife Evelyn. The daughter of a wealthy lumber baron, she had defied her father to marry for love. Events after the couple's arrival are not happy, and involve deceit, betrayal, misunderstanding, and a wolf of a man named Rance Belmont. I was all in! But then came an unimaginative climax that for a short story, no matter how long, relies far too much on coincidence. The denouement, happy and breezy, sees the Brydon twins receiving their just desserts.

Those familiar with the story will appreciate the pun.

The first ten chapters of 'The Black Creek Stopping-House' were so engaging that I moved my copy of Sowing Seeds for Danny to my night table. The final two chapters were such a disappointment that I moved it back to the shelves.

I thought no more about it until glancing through Nellie McClung's 1935 biography Clearing in the West. In the nineteenth chapter, the author recounts a thirty-mile trip to Brandon with her mother and brother Jack on a sleigh heavily loaded with wheat. According to McClung she was twelve at the time, meaning that the journey was untaken in the December of 1885: 

Though the stay at this "Black Creek Stopping house" is brief, four pages provide a Clearing in the West provides a description of the stopping house, which is something lacking in McClung's long short story:

Mrs. Cobett's stopping house was one big room, with one end used as a kitchen, in which stood a great high-over black stove where Mrs. Corbett with quick movements filled plates with a cut of roast bef and helpings of turnips, potatoes and gravy. Each man, who was helped took a place at the long table coveref with oil-cloth, where he found everything else he needed.
   "Da," Corbett, traversed the length of the table with a blue enamel tea pot and filled the cups that were stationed at every place. Bread and butter, pickles, biscuits and cheese were set at close intervals, along the long table and it took but little time to serve thirty or forty men.

Mrs Corbett's first name is not shared in Clearing in the West. In 'The Black Creek Stopping-House,' Maggie cannot bring herself to address her husband, whom she first knew as "Mr Corbett," by his first name. "Da" is Da is short for "Dad" which is something I'd rather not address, particularly as  they have no offspring .

The Corbetts of 'The Black Creek Stopping-House,' have one employee, a young hireling blessed with the unforgettable name Peter Rocket. The Clearing in the West Corbetts have help in the form of an child  named Peter Rocket about whom twelve-year-old Nellie has a strong opinion:

I could see he was a lout of a boy, who could not even think of two things at once.

   There was an impatient rattling of spoons on cups.
   "Let me do it," I said, and took the smallest pot on the stove and went down the line.
   I could hear Mrs. Cobett's voice above the chatter.
   "Look at that now, there's a girl with a quick turn, and her not more than twelve years old. I'd be a proud woman, if I had a little girl like that comin' along."

Young Nellie's mother is not of similar mind: "When we were in the sleigh again, Mother told told me, I should nt be so forward. It did not look well for a little girl to jump up and pour tea for strange men."

Was there a Peter Rocket? No one by that name is recorded in 1881 and 1891 census records, though the latter does include an English immigrant named John Rocket living in Manitoba. In 1885, that Rocket would've been a fourteen-year-old.  

Similarly, the Corbetts don't match up. The 1881 census features a John Corbett (age 27) and Maggie Corbett (age 21) living in Manitoba, but not close to one another. The sole Margaret Corbett is fifty-nine.

Don't get me started on the Brydon bothers.

Neither the Corbetts nor their Black Creek stopping-house receive mention in 1880 editions of the Brandon Daily Sun. Curiously, the newspaper did not review The Black Creek Stopping-House and Other Stories.

So, I ask, is 'The Black Creek Stopping House' a nouvelle à clef? Did such a place exist? Could it be that the Corbetts are modeled on a couple who had entirely different names? What of Peter Rocket? Is it that the author couldn't remember John Rocket's first name? Did she even know it?

And now, I can't stop thinking about 'The Black Creek Stopping House.'

Dedication:

Trivia (personal): Because I'm working on a book about the Maria Monk hoax, I'm leaving this paragraph from 'The Way of the West' by way of reminder.

Object and Access: A very attractive hardcover, my copy, was purchased eight years ago in Toronto as part of a lot. It once belonged to Florence Adams.

The 1911 census features twenty-six women named Florence Adams, three of whom lived in Toronto. I'm ruling out the three-month-old, but not the twenty-three and twenty-five-year-olds  Of course, it's entirely possible that the woman who once owned the copy never lived in Toronto at all. 

I find no evidence of an edition published after 1919.

First editions begin at $30.00. At $177, the prize is a copy inscribed to one Alice Jordan:

A perfect gift for Xmas 2026.