Romance Amongst the Racists

The Window-Gazer
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1921

Lured by the offer of lodging, Great War veteran Prof Benis Harrison Spence has left his aunt's altogether too busy Ontario home for the quiet of coastal British Columbia.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Spence is burdened by several ounces of shrapnel and a nervous disorder, both souvenirs from his time at the Front; rest is just what the doctor – physician friend John Rogers – ordered.

Unfortunately, host Herbert Farr turns out to be an unstable, unlovable charlatan. The man's home is nothing more than a leaky, albeit spacious, cottage shared by daughter Desire and Chinese servant Li Ho. Spence has no sooner arrived when he collapses from stress placed upon his shrapnel-filled leg. Weeks pass, during which the professor is nursed back to health by young Desire.

Make nothing of her name.

Theirs is a platonic relationship with a foundation formed by shared interests and outlook on life. Neither cares much for marriage – "a hideous thing," says Desire. Spence proposes just the same as a means of freeing his newfound friend from her crazy father's clutches. Believing the professor to be the sort who will one day find true love, Desire declines. The quick thinking Spence comes up with a sad story about losing the love of his life, a blonde girl named "Mary", to another, which leads her to reconsider. After all, the professor is not a man to "love twice."

The pair run off to Vancouver, are married, and share a chaste working honeymoon in separate tents on fictitious Friendly Bay. They soon settle in Bainbridge, an Ontario town beset by blonde Marys.

Canadian Bookman, February 1922

Recounting the plot doesn't quite do this novel justice. On the surface, The Window-Gazer is a simple romance, without the cocaine addiction, opium addiction, kidnapping and worker exploitation that are key to previous Mackay novels. The unpleasantness lies below in the twin veins of race and racism that run through the book. The reader will spot this first in Spence, who is studying the "primitive psychology" of Indians. The professor is sitting with Desire when he encounters his subject for the first time:

"A Jap?" exclaimed Spence in surprise.
     "No. He's Indian. Some of the babies are so Japaneesy that it's hard to tell the difference. Father says it's a strain of the same blood."

Spence's aunt allows that she doesn't mind having her luggage handled by Pullman porters, but she does worry that her nephew's new bride might be part Indian. Her concern is shared by the gentile ladies of Bainbridge. "Well, if Indian blood can give one a skin like hers, I could do with an offside ancestor myself!" one writes in a letter.

And then we have Li Ho, who is described by a less than honest boatman as "one of the Chinkiest Chinamen I ever seen." For much of the novel, Farr's servant appears as a stereotype out of… well, something published early last century. He speaks in a manner that will make today's reader cringe – "Me much glad Missy get mallied" – only to be revealed as the most intelligent of Mackay's creations. Indeed, he is the one character to really display character. In the end, Li Ho proves to be the hero of the novel, a fact ignored by reviewers of the day.

I wonder why?

About the title:

When I was younger and we lived in towns I used to wander off by myself down the main streets to gaze in the windows. I never went into any of the stores. The things I wanted were inside and for sale – but I could not buy them. I was just a window-gazer. That's what I am still. Life is for sale somewhere. But I cannot buy it.

Object: A 308-page hardcover bound in blue cloth. The design was shared with the American edition published by Doran. I've not seen a dust jacket for either. I purchased my copy for $3.75 last December from a London bookseller

Access: The Doran and McClelland & Stewart editions enjoyed just one printing each. As might be expected, Library and Archives Canada has neither. Does Interim Librarian and Archivist Hervé Déry care? Perhaps not – after all, the man is an economist, not a librarian or  archivist. Anyway, his position is only interim; it's been only a year since James Moore appointee Déry took over from disgraced James Moore appointee Daniel J. Caron. What's the rush?

Twenty-eight copies of the McClelland and Stewart edition are held by Canadian libraries, though only the Toronto Public Library and Vancouver Public Library serve the… um, public.

Eighty-one copies are listed for sale online, but seventy-seven of these come from print on demand vultures. As is invariably the case, they provide some amusing covers. Tutis has a good one, but my favourite comes from Read How You Want, which not only changes Desire's gender and transports her to Paris, so that she/he might to look over the Rue de Miromesni.

Not one of the other four copies has a dust jacket. At US$25, the cheapest is a Good copy of the Doran edition. Next up in terms of price – US$35 and US$47 – are two passable copies of that issued by McClelland & Stewart.  The Vermont bookseller with the absurd prices is trying to flog a "discoloured from damp" signed copy of the first edition – whether Doran or McClelland and Stewart he does not say. Either way, at US91.98 it is horribly overpriced; no one is much interested in signed Mackay's – except, maybe, me.

Cousin Basil's Dickensian Christmas Gift

The Happy Isles
Basil King
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923

I nearly let the year pass without reading any Basil King, and started in on this novel only when I remembered that my copy had been given as a present ninety years ago this month.

Not much of a reason, is it.

To be frank, after The Inner Shrine and The Contract of the Letter, I'd had enough of Reverend King's gentle preaching on matters of reputation, flirtation, infidelity, separation and divorce. I was wrong to expect more of the same in The Happy Isles. All figure, of course, but here things edge away from the matrimonial and toward the political.

The novel opens on a splendid spring day spoiled when eight-month-old Henry Elphinstone Whitelaw, of the New York Whitelaws, is stolen from his carriage in Central Park. A tragic event, it calls to mind Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's The House of Windows (1912), which is built around the abduction of a wealthy Vancouver couple's infant daughter. The balance of this novel, however, owes much more to Charles Dickens than Mrs Mackay.

King's abductor is Lucy Coburn. A young woman  "feeble in mind from birth, half-demented by the death first of her husband and then of her child," Lucy took the baby so as to "satisfy her thwarted mother-love."

Love Henry she did, moving about Manhattan, forever fearing that someone might identify him as the missing Whitelaw baby. Good thing, too, because Lucy can't quite keep her story straight; even Henry, whom she calls both Tom and Gracie, is confused:

   "I'm a little boy, ain't I?"
   "Yes, you're a little boy, but you should have been a little girl. It was a little girl I wanted."

The early years are the easiest, with poor, damaged Lucy living off her husband's life insurance. When the money runs out, she turns to shoplifting. Lucy's luck ends on 24 December 1904, when she is caught lifting a pair of fur-lined mittens that Tom had hoped would be his Christmas gift. The boy spends Christmas Eve in a children's home. The next morning he learns that his "mudda" has suffered a painful death by downing cyanide.

A Merry Christmas to you, Cousin Ida!

Now orphaned – or so the authorities believe – eight-year-old waif Tom is shipped up the Hudson to an unwelcoming foster family in an ugly little town. After a time – an unpleasant time – he is adopted by an unhappy couple who are suffering from a failing farm and failing marriage. King is on familiar territory here. I set aside all earlier complaints in recognizing the chapters that follow as the very finest in the novel.

There be many troubled souls in The Happy Isles, but not one so well drawn as Quidmore, Tom's adoptive father. An adulterous coward haunted by the road not travelled, he takes inspiration from the story of poor Lucy Coburn in trying to rid himself of a wife, Tom's adoptive mother. Quidmore tries to trick his freshly minted  son into administering the fatal dose. When this doesn't happen the farmer breaks down, as much from relief as failure. Quidmore is a man tortured, troubled and torn until wife Anna learns that he's been seeing the local widow. It's only then that he can summon enough courage to do the dastardly deed himself.

Rejected by the widow lady, who is no fool, Quidmore makes himself scarce. He takes Tom to New York, holing himself in the  very sort of place Lucy would've considered home.

Remember when I described Quidmore is a troubled soul? Well, he disappears, leaving Tom all his money. I think we can all assume that he took a dive off the Brooklyn Bridge.

Orphaned – kinda – for a second time, the boy is taken under the wing of fellow lodger, one-eyed Liverpudlian Lemuel Honeybun. "A rogue, a burglar, an ex-convict," old Honey Lem gives up his thieving ways and devotes himself to raising young Tom.

It's all downhill from here, I'm afraid. Tom, who has already shown himself to be an A+ student, uses Quidmore's money to pay for Harvard. In his very first class, he's seated next to Tad Whitelaw, the brother her didn't know he had. This is one of the more believable coincidences.

The Happy Isles marks something of a departure for Reverend King in that it ends up as less a comment on marriage than society. In its pages the poor suffer, they work hard and they take risks. Honey Lem dies after being is crushed in a workplace accident.

My apologies for that spoiler.

At Harvard, Tom finds himself surrounded by a privileged, spoiled, ill-behaved lot – and here I include brother Tad. There's more than an insinuation that when inherited, not earned, wealth and position lead to ruin. Socialism is spoken of, but only by goodhearted retired crook Honey Lem. Tom recognizes that it's all so unfair, but can see no solution to what ails the nation.

He's chosen banking as a profession, so one can't expect much.

The Happy Isles was King's penultimate novel. The last published during his lifetime, it first ran from March through October 1923 in Harper's Magazine. Advertisements for the finished book described the serialization as having "aroused interest almost if not quite equal to the furore which resulted from the anonymous publication of 'The Inner Shrine' by the same author years ago."

Not true.

In 1907, the furore surrounding The Inner Shrine was front page news in Canada and the United States; discussion of The Happy Isles was limited to book reviews… of which this is one.

Will there ever be another?

Most interesting passage:

Honey never pawed him, as the masters often pawed the boys, and the boys pawed one another. He never threw an arm across his shoulder, or call him by a more endearing name than Kiddy. Apart from an eagle-eyed solicitude, he never manifested tenderness, nor asked for it.

Object: A 485-page hardcover bound in green cloth with gilt lettering. I bought my copy – signed, of course – from a New York City bookseller late last year. Price: US$43.86. I'm blaming the missing jacket on Cousin Ida.

A first edition, it includes four plates by John Alonzo Williams. Knowing there were more, I splurged – ten American dollars! – on the advance copy made up of pages from the Harper's serialization.

With nine more illustrations, it turned out to be well worth the price. The depiction above of a collapsing Quidmore is one.

Here Tom has a chance encounter with a woman he does not know is his mother:

Access: The Harper first enjoyed no second printing, though a cheap Grosset & Dunlap edition did follow. Hodder & Stoughton released a UK edition in 1924. No reprint there either. The Canadian branch of Hodder & Stoughton appears to have released an edition in 1923 – it was advertised in that November's Canadian Bookman – but I'll be damned if I can find a trace.

As with nearly all Basil King items, prices are cheap. Very Good first editions, sans jacket, can be had for US$4.50. Copies of the UK Hodder & Stoughton edition are more scarce, but are only marginally more expensive.

Outside of the Toronto Public Library, we Canadians are served only by our universities.

Miss Cameron Does Mrs Mackay an injustice

Following Thursday's post on The House of Windows by Isabel Ecclestone Mackay:

An adventurer, educator, lecturer and suffragette, there's so much to admire in Agnes Deans Cameron (1863-1912) that I'm willing to overlook her membership in the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Sadly, I have today discovered another flaw, this in the form of her review of The House of Windows from the July 1912 issue of Canada Monthly:

Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's new book does something of a tardy justice to the romance of Canada's Pacific Coast. Men like London, Service and Hough have written of Alaska. But although Victoria and Vancouver breathe romance, and the sea-battered isles of the coast hide fantastic stories, they have as yet got but little into print. It is too bad that Mrs. Mackay has not emphasized more the locale of "The House of Windows" (Cassell & Co., Toronto) and made it manifestly impossible for the story to have happened anywhere but on the shores of Burrard Inlet. The scene is laid in a coast city, and then is carried afield to a curious, rambling old roadhouse on an inland highway. The heroine is a slip of a clerk in a department store, and her adventures are exciting enough, comprising a mystery of birth, a secret love affair, a revenge, an abduction and a rescue. The girl herself is pleasantly drawn, and her lover is a convincingly adequate young man with the resource of the west. Curiously enough, the impression that remained longest with the reviewer was that of old Granny Bates clawing in the ashes of the fire to find Christine's little grey silk glove.
   The book is charmingly written, and moves smoothly, but there is yet to come the writer who will paint with bold strokes Vancouver as the reviewer saw it in a certain May.

You see, The House of Windows doesn't take place in Vancouver. We know this because Mark, Miss Cameron's "convincingly adequate young man," is sent there by family so as to get him away from "pleasantly drawn" Christine. The fleeting glimpses of the city are limited to a couple of letters he sends back east, one of which forms the whole of a chapter entitled, appropriately, "From Vancouver."

The mystery of birth, the secret love affair, the revenge, the abduction and the rescue, all take place in and around an unnamed eastern city, which as I've noted, appears to have been modelled on Toronto. This is all so obvious, one can only conclude that Miss Cameron didn't read the novel. I will allow that she thumbed through it's 338 pages, encountered "Vancouver" a few times, and read the scene in which old Granny Bates searches for Christine's little grey silk glove.

And yes, that scene is memorable.

The Hell That is Retail: 1912 Edition

The House of Windows
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
London: Cassell, 1912

Writing on Ontario, opium and cocaine in Isabel Ecclestone Mackay's 1917 Up the Hill and Over, I reported that the novel featured "perhaps the most remarkable and improbable coincidence in all of Canadian literature." The House of Windows challenges in an entirely different way. Here the reader must believe that all characters remain blind to coincidence, conduction and consonance, and are each incapable of concomitance.

Mrs Mackay's story begins in the ribbon department of Angus and Sons, a fictitious department story in a fictitious city that appears to have been modelled upon Toronto. It's the day of the semi-annual sale,

with frenzied women causing chaos through collapsing displays. "SACRIFICE OF ALL RIBBONS WITHOUT RESERVE," the adverts announce, "EVERYTHING SLAUGHTERED!" At the end of it all, the shop-girls – known as "Stores" – wade through paper from the unwound bolts to find an abandoned go-cart with baby girl within. There's some talk of calling the police, but the newest Store, Celia Brown, comes forward to care for the child as she would a sister.

Not one of the shop-girls, good-hearted Celia included, gives so much as fleeting consideration of the news dominating the city's dailies. Baby Elice, daughter of wealthy Adam Torrence and wife, has been kidnapped. This tragedy will soon lead to the premature death of poor Mrs Torrence. Devastated widower Adam, bereft of wife and child, will take young Mark Wareham, a not so distant relative, to be his ward.

As Christine Brown, the abandoned baby is raised by Celia and her blind sister Ada. She grows to become a beautiful young woman, while spinster Celia loses looks and energy. Angus and Sons is to blame for the latter's decline. The work of a Store – ten hours a day, six days a week – is hard. Everyone knows that the stools behind the counters are just for show.

You musn't blame Celia's employer – who, as it turns out, is Adam Torrence. This man of wealth pays little attention to the store, and even less to the Stores, because the money they bring flows so steadily. Thoughts that stray in the direction of Angus and Sons invariably concern propriety. Adam is firm that all shop-girls hired have additional sources of income lest they turn to... become... find themselves... Oh, he cannot bring himself to express his fears.

Crisis comes to the cramped Brown flat when Celia suffers a nervous breakdown. It's unfortunate, of course, but her timing is good in that Christine has secretly been job hunting. During her search she meets Adam's unofficially adopted son Mark. The moment, which takes place when he pushes a man to the ground for daring to talk to her, is captured in illustrator Dudley Tennant's frontispiece.

Mark falls for Christine in such a way that the throb escapes no one. Disapproving his dalliance with someone named "Brown", someone who is plainly of the lowest class, the Torrence family – Adam and elder sister Miriam – dispatch Mark to Vancouver.

Adam is next to happen upon Christine. For a moment he gives consideration that this Miss Brown might be the same  young woman in whom Mark is interested – but then Brown is such a very common name of very common people. That said, Adam is distracted, bothered and fairly won over by Christine. She is very much a lady, despite her lowly family. The mere description of her hair – "honey blonde" – brings to mind that of his dear late wife. And, oh, doesn't Christine have the same eyes, laugh and smile of his dear departed sister.

Sixteen years into the story, everyone meets everyone else, which I suppose can be put down to coincidence. It's at this point that another plot, a nefarious plot, is revealed. We learn that Christine (née Elice) had been kidnapped all those years ago by an old crone who believed her daughter was ruined in working at Angus and Son. The poor Store turned to... became... found herself... Oh, I cannot say.

Weirdly, improbably, the crone thought that by leaving Elice in the ribbon department the girl would grow up to work in the store. Weirdly, improbably, she was right.

Christine – Elice, if you prefer – is kidnapped a second time. More coincidences ensue. I recognized them all.

Query: How is it that the Stores made no connection between kidnapped Baby Elice and the infant that had left in the ribbon department? Celia explains it all:

"We read it in the papers. But we did not feel especially interested. We did not know who Mr. Torrence was. He was just a name. We did not know he had any connect with the Stores. And this baby – so evidently a neglected and unwanted child! – it would have been a miracle if the coincidence had struck us."

Object and Access: My copy, inscribed by the author, was purchased just last month for US$25 from an Illinois bookseller; I'm thinking it's a first edition. While there are four copies currently listed online, each from sellers who claim the same, at least two lack the elegant monogram pictured above. I suggest that these are at best second state. Either way, expect to pay between US$50 and US$100.

Being in the public domain, print on demand vultures are all over this one. Nabu, General, Pranava and Repressed bring their usual ugliness, but the worst comes from the confusingly-named Book on Demand of Miami, Florida:

This book, "The house of windows" [sic], by Isabel Ecclestone 1875-1928 Mackay [sic], is a replication. It has been restored by human beings, page by page, so that you may enjoy it in a form as close to the original as possible. This item is printed on demand. Thank you for supporting classic literature.

You're welcome. Now, if you could just put some human beings to work on that cover.

Nearly all our universities have copies, as do the public libraries of Toronto and Vancouver. Library and Archives fails yet again – given current policy, one wonders whether it will ever procure a copy.

Christmas Verse by Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

from Fires of Driftwood (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1922) 

A Merry Christmas to all!

Related posts:

Christmas Verse from Master of All Poets James Gay
Arthur Stringer Pines for Christmas Past

Christmas Greetings from Gay Page!

Miss Machar's 'The Call of Christmas - 1914'

A Post-Victorian Christmas (w/ Frank L. Packard)

Purchased just last week, a century or so after it arrived at the news agent, the December 1911 edition of The Canadian Magazine was hard to resist. Just look at what's on offer: "A Study of Iago" by Arthur Stringer, some thoughts on winter by L.M. Montgomery, a new Homer Watson and no less than ninety lines of verse from the delightfully quirky Isabel Ecclestone Mackay.

But what really sold me was "The Mad Player", an uncollected work by Frank L. Packard. Something just less than 4000 words in length, this simple story is reflected in the accompanying illustrations by J.W. Beatty, R.C.A., O.S.A.

The unnamed narrator is a landscape artist travelling somewhere in France. One evening he comes upon a wild looking violinist busking on a village street.

The painter returns to lodgings, where he is confronted by the violinist – as a fellow artiste, he is offended that our narrator put a coin in his cap. Things are becoming quite unpleasant until the eyes of the unkempt musician fall upon the painter's most recent landscape:

"Monsieur will tell me where it was done – where?"

When told, he rushes out. The innkeeper, who is highly amused, fills in our narrator. It seems that the wild violinist is an aristocrat who as a young man lost his mind at the drowning death of his fiancée.

The following morning, the violinist's body is discovered near the spot captured in the landscape. Wracked with guilt, the painter watches the cortege. He returns to the landscape, trying to make sense of the insane aristocrat's reaction. Though it takes some time, he realizes that the violinist viewed the work upside down.

I reversed it quickly – and then I, as he had done, with startled cry, carried it closer to my eyes. At last I understood. The foliage, by some grim freak as my brush had traced it, bore a crude, but unmistakable resemblance to a woman's face, with her hair streaming down touching the river's brink – and to the poor, crazed brain it had been the end of a long search!

FIN

"The Mad Player" is the work of a man honing his craft as a storyteller; it's well-written, intriguing and, ultimately, most unsatisfying.

When the story appeared in The Canadian Magazine, Packard was labouring as a civil engineer; fortune and fame were still in the future. That said, 1911 did see the publication of On the Iron at Big Cloud, his very first book.

Though Thomas Y. Crowell, Packard's publisher, didn't advertise in this magazine, a whole lot of houses did. Macmillan, Cassell & Co., William Briggs, Oxford University Press, the Upper Canada Tract Society and Copp, Clark all took out full page adverts, only to be overwhelmed by a pink, four-page spread for the brand new Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

I ask, who wouldn't want to be met like this on Christmas morn?

Dedicated to the One I Love

Fetish Girl

Sylvia Bayer [pseud. John Glassco]

New York: Venus Library, 1972

I usually don't pay much attention to dedications, but the one in Up the Hill and Over has got me thinking. Isabel Ecclestone Mackay dedicated the novel to her mother Priscilla, adding, 'who might have liked the book had she lived to read it'. A bit odd, it becomes stranger still when one reads the novel and discovers that a mother and a step-mother serve as the two villains. I'm probably making too much of this, but in my defence, I point out that dedications are usually such bland things – any small display of eccentricity or emotion stays in the mind. Here, for example, is the dedication in The Woman Who Did (1895) by our forgotten countryman Grant Allen:

Allen's once controversial 'New Woman' novel seems fairly tame today; not so John 'Buffy' Glassco's pseudonymous Fetish Girl, the story of Ursula, a 'pretty long-legged bitch of wide and varied experience'. A sympathetic figure, the poor girl lives in frustration, due entirely to her inability to find a man who shares her fixation on things rubber. This, the reader is reminded, is in the days before the World Wide Web. Fortune changes, as it often does, when on vacation. Lounging beside a motel swimming pool, Ursula spots Adrian, an effeminate man sporting black latex trunks. The die is cast when he dons a tight fitting rubber bathing cap. Let the fun begin!

Glassco placed Fetish Girl with Harriet Marwood, Governess as his favourite piece of writing, in part, due to ease of composition. However, as publication approached, he struggled with the dedication. Glassco's desire was to pay tribute to Marion McCormick, who would become his second wife, but he knew that she would not appreciate having her name associated with a work of pornography. He ended up dedicating the book to himself, because, as he wrote friend Leon Edel, 'I am getting on in years and no one ever dedicated a book to me.'

Object: Paper and binding are typical of 'seventies mass market paperbacks; were it not for the contents and cover image it might well have been published by Bantam. And about that cover, Glassco hated the thing before he ever set eyes on it, complaining to a confidant: 'A friend in New York tells me it has a rather stupid illustrated cover of a girl in wet clothes coming out of the ocean – which is not what the book is about at all!'

Access: The novel was reissued – sadly, sans dedication – by Blue Moon in 2001, but is again out of print. That said, it can be bought 'as new' for under US$3. Queen's University holds Glassco's personal copies, one of which is inscribed in his hand: 'And once again to Buffy from Sylvia'. Really, libraries aren't much help – just two others, Library and Archives Canada and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, have copies of the first edition, while the reissue is held only by the Library of Congress. My hunt for the first edition lasted several years, reaching a successful conclusion last December. The bookseller, who asked US$25, appeared to have no idea as to the true identity of the author.

Further Fetish Girl: Fraser Sutherland's highly entertaining and informative 'Sylvia Bayer and the Search for Rubber' looks not only at the novel, but the debt owed by Margaret Laurence, Marion Engel and, above all, Margaret Atwood. Also recommended is Stephen J. Gertz's history of the Venus Library imprint.

Ontario, Opium and Cocaine

Up the Hill and Over

Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1917

363 pages

This review now appears, revised and rewritten, in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Pauline Johnson's Forgotten Heir

Canadian Poets, edited by John W. Garvin (McClelland & Stewart, 1926)

Since my piece on The Chivalry of Keith Leicester, I've had to endure some gentle ribbing from a couple of B.C. readers. Yes, I have two. Both (Did I mention I have two? At least!) appear to take issue with my insinuation that Isabel Ecclestone Mackay is something less than well-known. Eleven days later, I'm prepared to state boldly that hers is not a household name. As evidence, I cite the sad fact that Mackay's books have been out of print for well over seven decades. I add that The Canadian Encyclopedia and The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature fail to mention the author – though I do recognize that both the very fine Encyclopedia of British Columbia and Encyclopedia of Canadian Literature (edited by Vancouverite W.H. New) feature brief entries.

Mackay wasn't born a British Columbian. A native of Woodstock, her 33rd birthday passed before she first visited – and settled – in the province with husband Peter, a court stenographer. There can be no argument that Isabel Ecclestone Mackay was once well-known. She featured regularly in Harper's, Scribners', Smart Set and other great magazines of the day. Her first book, a collection of verse titled Between the Lights, appeared in 1904. Ten more volumes followed: poetry, novels and a light comedy that placed third in a 1929 American play-writing competition. All are pretty much forgotten. Mackay's lasting legacy lies as the force behind Pauline Johnson's The Legends of Vancouver (1911), published as a means of raising funds for the dying author. After Johnson's death, Mackay not only became executrix, but assumed her role as the leading lady of letters in British Columbia. Her books were published by McClelland & Stewart, William Briggs, Thomas Allen, George H. Doran, Samuel French, Houghton Mifflin and Cassell & Company. The Group of Seven's J.E.H. MacDonald provided 'decorations' for her 1922 collection of verse, Fires of Driftwood.

Mackay was known primarily as a poet, but I find her prose more interesting and inventive. Her first novel, The House of Windows (1912), begins with an abandoned baby in a department store and moves on to create a tale involving kidnapping, white slavery, secret identities and suffragettes. Sex, it seems, is at the centre of The Window-Gazer (1921).

The time has come, I suppose, to add Isabel Ecclestone Mackay to my dusty bookcase. I've ordered an old copy of Up the Hill and Over (1917), which New describes as a novel about drug addiction. What fun! Until it arrives, I'll be dipping into her 1918 The Singing Ship and Other Verse for Children (online here), which includes this mildly disturbing poem.

Chivalry Pays (Eventually)

The Chivalry of Keith Leicester:

A Romance of British Columbia

Robert Allison Hood

Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1918

Born in Scotland, raised in England, a son of privilege, Keith Leicester lives on a ranch near the banks of the Fraser River. He is not to be confused with a remittance man; Keith's troubled past is entirely the fault of former fiancée, femme fatale Patricia Devereux, who threw him over a few years earlier. Now a solitary figure, he's taken refuge in our westernmost province, where he spends his leisure hours with his pipe, paper and dog. This quiet routine is disrupted by the unheralded arrival of the beautiful, mysterious Miss Coon – in actuality, an English heiress named Marjorie Colquhoun. Having run off on a forced engagement, she takes refuge at the homestead of her old nurse.

To misquote Elvis Costello: Chapter One, they didn't really get along. But then they don't get along in chapters two through twenty either. This despite the transplanted Scot's many chivalrous acts. Keith, who considers himself a misogynist, has 'no desire to play squire to distressed damsels', yet finds himself coming to Marjorie's aid time and time again. True to the genre, each good deed is negated by a silly misunderstanding, leaving the long-suffering reader to wonder which act of kindness will stick.

The novel takes its most dramatic turn after Hood moves the action to Vancouver, where Marjorie looks to sell her jewellery in an effort to save her former nurse's farm. She walks through a city that is entirely unrecognizable to today's reader:

Down Granville Street she went to the Post Office and then east along Hastings Street as far as the B.C. Electric Station, but although she saw all kinds of stores and many attractive windows, there was no sign of what she was in search of. There were barbers' poles and electric signs of every description, but the three golden balls were nowhere to be seen. at last she decided that she must ask some one, and she picked out for the purpose a benevolent looking old gentleman with a white beard. For anything else she would have asked a policeman, but she felt instinctively that for this it was best not to consult one of the Force.

'Why bless my soul, what did you say - a pawnbroker?' he sputtered in astonishment, evidently distrusting his ears.

Marjorie repeated her query to reassure him. He looked at her amazed.

'A pawnbroker, miss!' he repeated after her. 'No, I'm afraid not; I never heard of one here...'

Marjorie is eventually successful in her quest, only to be fingered as Slippery Sal, a 'female diamond thief that has been operating in the Eastern cities'. Once again, Keith comes to the rescue. The next chapter finds the heiress dining in 'a gown of pink' as our hero goes on and on about his adopted home.

'You've never known the charms of English Bay at sundown,' he said, waxing eloquent, 'the shimmering tints of crimson and violet and yellow and gold; the opalescent splendours as the radiance gradually dies away; the dark blues and purples of the hills outlined against the sky; the flickering lights of the fishing boats sway out near the horizon; and then, landward, the beach full of people and behind, the town all cheery with its street lamps and its countless gleaming windows.'

'It is everything you said for it and a hundred times more,' Marjorie later tells him.

Vancouver's English Bay, c. 1920.

I've spoiled very little here. Harlequin readers know that matters of the heart are never so simple. Before long several members of the English aristocracy descend on Vancouver, bringing with them a whole new set of complications.

Object: A hardcover, fairly bland for the time, it was published just before Frederick Goodchild left John McClelland and George Stewart to set up his own house. The MG&S edition uses the plates of the American published by fellow Torontonian George H. Doran.

Access: Only one copy of this 'Romance of British Columbia' is found in the province's public libraries. Non-circulating, it rests on a metal shelf at the Central Library in Vancouver. Fifteen more library copies are scattered about the country's universities and in the Toronto Public Library. One of the earliest novels set in British Columbia, it isn't to be found at Library and Archives Canada – a ludicrous situation that, given the shameful moratorium on new purchases, won't be rectified anytime soon. The good news is that used copies sans dust jacket are very cheap. I bought mine three years ago in Vancouver, certainly the centre of interest in things Hoodian, for a buck. Good copies in their 91-year-old dust jackets are often listed in the US$30 range. For about the same price, print on demand publisher Waddell Press offers an ugly 'new' edition with with a cover designed by an illiterate. One Vermont bookseller is offering a copy inscribed by Hood to Isabel Ecclestone Mackay, who is described in their sales pitch as 'another well-known author'. As well-known as Hood, I suppose. The US$298 price tag adds insult.