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 the 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

A Wedding, but No Wedding Night; or, A Sorry, Tragic Tale of Two Solitudes (in two editions)

Antoinette de Mirecourt
   or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing
Rosanna Leprohon
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1973
200 pages

Antoinette De Mirecourt,
   or, Secret Marrying and Secret Sorrowing
Rosanna Leprohon
Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989
334 pages

Six summers ago, I made slow progress through Armand Durand; ou, La promesse accomplie, the French translation of Rosanna Leprohon's 1868 novel Armand Durand; or, A Promise Fulfilled. It made some sense to take on the challenge. As I noted at the time, the author's novels had been far more popular in French than in the original English. Consider The Manor House of De Villerai, which first appeared in 1859 and 1860 issues of the Montreal Family Herald. Le manoir de Villerai, E.L. de Bellefeulle's translation, was published as a book in 1861, then enjoyed four more editions, the last being in 1925. It wasn't until 2014, a full 154 years after the end of its run in the Family Herald, that The Manor House of De Villerai finally appeared in book form. Credit goes to academic publisher Broadview Press.

In the late 'eighties I began collecting Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts titles. Antionette De Mirecourt, sixth in the series, was purchased upon publication, taking advantage of the ten percent discount offered by my employer, a library wholesaler. I preferred the bland, jacketless hardcover editions because they seemed more substantial. Must add that the paperback editions, released simultaneously, weren't particularly attractive. 

This year being one dedicated to women writers (see my New Year's resolution), I decided, at long last, to read what had been Rosanna Leprohon's most popular novel amongst anglophone readers.

But which copy?

I've owned the first New Canadian Library edition for some time. Where did I buy it? When did I buy it? Somehow, its purchase is nowhere near as memorable as the CEECT edition. Might this have something to do with the ten percent discount?

The decision was easy. Madame Leprohon's title is Antoinette De Mirecourt, not Antoinette de Mirecorte, as the NCL edition would have you believe. What's more, the heroine's name is misspelled throughout the text. I would later discover that a significant spoiler appears on the front cover.

I still don't know what to make of the author portrait on the back cover.

The novel begins in November 1763, nine months after the Treaty of Paris, with Antoinette De Mirecourt's arrival in Montreal from her widowed father's Valmont seigneury. On the edge of seventeen, she has been invited by her cousin Lucille D'Aulnay to pass the winter at her elegant rue Nôtre-Dame home. Cousine Lucille is older and her husband older still, though by how much is left up to the reader's imagination. A contemplative man, Monsieur D'Aulnay devotes his days to philosophical works. Lucille's tastes run more toward romantic novels and sentimental verse.

Theirs was an arranged marriage.

Young Antoinette has always been intrigued by the structure of the union, so "with her childish inexperience, rich, poetic imagination, and warm, impulsive heart," wastes no time in asking Lucille whether she was in love with her husband when they wed:

"Oh dear, no! My parents, though kind and indulgent in other respects, showed me no consideration in this. They simply told me Mr. D'Aulnay was the husband they had chosen for me, and that I was to be married to him in five weeks. I cried for the first week almost without intermission. Then, mamma having promised me I should select my own trousseau and that it should be as rich and costly as I could desire, a different turn was given to my feelings, and I became so very busy with milliners and shopping, that I had not time for another thought of regret, till my wedding day arrived. Well, I was happy in my lot, for Mr. D'Aulnay has ever been both indulgent and generous; but, my darling child, the experiment was fearfully hazardous, – one which might have resulted in life-long misery to both parties."

"Remember Antoinette," concludes Lucille, "that the only sure basis for a happy marriage, is mutual love, and community of soul and feeling."

Is the D'Aulnay marriage happy? Not that this reader could see, though it is comfortable. Monsieur D'Aulnay is content to spend his days and nights surrounded by books, while his wife delights in being surrounded by men in uniform. The departures of the gentry to la vielle France and the retreat of the seigneurs to their seigneuries has left a social void that Lucille happily fills with English officers. Chief amongst these is Major Aubrey Sternfield. Monsieur D'Aulnay thinks of him as a "long-legged flamingo," but Lucille and sees an altogether different man:

A tall and splendidly-proportioned: figure – eyes, hair and features of faultless beauty, joined to rare powers of conversation, and a voice whose tones he could modulate to the richest music, were rare gifts to be all united in one happy mortal.

So say all the ladies.

Though Antoinette had been raised on a seigneury, she is all but overcome by the decor, perfume, gauzy dresses, and music of the contra dance of a Montreal soirée. I get it. This was Montreal when I was her age:

Major Sternfield, "handsome as an Apollo," pursues Antoinette. His success is such that the capture of her heart precedes the first letters Antoniette receives from Valmont. One contains a mild bloomer:

The first, which was from her father, was kind and affectionate; spoke of the void her absence made in the household; told her to enjoy herself to her heart's utmost desire; and ended by warning her to watch well over her affections, and bestow them on none of the gay strangers who might visit at her cousin's house, for assuredly he would never under any circumstances countenance any of them as her suitors.

A third letter arrives shortly thereafter. Composed by Monsieur De Mirecourt, it serves to inform Antoinette that she will be marrying Louis Beauchesne, her childhood playmate. What follows is uncomfortable. Louis himself has delivered the letter. While Antoinette, an only child, has great affection, it is as a brother. Louis, who has siblings, knows that his love for her is very different than the one he feels for his sisters. What remains hidden in their encounter is this: Antoinette accepted Sternfield's ring.  

Lucille has been living vicariously through her cousin. Whether under the influence of romantic prose and poetry or the regrets of her own arranged marriage, she has pushed Antoinette into the major's embrace. This secret engagement is known only to the betrothed, and of course Lucille D'Aulney.

Antoinette De Mirecourt and Aubrey Sternfield are married at the D'Aulay residence during a particularly stormy winter evening. The master is in his library, entirely oblivious to anything happening elsewhere in this house. Regimental chaplain Doctor Ormsby is the officiant. Lucille is troubled by his appearance and manner. All is so different from her Catholic faith, but she's keen on seeing it through.  

After the ceremony, Antoinette makes an uncharacteristic stand insisting that her new husband that will keep their union secret until it is blessed by her own church. Sternfield readily agrees. As we shall see, the major has his reasons. The evening becomes even more dramatic with the unexpected arrival of Antoinette's father. He is, of course, ignorant as to what has transpired, and so is too late in laying down the law, employing another mild bloomer:

"I forbid you child, to, have any intercourse, beyond that of distant courtesy, with the men I have mentioned; and if you have entangled yourself in any disgraceful flirtation or attachment, break it off at once, under penalty of being disowned and disinherited."

What's unstated is that the "gay strangers" with whom Antoinette is not to partake in "intercourse" are the English. This is perfectly understandable. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham had taken place just four years earlier. The capitulation of Montreal was a year after that. 

A View of Montreal in Canada, Taken from Isle St. Helena in 1762
Thomas Davies, 1762

I'll say no more for wont of spoiling, except to recommend Antoinette De Mirecourt to lovers of nineteenth-century romance, lovers of gothic romance, and to any Montrealer who share a love of reading. I was born in Montreal two hundred years after the novel is set and one hundred years after it was written, yet its past was not a foreign country. Descriptions of the island, the weather, and the climate are recognizable. This passage raised a smile:

It was the first really good sleighing of the season, for the few slight falls of snow that had hitherto heralded winter’s approach, descending on the muddy roads and sidewalks, had lost at once their whiteness and purity, and becoming incorporated with the liquid mud, formed that detestable, combination with which we Canadians are so familiar in the spring and fall, and which we recognize by the name of “slush.”

And here I'd assumed that "slush," like "smog," was a twentieth-century term.

Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon (née Mullins)
12 January 1829, Montreal, Lower Canada
20 September 1879, Montreal, Quebec

Rosanna Leprohon has much in common with her darker, even more successful New Brunswick contemporary May Agnes Fleming, whose Wedded for a Week; or, The Unseen Bridegroom I read earlier this spring. They may not have been sisters under the skin exactly, but they were cousins. Both were adept at writing complex plots involving romance, marriage, duplicity, nefariousness, and death. If you've enjoyed the company of one you'll like spending time with the other. And so, I've ordered a copy of The Manor House of De Villerai.

God bless our academic publishers.

Bloomer (not mild):

"God bless my soul. Miss De Mirecourt!" he ejaculated, involuntarily starting back.

Trivia (not really): The first sentence has it that the novel takes place "in year 176–, some short time after the royal standard of England had replaced the fleur-de-lys of France." As editor John C. Stockdale notes in the CEECT edition, this can only be 1763: "The year is confirmed by the fact that Madame D'Aulnay's St. Catherine's Eve party was held on a "Thursday" night; in 1763 St. Catherine's Day was Friday, 25 November.

Fun fact: Janet Friskney's New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2007) tells us that The Manor House of De Villerai was once considered for inclusion in the New Canadian Library.

Object and Access: Antionette De Mirecourt was first published in 1864 by John Lovell & Sons. A second printing followed the very same year. Such is the sorry state of Canadian literature that a first edition can be purchased online for a mere $255.

Interestingly, the Lovell edition was the last until 1973 when both McCelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library and the University of Toronto Press's Reprint Library of Canadian Prose and Poetry returned the novel to print.

The CEECT edition is still available through McGill-Queen's University Press. Penguin Random House is selling an ebook of the last New Canadian Library edition (2010), complete with copyright-free stock photo of an American Revolutionary War reenactor.

Penguin Random House charges $9.95 for a text that has been in the public domain since the nineteenth-century.

Related post:

Armand Durand; or, A Summer Project

A 'Japanese' Nightingale: Winnifred Eaton at 150

A Japanese Nightingale

Onoto Watanna [Winnifred Eaton]

New York: Harper, 1901

226 pages

Onoto Watanna was her own creation. She was not a Japanese princess; she was not Japanese at all. Onoto Watanna was Winnifred Eaton, a Montrealer born to a former Chinese circus performer and an Englishman who struggled to support his family through painting and people smuggling.

Winnifred made a better life for herself. She sold her first short story as a teenager. Dozens more followed, as did thirteen novels. There were stage and film adaptations. Winnifred spent six years working as a scriptwriter in Hollywood.

A Japanese Nightingale was Winnifred Eaton's second novel and first big commercial success. She claimed it had sold 200,000 copies.

I don't doubt it.

The novel landed at the height of the Japanese Craze; the very same craze that encouraged Winnifred Eaton to cast herself variously as "Kitishima Taka Hasche," "Kitishina Taka Hasche," or "Tacki Hashi,"a young woman from Yokohama writing under the nom de plume "Onoto Watanna."

It's all a bit confusing. 

A Japanese Nightingale itself is not at all confusing. A simple tale, at its centre is Jack Bigelow, son of American wealth, newly graduated from an unnamed university, who is whiling away his time on the outskirts of Tokyo. What drew him to the far east isn't clear, though it likely has something to do with his English-Japanese college chum Taro Burton. Looks like they were going to have a time together in Tokyo, but then Taro begged off. That Jack went off without him seems odd.

Never mind, the important thing is that Taro had warned him not to take a Japanese wife:

Taro Burton was almost a monomaniac on this subject, and denounced both the foreigners who took to themselves and deserted Japanese wives, and the native Japanese, who made such a practice possible. He himself was a half-caste, being the product of a marriage between an Englishman and a Japanese woman. In this case, however, the husband had proved faithful to his wife and children up to death...

From his earliest days in Tokyo, Jack had been visited by Ido, a nakōdo (read: matchmaker), who'd brought prospective wives for consideration. The wealthy American had found the efforts entertaining. One afternoon, Ido offers a young woman whom Jack had recently seen perform on a pleasure island in Tokyo Bay. 

Jack toys with Yuki cruelly before sending her away, just as he had Ido's other proposed brides. However, the heart will out. The American is haunted by the encounter. He starts on a quest to find the woman he'd rejected. Once found, he marries her.

Because the plot is so simple – twist included – it would spoil things to describe much more. It is important to the plot that, like Eaton herself, Yuki is "half-caste" – much is made of her blue eyes – and so is looked down upon by her fellow Japanese. More impactful to the plot is the clash of cultures, particularly as it concerns Oriental and Occidental understandings of marriage (here I employ the terms of the time). Reading in 2025, one hundred and fourteen years after publication I found interest in the married couple's reluctance to be open and share with one another.

In this one way, A Japanese Nightingale is a contemporary novel.

I finished A Japanese Nightingale last night. Today marks the sesquicentennial Winnifred Eaton's birth, which most likely took place in the family's rented row house on rue d'Iberville.

Once a bestseller, she has become Montreal's most neglected novelist.

Lillie Winnifred Eaton (née Winifred Lily Eaton)
21 August 1875 - 8 April 1954
RIP

Trivia: Adapted by Broadway and Hollywood, both subjects of the next post.

Object: A beautiful hardcover, issued without dust jacket with illustrations credited to Genjiro Yeto. The books features three colour plates and subtle illustrations on each of its pages. It is one of the most beautiful volumes in my collection.

Access: Easily found, the least expensive copy listed online is Constable's UK first. Price: £8.00. The Harper first edition can be had for under twenty-five dollars. 

The edition I read can be enjoyed online through this link to the Internet Archive.

The novel has been translated into Swedish (En japansk näktergal, 1904). German (Japanische Nachtigall, 1920), and Polish (Słowiczek japoński, 1922).

Related posts:

By Any Other Name: Onoto Watanna's Hyacinth

Beauty Ignored and Neglected
Glassco's $9500 Library and the Montreal Eatons

Alberta Gothic

Elinor Glyn Saturday Movie Matinee

An addendum to last week's post on Beyond the Rocks by Elinor Glyn.

A lost film found!

I first read about Beyond the Rocks in university, well before I'd heard of Elinor Glyn or her Guelph, Ontario, girlhood. Back then, by which I mean my early twenties, Beyond the Rocks was one of the most sought after lost silents, mainly because its frustrated lovers, Theodora Brown and Hector Bracondale, were played by Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino.

In 2004, by which time I was a deceptively young looking dad, nearly complete nitrate reels were discovered amongst recent donations to Amsterdam's EYE Filmmuseum. The restoration, nothing less than remarkable, is the subject of this short documentary:

All to say, that I've now seen this once lost film in something approaching its entirety.

You can, too:

As is typically the case, the differences between novel and film are numerous. Here they are particularly interesting in that Mrs Glyn not only co-wrote the screenplay but "supervised."

She rearranged sets, brought in flowers, had costumes altered, and on one occasion picked up a brush and applied dark paint to an extra's hair in order to better match the character she'd envisioned. Remarkably, there's no evidence that any of this behavior brought frustration, tension, resentment or a slap across the face. Indeed, photographic evidence suggests quite the opposite. Here she is goofing around on set with Swanson, Valentino, and director Sam Woods:

What fun!

Mrs Glyn's first change of note is locale. The opening scene is set in a village on the Dorset Coast, most certainly not Bruges, where Captain Dominic Fitzgerald "lives on the meagre pension of a broken and retired guardsman." For context, I present this image of the Fitzgeralds' modest seaside home (it's the one on the right):

I know, I know... different times.

Where in the novel Bracondale does not appear until the second chapter, here he features in the second minute.

You don't make people wait for Valentino.

In the scene, Hector rescues Theodora, who has somehow fallen out of her rowboat within sight of his yacht.

Apparently, Swanson performed the stunt herself, resulting in this saucy shot:

The adventure, which is not in the novel, takes place before her marriage to Josiah Brown. In the book, Hector first meets Theodora one year into the union.

In another scene not found in the book, Hector saves Theodora's life a second time during her honeymoon in the Swiss Alps.

It almost seems unfair to point out departures from the source material; the similarities are far more numerous. Glyn's accomplishment - and here I give credit also to co-writer Jack Cunningham, along with Swanson, Valentino, and Woods - is that Beyond the Rocks on film and paper share the same romantic atmosphere. If the book is better... well, isn't that almost always the case.

I admire Elinor Glyn's talent. She displays such great ability to condense, often adding scenes that aid in shortening the story. They fit so perfectly that, had I not recently read Beyond the Rocks, I might've thought they were in the novel.

To think she accomplished this when screenwriting was in its infancy. She has much to teach, and does in the four-volume Elinor Glyn System of Writing (1922).

I once passed on a copy being sold for a dollar.

Will I never learn? 

Related posts:

No Holiday Amusement

Freedom to Read Week: Embracing Elinor Glyn
Freedom to Read Week: The Police Raid Britnell's
Guelph: City of Galt, Gay, Glyn, Graves, and Girdles
Three Weeks a Lady

Three Weeks in Thirteen Images
Elinor Glyn's Chrustmas Ghost Story (and others)
Gloria Gets Groped

Gloria Swanson's Subway Scene

No Holiday Amusement

Beyond the Rocks: A Love Story
Elinor Glyn
New York: Macaulay, [1922]
327 pages

In the afterglow of Valentine's Day comes a tale of forbidden love between a nineteen-year-old newlywed and a somewhat older extremely handsome lord who is not her husband. Its heroine, Theodora Brown, is the daughter of Captain Dominic Fitzgerald, who is himself extremely handsome. Twice a groom, twice a widower, the captain has fathered three daughters, Theodora being the youngest and fairest of them all. Such is Theodora's devotion to dear papa that she agrees to be the first to wed, the groom being Josiah Brown, a fifty-two-year-old English grocer who has amassed a great fortune through a chance investment in an Australian mine.

Not to disparage Captain Fitzgerald, but the union benefitted him financially. He's a bit of a rogue, and has never been much good with money, which explains why his daughters were raised in Bruges and not Mayfair.

The Browns' honeymoon on the Continent was not a success. Josiah took ill, though he did manage to consummate the marriage. Mercifully, the author provides no details, though she does make it known that Theodora found it "a nightmare, now happily a thing of the past."

The deed was done, but as backstory ends and action commences the Browns have yet to make for home; Josiah has been advised by physicians to make a gradual reentry to England. As young Theodora whiles away the hours, days, and months her limited orbit brings her within the sights of  Hector Bracondale, the aforementioned extremely handsome lord.

As portrayed by Rudolph Valentino in the 1922 film adaptation, he really is extremely handsome. Gloria Swanson, who played Theodora, is extremely beautiful.

Ten years Theodora's senior, Lord Bracondale seems the sort of fellow you'd keep away from your sister, his engagements with the opposite sex being nowhere near as innocent as hers:

Usually when he had been greatly attracted by a married woman before, he had unconsciously thought of her as having the qualities which would make her an adorable mistress, a delicious friend, or a holiday amusement, There had never been any reverence mixed up with the affair, which usually had the zest of forbidden fruit, and was hurried along by passion.

Will Hector not settle down? His mother, Lady Bracondale has been pressuring her son to marry dull and heavy heiress Morella Winmarleigh. This campaign has been going on for so long that London society sees the two, who are anything but a couple, as more or less engaged. Hector himself had been or less resigned to marrying Morella at some point in the distant future... but then came Theodora.

Beyond the Rocks is to be enjoyed more for the writing than the plot. There are many slow patches, though it picks up from time to time. Nearly every character, members of the English upper class and aristocracy, is portrayed as dull and uninteresting. This middle class Canadian found it intriguing that pretty much every one of their number was having it on with someone else's spouse. The lone interesting figure of their set is Colonel Lowerby. Commonly called "the Crow," he is a man of strong opinion, as exemplified in this exchange with Anne, Hector Bracendale's sister:

“It is too bad, Crow," said Anne. “You take it for granted that Hector has the most dishonorable intentions towards Mrs. Brown. He may worship her quite in the abstract.”
   “Fiddle-dee-dee, my child!" said Colonel Lowerby. “Look at him! You don’t understand the fundamental principles of human nature if you say that. When a man is madly in love with a woman, nature says, ‘This is your mate,’ not a saint of alabaster on a church altar. There are numbers of animals about who find a ‘mate’ in every woman they come across. But Hector is not that sort. Look at his face —look at him now they are passing us, and tell me if you see any abstract about it?”

Lowerby is the most forthright character in the novel.

The most generous and kind are Theodora and Josiah Brown.

It culminates in tragedy, though I very much doubt that the author saw it as anything other than a happy ending.

Fun fact: Gloria Swanson, whom I'd assumed to be too old to play nineteen-year-old Theodora, was all of twenty-one when the film was shot.  Coincidentally, it was her twenty-first feature.

Object: A bulky hardcover in crimson boards with black type containing three "illustrations From [sic] the Paramount Photo-Play." A fourth illustration, not from the Photo-Play, appears as the frontispiece:

The jacket features an ad directed at Valentino fans.

Access: Long out of print, the cheapest copy of Beyond the Rocks listed online is what I assume to be the photoplay edition, sans jacket, at US$5.00. Copies of the Duckworth first UK edition begin at US$18.00. Copies of the Harper first American start at US$27.60.

My photoplay copy, with jacket, was purchased last year from a Minnesota bookseller. Price: US$35.00. I paid nearly the same amount in shipping.

It was worth every American penny.

Don't have the time to read 327 pages? Not to worry, the August 1906 edition of The Novel Magazine whittles it down to a couple.

(cliquez pour agrandir)

As far as I know, there has been just one translation, Za úskalím, first published in 1912 in the Czechoslovak Republic, and then again in 1914. 

Remarkably, it was republished a third time eighty years later. The cover is, um, not as good.

Related posts:

Freedom to Read Week: Embracing Elinor Glyn
Freedom to Read Week: The Police Raid Britnell's
Guelph: City of Galt, Gay, Glyn, Graves, and Girdles
Three Weeks a Lady

Three Weeks in Thirteen Images
Elinor Glyn's Chrustmas Ghost Story (and others)

Elinor Glyn's Christmas Ghost Story (and others)

The Contrast and Other Stories
Elinor Glyn
London: Duckworth, 1913
312 pages

As is typical of short story collections, this book is overshadowed by the author's longer works. The Contrast and Other Stories was published in the very same year as Glyn's novels The Sequence and The Point of View. Of these, the former, a story of the romance between "tall, stern and cynical" Sir Hugh Dremont and "pale, sensitive and spiritual" Guinevere, is the more notable for having earned a spot sixty-five years later as volume 17 in Barbara Cartland's Library of Love.

Those character descriptions of Sir Hugh Dremont and Guinevere come from Dame Barbara herself. I must read it, if only to learn Guinevere's surname.

The Point of View failed to reach quite that height, but it has an equally interesting publishing history. The novel was first published from start to finish in the February 1913 number of Ainslee's Magazine. Later that same year, it appeared as a book in the United States, though not in the United Kingdom. My first American edition was purchased three years ago for fifty cents .

New York: Appleton, 1913

The Point of View is one of five "stories" in The Contrast and Other Stories. Spanning 184 of the collection's 312 pages, it cannot help but dominate.

Frontispiece to the Appleton edition.

The heroine of the novel – again, it is a novel – is  21-year-old Stella Rawson, a pretty brown-eyed orphan who was raised by her uncle and aunt, Canon and the Honourable Mrs Ebly. The spring of 1913 finds the three visiting Rome. While dining at the restaurant of the Grand Hotel they notice Count Roumovsky. He's hard to miss. The count dresses in such fine clothes and wears such a slim wristwatch that the Canon and the Honourable Mrs. Ebly take offense. And then there's his hair:

It seemed incredible that such an almost grotesque arrangement of coiffure should adorn the head of a man in modern evening dress. It should have been on some Byzantine saint. However, there he was, and entirely unconcerned at the effect he was producing.

By all appearances, Roumovsky is oblivious to the Eblys' attentions, Stella's included, but when alone with her the following morning he makes his move in arranging an afternoon tryst, which is followed by another, and an evening encounter in which he proposes marriage. Stella is hot for the Russian dandy, but is already betrothed to Reverend Eustace Medlicott, a High Church Anglican who is prepared to leave his life of celibacy. 

It pains me to write that 'The Point of View' is the best "story" in the collection, because I really wanted to focus on 'The Irtonwood Ghost;' Canadian Christmas ghost stories being so uncommon.

Can 'The Irtonwood Ghost' be considered in any way Canadian? I say yes. Elinor Glyn came to Canada at two months of age and left as a nine-year-old. Those are formative years, right?

First published in the 1911 Christmas Issue of Pearson's, 'The Irtonwood Ghost' is the second longest piece in The Contrast and Other Stories. It's on par with the four others in that it is neither more nor less memorable. I read it two weekends back and can't quite recall what it was all about. From what I do remember, it concerns graceful young widow Esther Charters who has been invited to spend Christmas at Irtonwood Manor, located somewhere in the English countryside. Its a good break from her worries, which centre on a century-old marriage certificate that needs be found to secure the property she has inherited from her late husband. Unbeknownst to her, there is an enemy, Ambrose Duval, amongst the other guests. Duval has been on the hunt for the very same certificate, but only so that he might destroy it. The supernatural comes into play in the form of haunting dreams in which premonition plays a part. Oh, and there is a ghost.

'The Contrast' is an odd choice for the title tale in that it is the weakest of the five stories. Irish songbird Pauline is being strung along by a ne'er-do-well while a devoted man, the better in every way, pines from the wings.

In 'Her Advice,' a young wife chooses to confront an older femme fatale whom she believes is threatening her marriage, and instead comes away with advice on how to tend the flames of desire.

The closer, 'Fragments,' concerns an unnamed woman married to Ernest, a man made invalid by war. It is either Glyn at her most experimental or nothing more than notes being passed off as a short story.

I think 'Fragments' is the only one of the five to have a sad ending, though I may be wrong. In the course of its twenty pages, the wife falls in love with able-bodied landowner and dog breeder Sir John Harrington, and he with her. Neither act on that love out of deference to Ernest. The story ends with the wife arriving home one day to find her husband dead. Could it too be a happy ending? After all, Ernest is no longer suffering, and his wife is now free to be with Sir John.

That the ending is so very predictable reflects on Glyn's chief flaw as a storyteller. Once set in motion, her plots follow the simplest course toward a happy conclusion. There is conflict to be sure, as expected with matters of the heart, but there are no obstacles of any significance.

Each story ends with every character happy or at the very least satisfied, the exception being Ambrose Duval of 'The Irtonwood Ghost.' Esther Charters ends up with the lost marriage certificate, not him. On the other hand, Duval is allowed to escape, which must have made him happy.

Even Eustace Medlicott of The Point of View is happy, despite losing his charming fiancée to a Russian count. Bonus: Reverend Medlicott is free to maintain his life of celibacy.

The Point of View ends with the marriage of Stella and Count Roumovsky, but would they live happily ever after? After all, their whirlwind romance takes place in the spring of 1913, a mere fourteen months before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. I wonder how they fared once the Bolsheviks took power.

Soon to become ghosts themselves, perhaps.

Object: Once part of the Hammersmith Public Libraries, it isn't nearly so scarred as one might expect.

At some point it belonged to someone named O. Farnworth.

I purchased this copy, a first edition, earlier this year from an Edinburgh bookseller. Price: £15.

Access: A Quebec bookseller is offering a "Very Good" copy of the Duckworth edition for US$30.00, while another in New York State has listed the same in perhaps lesser condition at US$65.00. Both have blue boards, which I can only assume is a variant.

The only other edition of which I am aware is the Tauchnitz, published in Leipzig in 1913. Just one copy is listed for sale online; this by an Ottawa bookseller:

Half Bound. Condition: VG. 271 pages in very good, clean condition; edges a little yellowed. Marbled endpapers. Half bound with brown leather over marbled boards. Gilt titles and decoration on the spine. Light scuffing on the leather and boards. Edges rubbed. Corners not bumped. VG Size: 4 1/2 x 6 1/2.

Sounds intriguing. 

The Duckworth edition can. be read online here thanks to the Internet Archive.

The Point of View was published in 1913 by Applewood and Authors' Press, then never again. As I write, two online booksellers are offering jacketless copies of the latter online at US$4.50 and US$5.00, but at US$10.00, the copy to buy is this Appleton first:

Sure, that's more than 50¢, but it has a dust jacket. And doesn't it sound spicy?

Related posts:

Freedom to Read Week: Embracing Elinor Glyn
Freedom to Read Week: The Police Raid Britnell's
Guelph: City of Galt, Gay, Glyn, Graves, and Girdles
Three Weeks a Lady

Three Weeks in Thirteen Images