Old Novels and the Women Who Owned Them

Last year, I participated in CrowdsourceHerBook: Women's book history and participatory science – an experiment. Overseen by Charlotte Epple, a PhD fellow at the University of Southern Denmark, it ran from March to December and involved sourcing images of "women-owned books printed before 1900 in private ownership."  

It was an enjoyable experience. My only regret was that I learned of the project too late to have contributed more than a few titles before it came to an end.

On the other hand, I didn't have much to offer. Canadian books dominate my library, the vast majority dating from the twentieth-century. Few of the two hundred or so titles printed before 1900 bear signatures or other identifying marks of former owners. More often than not, those that do appear to have been owned by men – but there are exceptions. My favourite is the first I submitted.

I've written about Margaret Murray Robertson's Christie Redfern's Troubles in the pages of Canadian Notes & Queries, and have spoken about the author and her novel since. First published in 1866, my copy likely dates from about 1892.

What had intrigued for so long was its bookplate:

Encouraged by the project, I found far more about young Katie Seymour than expected. You can read about it through this link.

I was nowhere near so successful in tracking down Lulu Bird – presuming that was her actual name – who on Valentine's Day, 1900 received this first edition of Frank Norris's 1899 novel Blix.  Of all the inscriptions in my library, this is by far my favourite.

Ownership of this copy of The Bastonnais, John Lesperance's 1877 historical novel set during the 1775 and 1776 invasions of Canada, proved every bit as challenging. 

I like to think that I narrowed the field, but "Lizzie Beaty" wasn't much to go on.

You can read of my failure here. 

On this International Women's Day I can't help but think of these women. The books they once owned are now in my hands. I've read the words they read, and on the very same pages.

I also think of Jennie Jones, "a scholar in the Methodist Sunday School." In 1898, the Missionary Society of the Methodist Church presented her with a copy of W.H. Withrow's The King's Messenger; or, Lawrence Temple's Probation "as an acknowledgement of the diligence and fidelity in collection Funds for the Missionary Society."

Jennie Jones' copy of The King's Messenger would've been my next CrowdsourceHerBook submission. 

The seed has been planted. I must know more!

Related posts:

Let the Margaret Murray Robertson Revival Begin!
Margaret Murray Robertson Matrimonial Mystery
(and Canadian literature's most tear-stained novel)

The Colony of Unrequited Nightmares

Portrait in Fear [Mystery of Cedar Valley]
Vera Henry
New York: Caravelle, 1964
160 pages

I expected little of Portrait in Fear, the lone novel from an author whose bibliography consists almost entirely of confessionals published in post-war love pulps.

Ideal Love (December 1946) and Glamorous Love (July 1954)

She had me from the opening:

Even after all this time, the townspeople of Cedar Valley view our small summer art colony with suspicion. They tolerate us for business reasons, but they do not like us.

The narrator, children's book illustrator Maggie Balfour, is the colony's longest resident. She's also the youngest. Her parents first brought her as a child. She was fifteen the summer Steve Wentworth moved into the cottage next door. He was writing his first novel. Steve was a young man. Maggie was a girl with a crush. There was nothing untoward about their relationship. As the years passed, the two became good friends and in the off-season would visit other art colony residents in "the city." They all expected the pair to one day move on from being just friends, and so were surprised when Steve all of a sudden married another. Maggie had only herself to blame for introducing the two. Riona, Steve's bride, was an old schoolmate.

Now it's the newlyweds' first summer at the colony. Maggie is determined to put on a good front, and for the most part succeeds. Not so the colony's other women. Retired stage actress Connie Ordway is right in suspecting that husband Brown has been having an affair with Riona. Gwen Darlan is not only certain that her spouse would leave her for Riona, she would gladly give him up. It's not that she doesn't love her husband, rather that she wants him to be happy. Where the reader recognizes a selfish, directionless child of a man, wife Gwen sees a genius deserving of so beautiful a woman. Sadly for Ted, Riona sees him as a plaything, little more than a sardine entangled by a fishing line.

Riona fits the femme fatale stereotype, right down to her dark hair, pale blue eyes, pale white skin, rocking body, and provocative dress. In a tight-knit community with so much resentment, jealousy, and hatred directed toward one person, you just know that something bad is going to happen. The front cover tells you as much.

Here I'm going to change focus, as I often do when writing about mysteries. I never want to wade in too far for fear of spoiling things. Let's look instead at this Caravelle Books edition, beginning with the cover copy:

• Riona is not "pretty." Maggie, who has every reason to find fault, describes her as the most beautiful woman she has ever seen.
• Riona has great sense of right and wrong. Manipulative and cruel, she's no "lost pussy cat."
• "They" do indeed have a reason to kill Riona, and of course one of them does.

I've spoiled nothing in revealing that Riona is murdered, right? 

Now, the back cover:

The artists' colony is hardly "swinging," though it is true that its men are keen on sleeping with Riona, husband Steve included. 

There is a whopper of an error in the second paragraph:

When Marie Balfour, Steve's ex-fiance, questioned Riona about the odd gold brooch she wore, Maggie didn't know it then but it was a pin that would unlock the mystery of Riona's death.

I'm glad I didn't see this until after I'd read the novel, otherwise I'd've kept an eye out for Marie, the jilted lover. The copywriter means Maggie, not non-existent Marie. Not only are Maggie and Steve never engaged, they never exchange so much as a kiss.

Returning briefly to the novel itself, much of the mystery has to do with painter Paul Petrie. Unlike Maggie, he was not raised in the arts colony, but on the outskirts. He grew up within the "Evangelical Brethern [sic]," a small religious sect that had settled Cedar Valley after "fleeing from the temptations of the mid-Victorian world." Paul was very much a black sheep, painting from an early age in a religious community that considers lipstick garish.

After years of condemnation and rejection, Paul Petrie disappeared at the very point his talent began to be celebrated. If anything, his recognition caused further bad feelings within Cedar Valley's predominantly Evangelical Brethern locals. Young Paul would've given them his paintings for free, now they hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

Marie Balfour never appears, but does Paul?

I'm not telling, though I will say that the surprise ending Caravelle promises did indeed smack me right between the eyes.

About Cedar Valley: The author gives few clues as to the location of the community, but careful reading suggests that it is on Lake Ontario somewhere between Toronto and Hamilton.

About the author: Vera Henry (née Bates) began life in Forest, Ontario. According to the 1911 Canadian census he was born in July 1909, likely the last of seven children born to 37-year-old William, a livery stable laborer, and 40-year-old Margaret. The family doesn't appear in the 1921 census.

The University of Oregon Libraries, which holds Vera Henry's papers – all "0.5 feet" – reports that the author graduated high school at age fourteen. She may have been living in Michigan at this point. I have nothing to go on other than the proximity to Forest and Vera Henry's association with the state.

The most informative profile I've found, 'You May Be in One of Her Stories,' was published in the 8 May 1954 edition of the Detroit Free Press. This was on the occasion of the Detroit Women Writers honouring Vera Henry as Writer of the Year.

There's so much to explore, like distaste expressed for her cash cow:

This suggests a lost work:

And here's something to keep in mind if I ever write a second edition of Character Parts:

Vera Henry died in Royal Oak, Michigan on 4 October 1987.

About Forest: A community of fewer than three thousand souls located five kilometres east of the southern shores of Lake Huron, Forest has had more than its fair share of notable residents. Emily Murphy lived there for a time, as did journalist Robyn Doolittle. Like any Canadian small town, it has produced at least a couple of NHL players, but the name that stood out to me is Emm Gryner. For ten years, our paths crossed as residents of nearby St Marys, Ontario. Here's Emm onstage with David Bowie:

Object and Access: A mass market paperback, my copy was purchased online earlier this month from a Guelph bookseller. Price: US$3.50.

Evidence suggests that in 1967 there was a second Caravelle edition. As I write, seven copies of the two Caravelles – 1964 and 1967 – are listed online. Prices begin at US$5.00.

The novel was first published in 1964 by New York's Avalon Books as Mystery of Cedar Valley. Worse title, better cover:

Might it also be a better novel?

I ask because Caravelle's Portrait in Fear features several remarkable errors, this being the worst:

One copy of Mystery of Cedar Valley – ex-library – is listed online. It's in pretty rotten condition, but does include the dust jacket (chopped up and pasted on the boards here and there). Price: US$50.00.

I recommend both.

The Great Lost Canadian Mystery Novel?

'Four To Go'
Kay Grant [Hilda Kay Grant]
The Star Weekly (24 - 31 March 1973)

I once thought that Hilda Kay Grant's bibliography could be divided neatly into two unequal parts. The first spanned thirteen years, beginning in 1951 with The Salt-Box, a fictionalized memoir of her youth published under the name "Jan Hilliard." Five novels followed, all using the very same nom de plume, the last being 1964's Morgan's Castle. The second part, which lasted from 1967 to 1969, consisted of three works of non-fiction written or co-written under the name "Kay Grant."

And then silence... Again, this is what I once thought.

Last autumn, while working on the Ricochet Books reissue of Morgan's Castle I stumbled upon a reference to a novel by "Kay Grant" titled Four To Go published over two 1973 issues of Toronto's Star Weekly.  

Surely this couldn't be same Kay Grant. It had been nine years since her last novel. Besides, all her fiction had been published as being by "Jan Hilliard." Could this be the other Kay Grant, the one who wrote wartime verse like It's 'ard to Keep Straight in the City (1941) and It's 'ard to Be Good in the Blackout (1944)?*

Rural life can be 'ard. I was spoiled during my Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto years in having ready access to resources. It took some effort to access those old issues of the Star Weekly, but the heart leapt when I did. Here's why:

The Niagara Peninsula! Why, Morgan's Castle is set in the Niagara Peninsula! So is her 1956 novel The Jameson Girls! I next came across this:

The Star Weekly, 17 March 1973

Written by Gwen Beattie, it's an author profile published in anticipation of the next week's publication of Four To Go. In it, Kay Grant is identified as Jan Hilliard, the author of "earlier Niagara-based novels – The Jameson Girls and Morgan's Castle."

I would've felt confident in declaring Four To Go as the work of Hilda Kay Boyle just the same. Location aside, it contains two elements found in each and every Jan Hilliard novel: dysfunctional family and an unusual house.

Twenty-five-year-old widow Katie Gaylord is narrator and protagonist. Maiden name Whitney, she'd thrown off her family-pressured engagement to stable second cousin Charles Davis, a lawyer, and had eloped with freewheeling Harry. During their two-year marriage, Katie's husband promised much, delivered little, and brought it all to an end by drowning off the coast of California. Left with next to nothing, Katie packs her clothes in cardboard boxes. gets in a pale green convertible – "purchased during a brief period of affluence" – and drives the more than four thousand kilometers home to Cragsmore, the grand Whitney family home on the Niagara Escarpment.

Katie knows that her 87-year-old grandmother Beatrice will accept her back. The prodigal granddaughter  reappears as Beatrice is entertaining two other elderly ladies:

"Well, Katie," she said, as matter-of factly as if I'd left home that morning. But she clutched my hand tightly as she lifted her face to be kissed. "Sit down and have some tea. You know everybody. Mrs. Kemp, Mrs. Taylor. They're collecting for the unmarried mothers."

Grandmother Beatrice will never say a word about Harry or his tragic death. He will be forever forgotten, expunged from the Whitney family history.

* * *

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

— Leo Tolstoy

Katie's family isn't particularly happy or unhappy, though its history is tinged with tragedy. Only one of Gran's children lived beyond infancy, that being Shane O'Neill, described by daughter Katie as a "philanderer and amateur sadist":

Three years later, forty-something Shane married eighteen-year-old Rose, then three months pregnant with Katie. Gran liked this second wife and was heartbroken when Rose's car plunged over a cliff not a half-mile from the family home.

Shane was the next to go (boating accident), but not before fathering a son, Conn, who was left on the doorstep by the teenage daughter of an itinerant fruit-picker.

The Whitney fortune came from jam.

* * *

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.

—Anton Chekhov

Though it has been just two years since she left, Cragsmore is much changed from the house Katie knew. Thirty-three-year-old Martha, a woman who had never once garnered a second look from a man, is now married to local lothario Joe Bennett. Mrs Baines, the long-time cook is gone. Joe replaced her with a man named Horace. He lives with his "cousin" Dickie in an apartment above the old coach house. Dickie is employed as Gran's chauffeur.

Martha has taken to wearing makeup and now cares more about her dress. Katie doesn't even recognize seventeen-year-old Conn. He's grown his hair and bought a motorcycle, but really only as an act of rebellion against Martha. Conn's also taken up with a runaway named Sue, who he has hidden away in a room above the old barn. It also contains his rock collection. At night, he uses the old dumb waiter to sneak out of the house. It works on a pulley system that involves ropes and lead weights running from the cellar to the second of Cragsmore's three storeys. Originally used to carry coal, now used to carry laundry, Martha has the dumb waiter inspected every March and September by old Mr Bennett. He died in April. 

You'd be right in thinking that something's going to happen with that dumb waiter.

I'll leave it at that.

Four To Go is a conventional mystery. An argument can be made that it is the author's only mystery. I'm happy to have found it, all the while being disappointed. Four To Go just doesn't reach the level of the Jan Hilliard novels. Black humour is absent, the pacing is off, and the denouement seems so very long.

In that old Gwen Beattie Star Weekly article she describes Four To Go as a condensed version of the author's "latest Niagara novel."

The uncondensed version has yet to be published. The manuscript has yet to be found.

Is Four To Go the Great Lost Canadian Mystery? 

I don't suppose we'll ever know. Are there other lost Canadian mystery novels? 

Is Four To Go worth republishing as is?

Of course, it is.

* What little I know of Australia's Kay Grant comes from the brief author bio found on the rear jacket of the American edition of the intriguingly titled It's 'ard to Keep Straight in the Navy.

cliquez pour agrandir

Related posts:

The Jan Hilliard Ricochet
A Nova Scotian Writes Ontario Gothic
As He Lay Dying