The Dusty Bookcase

02 July 2019

Getting to Know the Woman Who Did

The Woman Who Did
Grant Allen
Boston: Roberts Bros, 1895
223 pages

The Woman Who Did was the first Grant Allen novel I ever bought. For nearly two decades, it sat on the shelf as I read later Allen purchases – more than a dozen – most of which I've come to consider the better Canadian novels of the nineteenth century. Some, like The British Barbarians and What's Bred in the Bone (winner of the £1000 Tit-Bits Prize!), garnered a fair amount of attention in their day, but none so much as The Woman Who Did. The novel's publication was countered by damning editorials, preaching from the pulpit, and calls for censorship (it was banned in Ireland), all of which helped make it the author's best selling work.

There's no risk in writing that The Woman Who Did continues to receive more attention than Allen's other books – and he published more than fifty. Anyone at all interested in the "New Woman" novel or nineteenth-century feminism will have encountered discussion of the work. References are hard to dodge. The accumulation of tit-bits encountered here and there over the years had me thinking that I knew a thing or two about The Woman Who Did... and so, I put off reading it. I mean, why bother with this Grant Allen novel when there were dozens more of which I knew nothing at all? When I finally pulled the book off the shelf last week, I expected no surprises.

The Woman Who Did begins much as I'd imagined. Its heroine, schoolteacher Herminia Barton, is holidaying in Surrey when she's introduced to London lawyer Alan Merrick by a mutual acquaintance:

"You'll like him, Herminia," Mrs. Dewsbury said, nodding. "He's one of your own kind, as dreadful as you are; very free and advanced; a perfect firebrand. In fact, my dear child, I don't know which of you makes my hair stand on end most."

Mrs Dewsbury is spot on in her prediction; not only does Herminia like Alan, the feeling is mutual. The two prove to be kindred spirits, sharing identical opinions on all topics, the foremost of which are the education and emancipation of women.

"They're trying hard enough to develop us intellectually; but morally and socially they want to mew us up just as close as ever. And they won't succeed. The zenana must go. Sooner or later, I'm sure, if you begin by educating women, you must end by emancipating them."
"So I think too," Alan answered, growing every moment more interested. "And for my part, it's the emancipation, not the mere education, that most appeals to me."
"Yes, I've always felt that," Herminia went on, letting herself out more freely, for she felt she was face to face with a sympathetic listener. "And for that reason, it's the question of social and moral emancipation that interests me far more than the mere political one, – woman's rights as they call it. Of course I'm a member of all the woman's franchise leagues and everything of that sort, – they can't afford to do without a single friend's name on their lists at present; but the vote is a matter that troubles me little in itself, what I want is to see women made fit to use it. After all, political life fills but a small and unimportant part in our total existence. It's the perpetual pressure of social and ethical restrictions that most weighs down women."

These exchanges test the reader's patience, but not that of the couple caught up in the bloom of new love. The challenge to their relationship comes when, three weeks after Mrs Dewsbury's introduction, Alan proposes marriage. Here, at last, is something on which they don't see eye to eye. Replies Herminia:

"My conscience won't let me. I know what marriage is, from what vile slavery it has sprung; on what unseen horrors for my sister women it is reared and buttressed; by what unholy sacrifices it is sustained, and made possible. I know it has a history. I know its past, I know its present, and I can't embrace it; I can't be untrue to my most sacred beliefs."

Alan tries to convince Herminia that their marriage wouldn't be like others. The ceremony would be a mere formality, and would save them both – her particularly – from scorn, hardship, and martyrdom.

The Woman Who Did is a suggestive title, particularly in the context of the time. But what did Herminia do exactly? From the tit-bits, I knew hers to be the story of a woman who has a child out of wedlock and then dares raise it on her own. And so, I anticipated Alan abandoning our heroine. Early on, the narrator appears to confirm expectations, sharing: "...it adds, to my mind, to the tragedy of Herminia Barton's life that the man for whom she risked and lost everything was never quite worthy of her; and that Herminia to the end not once suspected it." But the man Herminia loves proves loyal to the end.

Short months after what is described as her "bridal evening," Herminia becomes pregnant. Alan convinces her that it would be best to have the child abroad. They travel to Perugia, Italy, where he dies of typhoid. After giving birth to a girl she names Delores, Herminia returns to London intent on raising the child as the first "born into this world as the deliberate result of a free union, contracted on philosophical and ethical principles."

Oh-so-earnest in intent, The Woman Who Did barely skirts silliness, and has some of the worst dialogue I've read in an Allen novel. Still, I found myself caught up in the drama of it all, and grew to admire Alan and Herminia. The tit-bits led me to expect a tragic ending, but it wasn't anything like I anticipated. The concluding pages were as moving as they were depressing, putting me in a funk that lasted well into this past holiday weekend.

Never have I been affected by so flawed a novel.

Dedication:

Bloomer:

Alan observed almost without observing it that she was gone but for a second. She asked none of that long interval that most women require for the simplest matter of toilet.

Trivia I: Remarkably, The Woman Who Did novel inspired no less than three responses that took the form of novels: Victoria Crosse's The Woman Who Didn't, Mrs Lovett Cameron's The Man Who Didn't, and Lucas Cleeve's The Woman Who Wouldn't, all published in 1895.

As might be expected, Punch weighed in with a parody, "The Woman Who Wouldn't Do," which can be read here courtesy of Allen biographer Peter Morton.

This Punch cartoon is a favourite:

Trivia II: Twice adapted to the silver screen – The Woman Who Did (1915) and Die Frau mit dem schlechten Ruf (1925) – both, sadly, lost. The former featured Lionel Barrymore as Alan.

Object: A small hardcover. The decorations on the cover and title page are by Aubrey Beardsley. Ten pages of adverts for other "Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications" feature at the end. A first American edition, I purchased by copy in 2000 for US$9.99 from a Pennsylvania bookseller. The receipt records that I paid a further three dollars in shipping. Have rates really increased so dramatically?

Access: Common in university libraries, but not in those serving the public. The most recent editions are the 1995 Oxford University Press (above; now out-of-print) and a fine Broadview Press book with critical introduction and a generous gathering of appendices. Edited by Nicholas Ruddick, the latter is recommended.

The novel has been translated into French (Le Roman d'une féministe), German (Die es tat), Yiddish (Di froy velkhe hot es gethon), and twice into Swedish (Hon vågade det and Hennes livs historia).

The first edition is available for download here through the Internet Archive.

Starting in on Grant Allen: A Top Ten

01 July 2019

'God Guide Thee Canada'

On the one hundred and fifty-second anniversary of the Dominion, "God Guide Thee Canada" from Harold S. Wood's Your Home and Mine (Toronto: Musson, 1932).

'Canada to England, July 1st 1917' by Horace Bray

'O Canada! beloved native land...'
'O Canada! our native land thou art!'
Patriotic Verse from the Garden of a Girl's Dreams
A 123-Year-Old Poem for Canada Day

Two Hurrahs for the New Dominion

Charles G.D. Roberts' Dominion Day Collect

25 June 2019

Love, Love, Love, Love, Love, Tiresome Love

The Side of the Angels
Basil King
London: Methuen, 1917
316 pages

Thorley Masterman is another of Basil King's good young men. A son of wealth, he has chosen to devote his life to others as a medical doctor. Such is Thor's dedication that he has purchased a runabout in order to reach patients with the greatest of speed. Thor borrowed money to purchase the automobile, but that wouldn't have been necessary had he waited a year or so. The novel opens in 1910 with the doctor approaching his thirtieth birthday, on which day he will inherit his maternal grandfather's vast fortune.

Thor's need for speed is unwarranted. He hasn't managed to attract so much as a single patient until eccentric Uncle Sim puts him on to Mrs Fay. The Fays were once the Mastermans equals. A couple of generations back, they worked neighbouring fields, and often lent each other a hand. Now, Mr Fay operates a gardening centre of sorts on land he rents from Thor's father. Mrs Fay isn't so much ill as fed up. She's tired of the struggle. The city encroaches, the rent rises, and Fays fall farther and farther behind the families who had once been their peers.

Faced with impending defeat, Mr Fay has retreated into book reading. Matt, the son, is doing time for stealing money he'd intended for the rent. Hardworking daughter Rosie is the only thing keeping their failing operation together.

Thor doesn't quite fall in love with Rosie Fay at first sight, but he is shaken. Since boyhood, he'd intended to marry Lois Willoughby, daughter of Mr and Mrs Len Willoughby, whose considerable investment had aided in making his father's banking and broking house a real concern. Now, leaving the Fays to call on Lois, something has changed:

It did not escape his eye, quickened by the minutes he had spent with Rosie Fay, that Lois lacked color. For the first time in his life he acutely observed the difference between a plain woman and a pretty one.

The doctor begins frequenting the Fay home, ostensibly to care for the ailing Mrs Fay, but really in hopes of seeing Rosie. What Thor doesn't know is that for months she has been sneaking away for moonlight trysts with his caddish half-brother Claude. Because this news, delivered by his father, is too much to be believed, Thor confronts Rosie. In the ensuing exchange, the doctor allows it to slip that he is in love with her. Rosie, in turn, reveals that she'd have married Thor to save her family from financial ruin.

It's all a bit uncomfortable.

Thor decides to use part of his inheritance to enable Claude to marry Rosie, while he, of course, follows through with his decades-old plan to wed plain Lois Willoughby. But Claude, cad that he is, puts off marrying Rosie. And then Lois discovers that Thor was in love with Rosie, Claude learns the very same thing, and the novel dissolves into a very long treatise on the nature of love. For the most part, this takes the form of letters exchanged between Thor and his now estranged wife:

"You ask me what love is, and say you don't know. I'm more daring than you in that I think I do know. I know two or three things about it, even if I don't know all.
"For one thing, I know that no one can do more than say what love is for himself. You can't say what it is for me, or isn't, or must be, or ought to be. That's my secret. I can't always share it, or at any rate share it all, even with the person I love. But neither can I say what it is, or isn't, or should be, or must be, for you. You have your secret. No two people love in the same way, or get precisely the same kind of joy or sorrow from loving. Since love is the flower of personality, it has the same infinite variety that personalities possess. We give one thing and we get back another. Do not some of our irritations – I'm not speaking of you and me in particular – arise from the fact that, giving one thing, we expect to get the same thing back, when all the while no one else has that special quality to offer? The flower is different according to the plant that produces it. When the pine- tree loved the palm there was more than the distance to make the one a mystery to the other.
"Of the two things essential to love, the first, so it seems to me, is that what one gives should be one's best – the very blossom of one's soul. It may have the hot luxuriance of the hibiscus, or the flame of the wild azalea in the woods, or no more than the mildly scented, flowerless bloom of the elm or the linden that falls like manna in the roadway. Each has its beauties and its limitations; but it is worth noticing that each serves its purpose in life's infinite profusion as nothing else could serve it to that particular end. The elm lends something to the hibiscus – the hibiscus to the elm. Neither can expect back what it gives to the other. Perfection is accomplished when each offers what it can.
"Which brings me to the remaining thing I know about love – that it exists in offering. Love is the desire to go outward, to pour forth, to express, to do, to contribute. It has no system of calculation and no yard-stick for the little more or the little less. It is spontaneous and irrepressible and overflowing, and loses the extraordinary essence that makes it truly love when it weighs and measures and inspects too closely the quality of its return. It is in the fact that love is its own sufficiency, its own joy, its own compensation for all its pain, that I find it divine. The one point on which I can fully accept your Christian theology is that your God is love. Given a God who is Love and a Love that is God, I can see Him as worthy to be worshiped. Call Him, then, by any name you please – Jehovah, Allah, Krishna, Christ – you still have the Essence, the Thing. Love to be love must feel itself infinite, or as nearly infinite as anything human can be. When I can't pour it out in that way – when I pause to reflect how far I can go, or reach a point beyond which I see that I cannot go any further – I do not truly love."

The most tedious Basil King novel I've read to date, it says something that its most passionate characters are those who don't philosophize.

Object: A poorly produced book in light brown boards, my copy was published in 1917, during the Great War. The "New and Cheaper Issue," it lacks the eight Elizabeth Shippen Green illustrations (above) found in the older and richer issue. The novel is followed by a 31-page list of other books published by Methuen. Basil King favourites The Wild Olive, The Street Called Straight, The Way Home, and The Letter of the Contract figure, as do novels by fellow Canadians Robert Barr and Gilbert Parker.

Access: The Side of the Angels first appeared serially in Harper's Magazine (August 1915 - April 1916). The first edition was published in January 1916 by Harper & Brothers, followed nine months later by Methuen's first British.

The novel is held by Library and Archives Canada and most university libraries. Once again, our public libraries fail.

24 June 2019

"Hommage" pour la Fête

Verse for la Fête by nineteenth-century hipster Paul de Malijay from his Saint Jean-Baptiste: L'évangile et le Canada. A "Souvenir de la fête nationale du 24 juin 1874," it was published by the wonderfully-named Presses à vapeur de la Minerve.