Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (29 page)

Now lacking marital support, with growing children to care for, she returned to teaching and began, in 1846, writing her first novel,
Retribution
, which was published in 1849. All her novels were serialised and
Retribution
appeared in the pages of the
National Era
, the anti-slavery weekly which later popularised
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
.
Southworth later formed an alliance with the
Saturday Evening Post
and the
New York Ledger
, the two market leaders in the field of serialised fiction for adult family members. Subtitled ‘
or the Vale of Shadows, a Tale of Passion
’, the narrative of
Retribution
forecasts Southworth’s preference for romance centred on sexual betrayal, with Maryland and Virginia settings (highly coloured for Northern readers), violent storms, and ‘providential’ interventions. The heroine, Hester Gray, is betrayed by her husband Ernest with her closest friend. It is a typical Southworth plot complication.

She followed up with
The Deserted Wife
(1850), in which, given her own history, it is tempting to see autobiography. Southworth’s status as the most popular novelist of the day was clinched with
The Curse of Clifton
(1852), which saw her launched on a career that was to produce some sixty bestselling romances. As a serialist, South-worth’s stock-in-trade was the vivid, reader-grabbing, opening.
Lionne; or The Doom of Deville
(1859), for example, opens in the Maryland wilderness, where Lieutenant Orville Deville, a young officer, has a glimpse of a girl of the woods (‘Lionne’) by the vivid illumination of a shaft of lightning. He falls in love with the ‘brilliant brunette’ on the spot and is, immediately, felled by a falling branch. Is he dead? All this in a few opening sentences.

The money rolled in, but in the early 1850s Southworth and her children suffered chronic sickness and disability. She grossly overworked herself and precipitated a serious breakdown in 1855. She publicly requested her loyal readers in the
Saturday Evening Post
to bear with her, while she convalesced. By the end of the decade, with the huge success of
The Hidden Hand
(1859), she was earning an estimated $6,000 a year: possibly more than any other woman in America at the time, other than courtesans.

The most popular American novel since
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, Southworth’s gothic tale,
The Hidden Hand
, was boosted by the readiness with which it could be adapted for the stage. There were an estimated forty dramatised versions – one of them, appropriately enough, starring John Wilkes Booth as the assassin. The novel opens at Hurricane Hall, set in the romantic scenery of ‘the Devil’s Hoof’ in Virginia. The bachelor proprietor of the Hall, Major Ira Warfield (‘Old Hurricane’), is called to the bedside of a dying midwife, Granny Grewell. Twelve years before, she had secretly delivered a pair of twins, a boy and a girl. The boy died, the girl was disposed of somewhere in New York. The motive was to misappropriate their rightful inheritance. This dastardly plot is the work of the villainous Colonel Le Noir and his depraved son Craven. Warfield discovers the urchin, Capitola Black, in Rag Lane, New York, where she is a child of the streets and dressed as a boy (cross-dressing features prominently in her subsequent adventures, an oblique allusion to the ‘Bloomerism’ – women in trousers – which was all the rage in 1850s America).
After fearful complications, Capitola’s true identity emerges and poetic justice is measured out, overbrimmingly.

On the strength of the work’s popularity in Britain, where there were three piratically dramatised versions running concurrently, Southworth spent the years 1859–62 in London, fuelling the mania for ‘Capitola’ hats, suits and coats with her immensely popular public readings. True to her abolitionist affiliations, South-worth supported the Union during the Civil War and did voluntary work in hospitals during hostilities. She adapted well to changes in fictional fashion. Always up with the times, by the 1870s Southworth was using a typewriter and in the early 1880s she became a devotee of Swedenborg and spiritualism as the popularity of her fiction waned. By the time of her death, the mass of her readers had preceded her into the next world. Few remained loyal in this.

The Girl of the Period is a creature who dyes her hair and paints her face as the first articles of her personal religion.

Remembered, if at all, as the novelist who sold Dickens his beloved house, Gad’s Hill in Rochester, Linton was, in her time, a powerful – if reactionary – force in Victorian fiction. She was born in the Lake District, the twelfth child of a clergyman of hidebound Conservative views, yet a manifestly philoprogenitive disposition. Her mother died five months after Eliza Lynn’s birth and her father was thereafter generally indifferent to his many offspring, leaving his youngest child with a residual guilt at being the indirect cause of her mother’s death. She was, however, surrounded by books and taught herself comprehensively.

In her early girlhood, Eliza underwent what was evidently a severe religious crisis, from which she emerged largely unreligious. In 1845 she enterprisingly took her future into her own hands and went off to London to live by her pen. There she worked on the
Morning Chronicle
for three years, as the first salaried journalist in England. She also wrote three unsuccessful novels.
Azeth, the Egyptian
, the best of them, was accepted by Emily Brontë’s notorious publisher, Thomas Newby, for a fee of £50 – payable by the author. The experience rankled all her life.

In 1851, after quarrelling with her editor, Eliza left the
Morning Chronicle
to work as a freelance foreign correspondent in Paris. By this period she knew and – more importantly – was known by many of the most influential literary figures in London, notably Walter Savage Landor, whom she liked to call her ‘beloved father’. Her less beloved biological father died, leaving her £1,500 and the property at Gad’s Hill, which she sold on to Charles Dickens in 1856. Two years later she married the artist, William James Linton. The couple shared a love of the Lake District, reflected in their work. That love was not, alas, enough to keep them together. William was ten years her senior, politically radical, and a widower with seven children. He quickly ran through her little fortune. The marriage failed and the couple separated – although they never divorced and Eliza kept on good terms with her husband, who drifted to America, and continued to support her stepchildren.

In the 1860s, Linton started a new career in which fiction was to play a major part. From 1866 she worked on the
Saturday Review
and wrote an extraordinarily powerful sequence of anti-feminist articles, collected as
The Girl of the Period
(1869). Hitherto she had been somewhat in favour of women’s rights. However, she made herself a novelist of the first rank with
The True History of Joshua Davidson
(1872), a work which sardonically recasts the gospel in a modern setting. The free-thinker Charles Bradlaugh bought 1,000 copies to distribute for his cause. Her other major achievement,
The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland
(1885), remains one of the best depictions of a writer’s spiritual growth (and the woes of authorship) to be found in Victorian fiction: she called it ‘the book of my whole career’. It deserves to be read more than it is.

Linton went on to write a string of powerful novels – many with melodramatic plots and usually focused on some problem of the day. Most interesting, if provocative, are those directed against the loathed ‘girl of the period’ and the ‘shrieking sisterhood’ (i.e. feminists). Typical is
The One Too Many
(1894), which excoriates the ‘Girton girl’ as a smoking, drinking, morally depraved harlot. The novel is dedicated to ‘the sweet girls still left among us’.

In later life, Linton is reported to have declared, ‘All the reforms we have striven for have been granted. Nothing further is now required.’ She died of pneumonia, leaving a lively memoir, published posthumously as
My Literary Life
(1899). It was, particularly for a woman of the period, a rather well-remunerated life: she left £16,000 on her death.

My Little BA.
Eliza Lynn Linton’s nickname for Harraden

Beatrice Harraden was born in South Hampstead, the daughter of a musical instrument importer. She finished her education in Dresden and at Bedford College, London, where she studied classics and mathematics, graduating with a first-class degree. An early aspiration to be a cellist was given up and she went on to devote her subsequent life to travel, writing and, when the movement was at its height, to activity on behalf of women’s suffrage. Personally unassuming, physically small and prettier than she modestly gave herself credit for (she thought she had a ‘thin, eager, face’) and in later life bespectacled, she was, on her entry into London society, a protégé of Eliza Lynn Linton, who affectionately called her ‘my little BA’.

Harraden’s first novel,
Ships That Pass in the Night
(1893) was a bestseller. The hero and heroine are invalids who fall in love at an Alpine
Kurhaus
for consumptives. According to gossip of the time, this novel – and others she wrote that were centred on similar doomed brief encounters – ‘arose from the tragic experience of her life; she fell deeply in love with a man who falsified his clients’ accounts and whose body was found not long after in a crevasse on a Swiss glacier’. The narrative of
Ships That Pass in the Night
is veined with bitter and self-wounding remarks about life, such as that by the heroine, Bernardine: ‘I am tired of reading … I seem to have been reading all my life. My uncle, with whom I live [in London], keeps a second-hand book-shop, and ever since I can remember, I have been surrounded by books. They have not done me much good, nor any one else either.’ Read on.

Harraden was afflicted with TB herself, and travelled as far afield as southern California for the sake of her lungs. She evidently inherited money from her family, and in her mid-career was not impoverished. The settings of her fiction are correspondingly far-flung. Her later novels are more pugnaciously feminist (she may have been disinhibited by the death of Linton):
The Fowler
(1899), for example, is so titled after a vicious predator who violates women’s minds and bodies. Harraden herself never married.

In the early years of the twentieth century, she worked for the Oxford University Press in their dictionary department. She also became increasingly involved with suffragism, direct action and the Tax Resistance League, formed in 1910 (the novelist Flora Annie Steel was a fellow member of the League). In 1913, Harraden allowed her property to be distrained rather than pay the income tax she owed a government which would not grant women the vote. At the auction where her goods
were being sold, she and other protesters were assaulted by anti-suffrage ‘roughs’ and she later brought a charge against the London police for taking no action to protect her. The magistrates were unsympathetic. Though she and her fellow activists got the vote, her last years were penurious, made a little easier by a Civil List pension in 1930. The
ODNB
records bleakly that she died of delirium tremens.

‘Meddling monk,’ he cried, ‘how dare you drag your detestable form hither! Out, reptile, out!’
Ejaculation from
The Gunmaker of Moscow

What, it will be asked, is Sylvanus Cobb Jr – largely unknown, wholly unregarded by literary history – doing in the company of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce? Cobb is a writer of interest for the worthy reason that he helped lay the foundations of mass readership for American fiction. Millions of readers, particularly young readers, passed through his mass-produced stories to higher things. Or, if they did not, they supplied the financial turnover with which publishers could chance their arm with higher things. Fiction, like armies, marches on its belly. Cobb filled it and more.

He was born in Waterville, Maine, the eldest of nine children of a Universalist minister who believed in spreading his word by the printing press as much as by the pulpit. Among the anecdotes which make up all that posterity will ever know about Sylvanus Cobb, he is said to have been expelled from school for arguing with a teacher over a fine point of grammar – which of them was in the right is not recorded. He was subsequently apprenticed as a printer and worked on his father’s newspaper,
The Christian Freeman
. Hungry for unChristian freedoms, in 1841 he enlisted in the US Navy. Over the next four years, voyaging to the four corners of the world, he gathered the raw material and colour that ornaments his later romances.