Lady Baltimore, by Owen Wister, is an extraordinary novel. It wasn’t written as a historical novel, but it certainly is one now: a 1905 depiction of the American South at the turn of the twentieth century, on how life would have been so much better if the South hadn’t lost the Civil War.
I had to do some research on Owen Wister, though I’ve been rereading this novel, and his most famous one, The Virginian, for over twenty years. I knew he was a close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt, because my 1928 edition of Lady Baltimore reproduces a couple of long letters between them on the subject of race, on which I have something to say in a minute. I had already realised that Wister was keen on the idea of the natural aristocrat, the idea that some people are simply innately better than others, by their ‘breeding’ and their natural gifts. This is how he makes the eponymous protagonist of The Virginian such a hero, persuading the reader to accept his superiority by his actions, and by giving him outrageously attractive virtues. But the idea of natural aristocracy never sounded very democratic to me, so I was confused about how Wister felt about the American ideal that all men and women are created equal.
In Lady Baltimore we see substantial evidence that Wister, or his narrative persona, did not think that all men and women were created equal, since he is firmly (though always with gentlemanly regret) against any suggestion that men and women with black skins might be equal to those with white. The easy urbanity and simple persuasiveness with which the narrator of Lady Baltimore sets out just how impossible it is that black slaves and their descendants can be anything but dependent and lower than the whites, are horribly alluring. It’s the tone that does it. The novel is written as if Mark Twain and Edith Wharton were acting out a script by Jane Austen. It uses a dangerously familiar set of literary echoes, and so we assume we know what we are going to be reading. Jane Austen may have tacitly condoned slavery in Mansfield Park, but she doesn’t say anything about it directly. Edith Wharton was not known for her pro-slavery views, as was not Mark Twain: these are authors on the righteous side of history. We simply don’t expect to fall into the trap of going along with openly racist views in a novel that follows such great literary voices so faithfully.
Lady Baltimore is about the attempts of New York society girl Hortense Rieppe to persuade impoverished Southern gentleman John Mayrant to stay in love with her. He met her in romantic circumstances, there was an idyll and an engagement, he returned home to prepare for their marriage. She followed to make sure that he did not come to his senses, because he is quite unlike her usual beaux, although, regrettably, poor. And her usual beaux are incredulous that she allowed things to progress this far. Hortense’s pursuit is set in Charleston at the end of the nineteenth century when the New Rich of Newport were becoming a horrifying byword for vulgarity and philistinism for traditional Southerners. I can’t find much online about this novel, which makes me think that its subject matter has persuaded scholars to avoid it. I can’t find any reprints except in a Southern Classics series from 1992, and the admirable Librivox have done an audio book version. Tellingly, the blurb for 1992 edition describes Lady Baltimore as a ‘classic novel of post-Civil War Charleston life’. It talks about the theme of North and South becoming reconciled, but says nothing at all about the other major theme, of how the black American should never attain equality with the white. This is a novel that needs investigation, because of its manipulation of the reader. There is something very strange about the process of reading, and loving, I mean absolutely loving, a novel in all its aspects, and then being stopped in one’s tracks by the narrator’s assumption that something we know is utterly wrong is desirable, and that all the readers will agree with this. An analogy might be as if one were reading a great German novel of the 1930s, being totally wowed by it, and then finding out, too late, that it and its author were seriously pro-Nazi. It’s a kick to the intellect.
So that is today’s conundrum: how can you deeply admire a novel for narrative technique, emotional satisfaction, artistry, pacing, etc, even though it is appallingly wrong in so many ways? Have any great modern classics been in the same category? We know Virginia Woolf was a vile anti-Semitic snob and an unkind person from her private diaries and letters, so why does that not affect our appreciation of her novels? D H Lawrence had some seriously odd ideas about women’s relationship to men – apparently he tried to beat up his wife because she was not ‘suitably reverential to his maleness’ – yet he has been an unassailable modern classic in English literature teaching for decades. (Though I did hear a colleague remark some years ago that she could not believe Lawrence was seriously taught these days, so perhaps fashions are changing.) Among the lesser politically right-wing writers, personal views no longer thought of as socially acceptable are more likely to make us disapprove of their work. I can’t read ‘Sapper’ because his views poison his prose. I get enough stick about John Buchan to know that people feel the same away about him. Ditto Dornford Yates. Maybe not so much about Angela Thirkell, but the more I worked on her writing, the less I would have liked to have met her. The emotional satisfaction we get from their novels is tightly bound up with our approval of the ethics or moral values implicit in the narratives.
Going back to Lady Baltimore, I have to repeat: it is an eminently satisfying novel. The first-person narrator, a Northerner called Augustus, is sent to Charleston by his Aunt Carola, who wants him to find archival evidence that he is connected by blood to the crowned heads of Europe. This is a delightfully satirical sub-plot we needn’t think about much, but it brings Augustus to Charleston, and gives him letters of introduction to the old families of the town who approve, in a superior way, of his task. He himself has no great interest in being royally related, but he is a dutiful nephew, and can see that this task gives him the entrée into a society that he is soon longing to penetrate. He meets Miss Eliza La Heu, the daughter of a plantation family working, in a ladylike way, at the Woman’s Exchange, selling cake and light lunches to the upper classes. He also meets John Mayrant, first introduced as an out of breath young gentleman, who arrives at the Woman’s Exchange while Augustus is taking his first lunch there, to order a wedding cake for the following Wednesday: the ‘Lady Baltimore’ of the title.
Augustus finds out from elliptical, ladylike gossip-mongers that John Mayrant’s fiancée is a beautiful young woman, but she has no background, her father ran away from his post at the Battle of Chattanooga, and her Newport friends give her no respectability in the eyes of Mr Mayrant’s elderly aunts. Worse, Mr Mayrant is definitely going off the boil, and Hortense is playing fast and loose with a very wealthy banker from nowhere called Charley. But which one will she marry, and which one does she love? And if John Mayrant is realising that he no longer loves her, and in fact would run a mile rather than have anything to do with her so-called friends, how is he, as a very correct Southern gentleman, going to get out of the engagement?
We need to recollect that Southern manners at the turn of the century were definitely pre-Civil War in origin. It is the pride of the Southern ladies whom Augustus formally visits that they control all gossip and discussion by these antediluvian standards. So Augustus’s progress, and ours, in understanding all the ins and outs is severely constrained by what he can winkle out without being guilty of a lapse in manners.
I found all this completely delightful. When the Displacers – as Hortenses’s set is named by Augustus – arrive in Charleston in their vulgar automobile, and inadvertently run over Miss Eliza’s dog, and offer her money as a compensation because they think from her modest dress that she is a servant or peasant, we can see this is going to be a deeply felt enactment of the manners of the New Rich versus those of the Old Poor.
But I have not forgotten the racism. It begins casually, with a loyal ex-slave called Daddy Ben offering formal sympathy to John Mayrant over his appalling predicament of having a black man appointed as a superior official over him in his job in the Custom House. That’s a bit of a shock. Then Augustus goes looking for a carpenter to make him up a box for posting some fragile items, in the area of Charleston where the black population lives. This is described indelicately, and the black men who do not subscribe to Daddy Ben’s point of view are all categorised as filthy, violent and drunkards. The long discussions between very endearing and admirable characters over the utter impossibility of a black man ever being equal to a white are simply astounding. They should be read against modern fiction by Alice Walker or Maya Angelou, because Wister is so genuine and unconscious, so utterly of his time, and yet so appalling to read now. The complete lack of nuance in these sections is breath-taking, so much so that it seems a different novel. But perhaps, after all, Lady Baltimore is like Mansfield Park, and Jane Eyre, both excellent novels admired for their literary perfection, but with silent elements we do not consider or even notice until we come across them in a post-colonial literature class.
Lady Baltimore is deeply rewarding for the marvellous storytelling, the fun of the extraordinary social entanglements, the clever wit, and for the enjoyment of seeing the New Rich routed, as is traditional for this kind of American novel in the Edith Wharton style. Read it also for a very sobering piece of evidence that 12 Years A Slave was not made up in hindsight.
Rebellion, or Uprising? In this Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up I’m in the middle of the British eighteenth century, looking at the ‘1745’, otherwise known as the Jacobite Rebellion, or Uprising, depending on which side you were on. This was the second attempt by the exiled Roman Catholic monarchy of Britain to reclaim what they thought was their rightful kingdom, so let’s have a wee bit of history to fix us in time and space, before I get on to John Buchan’s fascination with the subject.
So that was the Jacobite Rebellion, or Uprising. Like Flora, I am a Macdonald, descended from Clan Macdonald of the Isle of Skye. However, this took place over several centuries and follows the genealogy of only one of my many ancestors, so it’s a very selective way of claiming a heritage. I’ve never been convinced by the heady romanticism of the cult of Jacobitism. The idea of the glamorous prince from over the water, the tragedy of Culloden and the lost cause, and the resulting oppression of the Highlands, have produced a deliberate nurturing of Scottish nationalist sentimentality about English oppression and the nobility of lost Scottish causes. This can be uplifting, in very small doses, but is disturbingly divorced from historical fact. Vast numbers of novels have been written about the Jacobite theme. Until the mid-twentieth century it was one of the most important subjects in Scottish fiction, first made popular by Sir Walter Scott with his novel Waverley of 1814, and continued by, among thousands of others, John Buchan, about whom I’ve posted several times. Looking at Buchan’s Jacobite novels and how he treated the theme is a useful antidote to some of the glutinous and unhistorical nonsense that has been published about this military, political and dynastic disaster.
Buchan’s third novel was A Lost Lady of Old Years, also of 1899, so we can see what his preoccupation was at this time in his writing life. It takes a very different approach to the ‘45 than is or was usual. The ‘Lost Lady’ of the title is Mrs Murray of Broughton, the wife of Mr Secretary Murray who was hanged for his part in the rebellion, though she escaped. The ‘Old Years’ means of times past: she herself was young and beautiful. History apparently records that she was a bad lot, but Buchan romanticises her spectacularly. His Mrs Murray is pure, perfect and brave in her unswerving support for the Prince, despite the treachery of her husband whom she is beginning to suspect. The main protagonist of the novel, a teenage delinquent called Francis Birkenshaw, is saved from a life of crime because Mrs Murray catches him breaking into her house, mistakes him for the Jacobite messenger for whom she is waiting, and gives him a highly secret political message to deliver to one of the great Jacobite leaders in the Highlands, Lord Lovat.
Buchan’s best Jacobite novel is Midwinter, of 1923, because it is a very plausible story – Dr Johnson (yes, THE Dr Johnson) tries to stop an anti-Jacobite plot at the moment of the Jacobite army’s decision to march away from Derby, and helps to save the marriage of a young girl married to a traitor. It is brilliantly plotted with really memorable characters. We all have a vague idea of Dr Johnson, the grumpy and superior lexicographer sitting in state at a tea-drinking at Mrs Thrale’s house, a figure of importance. This Dr Johnson is a much younger man, and a humble but doughty tutor to the gentility. Whether he 
This week’s 
Alexis lives in Athens, and has just left school. He has two years to wait until he can do his military service, so he takes lessons in oratory, he hangs around with the group of young men who listen to that irritating know-it-all street philosopher Socrates, and he starts noticing whispers about a plot to install a dictator in the democratic city-state of Athens. He is also writing a play, but he can’t tell anyone this because boys don’t do this (they’re too inexperienced), and people of his class certainly don’t get involved with the theatre. Once Alexis realises that there is a plot, and that someone has to do something fast to stop it, he puts the plot into his play, to deliver its message that the real enemies of Athens are not the peaceful philosophers, but the stuffy ideas and conservative minds of the men who rule and won’t listen to change. So the novel and the play are both about the young and untried challenging the old and established, using the subversive methods of Greek comedy to reveal the imagined danger as fear, and to satirise, and thus neutralise, the real threats to democracy.
While Alexis is a freeborn Athenian, Corinna is the daughter of a Syracusan inn-keeper and cook. This gives her the freedom to move around the city that Alexis’s sister Nico is denied, but it also means she is fair game for any young blood whose eye she catches. But young readers wouldn’t have noticed that. Trease did a lot to gloss over the sexual economy of Athens that adult readers would have known. Corinna goes out as a flute girl to a party at a mansion that she and Alexis need to infiltrate. Children (myself included) would have thought that this was fairly daring, but safe from detection (the only danger we would have thought about), since Corinna can play the flute very well. But adult readers can see other dangers, for instance in why she refused to wear the transparent gauze dresses that the dancers wear, and why the young lord Hippias particularly wants Corinna to sit on his couch. In another episode, Corinna models for a sculptor as Artemis wearing a short belted tunic. Nothing much is made of this in the story, but the episode raises questions about what she was paid, how much, and what else she did to earn a living outside the inn.
I was puzzled about Trease’s historical accuracy: if Corinna and her mother have only just arrived from Syracuse, why would they have been allowed into Athens, since Athens and Syracuse appear to have been at war for the whole of Socrates’s life? I was also wondering about the population of Athens at the time, and Alexis’s sense that Athens is the centre of the world. These were the years of the Peloponnesian Wars, there had been a great plague in Athens near the period of the novel that simply isn’t mentioned, and military security ought to have been a major element in their society. Well, it is, up to a point. The plot that Alexis and Corinna discover is a destabilising one, and the leaders are the right types who threatened Athens in history. But Trease skirts around the details because, for Alexis’s story, they’re not important.
This 
When Peter leaves school and comes home, he realises with cold horror that his cackling grandfather and demonic violent father are waiting eagerly for him to fall into their bullying, violent, cruel ways. Peter runs off to London and takes a job in a second-hand bookshop. This is a quite a jump in the plot, made possible by the meetings Peter has had in a mysterious junk shop in Treliss, where he encounters the enigmatic, romantic and also mysterious Mr Zanti, who offers him the job. Zanti is a deliberately curious character when he first appears, giving an impression of being all astrakhan coat and dark curling moustaches. He is important because he keeps appearing at all the turns in Peter’s fortunes. Consequently we take him at Peter’s estimation all through the novel: first as a figure of glamour and cosmopolitanism, later as a kind benefactor, then as a hapless victim, and finally as a devoted and loyal friend.
Fortitude is also the first of what would be later grouped together as Walpole’s eight London novels. London is quite clearly the centre of the known world for Walpole’s characters in this novel, with a range of Dickensian socio-economic and class settings. Walpole also added some pointed portraits of people who might well have been of his friends and acquaintances in the literary London of his own day, including Henry James, of whom he was a protegé. But the London parts of Fortitude begin in the 1890s, so as well as recreating his own early successes from the Edwardian period, Walpole also does a nice job of recreating the society that was withdrawing the hem of its garments from The Yellow Book, ten years earlier. Walpole is writing this novel for insiders and for those who wanted recent literary fashions revisited.
What makes this a true novel of 1913, if you ignore the now timeless Gothic bits and the David Copperfield plot, is the secret socialist circle and the anarchist bomb plot. Anarchism had been fashionable in fiction for some time, and Walpole duly inserts an anarchist episode into Fortitude. Closely linked to the Cornish Gothic is the new fashion for rural extravagance, to be made popular by Mary Webb’s novels The Golden Arrow and Gone to Earth, during the First World War. Walpole expends a great deal of effort establishing the character of the big, muscular, simple and faithful farmer and lovelorn suitor Stephen Brant, who waits and suffers for literally decades while the woman he loves is married to another man. Stephen is Peter’s faithful friend and protector, going to extraordinary lengths to keep him alive in moments of danger, and to bring him news from home. But as soon as the woman is free, she and Stephen hop onto a ship for Canada.
It’s not too far-fetched to read Peter as Stephen’s surrogate child and light of his life. Stephen does a fair amount of raging through the winter fields at sunset, recalling very forcibly the Starkadder brothers in Stella Gibbons’s much later Cold Comfort Farm, but he is out of place in London, even in the poorer quarters. There is a cataclysmic scene when Stephen and Mr Zanti and Peter are playing a riotously enjoyable game of romps with Peter’s baby son, and all seems happy and natural and all boys together, until Peter’s wife opens the nursery door and stands there, glaring icily down at them. She disapproves of them playing with the child at all, and she hates everything about Cornwall and Peter’s former life. Stephen is shrunken by her hatred, and he and Mr Zanti slink out of the door.
I don’t think Walpole knew or cared much about women, or babies. He was, as the obituaries in the quality press say, a confirmed bachelor. Clare is an appalling monster because of her weaknesses and improbable characteristics, whereas her mother is a masterwork of socially-sanctioned monstrous behaviour, who calmly moves into her daughter’s marital home at the first sign of trouble, and never leaves until disaster arrives. Compared to these London ladies, the demonic Gothic horror waiting for Peter when he finally returns to the House of Scaw was always going to be a damp squib. Walpole manipulates our expectations and produces a truly surprising, and oddly satisfying ending to the novel.
You can find her novels in print-on-demand editions, and sometimes the genuine second-hand article, and in older public libraries that haven’t yet thrown their less borrowed books into the bin to make room for more computers. Her first novel was published in 1899, and her last in 1944. She was prolific, producing forty novels and short story collections in just over forty years, of the type that would be asked for in libraries between the war as ‘a nice book’. But they’re rare: she was never a top of the range best-seller, and in the Second World War, the bombing raid on London in 1940 that destroyed Paternoster Row and the heart of the book trade also burned all her publisher’s stock. Because of that her books are simply very hard to get hold of. I managed to republish one, The Affairs of John Bolsover, in 
But he is a relatively minor character in this novel, which is about a girl called Keren Ashe, who lives with her father, Dr Ashe the alchemist, in the Forest, south of Colchester in Essex. He is a descendant of Dr Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s alchemist, and Keren’s mother was a gypsy from Bohemia, so Keren has a strange and distinguished bloodline. She works as her father’s lab assistant, and seems perfectly content to do this for the rest of her life, until well-meaning Tobiah mentions to Betsy Shipp in Colchester one day that there is a 17-year old girl growing up wild in the Forest, with no older woman to instruct her on household duties or to see that she does not stray into temptation. Betsy is Dr Ashe’s distant cousin, so she takes Keren to live with her in the town, which seems to be a good plan for all. Dr Ashe disappears shortly afterwards on a secret journey.
Tobiah seems to be the head preacher for all the Dissenting sects, those troublesome Protestants who broke with the Church of England and insist on splitting theological hairs in defining their own religious beliefs, until there are almost more sects than believers. When Tobiah is out of town, Samuel Calderbeck sneaks back in, an ignorant man with a mania about demonic possession and witchcraft. When Betsy goes to London to see her married daughter and the new grandchild, her fussy husband installs his sister, Rachel Shipp, in the house to keep an eye on the maids. Rachel is a Calderbeck enthusiast, and very strong on the girls attending all possible religious services. At one, Keren forgets to kneel down for prayers, because her mind is elsewhere, so after a stern interrogation by Calderbeck and Rachel, it is suspected that she must be possessed. This is not a good time for Keren to be under suspicion of witchcraft, because her sneaky cousin Kate already has a downer on her. Keren can see easily through Kate’s hypochondrical ways, and Kate is very good at being devout when it will do her good. Keren has also been making lapis lazuli, a straightforward alchemical experiment that she has never managed to work accurately before, so when this too is discovered (it was a present for her nice cousin Betty) she is sent straight to her room and locked in, awaiting judgement in the morning.
In this week’s
At the very end of Good Wives, when Jo’s new venture, a school at Plumfield, is being described, we’re told that a ‘merry little quadroon’ was one of the abandoned boys that she and Professor Bhaer took under her care, even though folk said (and I’m sure these were the background chorus of ‘society’ that the eternally perfect March family lived among, like the Pharisees), that taking him in would ruin the school. Well, that’s quite a divisive statement. A quadroon is an outdated term for a person with one black grandparent, or some ancestry approximating to that, so the novel is noting that mixed-race children existed in the comfortable and victorious North of the 1860s, and were being abandoned. It was Jo’s duty, as well as her pleasure, to take in a stray child like this and look after him. This boy has disappeared by the time the Plumfield sequels Little Men and Jo’s Boys was published, so perhaps Alcott didn’t want to develop him as a character, but only use him as a social indicator of a different kind of destitution that society needed to take responsibility for, rather than have people like Jo and Professor Bhaer do it through private charity.
This week in the 
From the evidence in the early, American section of the novel, Balestier seems to have been developing a writing style and subject in parallel with Willa Cather, one that she would go on to make her own, and which Owen Wister was already exploring. Balestier writes of the American West and frontier life with clear, passionate description, and a practical awareness of the expectations from life of the women who kept the frontier houses clean and fed. But the novel is not about sod houses and shoot-outs, but the civilised life of first-generation frontier towns that already have the furnished houses, the water supply, and the town newspaper, and now want the railroad and mining investment too.
There are flaws and annoyances, of course. The central premise of the plot is that the heroine’s desire to dedicate her life to serving the poor women of India as a nurse is a waste of time, because Indian women will not respect her since she has not yet had children. Kate’s true destiny is to be a good wife to the hero: I gritted my teeth through Nick’s self-satisfied assumptions that Kate would eventually come to her senses about this destiny. I shared her outrage on finding that he had travelled to India before she got there on her nursing mission, and that he will not go away and let her do her work. I was increasingly infuriated that Nick lies and deceives to try to steal the Naulahka, and expects Kate to share his triumph in having carried off a spectacular scam. I was horrified that the culmination of his brilliant plotting was that Kate’s life is in danger simply because Nick has tangled with the gypsy queen. Nick is a great creation, but his moral sense is distinctly shabby. One of the great satisfactions at the end of the novel is his realisation that he cannot have everything, no matter how cleverly he has planned things.
One of the strengths of the novel, according to the critics, is the portrait of the very young prince, the Maharaj Kunwar. I’m not sure I agree. Kipling has depicted young Indian boys far better – the small boys in Lucknow in his greatest novel, Kim, are more convincing – and since much of the speech of the Maharaj is in Indianised English, he isn’t his own person, he is a creature of the British Raj. The situations that the Maharaj leads Nick and Kate into, on the other hand, are definitely interesting: power and plotting follow him everywhere, and when he isn’t a protection to them, he’s a danger. Kipling worked out a fiendishly clever plotline to do with the transfer of the necklace, the safety of the prince, and how far the gypsy queen will go to get her revenge. The really refreshing thing about Nick is that he is written in Kipling’s instantly identifiable style, but he isn’t English, and my word, what a difference that makes.
The only woman to try seducing Nick does it with murder in mind: the gypsy queen is a marvellous creation, and deserves her ascendancy in the corrupt zenana schemings. Kate herself is an unfinished creation. Kipling can’t convey the truth of religious fervour to convince us that her vocation comes from a revivalist meeting, but he is completely persuasive when writing about her grim months of nursing training, and her capacity for hard work in the hospital. I also believe her completely when she continues to urge Nick to just go away and let her get on with her job. It’s maddening that Nick doesn’t listen, and refuses to take her desires seriously when they don’t coincide with his own, but it’s also very modern. While a lot about this novel is great Victorian fiction, there are some highly suggestive elements which make this a thoroughly modern novel of feminist aspiration.