Florence Marryat Archives - Victorian Secrets

Miss Florence Marryat vs Mr Charles Dickens

March 10, 2016 By Catherine Pope

Charles Dickens’s letter to Florence Marryat

It’s not often that Florence Marryat makes the national press, so this has been an exciting week. An unpublished letter from 1860 has emerged in which Charles Dickens berates Marryat for requesting advice from him. She offered a short story for inclusion in his journal All the Year Round, hoping that he would also give her a critique. Of course, it’s perfectly usual for authors to solicit feedback from editors, and Dickens was actually a close friend of her father, fellow novelist Captain Frederick Marryat. Poor Florence must’ve been rather miffed to receive a three-page snotgram in response.
Bonhams, who are to auction the letter on 16th March, have described Dickens’s reply as “wonderfully rude”. Refusing to enter into further discussion, he writes:

I do not think it is a good story. I think its leading incident is common-place, and one that would require for its support some special observation of character, or strength of dialogue, or happiness of description. … I cannot, however, alter what seems to me to be the fact regarding this story (for instance), any more than I can alter my eyesight or my hearing.

Warming to his theme, Dickens goes on to say:

You have no idea of the labour inseparable from the editing of such a Journal as All The Year Round, when you suppose it within the bounds of possibility that those who discharge such duties can give critical reasons for the rejection of papers. To read professed contributions honestly, and communicate a perfectly unprejudiced decision respecting every one of them to its author or authoress, is a task, of the magnitude of which you evidently have no conception.

Matthew Haley, head of books at Bonhams, commented:

He could just have been having a bad day, of course, and she later dedicated one of her books to him so does not seem to have held any grudges.

GrumpyChops

Future relations were certainly more cordial, and Marryat continued to ask Dickens for favours – she was never afraid of exploiting literary connections. This is not to say that she didn’t hold a grudge, though. Marryat was highly skilled in the art of the passive-aggressive book dedication. Her novel The Girls of Feversham, a story in which a family is shown to function very happily without a mother, is dedicated to Marryat’s own mother, with whom she had a very restrained relationship. And the novel she dedicated to her first husband is called Too Good for Him. Ouch.
Marryat never won Dickens’s approval. He later detected a “certain coarseness” in her writing and thought her “unwise in touching on forbidden topics”. Those “forbidden topics” were allusions to extra-marital sex and prostitution in Marryat’s novel The Confessions of Gerald Estcourt. When she dedicated her bigamy novel Veronique to Dickens, he responded with a rather uncomfortable letter of thanks.
Whatever she felt about Dickens’s contumely, Marryat remained undeterred. She went on to write 68 novels and hundreds of short stories and articles. Marryat also became the respected editor of the journal London Society, and certainly seems to have handled her would-be contributors more delicately.

Victorian Secrets publishes Florence Marryat’s The Dead Man’s Message, Her Father’s Name, and The Blood of the Vampire. For more information on Marryat’s role as editor, see Beth Palmer’s excellent study Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture.

Her Father’s Name by Florence Marryat

January 5, 2014 By Catherine Pope

Now that I’ve finished writing my thesis on Florence Marryat (just a few tweaks and proofreading to go), I can take a more objective view of her fiction. Having read all 68 of her novels, it’s fair to say that they are not of equal merit; in fact, some are downright dreadful. With 7 children to support and a predilection for useless husbands, Marryat was obliged to write quickly, often completing a novel within six weeks and seldom revising her manuscripts. Her haste in evident in around half the novels, their pages yielding very little, even for this determined scholar. Every so often, however, Marryat would stun me with a novel of such originality that I was instantly reminded why I wanted to spend all this time and money on writing a thesis that perhaps half a dozen people will read.

Anyway, I’m often asked, “what’s the best Marryat novel?” Of course, pronouncing on “the best” of anything is a tricky matter, as one person’s masterpiece is another’s stinker. Artistically, I think Love’s Conflict (1865) her best novel, as she took great pains with the structure, although some of its power was lost through editorial changes made by Geraldine Jewsbury. For sheer entertainment and stimulation, Her Father’s Name (1876) trumps all the others. This novel has something for everyone: murder, sleuthing, cross-dressing, lesbianism, and hysteria.

The action opens in Brazil, with heroine Leona Lacoste dressed as Joan of Arc. Flanked by a toucan and a goat, she nonchalantly rolls a cigarette, pausing briefly to deflect a sex pest with her pistol. The reader is immediately alerted to the fact that this is no ordinary Victorian heroine. Accused of murder, Leona’s father commits suicide, prompting her to embark upon an international quest to clear his name. Obviously, a young lady couldn’t just go gadding about in the nineteenth century, so Leona dresses as a man and steals the identity of Christobal, a childhood friend who is desperate to marry her. She heads for London, managing to get involved in a duel during the crossing. With Leona there is no faffing about: she shoots her opponent straight in the chest. On arrival, she sneaks into her uncle’s house, posing as a merchant by the name of Don Valera. His adopted daughter Lucilla, a hysteric who has been confined to her couch since the onset of puberty, is overcome with lust, refusing to have any truck with the handsome doctor her parents wanted her to marry. Indeed, Lucilla/Don Valera is seemingly irresistible to nearly everyone, with all the society minxes falling at her feet.

As a sensation novel, Her Father’s Name relies heavily on coincidence and other improbabilities, such as trains running on time, but its wit and exuberance are joyous. I’m not going to spoil the plot, as I hope you’ll read it for yourself. Also, I’m not going to delve too deeply into my interpretations at this stage, as I’ve written quite a lot about the novel in my thesis. No doubt other readers will find all sorts of things that I failed to spot. Of course, you might well say that cross-dressing was hardly a new theme in Victorian fiction (see also E D E N Southworth’s The Hidden Hand and George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel), but I reckon that Marryat was the first to use this theme to make a strong feminist argument. After nearly four years of writing about this novel, I still love it, and Her Father’s Name epitomises why Marryat is such an important writer.

Yes, I liked the novel so much, I published it. Our edition, complete with introduction and notes by Greta Depledge, is available in paperback and Kindle editions.

The Blood of the Vampire by Florence Marryat

July 7, 2009 By Catherine Pope

Cover of The Blood of the Vampire by Florence Marryat Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897) was rather overshadowed by a certain Transylvanian Count who made his debut in the same year. Although there are similarities between the two novels, Marryat’s vampire is female and drains her victims’ life force rather than their blood, making it a far less gory read.

Harriet Brandt, the daughter of a mad scientist and a mixed race voodoo priestess, is brought up in Jamaica on her parents’ plantation. Her father’s sinister tendency to perform vivisection on his slaves leads them to rebel, bludgeoning him and his wife to death. Harriet is spared and subsequently travels through Europe, meeting the eccentric Baroness Gobelli and finally settling at her home in London.

Although everyone is initially attracted to Harriet, people who get close to her seem to sicken and die. Women become deeply suspicious of her when their menfolk find her completely irresistible. They attribute her sensuality to her African heritage, and feel threatened by her apparent sexual availability. Although highly critical of her, they do not make the connection between her arrival and the sequence of deaths. This connection is made by Dr Phillips, a particularly rebarbative racist and misogynist, who believes Harriet has inherited her disposition through her maternal line. As a “quadroon”, he believes she is unable to escape her heritage. He tells her not to marry, in order that she doesn’t further pollute the British race.

At no point is there any proof that Harriet causes the seemingly inexplicable deaths; the reader is guided to that conclusion by the Doctor’s supposed medical authority. The other female characters accept his judgement unquestioningly, deferring to him both as a man and a member of the scientific establishment. The “scientific” basis for his claim that Harriet is a silent killer is that her slave grandmother, impregnated by her owner, was attacked by a vampire bat. He attempts to dehumanise mixed-race offspring, thereby expressing his fear of miscegenation. Eventually, Harriet accepts his diagnoses, leading to a tragic conclusion (which I shan’t spoil). She is a woman who wants only to love and be loved, but her “otherness” denies her security she craves.

One critic has dismissed The Blood of the Vampire as a “race-obsessed eugenic argument in fictive format,” which is a reductive reading. Although Marryat is certainly guilty of some toe-curling racism, this was an unfortunately prevalent feature of fin-de-siècle writing. There have been many obvious comparisons with Dracula, as both writers present a weak nation being invaded by a much stronger “alien” who tries to replicate itself. There is no evidence to suggest that Stoker and Marryat discussed their ideas, so it is likely this was a widely-held fear (think of H G Wells and his pesky martians). What makes Marryat’s creation different, however, is her apparent sympathy for Harriet, which is often overlooked by critics.

This psychic vampire, apart from representing the racial “other”, can also be read as the New Woman. She is financially independent, moves around freely, and is sexually liberated. It is this behaviour, as much as her heritage, that makes her appear dangerous and minatory. There is also a potential feminist reading of the metaphorical syphilophobia running through the novel. Dr Phillips is quick to diagnose Harriet as the problem, declaring that he can “tell at a glance” that she has inherited her mother’s “condition”. This incident evokes the behaviour of the medical profession when the Contagious Diseases Act were in force, where the communication of syphilis was assumed to be the fault of the prostitute – it was she who was stigmatised, rather than her priapic punter. Harriet’s stigma is clearly indicated by her surname of “Brandt”.

Like Harriet, Marryat was a strong, independent woman, with a decidedly un-Victorian attitude towards gender ideology. This made her something of an outcast, too, as did the Catholicism she also shares with her vampiric creation. Her distrust of medical authority is a leitmotif throughout her work, and the views of her fictional doctor should not be conflated with her own.

Hopefully, this new edition will make this work more widely-available for critical attention, as it deserves to be known as more than just the “other vampire novel”.

The Fate of Fenella

December 17, 2008 By Catherine Pope

Cover of The Fate of Fenella One can’t help but be excited at the prospect of a fin de siecle novel featuring chapters written by 24 different authors. The Fate of Fenella was first serialised in the illustrated weekly The Gentlewoman in 1890 and then published in three volume format two years later. Contemporary reviewers described it as a “curious mosaic”, as it was a collaborative work written with no consultation between the myriad writers. They included Helen Mathers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Florence Marryat and Adeline Sergeant. The plot involves the adulterous Fenella Ffrench, her husband’s affair with an evil temptress, a brutal murder, a sensational trial, bigamy, altered states of consciousness, false imprisonment in a lunatic asylum, and a shipwreck. Phew. It’s a plot in which you could stand a spoon.

Each chapter, unsurprisingly, ends with a cliffhanger, and the subsequent author is tasked with resolving the twist and then coming up with their own. Although obviously a thoroughly sensational tale, the themes with which it encompasses makes it a particularly interesting and important work. Fenella’s trajectory deals with the sexual double standard and the deeply-contested notion of femininity. The authors are all writing from different perspectives and Fenella’s behaviour is handled differently according to their opinions, thereby providing the reader with a panoramic view of the attitudes within the literary marketplace of the 1890s.

The Spectator thought the plot “ridiculous” and concluded that too many cooks did, indeed, spoil the broth. However, this is an experimental piece of fiction that is more than a sum of its parts. The text itself is enhanced by explanatory notes, biographies of all the authors, and a scholarly and illuminating introduction from Andrew Maunder. Thank you to Valancourt Books for such a welcome release.