CHAPTER XI
LADY AUTHORS AT ADDISON MANSIONS
THE great “Miss Braddon,” who is now one of the most valued of my friends, and a not infrequent visitor, never came to 32 Addison Mansions. She achieved fame before any living novelist. She had published _Aurora Floyd_ and _Lady Audley’s Secret_ more than half a century ago, in 1862, while Thomas Hardy did not write _Under the Greenwood Tree_ and _A Pair of Blue Eyes_ till ten years after that. Her powers are undiminished. Her _Green Curtain_, published fifty years later, is one of the finest books she ever wrote.
Nor did I ever meet Miss M. G. Tuttiett, who, since she wrote her great _Silence of Dean Maitland_, has been known to all the world as “Maxwell Gray,” until I became her neighbour at Richmond. These lost years have deprived me of a great pleasure, because, apart from my admiration for her novels, I share two of her hobbies—her enthusiasm for her garden and her enthusiasm for Italy.
I used to esteem it an honour and a privilege when dear old Mrs. Alexander—Mrs. Hector was her real name—used to toil up the stairs to our parties. Her books were delightful, and she was one of the earliest of my literary friends, for I met her at Louise Chandler Moulton’s before I went to America.
Still more, on account of her infirmity, did I appreciate it when Mrs. Lynn Linton came. My intimacy with her arose from two facts. When my novel, _A Japanese Marriage_, came out, she wrote to me in the warmest terms about it. She not only was enthusiastic about it as a novel, but thought it an unanswerable piece of advocacy for the relief of the Deceased Wife’s Sister (now happily accomplished). After that I was a frequent visitor at her flat in Queen Anne’s Mansions, and later we met as fellow-guests at Malfitano, the beautiful villa of Mr. and Mrs. J. J. S. Whitaker at Palermo. She looked the grande dame, and she was a great woman as well as a great writer, admired in both capacities by all the great writers of her day, which was a long one—long enough to include Walter Savage Landor. Her championing of _A Japanese Marriage_ came as a very complete surprise to me, because she was noted for severity as a moralist, and the marriage of the hero and the heroine by the American Consul, after the clergy had refused to marry them, in the eye of the Law was no marriage at all, since neither of them was an American subject—it was a mere manifesto that they meant to live together as man and wife. That letter of hers was the beginning of one of my most delightful friendships.
I don’t remember when I first met Mrs. Croker or Mrs. Perrin or Flora Annie Steel, though they have all been valued friends for many years. As they are all Anglo-Indians, I suppose that I must have met one of them through some member of my family in the Indian Army or Indian Civil Service, and the others through her. My family have been much connected with India. To mention only two of them, my cousin, General John Sladen, was a brother-in-law of Lord Roberts, and actually kept house with him in India for a year, and his brother, Sir Edward Sladen, was the British resident who played so great a part in Burmah, and whose statue has the place of honour in the Burmese capital.
Of one thing I am certain, that the marriage of Mrs. Croker’s beautiful daughter—the belle of Dublin—to one of the Palermo Whitakers, was not the introduction, for Mrs. Croker has never been to Palermo, and I remember her asking me all about the Whitakers’ famous gardens in Sicily. Captain Whitaker did not live there; he was with his regiment.
It is natural to mention Mrs. Steel, Mrs. Perrin and Mrs. Croker together, for they long divided the Indian Empire with Rudyard Kipling as a realm of fiction. Each in her own department is supreme.
In the days when we first knew her, and she was living in Ireland, it used to be like a ray of sunshine when pretty Mrs. Croker, with her blue eyes and her bright colour and her delightful Irish tongue, paid one of her rare visits to London. As I write these words, I am about to pay a visit to her in her Folkestone home. She is exactly the type you would expect from her irresistible books.
When I asked Mrs. Croker what first gave her the idea of writing, she said—
“My very first attempt at writing was in the hot weather at Secunderabad. When my husband was away tiger-shooting, and I was more or less a prisoner all day owing to the heat, I began a story, solely for my own amusement. It grew day by day, and absorbed all my time and interest. This was _Proper Pride_. With reluctance and trepidation I read it to a friend, and then to all the other ladies in the regiment—under seal of secrecy. Emboldened by this success, I wrote _Pretty Miss Neville_, and when I returned home with the Royal Scots Fusiliers, I had two manuscripts among my luggage. These went the usual round, but at the end of a year I received a small offer for _Proper Pride_. It came out in August 1892, without my name, and was immediately successful—principally owing to long and appreciative notices in _The Times_ and _Saturday Review_, both on the same day. Three editions went off in a month, and I must confess that no one was as much surprised by this success as I was. Subsequently I sold the copyright of _Pretty Miss Neville_ for one hundred pounds, and though now a lady of thirty, she still sells, in cheap editions. I attribute my good fortune to the fact that my novels struck a new note—India and army society—and that I received very powerful help from unknown reviewers. I like writing, otherwise I could not work. I believe I inherit the taste from my father’s family, who were said to be ‘born with a pen in their hands’!” Mrs. Croker tells me that it was I who first introduced her to London literary society. I consider this one of the most charming successes of my literary career.
Mrs. Perrin, on the other hand, since she came back from India, has played a continuously prominent part in London literary life. She has been a leading figure at literary clubs and receptions, and has been a pillar of “the Women Journalists.” As story-teller and psychologist combined, she has no superior. Those of her wide public who know her in private life know a brilliant and charming woman of the world, with a proved capacity for managing literary affairs.
When I asked Mrs. Perrin what started her in a literary career, she said—
“I think I took to writing from sheer need of occupation. When I married my husband in India, as a girl of eighteen, we were sent to a place in the jungle where he had charge of an enormous aqueduct which was under construction. He had several Coopers Hill assistants under him, not one of whom was married, and I was the only English woman in the locality. There was no station—or permanent settlement; our houses were temporary erections of mud, and we were miles from the railway. The landscape consisted of a sea of yellow grass about the height of a man, and there was only one road, which lay behind our bungalow—the grand trunk road that is the backbone of India. I began to write here, just to amuse myself, and then when we went to less isolated spots, I gained confidence and used to send little articles and turn-overs to the _Pioneer_—the principal Indian daily paper. These were nearly always accepted, and so I took courage and wrote a novel called _Into Temptation_, which ran through that prehistoric magazine _London Society_, long ago defunct. The book came out in two volumes and had very fair notices. Then I wrote another called _Late in Life_, which ran serially in an Indian weekly, off-shoot of the _Pioneer_, and in England through the _Belgravia_, and then came out in two volumes. So you may imagine—or rather, realise—how long ago I began! Both these novels are now to appear revised and corrected in Messrs. Methuen’s 7_d._ series.
“However, I did not receive the financial encouragement I had hoped for from these first efforts, and I lost heart. For nearly ten years I wrote nothing but a few Indian short stories. Then when my husband was offered an appointment at home, and we retired before we had ‘done’ our full time in India, I collected these stories, and they came out under the title of _East of Suez_. The book was a success and since then I have written and have been published steadily.
“I am deeply interested in India, in the people and their religions, and histories and social systems, and as I was sixteen years in the country I had an opportunity of receiving lasting impressions, and of gaining invaluable experience. I come of a family which has been officially connected with India for five generations. My great grandfather was with Lord Cornwallis, on his staff, at the taking of Seringapatam, and the surrender to Lord Cornwallis of Tippoo Sahib’s two little sons as hostages. He was afterwards Chairman of the old East India Company—known in those days as John Company.
“I cannot think of anything more anecdotal in my experience as a novelist—I can only remember the disappointments and the difficulties of what success I have made, at which, perhaps, I may now bring myself to smile, but I do not think they would be interesting if related!”
A few years ago Mrs. Steel was also one of the most prominent figures in London literary society. She had written _On the Face of the Waters_, one of the finest historical novels in the language; she was a hard and earnest worker in all sorts of movements, and as a fighting speaker there were few to match her. She could make a good set speech, but her set speeches were nothing to the oratory of which she was capable if, when she was totally unprepared, indignation stung her into springing to her feet to denounce the offender. Then her words came as blows come from a man who hits another man because he is incensed beyond endurance. A face full of life and expression added force to her words.
Since Mrs. Steel settled down on an estate in Wales, she has been little in London. But in those days she had a sort of country house on the Notting Hill slope of Campden Hill. She is a keen politician, and not long ago sold the opening page of _On the Face of the Waters_ as her subscription to the Women’s Cause.
Another author lost to London is Sarah Grand. She used to be our neighbour; she shared a flat in the Abingdon Road with her step-son, Haldane McFall, the art critic, and author of that remarkable novel, _The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer_. I met her soon after the success of _The Heavenly Twins_—a young woman with indignant blue eyes, very reserved, but with a rare charm of manner behind her reserve. I was introduced to her, I think, by Heinemann, who was often at our at-homes. He had, as I understood, purchased _The Heavenly Twins_ from her ready printed, copyright and all for a hundred pounds, but when the success came had torn up the agreement, and substituted a royalty agreement, paying the royalties from the beginning. She had already, I gathered, received twelve times the original sum in royalties.
Alfred Walford often came to see us—his wife, Mrs. L. B. Walford, more occasionally, since she was the mother of a large family as well as many books, and they lived in Essex. Alfred Walford used to chaff himself about his connection with literature being to produce the paper on which it was printed. He was a paper-maker; and she, at that time, was the favourite novelist of the Colonies. She was the daughter of that Colquhoun of Luss who wrote that famous book _The Moor and the Loch_.
The gentle-faced “Miss Thackeray,” the great novelist’s daughter, now the widow of Sir Richmond Ritchie, I did not know in those days, but I used to meet her afterwards at Lady Lindsay’s. There was a time when her _Old Kensington_ was my favourite novel.
And here I must say something about my old and dear friend, Lady Lindsay, who has so recently passed away, and whose lameness prevented her from toiling up the stairs to our at-homes very often. For many years I was constantly at her house, both at her famous dinner-parties and running in to have a talk about books when I was sure of finding her alone, for she was good enough to be much interested in my work.
The daughter of a Cabinet Minister, the Right Hon. Henry Fitzroy (son of the first Lord Southampton), a descendant of Nathan Meyer de Rothschild, who founded the fortunes of his House, and sister-in-law of the Loyd Lindsay, V.C., who became Lord Wantage, she knew nearly every noted person of her time, and those whom she did not know, she generally could have known but for some prejudice against them. At her dinner-parties you met men like Tennyson and Gladstone and Layard of Nineveh—great politicians, great nobles, great authors, great painters, but hardly any one from the theatrical world. I was nearly always the least important person present. Eight was her favourite number, though sometimes there were a dozen at her famous round table. The conversation used to be brilliant; the company was arranged with a view to that—naturally the chief guest often got possession of the table, and we sat and chronicled the historic scene in our hearts.
Afterwards, when one went up into the drawing-room, our eyes rested on pictures by Sandro Botticelli and Titian, sixteenth-century Italian wedding-chests, and other inheritances of the great. She wrote more than one volume of poems which went into several editions.
It is natural to mention beside her another great lady who was in touch with all the notabilities of her time, Walpole’s descendant, Lady Dorothy Nevill, who married a descendant of Warwick the Kingmaker’s elder brother, the Baron of Abergavenny. Her husband was at one time the heir-presumptive of the Marquis of Abergavenny. She happily gave her reminiscences to the world, as Lady Lindsay always meant to do, so readers know her connections, though she was too modest to show how Disraeli leaned upon her advice. Among the most interesting things which I remember in her house in Charles Street, Berkeley Square, were the unique mementoes of her ancestor, the tremendous Sir Robert Walpole, the Asquith of the eighteenth century. It was she who told me that Nelson was called Horatio because Horace Walpole presented his father to the living of Burnham Thorpe, which is still in the gift of the Earls of Orford.
Lady St. Helier, another great London hostess, at whose house I have met some of the most celebrated people of the day—Lady St. Helier and her daughter, Mrs. Allhusen, never came to see us till we had left Addison Mansions for the Avenue House, Richmond. No woman has been more integrally a part of the life of her time than Lady St. Helier, who wrote an admirable volume of reminiscences. Mrs. Allhusen has the inspiration of owning a house where one of the masterpieces of literature was written—Gray’s _Elegy_. For the house in which Gray wrote it after the inspiration, which came to him as he was leaning over the gate of Stoke Poges Churchyard, has been enlarged into Stoke Court, and the room in which Gray wrote out the _Elegy_ forms part of Mrs. Allhusen’s writing-room.
Marie Corelli, like Hall Caine, has a dislike of literary receptions. I cannot remember if she ever came to Addison Mansions, though we have been friends for many years, and I remember going to brilliant dinner-parties at her house in Longridge Road. Her stepfather, Charles Mackay, who adopted her, was one of my earliest literary friends.
Her stepbrother, Eric Mackay, author of the famous _Love-letters of a Violinist_, lived with her, and he came to our at-homes so frequently that I think she must have come with him sometimes. They were a very musical family. It is always said that Marie Corelli, had she so chosen, could have won as much fame in music as she has in literature. Her books illustrate Hall Caine’s axiom that the greatest novels are those which deal with the elemental facts of human nature. Her grasp of human nature has won her countless readers in both hemispheres.
It is not universally known that Marie Corelli is an admirable speaker—so lucid, so convincing, able by perfect elocution to reach the furthest corner of the large hall of the Hotel Cecil without raising her voice. Though she lives at Stratford-on-Avon, and is identified with all its functions, she is frequently to be seen in London at places like Ranelagh or dancing at the great balls at the Albert Hall.
Almost alone of the chief lady novelists of that time, Mrs. Humphry Ward was never at Addison Mansions. The most interesting thing I remember in conversation with her was her confession to me one day when we were at Mrs. W. K. Clifford’s that she enjoys handling the character of a person who is a failure better than the character of a person who achieves success. Heroes apparently do not appeal to her.
Mrs. W. K. Clifford was often at Addison Mansions. She is a very old friend of mine, and a great personality. Mrs. Clifford is an admirable example of the modern woman, breezy, wholesome, warm-hearted, clear-visioned, lucid in expression, interested in all questions of the day, and withal one of our best novelists. Early in life she suffered a loss which would have overwhelmed most women, for she lost her husband, Prof. W. K. Clifford, F.R.S., who was already reckoned the third mathematician in Europe, at the same age as Wolfe fell at Quebec, thirty-three, when they had only been married four years, and she was still a girl. He was the most brilliant Fellow of Trinity (Cambridge) of his day, and the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society. There is nothing he could not have done and would not have done if he had lived, for there was no side of life which did not appeal to him. People of every rank and of every shade of thought came to see him, and no matter how little they agreed with him, they were always hypnotised for the hour.
He had wonderful dark-lashed blue eyes, like his daughter, and a wonderful soul seemed to be looking out of them.
But she did not allow her loss to prostrate her, and she has lived to see her house one of the Meccas of literature in London, and her daughter, Mrs. Fisher Dilke, a recognised poetess.
Talking of Mrs. Clifford reminds me of the chequered career of _The Love-letters of a Worldly Woman_. It was published just twenty years ago, and though the first edition sold out immediately, no second edition was published in England, but in America, where it was non-copyright, it sold enormously. There were a dozen pirate editions of it, including a marked edition, which means one with the most popular passages indicated. Such a height of popularity did it reach that it was actually sold at street-corners in New York! But I have heard that Mrs. Clifford only got fifteen pounds royalties off the whole dozen editions.
The first batch of love-letters in this volume appeared anonymously in the _Fortnightly_, and were generally attributed to Oscar Wilde. As a piece of poetical justice when Housman’s _An English-woman’s Love-letters_ were published seven years later, they were attributed to Mrs. Clifford. _The Love-letters of a Worldly Woman_ was a remarkable book, and fully deserved its American popularity.
Mrs. Clifford is, above all things, an idealist and a lover of good work. She has said, in one of her books, “in good love and good work lie the chance of immortality for everything that is worth having or being; and yet, though I’ve aimed at the sun, and longed to put into the beautiful world something worthy of it, I have never hit higher than a gooseberry bush, or achieved anything that gave me satisfaction. And I’ve been so full of enthusiasms and dreams ... perhaps one of the dreams will come true some day—who knows? For if I live to be ninety, I shall still feel, as I do now, that the soul of me is as young and fresh as ever; and it is a sense of the beauty of things, of the kindness that underlies human nature, even when it’s choked with weeds at the top, that gives one courage, and helps one to do.”
Beside Mrs. Clifford I should mention Margaret Woods, whom I first met when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, and her husband, the present Master of the Temple, was my tutor, engaged to her while I was his pupil. I remember his asking me and other undergraduates to meet her in his rooms. I do not think he told us why, but we knew. She was one of the few charming women that the monastic Oxford of that day contained. Her father, afterwards the famous Dean of Westminster, was master of University College; I used to go to his Socrates lectures. He was dissatisfied with the progress we were making, and boldly—it was very bold at Oxford—charged us with paying too much attention to athletics, and it was then that he made his famous mot, that he had never taken any exercise in his life, except by occasionally standing up when he was reading. I have heard that it is equally true of Mr. Chamberlain, but it was Dean Bradley who said it. The Bradleys were an excessively clever family. The Dean had a brother or a half-brother a great philosopher, a don at Merton, and another, Andrew Bradley, a Fellow at Balliol, who became Professor of Literature at another University. I forget what his sister, Emma Bradley, did, but she was famous. Three of his daughters, Mrs. Woods, Mrs. Birchenough, Mrs. Murray Smith, are authoresses, Mrs. Woods being one of the best novelists of the day, and in my opinion the best of all poetesses in the English language. When Tennyson died there was a movement in favour of her being made the laureate, and no woman has ever had such claims for the post. She made her mark very young with _A Village Tragedy_ and _Esther Vanhomrigh_, and has written notable books ever since. Beautiful workmanship, singularly broad humanity, and truth to life are the characteristics of her prose. In poetry she has the gifts of both Brownings. She lives in an ideal home, the panelled Master’s House at the Temple, which has, however, one drawback, that the only way out of it to a cab on a wet night is to be carried in a sedan chair; a sedan chair of the eighteenth century is kept in the hall for the purpose, and passes from one Master of the Temple to another.
Charles Kingsley’s daughter, Mrs. St. Leger Harrison—the “Lucas Malet” of fame—used to come to us sometimes before she went back to live at Eversley, immortalised by her father; and once her cousin, the famous African explorer, the other Mary Kingsley, came. Lucas Malet is all that one might expect of Charles Kingsley’s daughter and the writer of _Sir Richard Calmady_.
It seems natural to mention the author of _Concerning Isabel Carnaby_ beside the author of _Sir Richard Calmady_. The two books made a stir about the same time, and the public mixed their titles with great impartiality. The author of the former, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, now the Hon. Mrs. Felkin, with her sister, Edith Fowler, was a good many times at Addison Mansions. I have told the story of her becoming an authoress in my chapter on the Idlers and Vagabonds.
I should have mentioned Beatrice Harraden before. When you see this small, slight, delicate-looking woman, with her bright eyes, you are forcibly reminded of the invalid heroine of _Ships that Pass in the Night_. But Beatrice Harraden is a public school woman; she was at Cheltenham College—the ladies’ College—and has taken the liveliest interest in all the interests of women since. She was cured, I fancy, of some pulmonary disease by going to California. She now has one of the most unique flats in Hampstead. I do not remember how I met her, but it was a long time ago, and I was very elated, because I always thought _Ships that Pass in the Night_ one of the best-written short novels in the language.
Helen Mathers has for many years been a dear friend of ours. She was another of the authors whose acquaintance it elated me to make. Although she is much about the same age as myself, she made her two successes with _Comin’ Through the Rye_ and _Cherry Ripe_ when I was a boy at school. Her husband, Henry Reeves, the eminent orthopædist, was one of the very first doctors to make practical use of the X-rays. She had a son in the army who promised to be her worthy successor in literature had he lived, as the writing which he achieved proved. Her real name was Mathews. She was a cousin of the Estella Mathews who married my near neighbour, George Cave, K.C., M.P., who was in my team, as was Mr. Justice Montague Shearman, when I was Captain of the Public Schools Football Club at Oxford, and who now occasionally plays golf with me when he can get a day off from the Courts, and from the case against Home Rule.
Frances Hodgson Burnett I first met in Washington, where she was the wife of a well-known doctor, and the mother of two beautiful boys in velvet Patience suits, locally called Fauntleroy suits, in honour of her book _Little Lord Fauntleroy_. But she was not an American; she was an Englishwoman born in Manchester, who had made her fame with a book about the north of England, called _That Lass o’ Lowrie’s_. Eventually she came back to live in her native England, first of all in a house in Portland Place and afterwards in a manor house in Kent. Her gigantic success with books and plays did not turn her head; she was always the same gracious human woman she had been when she was making her way.
John Oliver Hobbes, on the other hand, though she lived so much in England, and wrote all her books over here, was an American-born, the daughter of John Morgan Richards, who was at one time Chairman of the American Society in London, and had as much to do with _entente cordiale_ between England and the United States as any American Ambassador at the Court of St. James’. He was, as it were, a sort of social ambassador. The great house in Lancaster Gate in which he lived till he retired from business was a focus of entertainment for both branches of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Mrs. Craigie was a friend of our present Queen. She was extraordinarily clever and extraordinarily charming. She always gave every one to whom she was talking the knowledge that for the time being nobody else existed for her. In intellect she was the equal of any contemporary woman writer; added to this, she was very pretty, very engaging, very well dressed, and certainly proved the truth of the proverb “Whom the gods love, die young.” She had the gift of bringing out the wit as well as the best qualities of others.
Another American authoress who has spent most of her life and done all her writing in England is Irene Osgood, who came here as a very beautiful young bride of fabulous wealth, and rented a house which was one of the shrines of English literature—Knebworth, the home of Bulwer Lytton. She did not write _Servitude_, the book by which she will be remembered, there, but at Guilsborough, in Northamptonshire, another seat which she took for the hunting.
Yet another American authoress, who was also young and beautiful when she came to England, was Amelie Rives, who was at that time wife of J. A. Chanler, a great-grandson of the original Astor, but is now Princess Troubetzkoi. The daughter of a Virginian country gentleman, she simply leapt into fame with a book called _Virginia of Virginia_, which took the Americans by storm. She was irresistibly clever, and very striking-looking, with her pale gold hair, clear dusky complexion, and big blue eyes.
Gertrude Franklin Atherton, a remarkable-looking Californian with the same pale gold hair and rather the same complexion as Amelie Rives, whose mother was a great-grandniece of Benjamin Franklin, was at one time a very frequent visitor of ours. She was a long time getting her recognition, and then suddenly leapt into her full fame. But those who used to meet her socially knew from the first that she was a woman of commanding intellect. She had an odd trick of wearing a quill thrust through her hair.
Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson are among my oldest literary friends. I made Williamson’s acquaintance when he was sub-editor of the _Graphic_, and asked me to write an illustrated article on Adam Lindsay Gordon. Alice Livingston was an American girl, who came over to England to spend a year with some friends, and has never been back in her own country for more than three months at a time since. She had a letter of introduction to C. N. Williamson, who introduced her to a number of London editors, and thus gave her a chance of success in story-writing. After their marriage she wrote many serial stories, some of which appeared in book form; but the first great “Williamson success” was _The Lightning Conductor_, suggested by their earliest motoring adventures in France and Italy. C. N. Williamson having expert knowledge as a mechanical engineer (he intended to be one, before he determined to become a writer), it was easy to mingle amusing mechanical details of motoring with the story, a feature which appealed to lovers of automobiles in the days, ten or eleven years ago, when the sport was an uncertain adventure.
They both love story-telling—Mrs. Williamson used to “print” stories when she was six years old, before she could write—and have written a good many popular travel novels since _The Lightning Conductor_. They love also to see the far corners of the world, though they contrive to spend two or three months each winter in their Riviera house, and a month or two in summer among their friends in London.
Next to travelling, they love to build houses, and make them beautiful. If they see some land on a hillside with a splendid view, they can hardly resist buying it, and planning exactly the sort of house which ought to exist there. This means that they sell their last house, and begin another, with a different sort of garden, but there must always be a bull-dog in it, rejoicing in the name of Tiberius, or “Tibe.”
Madame Albanesi, one of the most successful novelists of the day, and wife of the well-known musician, is an old friend of ours. She had long been one of the most successful writers of serial fiction in popular journals, but it was not until after her marriage with Signor Albanesi that she turned her attention to novels—one of the earliest of these books receiving remarkable reviews. She conceived the idea of advertising these reviews herself, with the result that she was approached by a number of leading publishers for her next book, and happily followed with the book which established her name—_Susannah and One Other_, a book which has been running for over ten years, and is still selling. The book-reading public only required to have its attention adequately drawn to her novels, to see what admirable stories they were—faithful to life, pulsing with human nature.
I asked Madame Albanesi what first made her write. She said that she could not remember when she had not tried to write in some form or other, and that happily for her, when she was quite a girl circumstances threw her into a circle where her gift of imaginative writing was warmly encouraged, and opportunities were found for turning this gift to the most satisfactory results. I remember Madame Albanesi telling me that an interesting fact in connection with her earlier writing was that her imagination was so fertile that she used—before she was twenty years old—to keep three or four serials running at the same time. She never had less than two going at once, and wrote them in instalments from week to week, and never took a note. Everything was published anonymously, and a new serial would begin before the old one was finished. Madame Albanesi regards her serial work as being the very best training for telling a good story.
I ought to have mentioned earlier, since she belonged to that generation, John Strange Winter, a shining light in Bohemia at the epoch of which I am writing. She made her first success when I was at Oxford, with _Bootles’ Baby_, and _Hoop-la_, but she had lost her vogue before we went to live at Addison Mansions, though her name remained a household word, and she continued to publish a number of popular books. She was then living in an old house at Merton near Wimbledon, but shortly afterwards came to live at West Kensington, because she found Merton too far out.
She was a woman of inexhaustible energy, and had a very kind heart. She was exceedingly good to young authors and journalists; she made their cause her own; she welcomed them to her house, and visited theirs. She was a sister-in-law of George Augustus Sala. She was unfortunate in losing her public; she would have it again if she were alive now. But at that time a wave of preciousness and morbidness, which left her stranded, was passing over the country.
“George Egerton” and “Roy Devereux,” very pretty and clever women, were at the top of that wave among women, the former with books like _Keynotes_, the latter, and George Egerton’s beautiful sister, Miss Dunne, with brilliant and virile journalism in the _Saturday Review_, the _Pall Mall_ and elsewhere. Lane was their publisher, Beardsley was their illustrator, H. G. Wells headed the list of their male rivals, followed by Arthur Machen, H. D. Lowry and others. I have all their books—such slim books for novels. Fisher Unwin had another school of them, headed by John Oliver Hobbes, as daring from the sex point of view, but lighter in touch, which he published in long slim books with yellow paper covers at eighteenpence each. _Some Emotions and a Moral_ came out in this series, which I heard some one ask for at Smith’s Library quite seriously as _Some Morals and a Reputation_. These were Wells’s _Time Machine_, _Stolen Bacillus_, and _Wonderful Visit_ days.
I asked George Egerton, who was in camp at Tauranga during the Maori war as an infant, and as a child was in her uncle Admiral Bynon’s fleet while he was bombarding Valparaiso, and who I knew was intended for an artist, what had made her turn writer. She told me—
“Why I wrote? Because I had to. Why I wrote as I did? Because I felt woman could only hope to do one thing in literature—put _herself_ into it. Write not in breeches, but in corsets. That I took the name of George Egerton was partly because I did not think any publisher would take stories of that kind written by a woman, partly to see if my sex would make itself felt. _Keynotes_ went into seven languages in two years. I am not dead abroad. At the Goethe Centenary in Weimar the Dr. Professor who gave the lecture on literature of the century, spoke of Rudyard Kipling and George Egerton as the two who had introduced a new note, a new method, into English literature ‘in our time.’
“I gave up writing books when I found that authors are ‘unsecured creditors’—not worth the candle unless one can reel off popular stuff. I can’t. I go to America with plays. I make any money I make there. I shall arrive here too. I am doing a big book now, and I am starting a book of recollections. If one attaches credence to the fortune-tellers, I am to live to be an old woman. It might be amusing, if only to demolish the men and women of straw one has seen lauded to the skies, in one’s memory.”
Marie Belloc, who had not then married Lowndes of _The Times_, was a constant visitor. She belonged very much to the Idler and Vagabond set of which we saw so much, and was already longing to write novels, though many years were to go by before she was able to fulfil her wish. She is a sister of Hilaire Belloc, the free-lance M.P. of the last Parliament, one of the wittiest writers of the day, who has the further distinction of having been a driver in a French artillery regiment and a Scholar of Balliol afterwards. It should be added that he was twenty-three when he went up to Oxford.
Marie Stuart Boyd, of the same set, the wife of the well-known _Punch_ and _Graphic_ artist, did not begin to publish her delightful books till nearly ten years later, though she was a regular contributor to important Reviews.
Mrs. Frankau (“Frank Danby”), who came with her sister, Mrs. Aria, had at that time dropped writing for engraving, and did not resume it till some years later. _Pigs in Clover_, and her other successes in fiction, belong to a much later date.
One of the most daring and witty of women writers, Violet Hunt, was constantly at our at-homes. With a father who was a well-known artist, a Fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford, and a friend of Gladstone’s, and a mother who wrote novels of repute; and brought up in the brilliant set which gathered round Burne-Jones and Ford Madox Brown, it was no wonder that she should be extraordinarily clever, and no one was surprised when she produced scintillating books like _The Maiden’s Progress_ and _A Hard Woman_. South Lodge, their house on Campden Hill, was a Mecca for distinguished literary people. It was there that I first met Andrew Lang, Robert Hichens, Somerset Maugham, Katherine Cecil Thurston in a crowd of writers of high calibre. It was one of the few houses where Lang was natural without being rude.
I now come to a group of able women writers whom I met at clubs like the Pioneers and the Writers’, though they mostly came often to our at-homes afterwards. First among them I may place that brilliant and delightful writer, Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick, who published her early novels under the pseudonym of “Mrs. Andrew Dean.” Her husband, Mr. Alfred Sidgwick, is the author of well-known works on logic, and one of the earliest of the modern school of philosophers, known as the Pragmatists. He is a cousin of Mr. Henry Sidgwick (d. 1900), the distinguished Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, who married Mr. A. J. Balfour’s sister, the guardian spirit of Newnham.
Mrs. Sidgwick’s novels have always been full of verve. She has steeped herself in the literature of three countries, and until she married knew the world better from the Continental point of view than from the English. But her marriage took her amongst English people, so that she has had unusual opportunities of understanding two nationalities intimately. In those days we saw a good deal of her because she lived at Surbiton, but for many years past she has lived in Cornwall.
At the same club I met Miss Montrésor, whose delicate health has prevented her seeing much of London literary society, though she lives in South Kensington. With her _Into the Highways and Hedges_ she leapt into fame at a single bound. Miss Montrésor is a genius. Her intuition enables her to describe with fidelity phases of life with which she cannot have had any acquaintance. When she wrote _Into the Highways and Hedges_, my friend Sheldon, who was the London manager of D. Appleton & Co., gave me five pounds to write a careful opinion of it, to see whether his firm, to whom it had been offered, should publish it or not. I gave them a long opinion, in which I told them that they could not possibly refuse such a book. But they did refuse it, because almost any American publisher will refuse any novel which is not by a novelist who has already made a great name. Some other New York firm took it, and it was the book of the year in America.
At a club, too, I met Annie Swan (whose husband, Dr. Burnett Smith, was last year Mayor of Hertford), twenty years and more ago, a woman completely unspoiled by success, which came to her early and without stint, and remained. She stands at the very head of the writers of the wholesome school of fiction. In those days she lived at Hampstead, in a house called “Aldersyde,” after the novel which gave her her fame. She is one of those people whose obvious sincerity charms you the moment you meet them. I don’t know whether she is interested in spiritualism, but I did on one occasion meet Florence Marryat and Dora Russell together at her table.
Of Florence Marryat (Mrs. Francis Lean), the daughter of the immortal Captain Marryat, I saw a good deal at one time. She was a very regular attendant at a dining club called the Argonauts, which Frankfort Moore and I got up because the Vagabonds would not then admit ladies to their banquets. Spiritualism played an immense part in her life. She was also a very voluminous writer. I remember her telling me that she had written more than seventy novels. She was a tall, striking-looking woman, whose eyes suggested intimacy with the occult.
The Leightons, who are among my most valued friends, I certainly met at some club—Marie Leighton is the best newspaper serial writer of the day—a story-teller born, and, like her husband, a great authority on dogs. One at any rate of her thrilling stories has been dramatised and others are sure to follow, as the managers of the melodrama theatres recognise how immensely dramatic her stories are.
“Lucas Cleeve,” another frequent visitor at our house, wife of Colonel Kingscote, and daughter of Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, M.P., who made with Mr. Balfour, Lord Randolph Churchill, and Sir John Gorst the celebrated Fourth Party, had an extraordinary facility for writing novels of a certain merit, and, like her father, was a great linguist and traveller. Sir John Gorst introduced me to her. I met him at Castle Combe, which now belongs to him, and then belonged to his brother, the late Edward Chadwick Lowndes. I was staying with my brother-in-law, Robert Watkins, the agent of the estate, which is one of historical interest, for its archives prove it to have been irretrievably wasted by Sir John Fastolfe, Knt., Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who had married the widow of the last of its Scroop owners, and managed the estate for her. He built the chancel arches in the church, fine and early Perpendicular. The Scroop and Falstaff house has long since disappeared, while the Cromlech of a British Chief, and a Roman Camp, continue almost perfect. I was often the guest of Sir John’s eldest son, Sir Eldon, when I was in Egypt, and his younger son, Harold, and his charming wife, have been our intimate friends for many years. Mrs. Harold Gorst, who was a Miss Kennedy of the famous Shrewsbury School family of scholars, has an extraordinary knowledge of the life of the poor in London, and her novels reflect it with a fidelity which should have won them ten times their circulation.
Quite a prominent place among the authoresses who used to assemble on those evenings at Addison Mansions is occupied by novelists who began as my secretaries, and whom I trained to write.
I have been singularly fortunate in my choice of them. Not only have they given me so much satisfaction as secretaries that I have only had to send one away for inefficiency, and none for any other reason, but they have made such good use of the opportunities they had for observing the ways of book-writing, that in the twenty-seven years since the first came to me, they have between them had more than twenty-seven books published and paid for by leading firms like Hutchinson, Heinemann, Methuen, Hurst & Blackett, Constable & Co., Chatto & Windus, Eveleigh Nash, Mills & Boon and Stanley Paul.
My first secretary was Norma Lorimer, who came to us in her teens, before our memorable journey to America, Canada and the Far East. She has accompanied us on every important journey we ever made in Europe, Asia, Africa and America since I returned from Australia. When typewriting came in, she ceased to be my secretary, because she was never a typist, but she continued to live with us, and act as hostess, since my wife’s health has never permitted her to undertake the strain of managing the large literary, artistic and theatrical receptions which we held weekly for a good many years.
During that period Miss Lorimer made an immense circle of friends, which included practically every one in our acquaintance. Men like Fisher of the _Literary World_, and Robert Barr urged her to write a book for years before she could persuade herself to put pen to paper, though seeing so many of my books put together, and transcribing when they were finished, had familiarised her with the process of book-making, and though she had assisted me at every stage, in sight-seeing with an armful of guide-books, in making copious notes, in studying all the available authorities on the subject, and in digesting and arranging the information if it was a travel-book, or in giving her advice about the story if it was a novel. She must have been with us quite ten years before she published her first book, _A Sweet Disorder_. Since then, besides the two books in which she collaborated with me, _Queer Things about Sicily_ and _More Queer Things about Japan_, she has brought out _Josiah’s Wife_, _Mirry-Ann_, _By the Waters of Sicily_, _Catherine Sterling_, _On Etna_, _By the Waters of Carthage_, _The Pagan Woman_, _By the Waters of Egypt_, _By the Waters of Italy_, _The Second Woman_, _A Wife out of Egypt_, and _By the Waters of Germany_.
It gives me great satisfaction to think that she was my pupil in writing, for most of these books will stand reading again and again for the admirable sayings and analyses of life with which they are strewn, as well as for their stories, and the knowledge displayed in them. They are redolent with the atmosphere of the Isle of Man, Japan, Italy, Sicily, Tunis and Egypt, and one of them, _Josiah’s Wife_, contains a brilliant picture of America, where she lived with us for nearly three years.
Miss Lorimer comes of a very clever family. Her uncle, James Lorimer, was Professor of International Law in the Edinburgh University, and wrote some of the standard books upon the subject. He was a man of international reputation. His hobby was the restoration of Kellie Castle in Fifeshire, which he acquired from Lord Kellie and Mar, and, as the Latin inscription sets forth, “rescued it from the bats and the owls.” Living at Kellie was the inspiration of three of his clever children. His youngest son, now Sir Robert Lorimer, has become the most famous living Scottish architect. He had the high honour of building the Chapel of the Knights of the Thistle in St. Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh. His second son, J. H. Lorimer, the Scottish Academician, is recognised as one of the soundest painters of the day. One daughter, Lady im Thurn, caught the trick of the beautiful moulded plaster ceilings at Kellie, done by a wandering band of Italian artists in the seventeenth century, and was entrusted with the execution of the moulded plaster ceilings which Lord Bute had made for his House of Falkland. Another daughter is an author, and the other married Sir David Chalmers, the only man who ever earned two pensions as Chief Justice of two tropical colonies.
My next secretary was Miss Maude (Mary) Chester Craven, who had quarrelled with her stepfather, and was seeking to make her own way in the world.
She was a singularly clever girl, very much interested in literature, with a great sense of humour, and a great idea of “copy.” Had she come to me later, when I was writing the various volumes of _Queer Things_ series, I should have been able to make better use of her help. She was most generous and self-sacrificing, and when she had thrown herself into the subject, you could hardly get her away from the papers. And she was very well read on certain subjects.
A few years after she left me she wrote an excellent book called _Famous Beauties of Two Reigns_. Since then she has found a niche all to herself in book-producing—teaching people who have led interesting lives, and have good stories to tell, but have had no literary experience, how to put their biographies together and editing them herself. The books produced in this way have proved some of the greatest sensations of our times. Lady Cardigan led off, followed by the adventurous ex-Crown Princess of Saxony, and Lord Rossmore’s racy recollections came as an _entr’acte_ to the drama of Meyerling as narrated by Countess Larisch.
Editing these books has made Miss Craven—she is now Mrs. Charles ffoulkes, wife of the Master of the Armour of the Tower of London—an admirable raconteur, and she told me that the late M. Charles Sauerwein, directeur of _Le Matin_, had offered her a large sum to write her reminiscences of her “sitters,” but conscientious scruples prevented her from accepting the tempting offer, as to disclose all she knew would have caused trouble in London and elsewhere.
The ex-Crown Princess of Saxony, for instance, was a most ingenuous person, who would have written a chapter, had Miss Craven permitted her, on “why the royal honeymoon bored her to tears,” and much more that would have caused endless scandal and heartburnings to the Saxon court.
“Our Louise,” as she was termed by her subjects, had a positive mania for cleanliness, and she told Miss Craven that once when she was travelling with her mother the water supply gave out and she was in despair how to wash her hands. But necessity originated a brilliant idea, and at the next stop Louise rushed to the buffet, and returned with a waiter staggering under many bottles of mineral water, with which she performed her ablutions. “Surely,” remarked the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, “there is no accounting for your vagaries, Louise!”
Miss Craven asked the Princess what she most desired to do when the dullness of palace life obsessed her. “To post a letter in a pillar-box like any one else,” was the reply. Once, coming from the Continent, she overheard some fellow-passengers discussing her rather freely, and entering into the spirit of the adventure, Louise joined in the conversation, and for once saw herself as others saw her. “Well,” said she, as the train slowed into Charing Cross, “you’ve had an opportunity of meeting that terrible woman—I am the ex-Crown Princess,” and when the horror-stricken occupants of the compartment saw her name upon her small luggage, they realised that the pretty, vivacious, fair woman was none other than the former wife of the King of Saxony.
Lady Cardigan (whose recollections “Labby” described as a classic) disliked the blue pencil, for she saw no reason why you should not say what you like in a book. She was a most brilliant anecdotist, and Miss Craven said she could tell good stories for a fortnight without repeating herself. One, which related to a well-known Bacchanalian member of the aristocracy, is worth recalling. The gentleman in question once kissed a pretty housemaid, who made a decidedly original protest. “I wonder, my Lord,” said the girl, “that a nobleman like you don’t drink champagne. Brandy do colour your breath.”
Lady Cardigan held the opinion that sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander. “Men fall in love with ballet-girls, barmaids and servants,” she once remarked, “so why shouldn’t women fall in love with men of inferior station if it amuses them?”
Maude Craven could tell of flutterings in the dove-cotes of Mayfair, and of many skeletons in ancestral cupboards whose bones must have rattled in dread of what Lady Cardigan’s marvellous memory could have recalled about them.
The lady who followed Miss Craven had only been with us for a short time when the doctors told her that she could not live in England. She went to California and got married. Miss Marie Ivory, who followed her, married a famous artist.
Miss Ethel Phipps, the next, was with us for several years, and accompanied us to Italy and Sicily, and inaugurated the system of tissue-paper scrap-books, which I have found so useful in collecting the materials for my books of travel. And she was an excellent typist, the first excellent typist we had had, though I took up the use of the typewriter quite early. The first I ever had was a Remington which I bought in 1883 in Sydney from a man named Cunningham who reported law cases for the _Sydney Morning Herald_. He sold it to me for half the price he had given for it (I paid him about fifteen pounds, I think), because the judges would not look at his notes when they were in typewriting. He had bought the instrument under the idea that the extra legibility would be received with acclaim. The judges thought that the machine might not write down what the reporter meant it to—they credited it with the powers of a planchette, which was then very fashionable.
Miss Phipps wrote a very amusing little book called _Belinda and Others_, which Warne bought from her and published both in England and America.
When she left us because she was needed at home, her place was taken by a very clever and interesting girl fresh from school, who has made a great name for herself in fiction—Miss Ethel May Stevens, whose pen-name is Ethel Stefana Stevens. We took her to Sicily almost directly she came to us, and Italianised her surname into the nickname Stefana, by which even her own relations grew to call her.
The moment I saw her I was struck by her brilliance and intelligence, and I did not require to learn that she had carried everything before her at Miss Douglas’s famous school in Queen’s Gate, to know that she was much the ablest of the ladies who answered my advertisement when Miss Phipps had to leave us.
At various times she travelled all over Italy and Sicily with us, and visited Tunis and Carthage. She was with us for several years, and a great worker. On her fell the almost incredible labour of typing out and keeping sorted the immense mass of materials accumulated chiefly from Italian sources, for the Encyclopædia called _Things Sicilian_, which forms the bulk of my _Sicily, the New Winter Resort_.
She had studied a great deal before she came to us, and besides a good knowledge of French and German and music (she played the violin charmingly), had a strange accomplishment—she spoke Romany, the Gipsy language, so fluently that when she made up a little, even gipsies took her for a gipsy. She had learnt it in the New Forest, which was near her home. She began before she had been very long with us the gipsy novel, which now, after many years, she has taken up again. It was a story with a strong love interest in it, but it gave no promise of the admirable gift of writing which she has shown in her published works like _The Veil_ and _The Mountain of God_. In the large amount of reviewing which she did for me—against time, it was true—she had a habit of introducing stock phrases and introductory periphrases, such as “the worst of the whole matter was that,” “that redoubtable,” “the venerable form of.” Her criticisms of books were in judgment very good, but in expression they were verbose and lacking in distinction. She was always studying in the fine library which I had collected as a reviewer. Besides gipsy-lore and music she was especially interested in everything connected with occultism and amulets, and the Black Art generally, and everything connected with the Orient. It was in the three excellent chapters which she wrote for my _Carthage and Tunis_, where they are signed with her own initials, E. M. S., instead of the E. S. S. she uses now, that Miss Stevens first showed what she could do when she tried. The chapters are