Pam’s Pictorama Post: Today is a book day here at Pictorama. You all know that periodically I share something I have dived into, usually a late 19th or early 20th century author. (Other examples include my passion for series books found in posts here and here – or my recent passion for the author Rosa Mulholland and the first post about her can be found here.) By coincidence this year on my birthday I picked up a book, which like last year’s Rosa Mulholland find, has sparked reading a series of books by the author. While Mulholland is an Irish writer who is sort of all about being Irish, Susan Rowley Richmond Lee (quite a name!) is a Scottish writer who penned under the, blissfully simple, name of Curtis Yorke. Really, these are the only similarities between the two writers. I guess I should give a bit of spoiler alert on plots – really just the third book. These books don’t have a lot of plot surprises however; it’s mostly about how you get there.

Her available autobiography is very thin. She was born in Scotland in 1854 (d. 1930) and educated in Glasgow. She married a mining engineer, John Wilson Richmond Lee, and they moved to Kensington. She published her first book in 1886, That Little Girl, and went on to write 50 books. Unlike Rosa Mulholland, that brief bio is all we know about her and as noted also differing from Mulholland her Scottish nationality is not a dominant feature of her writing. You could easily just assume she is British.

I have read three of her books, starting with The Wild Ruthvens which I purchased at The Strand bookstore on my birthday. Her books all seem to weigh in at about 350 pages. The Wild Ruthvens is what was called a juvenile and today I guess would be a young adult novel. It is the story of a family of essentially very unruly kids (naughty to the point of being unlikeable at times) who are minus parents and raised by an elderly aunt with the occasionally intervention of a somewhat younger uncle with periodic attempts to tame them. A cousin who was crippled in a riding accident is thrown into the mix and is one of the forces that slowly changes the family dynamic. Published in 1899 (from the Gift Book Series for Boys and Girls) by L.C. Page and Company, my entry into her work 13 years in clearly shows she knows what she is doing when writing a book. The plot of this, and her other books I have read thus far, is not especially complicated and in all fairness she does not really compete with Rosa Mulholland in this or other ways. However, it is easy to see why she was popular and The Wild Ruthvens appears to be one of her most popular books, hence its availability in the Rare Book Room at The Strand.

Physical copies of her books are not hugely available (some are for sale with bizarrely huge prices for a completely unknown author – a waterlogged copy of one is up for $350 on eBay), however I have found a cache of them scanned for free reading via Google Play Books and I have read two more that way and have a third underway. A warning that at times the scanning is messy and amateurish (I am loathe to complain as otherwise these books wouldn’t exist) but in the end all the pages do appear to be there so just push forward. Goodreads appears to have no reviews or ratings of any of her books yet (although I did come across a request from someone to add a book) and of course I mean to change that. Even the Wikipedia listing for her books is only partial (select) if we know she published 50.

With each book I have read I like her more and that may have something to do with the fact that, by coincidence, each has taken me further in her career. My second read was The Medlicotts: An Uneventful Family Chronicle (1895) published by Jarrold & Sons. It would appear that this might be her second most available book. A somewhat typical tale of a young woman who goes into service as a governess. While this family isn’t missing parents, their role is thoroughly superseded by the grandmother who is the heart of the house and a wonderfully defined character. One of the children is a little girl nicknamed Batty which seems like an unfortunate nickname – she is an aspiring writer and I note this to come back to it in a minute.

Third and most recent read is The World and Delia, 1907. Now first and foremost a warning, a reprint of this book is for sale on Amazon (I read a free copy on Google Books) however their description of the plot is entirely wrong. Maybe AI wrote it? I have no idea. It isn’t that I wouldn’t like to read the one the described there but it isn’t this book. The plot of this one is actually a bit interesting however. A young woman has been raised by maiden aunts and is entirely unworldly, somehow she is introduced to a widowed man and her isolation and sadness at not being a part of the world so captures him that he asks her to marry him within days of meeting her. He lives in a fairly rural area (so she actually goes from living in London but totally isolated to this town where she gets to engage out in the world more) and by plot planning coincidence her only acquaintance her own age she has ends up marrying and moving into an estate nearby.

The story is of how she and her husband grow to love each other in a one step forward, two steps back sort of fashion. As above, the odd thing is a character named Batty who is a middle-aged housekeeper! It is such a distinctive nickname – did she mean for us to know it is the young girl as above in The Medlicott? No indication is ultimately given – just an insider notation within her universe, I guess. It did leave me wondering how the young girl above could have evolved into this character but not sure if there is ever going to be an explanation. Meanwhile, warnings on this one include a not very contemporary analysis of modern (new) women and a smidge of unexpected racism.

There you have it for now. I have two more downloaded and ready to go so we will see where it takes me – clearly still much to mine in the vein of early women authors of Great Britain.