Jessie Mansergh

Reading: de Horne Vaizey Cont.

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: I continue to work my way through the available books by Mrs. George (nee Jessie Mansergh) de Horne Vaizey, as chronicled in early parts here and here. I have had a tough time reading with a consistent timeline so I have hopped a bit through her ten year, prolific career and have been spending a lot of time around 1908 and 1909 recently, with a few jumps to near the end of her life in 1917.

There is not a lot of deep biographical information readily available and I sketched out most of it in my second post about her. She had a good for nothing drug addicted husband who had the good grace to die and she starts publishing shortly after. What I didn’t know until recently was that her young daughter, Gwenyth, took one of her stories from a drawer and sent it to a magazine contest without telling her mother. Jessie won and the prize was a cruise where she met George de Horne Vaizey and they marry and meanwhile her career was launched.

From A Houseful of Girls, 1902.

So the question of what was really lighting a fire under her about writing is an open one – she must have enjoyed it, but was it a financial need? I always thought she wrote for a longer time before remarrying and needed to support her family. Nonetheless, write she does with tremendous output. Wikipedia counts 31 books in the span of her brief career (another site says 33) and I think we have to assume there were magazine stories published as well. (There appears to be a collection of them published either right before or after her death.)

Her books are not especially brief. I would say they average around 300 pages. Reading them electronically it is a bit hard to tell. Sometimes two or even three were published in a given year.

I have been thinking about her heroines as I read and as they grow in interest with her increased skill as a writer. They stop being simply likable (beautiful and loveable – gray eyes, long lashes) fairly early on and start to become more complicated. In Flaming June (note that the painting above is of the same name and was well known at the time – was she making reference to it? Frederic Leighton, 1895 – I say yes!) she has an American main character with a Western accent which, while effective, gets a bit tedious to read after awhile. (She also had a character with a lisp in one volume that started to drive me nuts. It seems to be a fashion for writers of the time to show all the accents they could write with.)

Also from A House Full of Girls.

However, over time her women grow into complex characters who are sometimes more interesting than likeable. For example, the woman in Flaming June is hot tempered and extremely independent. Much of the plot, and what happens to her both good and bad, centers on this quality as well as her stubbornness. It makes the story tick and, without being a spoiler I will say, gives it a somewhat quixotic ending.

In addition to greater character development her plots become more interesting and she leaves off the basic sort of worn tropes about school days and money acquired, lost and acquired again which were the bread and butter of her early writing and certainly for women authors of the day. A young woman of middling income decides to take a basement flat in the city and dress as a much older woman so that she will be free to help people in a way that an attractive young woman could not. (The eponymous volume is The Lady of the Basement Flat, 1917.) The story is worked however so that she also has a life at a country house where she is herself – of course the two weave together at some point. However, what a concept!

From Etheldreda the Ready, which I am currently reading, 1910. Definitely not one of her more likeable heroines! Etheldreda is utterly self-oriented and conceited, thus far anyway!

In What a Man Wills she takes a sort of well trod narrative path with a wealthy, ill, elderly man who invites four nieces and nephews for a long visit to decide who will be his heir. While, again without being a spoiler, I would say she doesn’t manage an entirely new take on it, she does well with expanding it and again, not afraid to make one of her main characters flawed.

Her women, even her heroines, can fall victim to vanity and greed, if not quite all the way to ambition. (She does poke fun at women authors occasionally with a sort of self-deprecation.) They are often a bit forward for the time and space they live in – especially those who reside in or come to find themselves in small rural towns. Financial ruin comes to people and families on a routine basis, but with a sort of detail that makes you think that for those who lived on investment income they way many people did at the time, that this was a very real event.

Her characters opine on the limited options for women – that they are not trained for anything to prepare them for life or possible ways to make a living. Therefore their fortunes hang largely on their ability to marry well – or remain dependent on a male relative or someone else to settle money on them. In the end this depends on how attractive they are and can make themselves and some of the more forward characters have a real struggle with this very real problem.

From The Lady of the Basement Flat – sadly I don’t have one of her dress as the elderly version of herself!

Frankly, the male characters tend to be a bit more one dimensional; she came from a large family and almost all of her characters do. Therefore, there are always a few brothers for color and plot development and of course there are suitors, and although we are privy to fewer of their thoughts and motivations, they are generally not fleshed out like the women are having they were often an end goal which offered security and a home in addition to whatever romantic interest was brought to the table.

The closest we come to the male prospective in the somewhat brilliant novel, An Unknown Lover. This is a complicated plot and while there is a woman at the center of it, we do get into the heads of both her epistolatory lover and brother and their motivations which help drive this story. Thus far I would say this is her best, published in ’13 so she is flexing her muscles, but not yet at the end of her life.

From Daugther of a Genius, 1903. A ner’do well father dies leaving his children to rely on their wits and creativity to make their way.

So my interest in women authors at the turn of the last century continues unabated. Watching them chafe at the conventions that defined their lives and dictated how they could live – sometimes these very conventions sentencing them to penury without a way to survive. It has been interesting to place her historically before some of my other beloved authors such as the adult novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett and Edna Ferber (a few of those posts are here and here, but there are others!) but interesting to add her to the timeline. Also, the play between the British authors and the American is interesting as women in the United States seem to have been freer to pursue a living more broadly than their British counterparts earlier on – and the conventions of our society a smidge less confining.

As stated in my earlier posts, Jessie de Horne Vaizey spends the last years of her life bedridden and dies in 1917. I learned recently however that it was first typhoid, then eventually arthritis which confined her to bed and she died unexpectedly during an operation for an appendicitis – so what made her an invalid is not what killed her. She does some of her characters painful rheumatic complaints, usually elderly men, but clearly she knew what she wrote of – and as someone who suffers from it myself, I can only imagine the kind of pain she must have had without the meds of today to help alleviate them. There are also many plot instances of long recoveries from illness, not unlike her typhoid I assume. She was my age when she died, but she made the most of her almost two decades as an author.

Part 2: Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey Cont.

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: Apologies in advance for anyone who was peevish that yesterday was a book-ish post as I am going to wrap up (at least for now) my thoughts on Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey today as she continues to be my reading material of choice. (Yesterday’s post is here.)

I will confess I went for a long fallow period of not reading much and just one off books here and there when I was. Kim powers through all sorts of long and short term reading projects, both for his own edification and for things related to work, so I am jealous when I am without one too. However, I am there with the best when I find a rabbit hole to go down and therefore here we are today.

From Wikipedia and the only image of her I can find.

Mrs. G de HV as I like to call her, is fading from consciousness and seems to have barely been rescued for the digital age. If we are to look at the remaining availability of her published volumes, we have to assume that the Pixie books I wrote about yesterday were among her most popular, with a few other titles that seem to stand out. She wrote upwards of 32 books (I say upwards because Wikipedia does not always have every book published by an author although they do a good job of it) and clearly there were short stories. There is a collection of them mentioned as published in 1918. The list of her publications runs from 1897 to 1918, ending with that collection of stories. However, if I really want to read the widest swath of her work I will need to dig some. I would say about half is available online or for sale as antique volumes or occasional reprint.

From “Tom and Some Other Girls”, 1901.

Born Jessie Bell in 1857 as one in a melee of seven children (four brothers, two sisters) she was the daughter of a Scottish insurance broker. Her place of birth was Liverpool. She first married Henry Mansergh, a cotton broker, and published her first volumes under the name Jessie Mansergh. They had a daughter, Gwyneth Alice, in 1886. Mansergh was an addict which seems to have contributed to his early death. Reading between the lines so to speak, one wonders what part her early writing played in supporting them.

While I was certain that hers was a pen name of a type that was often adopted at the time, I learned that no, her second husband was indeed George de Horne Vaizey. She meets him while on a cruise which was a prize awarded for one of her short stories. They marry in ’98 and have a son, also named George, who goes on to be a writer. Sadly her own life ends as an invalid, confined to bed for many years. She dies in 1917 at about age 60 (her precise date of birth unknown) and therefore the final volume is posthumous.

From “A College Girl”, 1914.

Jessie uses her own life as whole cloth for her fiction. Large dynamic families, addiction, illness abound in her pages. Therefore, I have to assume that her evolving views on marriage and the relationships between men and women was also explored on her pages. If you’ve followed my previous musings on women writings of the early 20th century, you know that I found that even the juveniles such as The Radio Girls and Automobile Girls were gently ever pushing the line forward for what was permissible and acceptable for young women. (Some posts on those books here and here.)

Interesting to find Mrs. G de HV who is a bit earlier still than those authors and for me a logical forerunner of some. The line for women, the options they had in society for supporting themselves, is still more nascent although shifting all the time. An ongoing theme she explores is the unmarried middle class woman and her lack of options. I’ve already encountered several books where due to various circumstances the heroine is in some way prohibited or unable to marry and is faced with the issue of how to live their lives, preferably not just dependent on family. She seems to walk a narrow line – clearly a woman married to a man of means is the safest port in the storm.

She also confronts the daily reality of marriage – the idea that you are joining up with a mate who you will continue to make conversation with daily for decades. (I have often said that knowing that I would never be bored talking to Kim helped ensure a good union for us!) The sheer difficulty and exhaustion of running a house and caring for a family.

From “Lady of the Basement Flat”, 1917.

I am going to skip forward to An Unknown Lover, a novel published in 1913. (Some spoiler alerts ahead for those who care.) The author sets herself some unusual tasks. We have a heroine, Katrine, in her late twenties who has spent most of the last decade caring for her older brother who was widowed shortly after marrying. There are rarely effective parents in her books – adult children have either lost them or they are on the sidelines for some reason. I can’t even remember why they weren’t present to stop this hot mess of a situation – dead and forgotten in this case.

Anyway, both characters are beginning to chafe at the situation. The heroine opines on having all the responsibilities of housekeeping without the partnership of a true mate. She is also painfully aware that she is dependent on her brother for her keep, which comes to a hard point when he decides to remarry. She has no marketable skills and living in a small hamlet no prospects of marriage which is more or less what she is trained for. As a literary challenge, our author has placed an epistolary relationship through part of the book, which moves the storyline along. At first it seemed a bit awkward, but it grew on me. Despite some flaws and maybe questionable decisions, it is to date my favorite of her novels.

Love this title and looking forward to this one. Published in 1908.

De Horne Vaizey has beloved tropes – I’ve noted before a preponderance of gray eyed heroines, some have golden eyes as an alternative. An odd one seems to be a fondness for shipwrecks – I believe I may be up to three in her oeuvre to date. An interesting tidbit, while researching this post I came across the following in an Internet Archive version of An Unknown Lover which actually photographs the pages of a hard copy of the novel and included this forward below:

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Lest I should be credited with making literary material out of a disaster still painfully fresh in the minds of readers on both sides of the Atlantic, I should like to record the following rather striking coincidence.

On the fourteenth of April last, I was engaged in writing the description of the collision at sea in which the heroine of the present book plays a part; and after some deliberation as to the most forceful word to employ, wrote the sentence which originally ran as follows: —

”Mercifully it is not one person in many thousands who is called upon to endure so titanic an experience. …”

A few hours later my husband returned home and told me of the news which had that day thrilled the world — the foundering of the steamship Titanic on her maiden voyage.

Many weeks passed by before I could bring myself to continue the narrative.

Hampstead.

Jessie de Horne Vaizey.

Somehow she pulls out two parallel love stories and details the personal growth of Katrine as she makes some rather bold leaps forward to attain a measure of happiness and independence, gently breaking with at least some of society’s conventions.

Sadly Jessie de Horn Vaizey doesn’t live quite long enough to see the shift which occurs even in the early 20’s for women. At six or so volumes I have barely scratched the surface and if it is interesting enough I promise more to come.

Pixie and Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey: Part One

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Pam’s Pictorama Post: It has been a very long time indeed since I have posted about a writer or books I have been reading. That is in part because the last year did not lend itself to reading. Helping during my
mother’s last illness and the months that followed, ultimately leading to my changing jobs at the end of the year, certainly there were books, but reading was sporadic. Love or hate my book posts, books are back and today kicks off an interest in Mrs. de Horne Vaizey, nee Jessie Bell, later Mrs. Henry Mansergh and finally Mrs. de Horne Vaizey.

Pictorama readers of long-standing know that in recent years (especially during the at home pandemic years) I chased down the writings of numerous authors including all the Judy Bolton mysteries (a post about those can be found here) and strolled through the collected works of several women who were writing short stories and novels that depicted the emerging woman in the US and Britain at the dawn of the 20th century.

These included the adult novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett (in several parts, but it all starts here),
the (glorious) short stories and novels of Edna Ferber (here) and the various series books including the Red Cross Girls, Ruth Fielding books and the many volumes of my beloved Campfire Girls. (Starting here, here and here if you are game.)

You might remember that my birthday this year turned into a day of poking around bookstores downtown, including The Strand’s re-opened rare book room. I picked up a copy of More About Pixie, the second volume in a three novel series by Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey (Mrs. GdeHV for my purposes going forward)

I was able to find the first volume of the books about Pixie online, Pixie O’Shaughnessy, with relative ease on my old friend Project Gutenberg. (All three volumes mentioned here are available on this free online resource as well as some others, although beyond these books only about half of her publications seem to be readily available. Many volumes of her work are also available at the Internet Archive.) I have largely been able to download illustrated versions of the books which I urge you to try to do as some of the illustrations are very good. (Oddly I can’t seem to open and share them here and show what I was able to find otherwise. I will add that the blog site isn’t actually allowing me to add images today so I apologize for the largely un-illustrated post!)

This first volume is a wonderful depiction of life in Ireland in the waning days of the 19th century. Written in 1902 it is a bit earlier than the copious volumes of my earlier reading I mention above. The impoverished, motherless (a recent loss) family resides in a dilapidated castle which becomes a sort of
character in the book, as does the backdrop of the small Irish town they reside in.

Pixie is a young child still at the start of this book – she is not a physically attractive youngster (this is an oddly defining characteristic that stays with her; her looks do not improve with age), however she has such an outspoken and winning personality that she always everyone’s favorite. To make up for her physical limitations as a beauty, she has two lavishly beautiful sisters (Mrs. GdeHV is a little obsessed with her heroines having gray eyes, they all do), Bridgie and Esmerelda, and attractive brothers in the bargain.
The funds are scraped together to send Pixie off to a private school in London and her adventures there make up the second half or so of the volume. (Esmerelda is hot tempered and so extravagantly stunning that she is somewhat done away with at the close of volume one.)

Written a year later, volume two, the one I picked up at The Strand More About Pixie, takes an interesting turn. It is in fact not so much more about Pixie, as the story is actually told by a young woman neighbor, a
recovering invalid, who lives on the street in London where the family decamps to at the start of this volume. Her encounters with the O’Shaughnessy family include Pixie, but in reality it focuses more on her friendship with one of the older sisters, Bridgie, who plays mother to the clan. Pixie does reassert
herself in the latter part of this volume, but it is Bridgie and the neighbor girl, Sylvia, and their friendship that is at the heart of the book.

Much of the book concerns the slow recovery of Sylvia (an illness which is given no name but has even affected her bones as they gravely consider needing to amputate her foot) who is another motherless child (life of mother’s was evidently cheap), living with an aunt while her father is away in India. (Mrs.
GdeHV likes to send men to India and bring them back after many years. To date I have barely been in India with her books, but wouldn’t be surprised if we end up there one of these days.)

It isn’t until 1914 that the final volume of the three is published, The Love Affairs of Pixie. Our prolific author has penned at least 17 volumes between these so it is a more mature writer who writes this novel. It interests me that she decided to turn her hand back to a now fully adult Pixie who returns as the heroine and focus of this story. Much of this story brings Pixie and the reader back to Esmerelda and Ireland, although the Ireland of this book is less lovingly described. Pixie remains unattractive on the face of things and in fact the book opens with her own discovery of this and is a theme throughout, but the pluckiness and good heartedness of Pixie has her as a sought after mate who (spoiler alert) finds her mate at the close of this volume.

Mrs. GdeHV clearly liked to assign herself challenges to keep things interesting. These are not formulaic series books (not that there’s anything wrong with those!), but instead you can see her making choices and setting up approaches to keep things different and interesting. I’ll cover more of her biography tomorrow, a sort of sad tale despite being a very prolific writer. She must have been popular in her time, but sadly volumes appear to be hard to find and I know she wrote short stories but none of those have turned up yet. However, I have only just begun my research so undoubtedly more to come.