Sir Rohans Ghost. A Romance

Harriet Prescott Spofford

Description

A forgotten gem of nineteenth-century American fiction

Originally published in 1860, the formative Gothic novel ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ by Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835–1921), one of nineteenth-century America’s most significant woman writers, relates the tale of a tormented British aristocrat who struggles to retain his sanity while suffering horrifying visitations from the spectre of his dead lover amid the agonies of an already fragile mind. Setting her tale in the enigmatic Sir Rohan’s beautiful-yet-decaying estate, Spofford immerses readers in a ghost story that marries lush imagery with an atmosphere of impending, mysterious doom.

Upon its initial publication, a reviewer writing for ‘The Baltimore Sun’ deemed ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ as ‘a strange, weird production, fascinating and exciting […] A work of genius and not without moral significance’. Dating from a time when women writers like Spofford were increasingly making their voices heard by reshaping the character of popular American literature, ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ remains to this day an engaging and important work of Gothic fiction.

Spofford was, in her time, one of the most popular writers in America, and her work garnered praise from such notable literary figures as Henry James, T. W. Higginson and Emily Dickinson (who admitted she found some of Spofford’s writing frightening). ‘Sir Rohan’s Ghost’ is, then, a rare mid-nineteenth-century Gothic novel by an influential American woman author. It is also – simply put – a good read.

1. Introduction; 2. ‘Sir Rohan's Ghost. A Romance.’; 3. Explanatory Notes; 4. Appendix.

Sujets

• amour
• Gothic
• Fiction
• Romance

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 14 décembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781785272899
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sir Rohan’s Ghost
Sir Rohan’s Ghost. A Romance
Harriet Prescott Spofford edited and with an introduction and notes by Matthew Wynn Sivils
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
© 2020 Matthew Wynn Sivils editorial matter and selection
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-287-5 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-287-X (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Bibliography for the Introduction
Note on the Text
SIR ROHAN’S GHOST. A ROMANCE
I. Sir Rohan
II. Over the Hills and Far Away
III. Miriam
IV. The Wine-Cellar
V. The Rings
VI. Fanchon
VII. Testimony
VIII. The Forehead of the Storm
IX. Sunshine
X. Mr. Arundel
XI. Work
XII. Mortmain
XIII. Halcyon Days
XIV. Miriam’s Kingdom
XV. The Two
XVI. In the Lanes
XVII. Whether or No
XVIII. Redruth Surrenders His Accounts
XIX. The Face in the Flash
XX. The Clang of Hoofs
XXI. The Ghost
Bibliography for the Explanatory Notes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their input at various stages of this project, I thank Alfred Bendixen, Charles L. Crow, Margaret S. Mook, Cynthia C. Murillo and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. I am likewise grateful to the Anthem Press staff for their crucial role in the creation of this edition. Finally, I thank Iowa State University for their support, which included a Center for the Excellence in the Arts and Humanities Fellowship and a Publication Subvention Grant.
INTRODUCTION
Born on April 3, 1835, in Calais, Maine, to a prominent New England family of diminished fortunes, Harriet Prescott Spofford ( née Harriet Elizabeth Prescott) was by all accounts a child of precocious literary talent. 1 The dates are uncertain, but at some point in the late 1840s, with the family suffering significant financial hardship, Harriet’s father, Joseph Newmarch Prescott, seeking opportunity in the West, took leave of his family to live for approximately eight years in the frontier town of Oregon City, Oregon. At about the time Joseph first left for Oregon, young Harriet (hereafter referred to as Spofford) and her mother moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, and in 1849 she enrolled in the Putnam Free School. She enjoyed her studies, as well as explored Newburyport and wrote that she and a friend “walked the halls together at recess, reading Tennyson and Shelley and Milton from the same book; and we went on botanizing trips; in vacation we tramped three miles to Plum Island to spend the day at the seaside” (quoted in Halbeisen 36).
Spofford’s copious reading, “botanizing” and seaside trips had a pronounced influence on her writing style, with its wide range of literary allusions, botanical (and other natural historical references) and romantic seaside vignettes. She had a talent for drawing upon her reading to help her write in convincing detail about faraway lands she had never visited. As her biographer Elizabeth K. Halbeisen writes, “She had an ability to a remarkable extent to read up on things, transferring the atmosphere as well as facts to her own writing” (37). This deftness in weaving together facts and florid descriptions—crafting the essence of the exotic from decidedly conventional sources—formed the core of her style and played a major role in her early literary success. Take for example Spofford’s masterful 1859 Parisian detective tale “In a Cellar” and the Gothic tour of Cornwall that forms so much of Sir Rohan’s Ghost (1859). Drawn to the romantic confluence of culture, nature, love, mystery and death, she was, in quotidian Newburyport, cultivating the intellectual fodder necessary to create some of the most influential fiction of her day. In a telling anecdote, one of her classmates years later recalled seeing young Spofford sitting “by the graves in the old burying ground […] reading Shakespeare” (quoted in Halbeisen 37).
At Putnam, Spofford had the opportunity to study an impressive range of subjects, such as philosophy, logic, French, theology, astronomy, botany and literature (37). The latter three subjects—each prominent in Sir Rohan’s Ghost —would become an important hallmark of her writing style (37). In addition to considerable study in composition and rhetoric, the students at Putnam would assemble every Wednesday morning to hear lectures on literature and other cultural issues, sometimes by notable figures such as Edward P. Whipple the editor for the North American Review . Along with this structured study of English and literary culture, the school also published its own newspaper, The Experiment , and Spofford made good use of this venue, publishing several pieces in its pages. As Halbeisen writes, she “had early practice in literary expression plus unexcelled opportunity to see the immediate reaction to her efforts” (40). And it was at Putnam that she made one of her first major strides into the literary circle of nineteenth-century New England.
In 1851 Spofford won an essay competition founded by the noted author, editor, Unitarian minister, and abolitionist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a figure now mostly known for his famed correspondence with Emily Dickinson. Her entry on Hamlet won her $10, and, of far more value, it attracted the notice of Higginson (Cooke 529). He took interest in Spofford’s development as a writer, and he would serve as an especially important influence and advocate during her early career. In the first years of their acquaintance, she participated in Higginson’s poetry group, attended classes he taught while he lived in Newburyport, and—after he moved in 1852 to become pastor of the Free Church in Worcester, Massachusetts—they maintained a healthy correspondence by which he critiqued her writing, gave her advice on possibly pursuing a career in teaching, and guided her reading—encouraging her to read Emerson and more Shakespeare (Halbesien 43). Her formal education continued as well. After finishing her studies at Putnam, she and her sister Mary enrolled in Pinkerton Academy in nearby Derry, New Hampshire, where they studied from 1853 to 1855 (45). While Spofford probably maintained a similar educational and literary drive as when she was enrolled at Putnam, there is only a sparse record of her two years at Pinkerton or of her progress toward a literary career. However, at least one notable literary event did occur for her during this time; she published as a broadside a Tennyson-inspired poem entitled “Life,” and it stands as her first publication aside from those she placed in the Putnam Free School paper. As her time in school came to a close, she would soon begin to publish far more widely, and for what were largely financial reasons.
At about the time Spofford’s studies at Pinkerton Academy ended, her father Joseph returned from his extended stay in Oregon (he had returned by about 1856). Little is known of his years out West aside from the fact that he served for a time as the mayor of Oregon City. Joseph’s original plans, whether (once he had made his fortune) to return to his family or to have them follow him out West, remain unknown. Any such plans were rendered moot, however, when he began to suffer from what Spofford’s friend, Rose Terry Cooke, describes as a form of “lingering paralysis” (522). It seems Joseph returned to his family no better off financially than before and, now, due to his illness, he was unable to work. Making matters worse, Spofford’s mother’s health also began to suffer. So, it was within the context of these extreme financial pressures that Spofford first began to write for a commercial audience (Halbeisen 47–48). Specifically, she began placing work in the Boston story papers, which were considered among the lowest of literary venues (Cooke 530). These periodicals—such as the Child’s Friend and Family Magazine , Ballou’s Dollar Magazine and the Christian Parlor Magazine —were largely filled with sentimental verse and trite tales of knights rescuing fair maidens. The story papers did not pay well, and she reportedly earned just $5 for her first published story. Over the next three years she would write hundreds of stories for these papers, often making as little as $2.50 per submission. Such meager compensation required her to write constantly, spending upwards of 15 hours a day churning out tales (Halbeisen 50).
In 1858, doubtlessly hoping to put the poorly remunerative story papers behind her, Spofford set her sights on a more elevated literary venue: the newly minted Atlantic Monthly . Only one year into its existence, the Atlantic —founded and helmed by several members of New England’s intellectual elite—had already positioned itself as the premier American literary magazine of the time. Its founders included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell (who served as the magazine’s first editor). Most of these founders placed pieces in the magazine’s first issues, a