Notable Women Authors of the Day: Biographical Sketches. Helen Black

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ who asks you to "go and see the twins." Accordingly their mother takes you on to a large night-nursery, where the two little ones, boy and girl, are being prepared for bed. They are just turned four, and are called Eliot and Violet Mignon, after two of the characters in Mrs. Stannard's books. They are perfectly friendly, and as you bend to kiss the baby girl last, she looks reproachfully out of her great dark eyes, and sternly commands you to "kiss Gertie, too." (Gertie is the under nurse.) This raises a hearty laugh, under cover of which you hastily retreat.

      Above all things, Mrs. Stannard is a thoroughly domestic woman. Popular in society, constantly entertaining with great hospitality, she yet contrives to attend to every detail of her large household, which consequently goes like clockwork. She writes for about two hours every morning, and keeps a neat record book, in which she duly enters the number of pages written each day.

      Presently Mr. Stannard comes in, and soon suggests an adjournment to his study downstairs, a snug, business-like room, half filled with despatch-boxes, books, and MSS. On a table stands a large folio-like volume, which is Mrs. Stannard's visiting book, containing many hundreds of names. She looks ruefully at a clip containing some sixty unanswered letters, and candidly confesses that she finds considerable difficulty with her private correspondence and her calls, both of which accumulate faster than she can respond to; though, as she says, her many friends are very indulgent to her on those scores, and are "quite willing to make allowance for a poor woman who has the bulk of her literary work cut out for a year or two in advance, three little children, and a houseful of servants to manage; but, happily," she adds, "good servants. I have been so lucky in that way."

      Just now, indeed, she claims especial indulgence in respect to social observances, for, as though so busy a life were not enough to exhaust her energies, early in 1891 she added a new burden to her indefatigable pen, by starting a penny weekly magazine under the title of Golden Gates, subsequently altered to Winter's Weekly in deference to the opinion of those who objected to the somewhat religious sound of the former name. The little paper was the first weekly periodical that was ever exclusively owned, edited, and published by a popular novelist, and its fortunes have been watched with vivid interest by all who know how treacherous and adventuresome are such enterprises. The fresh, frank individuality of Winter's Weekly has, however, made friends for the journal wherever it has gone, and if John Strange Winter can keep it at its present point of unconventional interest, it may consolidate into a valuable property. Already it seems to have suggested the publication of new journals on similar lines, though no other woman novelist has yet had the courage to follow suit.

      Later works of this favourite writer are "Mere Luck," "My Geoff," "Lumley, the Painter," also a powerful and pathetic novel, in two volumes, entitled "Only Human." Her last is a story called "A Soldier's Children," which she has given for the benefit of the Victoria Hospital for Children, Chelsea.

      But with all this accumulation of business, these domestic cares, and social claims, somehow Mrs. Stannard never seems in a hurry. The kind and hospitable young couple are always ready to do an act of kindness, and to welcome with help and counsel a new aspirant to fame in the thorny paths of literature. Small wonder that they are so much sought after in society, and so heartily welcomed wherever they go – and one is seldom seen without the other. You go on your way with every hearty good wish that each year may bring them ever-increasing prosperity and success, for in such union there is strength.

      MRS. ALEXANDER

      About three miles north-west of St. Paul's lies a comparatively new suburb of the great metropolis, which but forty years ago was described as "a hamlet in the parish of Marylebone," and through which passes the Grand Junction Canal, almost reaching to Kilburn. London, with her ever-grasping clutch, has seized on the vast tract of ground, which erstwhile grew potatoes and cabbages for the multitude, and, abolishing the nursery and market-gardens, has transformed them into broad streets, of which one of the longest is Portsdown-road.

      Not altogether inartistic is the row of substantially built houses where Mrs. Alexander Hector has been for some years located. It is far enough away to enable the popular authoress to pursue her literary vocation in peace and quiet, yet sufficiently near to keep her in touch with the busy world of literature and art, wherein she is deservedly so great a favourite. The blue fan, serving as a screen for the window, is a sort of land-mark distinguishing the house from its fellows. You are shown into the library, where Mrs. Alexander is seated at a handsome oak writing-table, busily engaged in finishing the last words of a chapter in her new story. She looks up with a smile of welcome, and is about to discontinue her occupation; but you hastily beg her to go on with her work, which will give you time to look around; and as she complies with the request, she says pleasantly, "Well, then, just for three minutes only."

      Your glance lights again on the gentle author herself, and you watch the pen gliding easily over the page, which rests on a diminutive shred of well-worn blotting-paper. The face is fair and smooth, the hair, slightly grey, is simply parted back from the forehead, and the three-quarter profile, which presents itself to your gaze, is straight and well-cut. She wears a little white cap, and a long black gown, trimmed with jet, and close by her side lies an enormous Persian tabby cat of great age.

      The study is divided from the adjoining room by heavy curtains drawn aside and a Japanese screen. It is all perfectly simple and unpretending, but the rooms are thoroughly comfortable and home-like.

      The chapter being finished, your hostess rises, declares herself entirely at your service, and mentions that she is now engaged on a new three volume novel, which is to come out early next year in America, and is as yet unnamed.

      Mrs. Alexander was born in Ireland, though no touch of accent can be detected. She never left that country until after her nineteenth birthday. Her father belonged to an old squirearchal family, the Frenches of Roscommon. He was a keen sportsman, and a member of the famous Kildare Hunt. The few old pictures which hang on the wall are all family portraits. One represents a paternal ancestor, Lord Annaly, painted in his peer's robes. He was one of the Gore family, of whom no less than nine members sat at the same time in parliament shortly before the Union. Another picture of a comfortable-looking old gentleman in a powdered wig is the portrait of a high legal dignitary, well known in his day as Theobald Wolfe, a great-uncle of Mrs. Alexander. A third is a seventeenth-century portrait of Colonel Dominic French, who looks manly and resolute, in spite of his yellow satin coat, flowing wig, and lace cravat, drawn through his buttonhole. This gentleman was the first Protestant of the family, and is credited with having given up his faith for love of his wife, who simpers beside him in an alarmingly décolletée blue dress, suggestive of the courtly style in the time of the Merry Monarch. Her husband, with the ardour of a convert – or a pervert – raised a regiment of dragoons among his tenantry, and fought on the winning side at the Battle of the Boyne.

      Mrs. Alexander remarks that her "kinsfolk and acquaintance in early life, were, if not illiterate, certainly unliterary." "I always loved books," she adds, "and was fortunate, when a very young girl, barely out of the schoolroom, in winning the favour of a dear old blind Scotchman, whose wife was a family friend. He was a profound thinker, and an earnest student before he lost his sight. My happiest and most profitable hours were spent in reading aloud to him books, no doubt a good deal beyond my grasp, but which, thanks to his kind and patient explanations, proved the most valuable part of my very irregular education. In reading the newspapers to him, I also gathered some idea of politics, probably very vague ideas, but so liberal in their tendency that my relatives, who were 'bitter Protestants' and the highest of high Tories, looked on me, if not as a 'black sheep,' certainly as a 'lost mutton.' The tendency has remained with me, though my consciousness of the many-sided immensity of the subject, has kept me from forming any decided opinions."

      The only bits of ancestry she values, Mrs. Alexander says, are her descent from Jeremy Taylor, the celebrated Bishop of Down and Connor, and the near cousinship of her grandmother to Lord Kilwarden, who was the first victim in Emmet's rising; that high-minded judge, whose last words, as he yielded up his life to the cruel pikes of his assailants, СКАЧАТЬ