HARRIETT JAY REVIEWS

[Photo courtesy of Frankfurt University Library]

PLAYS

Harriett Jay’s theatrical collaborations with Robert Buchanan are included on the Theatre Reviews pages, and include the following plays:

Alone in London 1885.
Fascination 1887.
The Strange Adventures Of Miss Brown (As Charles Marlowe) 1895.
The Romance of the Shopwalker (As Charles Marlowe) 1896.
The Mariners of England (As Charles Marlowe) 1897.
Two Little Maids from School (As Charles Marlowe) 1897.

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Following Buchanan’s death in 1901, Harriett Jay (still using the pseudonym ‘Charles Marlowe’) produced When Knights Were Bold, which became a great popular success. Reviews and additional material available below:

When Knights were Bold

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[Advert for The Nine Days’ Queen from The Times (22 December, 1880 - p.8)]

Harriett Jay also tried her hand as an actress and the following brief item in The Guardian (5 November, 1880 - p.5) gives details of her stage début:

     “Miss Harriett Jay, the novelist, is about to make her début as an actress in the Olympic version of her own novel, “The Queen of Connaught.” She will appear for the first time in London at the Crystal Palace Matinée on November 17, and will play the part originally sustained by Miss Ada Cavendish.”

The following reviews mention Harriett Jay’s performances as an actress:

The Nine Days’ Queen 1880.
The Exiles of Erin [alternate title: The Mormons] 1881.
Lucy Brandon 1882.
A Madcap Prince (revival) 1882.
Lady Clare 1883.
The Flowers of the Forest  1883.
A Sailor and his Lass 1883.
Alone in London 1885.
The Blue Bells of Scotland 1887.
Fascination 1887.
The Bride of Love 1890.
Sweet Nancy 1890.

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WHY CHARLES MARLOWE?

The first two plays Harriett Jay wrote in collaboration with Robert Buchanan, Alone in London and Fascination, appeared under her real name. Her later collaborations, The Strange Adventures Of Miss Brown, The Romance of the Shopwalker, The Mariners of England, Two Little Maids from School and her only solo effort, When Knights Were Bold, appeared under the pseudonym “Charles Marlowe”. Harriett Jay makes no mention of this in her biography of Robert Buchanan, but one can speculate as to its origin. The name itself comes from Fascination - it’s the name of the male identity assumed by Lady Madge Slashton, the heroine of the piece - and, of course, there’s also an echo of Charles Marlow in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops To Conquer. After reading the reviews of Alone in London and Fascination in the American press (or, specifically, The New York Times), one can’t help noticing that Harriett Jay’s name as co-author is rarely mentioned - the plays are almost always referred to as Robert Buchanan’s alone. In fact, The New York Times in general is rather ‘snide’ in its remarks about Harriett Jay. In a piece from 18th May, 1884, we find the following:

“In London Mr. Buchanan is not regarded with enthusiasm by theatrical managers. In the first place he has written a large number of pieces, none of which, barring “Lady Clare,” has been successfully performed in the English metropolis. In the second he has a sister-in-law named Harriet Jay, who is the cause of travail and sorrow in managerial circles. Whenever Mr. Buchanan writes a play he insists, as far as he can, upon having Miss Jay perform the principal character. The lady is an amiable and interesting person when she does not try to act. But the quickest preparation for a London exodus lies through the appearance of Miss Jay in public. It is because Mr. Buchanan, metaphorically speaking, goes around with a bundle of manuscript under one arm and his sister-in-law under the other that he is not enthusiastically regarded by English managers.”

And the situation was not improved later that year when Buchanan and Jay made their first and only visit to America. The articles from that period (available here) give the impression that The New York Times felt that Buchanan was unjustified in trying to promote Harriett Jay’s acting career, and one can only assume that when Alone in London and Fascination appeared, the paper just presumed that Buchanan had just added her name as a further attempt to promote her, this time as a writer. Whether this was the reason for the later adoption of the Charles Marlowe pseudonym, or whether there was a general antipathy to female playwrights (although none of the English reviews of the earlier plays seem to have any problem with crediting Harriett Jay), I don’t know. This is mere speculation on my part.

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BOOK REVIEWS

Two Men and a Maid: A Tale from The Scotsman (22 December, 1881 - p. 3)

Two Men and a Maid: A Tale. By Harriet Jay, author of “The Queen of Connaught,” &c. &c. Three Volumes. London: F. V. White & Co.

     It is not often that a book is produced with a more wildly extravagant plot and development than those which Miss Jay has embodied in Two Men and a Maid. The hero is a certain Richard Gloucester, a gloomy, suspicious, hot-tempered man, who has nevertheless contrived to win the love of a beautiful and sweet Welsh girl, Alice Chepstow, the daughter of a poor vicar. Mr Gloucester, in an earlier part of his career, has ruined his fortunes for the sake of a woman who, in the hour of the adversity he had incurred for her sake, showed that it was not himself but his money that she loved, and calmly deserted him. This makes him almost insanely distrustful of Alice’s sincerity. He goes out to China to retrieve his estate, which, though large, is mortgaged up to the hilt. The understanding is, that in nine months he will come back for Alice, marry her, and take her with him to his place of Eastern exile. Before the expiration of this fixed time, however, news comes that he has been murdered by pirates in the China seas. The shock to Alice is terrible, for her love for Gloucester has been deep and intense. She is gradually recovering her physical health, however, when a new complication arises. Gloucester’s lawyer, a man of the name of Tremaine, is the real owner of the mortgages on his estate. By the will of the supposed dead man, Alice has an interest in the property unless or until she marries. Mr Tremaine has a direct interest in hastening that event, and he is taking measures to that end; but he is soon spurred on by a stronger motive than the desire of pecuniary gain. His one child, a daughter, to whom he is passionately devoted, has long loved Gloucester; and when that gentleman, as every novel reader will have foreseen, returns to England, though in a shockingly mutilated condition, Tremaine plots, on the one hand, to make Alice Chepstow believe that Gloucester has never really loved her with an honest love, and, on the other, to persuade Gloucester that Alice is already preparing to console herself for his loss. He is the better able to carry out this design because Gloucester, with his usual tendency to morbid suspicion, keeps the secret of his return, and goes down to the place of Alice’s residence in disguise to act as a spy on his unfortunate betrothed. Alice’s love for him is really unabated; but she is induced by Tremaine’s machinations to lose her faith that he had died true to her, and is persuaded by her relatives to consent to marriage with another and very eligible suitor, who has loved her long and ardently. Gloucester contrives to carry her off a few hours after the marriage ceremony has been performed. The only consolation he derives from this infamous act is to find that her love for him is still unabated; but he is obliged to restore her to her heart-broken husband, and she very soon afterwards dies—which is, indeed, all that is left for her to do. This preposterous story is told with a certain amount of narrative and dramatic vigour; but no literary power could give real interest or vitality to a plot which is one long violation of probability. It is impossible for the reader to have the smallest sympathy with the personages of the tale, most of whom would inevitably, in real life, be consigned to a lunatic asylum before they had committed half the follies here ascribed them. Alice is too colourless a character to arouse any interest, and Richard Gloucester is simply a monstrosity—a sort of caricature of Rochester in “Jane Eyre,” with none of that personage’s redeeming traits.

Back to Harriett Jay’s Bibliography

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Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life, His Life’s Work and His Literary Friendships from The Scotsman (2 February, 1903 - p. 2)

ROBERT BUCHANAN. Some Account of his Life, his Life’s Work, and his Literary Friendships. By Harriet Jay, Author of “The Queen of Connaught,” &c. London: T. Fisher Unwin.

     Readers of novelty will find relatively little to satisfy them in this biography, for the obituary notices given in the newspapers when Robert Buchanan died less than two years ago were well informed, and the life of that man of letters was uneventful except in the publication of books. Yet the work has its own fresh interest as a piece of literary piety. It is written by Buchanan’s wife’s sister, who had been adopted into his family when a child; and, while coloured by a partiality characteristic of familiar biographers, brings together a larger and more trustworthy body of particulars concerning the author of “The Shadow of the Sword” than is to be found elsewhere. It recounts Buchanan’s boyhood in Glasgow as the son of a busy journalist there, and his going up to London at eighteen years of age, when his father’s fortunes failed. It gives pathetic incidents of that period of early struggles in which Buchanan lived and worked in a garret, and tells over again the story of the ill-starred ambitions, the sad illness, and early death of his companion, the poet David Gray. It tells of the friendships he formed with authors, journalists, and actors in Bohemia, of his marriage, and of his first books that came out in the early sixties. The spirit of these ran counter to the orthodox theologies of their day, and the biographical narrative is at this point appropriately interrupted by a paper in which Mr Henry S. Salt gives his impressions of Robert Buchanan as a humanitarian. The writer’s services to the literature of his time were already so far recognised as to have made him the recipient of a Government pension; but his name was scarcely known to the great public until it came to be connected with the pseudonymous article and pamphlet that attacked the so-called fleshly school of poetry. The reception of invective with which this publication met at the hands of poets and critics is duly recorded by the present biographer, who, without going so far as to maintain the justice of Buchanan’s attack on Swinburne and Rossetti, explains the provocation that led to it, and puts it that Buchanan found in the pleasures of independence more than a compensation for the pains of personal martyrdom. The book then follows the author through his career as a novelist, a poet, and a writer of plays, retracing the steps of a public career known to all reading men of these days, and now supplemented by a record of the few domestic incidents, such as the deaths of Buchanan’s wife and his mother, and of the many pecuniary embarrassments that chequered its private side. Mr George R. Sims contributes to the volume a reminiscence of his dramatic collaboration with Buchanan; and Mr Henry Murray describes from personal knowledge the fondness which the humanitarian poet cherished for speculation upon the turf. As if anticipating the objections of the censorious, Mr Murray does not neglect to tell that Buchanan did not allow the race meetings to interfere with his literary work. “Nay,” he says, “he even carried his literary labours on to the turf. At the time when he was preparing a long commentary on Rénan’s views regarding certain Scriptural episodes we went together to Sandown, and in an interval between two races I found him standing in the middle of Tattersall’s ring, serenely unconscious of the charivari about him, reading his Greek Testament. When the bell rang he slipped the volume into his pocket, marking the place with a tip telegram, and plunged into the fray apparently greatly refreshed by his studies.”
     That passage may be said in no unkindly spirit to give a juster notion of the odd mixture of energies embodied in Buchanan as a man than does the book as a whole, touched so strongly as it is by the natural feeling of a writer perhaps too near her subject to see its lineaments with perfect clearness. The book would have been more complete had it exhibited more fully Buchanan’s place in literature and defined more closely the relation of his works to the fiction and poetry of his own time. As it stands, however, it is an interesting and a valuable memorial that will be eagerly read by the many who remember its subject.

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Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life, His Life’s Work and His Literary Friendships from The Times Literary Supplement (13 February, 1903 - p.46-47)
[Reviewed by Edward Verrall Lucas]

ROBERT BUCHANAN
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ROBERT BUCHANAN. Some account of His Life, His Life’s Work, and Literary Friendships. By HARRIETT JAY. (Unwin. 10s. 6d. Net.)

     This portly volume once more suggests the need for the more serious consideration of biographical values. The men of whose lives a pedestrian year-by-year record, such as this, is necessary require to be separated more rigorously from the men of whom a bird’s-eye view would suffice. Some one should decide; if the publishers are not capable, there should be a necrologist-in-chief, to whom intending biographers should apply before setting forth on their tasks. Then we should be spared the pain of having to say that Miss Harriett Jay’s memoir of her brother-in-law, the late Robert Buchanan, is both out of proportion and insufficiently instructive. We are afraid, indeed, that Mr. Gosse’s indictment of the widow as biographer must be extended to the sister-in-law. Love and admiration and a sweet charity Miss Jay has in abundance, but she was too near her subject, and she has few of the more important gifts of either the biographer or the critic. The whole man is not in these pages; we doubt, indeed, if more than a moiety of him is here, or rather would have been here but for the contributory chapter by Mr. R. E. Francillon, to which we shall return later.
     Robert Buchanan, neither by performance nor by character, was subject for the near-of-kin pedestrian biographer; but he was eminently fitted for the brief monograph by a student of men and letters. The facts of his life, after his childhood and youth were over, were unimportant. His work was rarely better than second-rate in any of the many departments of intellectual industry which he attempted; his friends were not notable, nor was his own personality conspicuous. He wrote nothing that will endure, such was his fecundity and want of distinction and style. He wrote a little good poetry, but much that was indifferent; he wrote little good criticism (although much that by its wrongheadedness made other people think); he wrote second-rate novels and second-rate plays. We dislike to have to put the case thus baldly; but it is necessary to show why Robert Buchanan, in common with too many other men whose biographies make heavy volumes, was no subject for the painstaking treatment which has been accorded him. But, on the other hand, Robert Buchanan was curiously well fitted to be the subject of a discriminating monograph which should state as many of the facts of his life (particularly his parentage and early years) as were necessary, and then pass on to focus him as a whole. He was fitted for such treatment for several reasons. He was a very perfect type of the literary Berserk; he was a fearless and headstrong champion of what he believed to be right and opponent of what he believed to be wrong; he was a superb weaver of angry prose; he was once found at Sandown-park between two races, reading his Greek Testament with a tipster’s telegram to mark the place; it was he who said one of the best things of Ruskin that was ever written, in the compactest form, when he called him in one of his satires
                    Half seraph and half shrew;
and he was the author of the “Ballad of Judas Iscariot” and certain other striking poems of strong individuality, if undistinguished in form.
     The monograph, however, has not been written. Instead, we have Miss Jay’s diffuse volume, which, were it not for the contribution of six pages by Mr. Francillon, who met Buchanan very occasionally but instantly divined his character, would tell us of essentials little more than we knew before. Mr. Francillon writes:—

     The right reading of Buchanan was, I am convinced, that his very genius had prevented him from outgrowing, or being able to outgrow, the boyishness of the best sort of boy; while too many of us only too quickly forget what any sort of boyhood means. And the grand note of the best sort of boy is a sincere passion for justice, or rather a consuming indignation against injustice—the two things are not exactly the same. The boy of whatever age can never comprehend the coolness with which the grown-up man of the world has learned to take injustice as part and parcel of the natural order of things, even when himself the sufferer. The grown-up man has learned the sound policy of not sending indignation red-hot or white-hot to the post or the press, but of waiting till it is cool enough to insert in a barrel of gunpowder without risk of explosion. But the boy rebels, and, if he be among the great masters of language, hurls it out hot and strong, in the full belief that no honest feelings could be so weak as to be wounded by any honest words. Of course he was wrong. Complete honesty is perfectly compatible with even abnormal thinness of skin, and with an even exceptionally plentiful crop of corns. He would often have been amazed and shocked could he, to whom hard hitting was so easy, have estimated the effect of his blows. I do not believe Robert Buchanan to have been capable of a malign or vindictive thought; I know that I never heard him utter an unkindly word. I wish, above all else, that those who thought of him as I had thought of him before knowing him could have met him at home—Strasz-Engel, Haus-Teufel (“Street Angel, House Devil,” say the Germans) —not that they have any monopoly of the experience. I have never heard the natural converse of the saying, but it is impossible to think of Buchanan without its suggestion. . . .
     In short, he always gave me the impression of being thrown into a world into which he had never really grown, where he was never at home, but always in a foreign country whose language he could not learn, despite all his efforts, and whose manners and customs, despite his desire to adopt them, he could not understand. It was not that, like many mystics, he in his inmost mind regarded life as a sort of dream to be slept through pleasantly or painfully, as the case might be, but not with serious concern. On the contrary, while to the Celtic part of him the unseen life was fully as real as the seen, to another element in him the seen was as real as the unseen. And so the two hostile realities became mixed without becoming fused, so that the ordinary man of ordinary affairs, who knows this world (or at least his own little part of it) very well—who indeed makes this world what it is—found Buchanan exceedingly easy to misunderstand.

This is the temper in which we would have had the monograph on Buchanan written. Miss Jay’s lengthy biography has, however, as we have said, come instead. It is a well-published book (save for its flat back), and will be found readable by those who want an emotional and superficial account of an author’s life. For ourselves, we can but regret that so little has been made of the more interesting episodes, such as, for example, Buchanan’s friendship with Thomas Love Peacock. We could well have spared reminiscences of the “Bard” by Mr. George R. Sims to have more of Buchanan’s own autobiographical sketches; and a few of his best poems might have been given. Here we leave the work—with a prayer for the speedy arrival of the necrologist-in-chief.

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Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life, His Life’s Work and His Literary Friendships from The Guardian (17 February, 1903 - p.4)

ROBERT BUCHANAN: SOME ACCOUNT OF HIS LIFE, HIS LIFE’S WORK, AND HIS LITERARY FRIENDSHIPS. By Harriett Jay. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Pp. 324. 10s. 6d. net.

     Miss Jay does not pretend to approach her subject critically. She collaborated with Buchanan in some of his later dramatic work, and he was always her generous and intimate friend. If her devotion leads her sometimes into mistake, we must recognise that generally she writes with moderation and with a reserve that will not be misunderstood. It strikes us sometimes that the life is a little lacking in the intimate touches that might give a clearer impression of personality. Buchanan’s attitude to the world was perhaps rather artificial, and a great part of the book is made up of letters and reminiscences in which his opinions are stated and restated. Miss Jay’s plan is not, we think, the best that could have been adopted. The compromise between a general trend of narrative and the grouping of particular features is not very skilfully carried out, and the positions of certain chapters, written by other friends, seem to be determined arbitrarily. There is one by Mr. H. S. Salt on Buchanan’s “Humanitarianism,” an “Impression” by Mr. R. E. Francillon, “A Reminiscence” by Mr. G. R. Sims, and a short account of his connection with the turf by Mr. Henry Murray. Miss Jay refrains from any criticism of Buchanan’s work and is content to indicate its reception by the public and by certain of his contemporaries. The earlier parts of the book are the most coherent, and we are shown the causes which made of Buchanan, naturally genial, a persistent rebel. He belonged to the ostracised faction, and as he was born in the “odour of infidelity” his early life was passed among theorists, “atheists,” and uncomfortable people of various epithets. There are some interesting passages about the influence of Robert Owen, and the initial steps of the poetical career are clearly traced. Among those who showed him kindness in his youthful struggles in London were Barry Cornwall and Lord Houghton. Other acquaintances or associates, whose names may serve to suggest Buchanan’s wide and various interests, were Louis Blanc, Hermann Vezin, Peacock, Edmund Yates, G. H. Lewes, George Eliot, Browning, Charles Reade, Whitman, and Roden Noel, his “most intimate and life-long friend.” Certainly Buchanan lived a very full and, we may believe, upon the whole a happy life. Miss Jay’s biography shows us a man of many good and generous impulses who “fought bravely for the good of Humanity” but never quite got himself in hand. The diversities of his pursuits may be illustrated by a passage from Mr. Murray’s chapter:—

     At the time when he was preparing a long commentary on Rénan’s views regarding certain Scriptural episodes we went together to Sandown, and in an interval between two races I found him standing in the middle of Tattersall’s ring, serenely unconscious of the charivari about him, reading his Greek Testament. When the bell rang he slipped the volume into his pocket, marking the place with a tip telegram, and plunged into the fray, apparently greatly refreshed by his studies.”

A bibliographical list includes some fifty volumes of prose and verse, which, together with the numerous plays of which he was author, wholly or in part, makes a formidable body of work. Whatever may be the ultimate verdict upon it, admiration and respect are compelled by a life of such fine activities.

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Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life, His Life’s Work and His Literary Friendships from The New York Times (7 March, 1903)

MR. ALDEN’S VIEWS.
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LONDON, Feb. 26.—The life of Robert Buchanan, by Harriet Jay, his sister-in-law, has the merit of giving a truthful portrait of the man. As a rule, this cannot be said of a biography written by one who is in warm sympathy with the subject. When a man has been dead a hundred years or so, a biographer may be expected to tell the truth about him, but a biography written within a year after the death of the subject, and written, too, by a personal friend, almost inevitably takes on the coloring of friendship, and gives us a purified and glorified impression of the dead man. But Buchanan was one of the most transparent of men, and it was not a difficult task to show him as he was. certainly Buchanan was a poet, for he wrote not a little verse that was worthy of the name of poetry, although he also wrote much that was simply rhyme and nothing more. He was a novelist, but his books always suggested that they were written merely to sell, and not because the writer had any thing to say or any love for his art. He was a clever and savage critic, but his personal animosities made his criticism occasionally worthless. He never attained a commanding position in literature, and it is doubtful if anything written by him will survive.
     But for many years Buchanan was a prominent personality in London. He had a strong nature, and he spent his life in revolt against most things. He might be summed up as an intelligent, warm-hearted man, with an ungovernable temper, and a disposition to attack everything that other people liked. He came up to London as a friendless and penniless young poet, and he received much kindness. How he repaid some of it, by savage attacks on men who had helped him, will not be forgotten, especially as he had the bad taste to make his attacks under the disguise of another name than his own. He never recovered his position after that unfortunate event. Men were afraid of trusting to his friendship, and as the knowledge of this grew upon him, he became more and more of an Ishmaelite.
     And yet Buchanan was really a kindly man. It is doubtful if he fully comprehended how virulent and abusive were his attacks upon other authors, and it is probable that he was somewhat surprised to find that they were indignant. When he saw a head he hit it, but he thought it rather hard that the owner of the head should be seriously annoyed. He knew that the angry impulses which made him attack friends, and whatever they held dear, were passing moods, and he wondered that others attached importance to them. He did not really hate Christianity although he reviled it with vigor. It was something that commonplace people believed in, and therefore he attacked it, but in his heart he did not despise it, except, perhaps, when Mr. Richard Le Gallienne defended it.
     Had Robert Buchanan ever learned the value of self-restraint, and practiced it, his life would have been a very different one. He would have succeeded in literature far better than he did succeed, and he would have gained the esteem and respect of his fellows. The whole trouble with him was that he uniformly gave way to his impulses, and mocked at the idea of restraining them. He was a lovable man who made himself disliked without a shadow of excuse for so doing.
     Miss Jay does not say this in plain language. Indeed, it is by no means certain that she holds any such opinion of Buchanan as I have expressed. But in her book we cannot fail to see just what manner of man Buchanan was. The story is for that reason a pitiful one. There was so much that was good, so much that was clever, in the man, that it is an infinite pity that he never learned to govern himself. But it should be remembered that he was brought up in Scotland, where the strict restraints to which he was subjected had a natural tendency to beget in him a hatred of all restraint. Had he been born and bred in a more liberal land he might have been a very different man.

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