books – Page 12 – Empowering women through fiction and history.

The Buccaneer in Nineteenth Century America

Photo Credit: sdigitall/Depositphotos.com

If you’ve read the first book of my Waxwood Series, The Specter, you might already be familiar with the term “buccaneer” as it pertains to the 19^th century and to the Gilded Age in particular. Early in the book, there is gossip amongst the Nob Hill blue bloods about Malcolm Alderdice, the patriarch of the Alderdice family, and his rise in business and society:

“Oh, that poor Penelope, the woman was such a lamb!
“Too good for him for the likes of her father’s clerk, to be sure. Can’t think why she married him.”
“Oh, that’s obvious, my dear. Where there’s money to be had, rest assured, the buccaneer shall have it.”
“True, Catherine, true. And who can say how far the buccaneer will go to make himself one of us?”

So the buccaneer was a popular image in the 19^th century Gilded Age, especially in the realms of the public sphere.

Ever since I started writing historical fiction, definitions and word origins fascinate me, and the word “buccaneer” is no exception. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the term as “any of the freebooters preying on Spanish ships and settlements especially in 17th century West Indies” (“Buccaneer”, n.d.). This is the way I think many of us picture the buccaneer — something off of a pirate ship, a bad guy who looks like Johnny Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise.

But in the 19^th century, the word took on the more figurative meaning that exists today in our modern world which the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as “an unscrupulous adventurer especially in politics or business” (“Buccaneer”, n.d.). As I mentioned in my blog post about the Gilded Age here, the 19^th century was a time when big businesses were built, millionaires were made, and corruption and graft abounded. It wasn’t just about spending money in an excessive, lavish way. It was also about making it — any way you could, whether it skirted the laws of fair trade or not.

In this atmosphere, the modern buccaneer was born. Ambitious, ruthless, and driven, the buccaneer was a wheeler-dealer whose only interest was getting ahead and making money. Thus, he often used unscrupulous business methods. Probably the most infamous of these in the 19^th century were the Robber Barons. These were men like Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, and J.P. Morgan. In San Francisco, there were specifically four heavy hitters who made up the railroad Robber Barons: Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Collis P. Huntington.

We do, however, want to consider that these men, while ruthless in business, also did some good works. Many had the “pay it forward” attitude, and some of America’s most impressive institutions and cultural centers were built from their initiative. For example, Leland Stanford served as governor of California and instituted forest conservation and, as a believer in education, oversaw what is now San Jose State University and, of course, founded Stanford University.

And, interestingly, the term began to acquire less negative connotations around the mid-20^th century, at least in Britain. According to this article from the BBC, several powerful corporate businessmen saw the term as connoting qualities of daring, adventure, and innovation.

While Malcolm Alderdice is not on the scale of Stanford or Carnegie, San Franciso society is none too keen to accept him into the fold, and this is part of the Alderdice family struggle in the series. There’s also another buccaneer who appears in Book 3 of the series, Pathfinding Women. His name is Monte Leblanc, and he’s referred to by a minor character as “our cousin, the Canadian buccaneer”. His cousin (one of the San Francisco social matrons) insists he made his fortune “without ruffling any feathers”. Whether that’s true or not remains a question in the novel.

You can read more about Pathfinding Women, which will be out next month, here. You can also learn about Malcolm Alderdice and his buccaneering ways in Book 1 of the series, The Specter, which is currently on sale for 99¢. And if you want to know more about the series in general, including Book 4, which will be coming out at the end of 2020, you can go here.

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Works Cited:

Buccaneer. (n.d.). In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/buccaneer.

Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905)

Photo Credit: Book cover for the Dover Thrift Edition of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, 2002, uploaded 6 July 2008 by Wolf Gang: Wolf Gang/Flickr/CC BY SA 2.0

Wharton is one of my favorite authors, both because I love Gilded Age and Progressive Era literature, and because she is one of the godmothers of psychological fiction. Not only that, Wharton had a reputation for having been sympathetic to women’s plight and the limitations women endured in these eras, making her an early feminist writer.

The first time I read the book, I adored it. I loved the protagonist Lily Bart and saw her as a feminist character in the way she wouldn’t settle for any man, defying the Victorian ideal of the separate spheres. I also loved the descriptions of the elegant world Wharton knew, the New York elite at the turn of the century. Wharton’s novel was one of the first classic stories I read after I rejected potboiler romances in my teen years. I credit the book for beginning my love affair with classic literature.

The second time I read this book was years later while in graduate school. While my passion for the book hadn’t cooled (I still find it a page-turner), my affection for Lily Bart was a different story. By that time, I had studied quite a lot of women’s fiction and women’s history. I recognized Lily Bart as not the feminist heroine I had envisioned her to be the first time. I saw her as rather vain and selfish, the Victorian version of the entitlement generation. I had little patience for the ease with which she criticizes others and the snobbish airs she takes of the well-to-do New York society in which she circulates, but, in terms of money and position, doesn’t really belong (the old saying, “beggars can’t be choosers” comes to mind). I was especially affected by the way she constantly puts down the one real friend she has, a working-class reformer named Gerty Farish. In Lily’s eyes, Gerty is shabby, poor, and sanctimonious because she doesn’t live on Fifth Avenue, doesn’t attend afternoon teas, and works hard to help young women worse off than herself.

Photo Credit: Illustration from The House of Mirth, 1905 by A. B. Wenzell. From a scene where Lily Bart is leaving Lawrence Selden’s apartment house and passes by a woman cleaning the stairs. Note Bart’s haughty pose, as if to say, “How dare this lowlife get in my way of passing on the stairs?”: Sherurcij/Wikimedia Commons/PD 1923

My third reading of the book happened a few years ago. By then, I was a published author and working on my own Gilded Age novels depicting the upper class (though mine takes place in the West Coast rather than the East Coast). I can’t say I’ve changed my views much about what kind of character Lily Bart is. I still see her, for the most part, as self-centered and shallow, though not without other redeeming qualities (like her feminine charm and self-awareness). However, since experiencing my own characters caught up in the power of wealth and social status that identified the Gilded Age in America, I realized I had been making what is probably the biggest mistake readers make when approaching classic literature: I was reading the book from the point of view of my own time and not from the perspective of the time in which it was written. Armed with some background on the era, I now understand why she behaves the way she does, what motivates her socially and psychologically.

Wharton was anxious to show the waste “old moneyed” New York put upon young women like Bart in order to be accepted into that society. Bart is a product not just of her time but of her social and psychological circumstances. She does what young women who wanted to belong to the exclusive circle of New York high society had to do. Beautiful, young women in Gilded Age New York were taught that their only asset was their looks and their willingness to comply, and they had better make the most of these qualities while they could by snagging a rich husband. So Bart’s obsession with finding a rich husband may seem artificial by contemporary standards, but she was taught nothing else by her mother and the society in which she aspired to belong.

My interest in The House of Mirth isn’t just as a reader but also as a writer. In my upcoming book, Pathfinding Women, which is Book 3 of my Waxwood Series, the subject of marriage is very much on the minds of both Vivian Alderdice, the unofficial protagonist of the series, and her mother, Larissa. Vivian doesn’t have the problem that Lily Bart has (no money). Her problem is more one of age. In this book, Vivian is twenty-six, and in Gilded Age high society, any young woman who wasn’t married by the age of twenty had a problem. There are also other, more personal reasons why both Vivian and Larissa are anxious to see her married.

Women Progressives in the Late 19th Century

Photo Credit: Children gathered in Hull House for kindergarten, 1902, Allen B. Pond, James Addams Hull House Museum: JethroBT/Wikimedia Commons/PD US

Last year, I wrote this blog post about the Progressive Era. But progressive reforms didn’t just begin the 20^th century. The Gilded Age laid the groundwork in the last quarter of the 19^th century, and especially its last decade when its dazzle of its excessiveness, idleness, and glitter were beginning to wear off, and Americans were becoming more aware of the political wrongs in the country that needed to be made right.

Women, mainly from the upper class social stratum (that is, wealthy and middle-class women) put themselves front and center as reformers during this time for several reasons. They took up issues they felt were of particular concern to, and in the domain of, women, such as sanitation, health and safety, and child labor. They saw reform as more about social problems than political problems (so they were not necessary suffragists, though the suffragists were certainly concerned about these issues as well). These women were social reformers who preferred to work within the woman’s sphere — that is, unlike the suffragists, who could rub the public the wrong way with their demand for a voice in public arenas such as politics, business, and law, women progressives preferred to work in areas that were more private.

A myriad of social changes were happening in America during the last decade of the 19^th century. One of them was the economic criss brought on by the Panic of 1893. In the wake of this panic, slums in big cities like New York and Chicago grew, as well as the population of the poor elsewhere in America. Added to this, immigration increased during this time (with the opening of Ellis Island), and conflicts between laborers and employers signaled a growing concern for the rights and conditions of working women and children.

Much of this social reform took place in the settlement houses largely run by middle-class women that offered a host of services for poor and working class people in urban communities. Probably the most famous of these was Hull House in Chicago, run by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. But there were others all over the country.

Photo Credit: Telegraph Hill from Sacramento and Powell Streets, 1858-1900, Thomas Houseworth & Co., Publishers: New York Public Library/Public Domain

Since I deal with San Francisco and the Bay Area in my books, I went seeking information about settlement houses in the city in the late 19^th century and found that the first one that operated was very similar to Hull House. Located on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill (one of the most picturesque areas of the city), the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Center opened its doors in 1890 in response to the area’s growing immigrant population and its neighborhood children being pulled out of school and play for work, Elizabeth Ashe and Alice Griffith, like Addams and Gates, were educated New Women who responded to the growing needs of the neighborhood after they got to know some of its children through their teaching of Sunday school. Like Hull House, their objective was to offer residents a myriad of social improvements, from education to physical activity. The center offered classes for children and adults and also a library, as well as a playground and gymnasium, encouraging nurture of the mind and body, as well as the soul.

In Book 3 of the Waxwood Series, women progressives make an appearance in two ways. First, there is a group called the Bay Area Women’s Social and Political Rights League made up primarily of wealthy women to which Vivian Alderdice, the main character of the series, was introduced in Book 2 by one of the Washington Street blue bloods, Marvina Moore. Vivian also meets some New Women in the book through Annette Grace, a Waxwood native who owns a pharmacy/drug store in town. Though from different classes, both these groups are concerned with women laborers and their situation in the late 19^th century, and both are looking to implement social changes as the nation moves into a new century.

Book 3 of the series, Pathfinding Women, will be out this summer, and you can find out more about it here. And to find out more about the series, go here.

Jake and Vivian Alderdice: Isolated Siblings

Photo Credit: Siblings, Carl Froschl, 1913, oil on canvas: Mutter Erde/Wikimedia Commons/PD old 80 expired

May 2 is National Brothers and Sisters Day. Since I’ve been working on Book 3 of the Waxwood Series, I thought this would be a perfect time to revisit the characters of Vivian and Jake Alderedice, the sister and brother of the Alderdice family. I say “revisit” because I’ve written about both characters in the past (about Vivian here and about Jake here). But Book 3 finds them both older, wiser, and, in some ways, very changed.

I talked here about how a novel I wrote in 2004 evolved into this series and some of the changes from novel to series. One thing that didn’t change was the relationship between this sister and brother. I envisioned Vivian and Jake as rather isolated as children which, in that contemporary version, was due to the dysfunctional family dynamics of the Alderdices. That disfunction became more complex when I decided to put the series in a historical context because so much in the Victorian era was hidden and “not talked about”. Often times, my fiction works off of metaphors, images, and symbols and the playroom became the metaphor for Vivian and Jake’s isolated world. On the top floor of the massive Alderdice Hall, Vivian and Jake spent many hours there, left to themselves because of the Victorian era idea that “children should be seen and not heard.” In The Specter, the first book of the series, Vivian describes the playroom in this way:

The playroom looked just as she and Jake had left it the last time they had played there as children. Maids still kept the dust out, and the sailboat window was locked so as to keep out intruding creatures. She turned on the gaslight, and the yellow glare immediately illuminated the small cabinet with the transparent door where the glass circus still stood in mid-action, ready for its audience of delighted children. She approached the cabinet and feeling for the panel at the bottom of it, pressed the flap back.

There were images that stuck in my mind when I was writing about the playroom in earlier versions of the story: The round windows, like you see in a ship’s cabin, toy soldiers Jake’s grandfather had bought him as a child as a sort of token of the manliness he expected from him in the future, and the display of glass circus animals in the cupboard (which, I frankly admit, was inspired by Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie). As children, virtually ignored by their elders, Vivian and Jake created a make-believe world together, though one that was less defined than, say, the worlds of Gondol and Angria created by the Bronte sisters, but in Book 2 of the series, False Fathers, Jake asks his sister to pose for a painting in the wax woods, and the picture he creates is a sort of mythical child-like Diana in an enchanted forest.

Photo Credit: Sister and Brother (Portrait of Ernesta and Philip Drinker), Cecelia Beau, 1897, The Atheneum: BoringHistoryGuy/Wikimedia Commons/PD old 70 expired

When I started to rethink the series in the Gilded Age era, I also realized that, while family secrets and lies play a role with this family, there was another element that contributed to the close-knit relationship of these two siblings: time. The Gilded Age saw a lot of families rise to the top and legacies form and along with that, generations of young men and women who were burdened with rigid social and conventional expectations. Vivian and Jake, I knew, were not ones to bend to social conventions and therein lay their psychological reality. Conflicts of family expectations and obligations on the one hand, and the quest for their own identity on the other, are what drive both Vivian and Jake in the series.

You can read more about Vivian and Jake in The Specter and False Fathers, the first two books of the Waxwood Series. And to find out more about the series itself, you can go to this page.

“The Most Beautiful Train in the World”: The Coast Daylight in the Mid-20th Century

Photo Credit: Postcard of the Noon Daylight leaving San Francisco, 1949, Jim Fraiser, Los Angeles, CA: We hope/Wikimedia Commons/PD US no notice

Today, trains seem like one of those quaint, old-fashioned things we reminisce about. But if you’re a writer or reader of historical fiction (or, for that matter, a fan of classic films), trains seem as real as the SUVs and 747s of today.

There’s a romance attached to trains, and this is something I wanted to capture in my story “Soul Destinations,” which is part of the collection in my new book, Lessons From My Mother’s Life. The story takes place in the mid-1950s, when more modern forms of transportation were starting to become popular (such as cars and planes). Joan, the protagonist of the story, is the old-fashioned kind, and her dreams of traveling begin with a train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. I was happy to find in my research that there was an actual train that traveled that route during this era, in fact, quite a famous one.

The train, run by the Southern Pacific, was called the Coast Daylight, or, simply, “the Daylight”. The Daylight’s first run was in 1937, and it soon rose in popularity in the 1940’s and 1950’s. The train was indeed advertised as “the most beautiful train in the world” because of the amazing California scenery that graces the route between Los Angeles and San Francisco (which, if you’ve been fortunate enough to travel the Pacific Coast Highway, you may have seen). The train ride in the mid-20^th century was about 10 hours, so people had a lot of time to sit back and enjoy the coastal views and mountains rolling past their windows, to read or sleep or chat or do some soul searching. And they could do it in a luxurious style that I think hardly any train (and certainly no car or plane) can boast today. If you’re curious, here are some photos from the era of the inside of the Daylight passenger cars. They look pretty comfy to me!

Photo Credit: Southern Pacific steam locomotive at Jack London Square in Oakland, CA, May 1981, taken by Drew Jacksich: Flickr upload bot/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0

The Daylight was also pulled, for a while, by one of the most famous steam engines in America, the 4449 steam engine. It has a futuristic look to it that immediately reminds one of the old 1950s sci-fi films and TV shows (The Jetsons, anyone?) The locomotive was used to pull the American Freedom train in 1976 which traveled all over the county in what made up a moving museum, with lots of American relics on it, stopping at many cities so people could admire them. The 4449 now rests in a museum in Portland. You can see it and learn a bit more about its history here.

The Daylight isn’t only a practical means of transportation for Joan, the protagonist of “Soul Destination” but it’s also symbolic of the journey she and Gary, an aging musician, take into their own pasts that end, as most trains do, at a new destination:

“Isn’t it wonderful how you only have to travel on a railroad track to reach a new place, a new world, even?”

“It’s not enough,” he said in an almost brutal voice. “I’ve been on many train tracks to many new places and new worlds. It’s like the living body and the living soul. One without the other kills them both.”
She took a breath. “You mean your body can be in a different place, but if your soul is the same, you’ll always be back where you started?”
For both of them, the Daylight, then isn’t just a physical destination, but a psychological one as well.

The Daylight, unfortunately, went the way most trains did later in the 20^th century, when both car and plane travel became more popular, efficient, and time-saving. In 1971, Amtrak took over the few remaining Daylight trains and turned them into the Coast Starlight, A 35-hour train from Seattle to Los Angeles that still runs today.

To read “Soul Destinations” and the other four stories in Lessons From My Mother’s Life, plus an author’s note and a sample chapter from The Specter, the first book of my Waxwood Series, go here.