Sir Rohans Ghost. A Romance

By Harriet Prescott Spofford

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Dec 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781785272899

Book preview

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

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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© 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, alongside work by other literary notables such as John Lathrop Motley, John Greenleaf Whittier and Rose Terry Cooke (whose story Sally Parson’s Duty appeared in the inaugural number). It might have been the presence of writers such as Cooke and Stowe in the Atlantic’s pages that first drew Spofford’s attention to the magazine. While the Atlantic was not the only literary venue to welcome women writers at the time, it was more overt about doing so than some of its competitors. So Spofford decided to test the waters of this prestigious magazine by submitting a detective tale set in Paris called, In a Cellar. When the manuscript crossed Lowell’s desk it precipitated an interesting reaction, one that sealed Spofford’s status as a promising new writer. Her engaging crime narrative offered such a convincing portrayal of European politics and social mores, as well as a deft melding of its French setting with its larger moral themes, that Lowell initially thought it was a translation of a French story. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, however, soon put an end to the question of the authorship of the surprisingly cosmopolitan tale, assuring Lowell that the story was indeed from the pen of a demure little Yankee girl (quoted in Halbeisen 53). The Atlantic published In a Cellar in their February 1859 issue and paid Spofford $105. This sum probably seemed like a fortune for a writer used to receiving a paltry $2.50–$5.00 per tale in the story papers (Halbeisen 53–54, 50).

Though the Atlantic did not at that time print the names of its contributors, their identities were generally known to those in the close-knit Boston literary scene, and the story—made even more interesting because of the disbelief it had initially provoked in the Atlantic staff—positioned her as a young writer of promise and afforded her entry into the social circles of the literary elite. For example, on July 9, 1859, she was invited to attend a monthly Atlantic-sponsored dinner. This particular dinner was notable because it was held in honor of Harriet Beecher Stowe and was meant as a send-off for her impending trip to Europe. It also had the distinction of being the first Atlantic dinner to which women had been invited, with Stowe and Spofford comprising the only two women in attendance (Halbeisen 56). Stowe was ambivalent about attending, and, as an ardent temperance advocate, eventually agreed to come only if they promised to not serve wine at dinner. Higginson accompanied Spofford to the dinner party and found that—in addition to the famed guest of honor—they were in the rarified company of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier and E. P. Whipple. Higginson, in his memoir, provides an account of the dinner, writing that Spofford was understandably nervous, and made doubly so by the fact that she was one of only two women there. As Higginson relates, Stowe’s insistence that they serve no wine caused some grumbling from around the table, and Longfellow quipped (well outside of Stowe’s hearing) that Miss Prescott should send down into her Cellar for some wine, since Mrs. Stowe would not allow any abovestairs! Higginson enjoyed the joke, writing it was capital, for you remember her racy description of wine (quoted in Halbeisen 56–57). Longfellow’s comment hints at just how well In a Cellar had introduced her work to several key figures of the American literary elite. It even afforded her a certain degree of social credibility with Higginson, who comments, when I reflected on the entertainments which were described in ‘In a Cellar,’ I felt no fear of Harriet’s committing any solecism in manners at an ‘Atlantic’ dinner, which she certainly did not, though a little frightened, occasionally, I could see, at the obsequiousness of the waiters and the absurd multiplicity of courses (quoted in Halbeisen 57). For a woman who had lived practically all of her life on the edge of poverty, the opulent dinner with its larger-than-life guests must have seemed more like the product of one of her romantic tales than an actual reality to which she had been invited.

The early 1860s saw the publication of Spofford’s most innovative and enduring short fiction, which, as Alfred Bendixen writes, positioned her as one of the most important, exciting, and promising young writers in the nation (x). Putting aside any question that In a Cellar was the product of beginner’s luck, the following year she returned to the pages of the Atlantic with a story even more ambitious than her first. Published in two installments across the magazine’s January and February 1860 issues, this second story, The Amber Gods, features a formalistically and thematically innovative approach to the Gothic romance, culminating in a line that reveals its narrator to have been a dead woman speaking to us from the afterworld. A couple months later, in the May 1860 issue of the Atlantic, Spofford published what has since become her most canonical of tales, Circumstance. Set on the Maine frontier, Circumstance relates the story of a pioneer woman, who, walking home through the woods at night, is attacked by a ghostly, ferocious beast called the Indian Devil, a creature described as both a panther and as a supernatural fabulous flying dragon (85). Circumstance earned praise from none other than Emily Dickinson, who commented twice on the story. In a letter to her sister-in-law, Sarah Huntington Dickinson, the poet asked to be sent everything she writes, and claimed that Circumstance was the only thing that I ever saw in my life that I did not think I could have written myself (quoted in Bendixen x). Offering a different kind of praise, Dickinson likewise mentioned Spofford’s story in a letter to Higginson: I read Miss Prescott’s ‘Circumstance,’ but it followed me, in the Dark—so I avoided her— (x).

It was in the midst of this series of notable works of short fiction, sometime in the final weeks of 1859, that she published her first novel—the first American Gothic novel published by a woman—Sir Rohan’s Ghost. This highly descriptive romantic ghost story set among the castles and cliffsides of a fancifully aristocratic Cornwall fully reveals, as Jeffrey Weinstock contends, the ways in which American female authors were influenced by and revised the British Female Gothic tradition (Scare Tactics, 27). Released by the Boston firm of J. E. Tilton and Company, the book’s front matter indicated a 1860 publication year, but the clerk’s office registration page lists it as a 1859 publication, and advertisements and reviews were already appearing in periodicals in December of 1859. For example, a notice in the December 3, 1859, issue of the Boston Daily Advertiser proclaimed that Sir Rohan’s Ghost, by a contributor to ‘The Atlantic,’ was READY THIS DAY, Dec, 3d, PRICE […] $1 (6). Perhaps keen to publish the first review of the novel, the Bangor Daily Whig and Courier seems to have forgotten to actually read the book. Prefatory to a comically misinformed summary of the novel, the reviewer concedes, We have had no time to make a full acquaintance with Sir Rohan’s Ghost, and cannot, therefore, speak from absolute personal knowledge (December 7, 1859, np.) Following this admission, the reviewer then proceeds to mistakenly identify the ghost as Sir Rohan himself, and We find, indeed, that he is an amiable ghost […] [who] takes the role of hero in a love story and after a casual glance into the book […] We may indulge a confidence that Miriam succeeds in reaching the end of the volume in pretty good condition. As anyone who actually reads the book will deduce, the Bangor Daily Whig and Courier’s reviewer trades enthusiasm for accuracy in a most comical way.

At first look Sir Rohan’s Ghost seems a standard Gothic romance, one that borrows its ruin-strewn European setting, well-worn set of characters and coincidence-laden plot from the conventions established by earlier Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778) and the highly influential works of Ann Radcliffe, including The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Spofford’s choice of a European setting may have been bolstered by the success of her 1859 story, In a Cellar, the one that presented such a convincing portrait of Paris that the Atlantic editor initially suspected it to be a pirated translation of a French tale. Similarly credible portrayals abound in Sir Rohan’s Ghost, such as her convincing description of Cornwall and its surroundings, from its cliff-side ocean vistas to the dark recesses of a coal mine (much of which probably originates from her reading of The Cornish Tourist or Excursions Through Cornwall [1834]). Even her detail-rich tour of Sir Rohan’s wine cellar, which likely took as its source Cyrus Redding’s A History and Description of Modern Wines (1833), demonstrates Spofford’s ability to persuasively meld real-world specifics into her fanciful narratives. Still, her decision to draw inspiration so heavily from conventions harvested from late-eighteenth-century European classics comes as something of a surprise for a writer who would later that same year publish Circumstance, an evocative work of American frontier Gothic. After all, the young New Englander knew Europe only from her reading and seemingly draws as much inspiration from the likes of earlier writers, especially Radcliffe, than other more contemporary and popular masters of the Gothic who had since risen to fame, most notably the celebrated Brontë sisters. But Spofford’s creative decisions represent a more complicated strategy than simply copying established Gothic conventions and peppering them with details from reference books.

As with the writings of the Brontës, Spofford’s tale ultimately presents a feminist take on the Gothic romance, one that is not fully apparent until literally the final paragraphs of the book. Spofford’s presentation of women, especially the pre-Freudian specter of the female ghost for which the book is named, presents a rich area for critical study. The interweaving of this feminist thread bears out across the narrative, often manifesting in the alignment of Rohan’s paintings and the psychological burden of his being haunted by a mysterious female ghost. Miriam asks what is perhaps the operative question of the novel when she says to him, How is it, Sir Rohan […] that all your female faces, when you put anything of the weird into their construction, resemble me?—though one could not be more matter-of-fact flesh and blood than I (188). Miriam, the novel’s closest approximation to a protagonist, occupies a deceptively complicated role of a carefree young woman, and by the end of the book, becomes haunted herself. The other women of the novel likewise invite promising critical examination. For example, how are we to reconcile Spofford’s presentation of young Miriam alongside the far less-privileged servant characters such as Redruth’s wife, and especially, the outcast figure of the gypsy woman who foretells Miriam and Rohan’s doom. These women, joined as they are by patriarchal control, are still separated by their various classes and social ranks: aristocrat, servant, peasant.

In fact, the novel might be read as an examination of how, when juxtaposed, the concepts of class and kinship create a muddied intimacy. Ultimately, writes, Charles L. Crow, all Gothic stories are family stories (15), and Sir Rohan’s Ghost, which begins with the line, There is a ghost in all aristocratic families … certainly follows suit. Housed within the Romantic setting of an exceedingly aristocratic, mid-nineteenth-century Cornwall, the novel’s cast of characters form a network of relationships, an extended family of sorts, but one nonetheless firmly divided by class, prejudice and internal strife. Spofford’s ostensible villain, Marc Arundel, who, in his capacity as St. Denys’s closest (if still distant) male relative, stands to inherit St. Denys’s considerable wealth, embodies an important component of the family-centered drama so prevalent in the story. Yet the young Arudel also fills other key roles in the book. In his years-long pursuit of Miriam’s hand, he functions as the unwanted suitor, one whose tenacity knows no bounds and who, as Sir Rohan’s neighbor, manages to appear repeatedly throughout the novel, manifesting as something of a figurative ghost himself. While these aspects of Arundel’s character mirror those found in other antagonists in Gothic romances, Spofford also bestows him with a facet drawn at least partially from the American Gothic tradition: his status as a villainous and inquisitive lawyer, who, in that capacity, proves especially annoying to Rohan. Indeed, Arundel becomes something of a detective, one bent on unearthing Sir Rohan’s secret past. When Rohan asks Arundel if he likes practicing law, the young man responds, Why, no, not particularly. Though there’s something like a zest to ferreting facts, especially when I have one such as yourself in the witness box (xx). It is in this role as the impudent but talented lawyer (in essence a proto-detective) that Spofford shows more contemporary Gothic influence. Writing about the Romantic distrust of Enlightenment-era authority, Crow states that in Gothic fiction, Education and law, two traditions justified as protecting and nurturing, in fact are usually instruments of control (4–5). Likewise, there is a class issue at the core of Arundel’s pride in his success as a lawyer. After all, he must take on a profession because he does not possess the wealth of those like St. Denys and Sir Rohan. What better career for a petulant young man of limited means than one that has the power to