Imagination on Fire: The Literary Career of Alice Muriel Williamson

By Richard Rex

Among the most popular novels in the early decades of the twentieth century were those published by Alice Muriel Williamson, whose novels were frequently attributed on their title pages to “C. N. and A. M.  Williamson.” Although it is now known that “A. M.” never wrote any fiction by “C. N.” – her husband, Charles Norris Williamson, – the view erroneously persists that the married couple were joint authors. Preceding her fame as a novelist, Alice wrote a series of sensational stories that appeared serially in journals in the 1890s. So fertile was her imagination that she was able to supply her publisher, Alfred Harmsworth, with weekly installments for as many as seven serials concurrently (one for each day of the week), a feat probably unmatched in the history of fiction. As a novelist, the creative fervor of her stories ensured a popularity as great as or greater than that enjoyed by any of her contemporaries. Although particularly renowned for her travel romances, she was a literary polymath adept in a wide variety of genres, often published anonymously or pseudonymously, such as her sensational exposé of German war plans on the eve of World War I, What I Found Out in the House of a German Prince (1915). Purporting to be “by an American-English Governess,” it was so realistic that it was accepted as a true account and published serially in the Fortnightly Review. The missing chapters of her tumultuous life in America, revealed for the first time in Richard Rex’s riveting study, unveil the history of her multivalent careers as actress, journalist, traveler, and author of fiction. Readers revisiting her stories—many ideated from her own adventurous and romantic life—will find them remarkably relevant and offering an intense human interest dimension no less intriguing today than when they were first published.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: May 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9781680533125

Book preview

Introduction

Among the most popular authors in the early twentieth century— perhaps the most popular of all – was Alice Muriel Williamson. As with many once-popular authors, Alice Williamson is today largely forgotten – remembered, if at all, solely as the author of automobile travel romances, a genre she is credited with having invented. Ironically her current obscurity may be charged to the former popularity of her novels written in that genre--motor cars, and the possibilities of travel enabled by them, having lost any sense of romance or novelty they once possessed. But the irony of this disconnect goes beyond sociological changes involving the automobile, in that motor travel novels constitute a relatively small portion of her work, featuring not at all in the many dozens of her stories eagerly sought after and published by magazines of the period, and in many of her novels.

It may be said, broadly speaking, that the romance novel has to do with emotion, realism with critical analysis of motive. No matter how transparent motives are in a novel by Williamson, the characters are real by virtue of being easily understandable, their emotions those commonly experienced by the majority of mankind. So far above the ordinary is her talent for evoking common cause between reader and character that even a dog might become co-conspirator in the service of love, as in The Chaperon when a suitor wins favor in the eyes of the heroine through rapprochement with her pet bulldog: Tibe, being an animal of parts, was not long in comprehending that the hand on his collar meant well by him. He deigned to fawn, and meeting his glance at close quarters, I read his dog-soul through the brook-brown depths of the clear eyes. After that moment, in which we came to a full understanding one of the other, once and for all, I knew that Tibe’s wrinkled mask, his terrible mouth, and the ferocious tusks standing up like two stalagmites in the black protruding under jaw, disguised a nature almost too amiable and confiding for a world of hypocrites. Tragic fate, to seem in the shallow eyes of strangers a monster of evil from whom to flee, while your warm heart, bursting with love and kindness, sends you chasing those who avoid you, eager to demonstrate affection.…In this first instant of our real acquaintance he felt that I at least saw through his disguise; and under the nose and spectacles of his mistress sealed our friendship with a wet kiss on my sleeve.

The chief defect of the romance novel in the eyes of critics is its foreordained happy ending. Who can forget Cecily’s take on the subject in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest:

Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.

Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.

Overused as it is, and therefore too easily anticipated, the happy ending is no less realistic than an unhappy or indeterminate ending. The point was made by Mrs. Williamson during an interview with the New York Times: Many critics think it is much more clever to end a book in doubt, or sadly, than happily. To me it always seems that the end of the book depends upon where you stop writing. If you stop writing when the characters have had a very bad day, your ending will be bad.…It may be realistic to end the story there. But suppose we wait two or three days and find that the two come together happily again. That is just as realistic, and it makes more of an appeal to me. As for indeterminate endings: I always get furious with authors who end their stories in doubt. The reader always knows the story ended positively one way or another, and the author knows what the end was, and he is the only person that does. Not to let readers have the benefit of that exclusive information is sheer cruelty.¹ Although literary critics disparage romance novels for their happy endings, considered so false to life, true realism is achieved not by a novel’s ending, but by the author’s skill in character drawing, which depends almost entirely on dialogue. If characters seem real to the reader, the ending is irrelevant. Plot, while all-important to the interest of a story, has little to do with creating a sense of realism.

Williamson’s stories characteristically achieve a vivid sense of realism in one of two ways: either through dialogue or by equivalent first person narrative, the narrator baring her soul to a diary or telling her story in letters to a sympathetic correspondent--a technique dating from Richardson’s Clarissa. As with Richardson, it can be extraordinarily effective. No matter what genre she chose to employ, romance being only one of them, her stories always seem original and convincing. Two in particular may be cited specifically for their realism. The first, written incognito, is her novel, To M. L. G.: ‘Unpleasant reading’ the book has been called by some who are afraid to look at life as it is and prefer for their literature sugar-coated romance.… ‘To M. L. G.’ is good from the point of style. It is written in a simple, straightforward way that no one but a first class literary craftsman can command, and it scintillates with metaphor and highly condensed expressions that are the product of the finest imagination. But psychologically its appeal is even greater than from the literary view point. It is a wonderful record of the unfolding of a woman’s life. It rings true.² Its successor, The Life Mask, earned even higher praise: A first reading verdict of this book would say that it is better than the ‘To M. L. G.’ one. There is more attention to detail, there is firmer grip on the plot structure, and the atmosphere, Granada, is entrancing. It is the account of the return to an interest in life of a woman who had been imprisoned for the murder of her husband. She is not guilty, and this adds to the delay in the rehabilitation. The story is narrated with great pathos, psychological insight, and ingenuity in the matters which create strong fiction. It may not be pleasant reading, but it is absorbing, and artful.³ Critics assuming that Williamson was simply an author of popular romances will find their assumption challenged by those of her stories--short stories as well as novels--which cross the boundary between romance and realism, blurring the distinction and proving that one genre need not exclude another, inclusis unis, exclusis alterius.

It is impossible to categorize as a whole Williamson’s stories, which cut across so many genres and appeared in such a wide variety of magazines--published in fact by virtually every magazine of note in England and America: Harper’s Bazaar, McClure’s, Hearst’s, Lippincott’s, Pearson’s, Hutchinson’s, Cassell’s, Smith’s, Lloyd’s, Holland’s, Canadian Magazine, Maclean’s, Munsey’s, Ainslee’s, Nash’s-Pall Mall, Argosy, Bystander, Cosmopolitan, English Illustrated Magazine, Everyweek, Idler, Saturday Evening Post, Sunday Companion, Lady’s Home Magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, Household Magazine, Household Words, Lady’s Pictorial, Pictorial Review, Lady’s Realm, Lady’s World, Ladies’ World, Woman’s Home Companion, Woman at Home, Home Life, Metropolitan Magazine, Temple Magazine, Windsor Magazine, Grand Magazine, Hearth and Home, House Beautiful, Sunset Magazine, Harmsworth London Magazine, Strand Magazine, Illustrated London News, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, West-End Review, Country Gentleman, Cavalier, Story-Teller, Corner Magazine, New Magazine, People’s Magazine, Premier Magazine, Blue Book Magazine, Red Book Magazine, The Graphic, The Quiver, The Designer, The Delineator, The Queen, and more. What other author had stories published in as many magazines (implying critical acceptance by the editors who chose them)? Collectively these magazines were read by every segment of society, signifying that the audience for her stories was both worldwide and societally all-inclusive--that her stories epitomize reading preferences in the early decades of the twentieth century, mirroring contemporary views, moral attitudes and assumptions. Even in a crowded field her stories achieved a degree of popularity as great as, and probably greater than, those by any of her author contemporaries.

Her fiction perfectly represents an eventful life, its earliest phases hitherto all but unknown. Because she was so successful at controlling what was known about her in the media, primarily to conceal a troubled past, it has not been possible (in the absence of biography) to appreciate the full extent of her achievement--her struggle for artistic freedom and individuality in a world dominated by nineteenth-century moral values and constraints on women. Her flight to England in 1892 was an attempt to secure a path to that freedom, placing her in the company of late-Victorian New Women who sought an independence equal to that enjoyed by men. With her marriage to Charles Williamson, in 1894, she became a British citizen and wife to a widely respected editor who undoubtedly helped further her career; but even before this marriage she had already gone far toward achieving success on her own as a journalist. During her first five years in England, in addition to reporting for Black and White, Woman, and The Sketch, she was London correspondent for the Boston Evening Transcript, providing two or three letters a month to that journal including interviews with notables such as Lily Langtry, Marie Effie Wilton (Lady Bancroft), George Egerton, William Ewart Gladstone, Walter Besant, Stanley Weyman, Ignace Paderewski, Anton Lang, the King of Siam, S. R. Crockett, Weedon Grossmith, J. M. Barrie, Olga Nethersole, Sarah Grand, Beatrice Harraden, Bertha Spafford (American Colony in Jerusalem), Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, Sergius Stepniak, Fridtjof Nansen, Jerome K. Jerome, and George Alexander. Although only forty of an estimated 120 of these letters survive, those extant provide clear evidence that she was one of the most brilliant American women journalists of the 1890s reporting from England in that fascinating decade. In addition to interviews, descriptions of occasions, and sketches of personages in the fields of art, literature, theater and politics, her reviews of theatrical performances are particularly noteworthy, informed by her own experience as an actress in America--an important phase of her life elucidated in the chapters that follow.

One of her theatrical reviews concerns the disastrous première of Henry James’s play, Guy Domville: I am sure all good Bostonians must be sorry that Mr. Henry James’s play, ‘Guy Domville,’ has been a failure at the St. James’s, despite Mr. George Alexander’s and Miss Marion Terry’s delightful acting and the most charming, quaintly pretty settings that can be imagined. I was there on that dreadful first night, expecting success and ‘applause to the echo,’ as has been the invariable rule at the St. James’s since Mr. Alexander became the manager. My hopes ran high during the first act, and then dropped, until the bitter end. Of course the play is full of good writing. It couldn’t have been done by Mr. James and be otherwise; but there is no disguising the fact that it is dull and awkwardly managed almost throughout. But I shall never forget the sensation of absolute, writhing misery I felt when, after the call for the author, which followed that for the actors, Mr. Alexander led on Mr. James, knowing well what was coming, and unwilling to let the author suffer alone. Both men looked grave, and kept their eyes fastened on the gallery, from whence the loud and disgraceful ‘booings!’ proceeded. I fancy many people felt with me--almost as if the ordeal had been their own.⁴ Of all possible reviewers of the play, none could have had more empathy for those concerned as if the ordeal had been their own than Alice Williamson, owing to her own experience as leading lady in Mark Twain’s play, The American Claimant, which had failed almost from the beginning in America. There is good reason to believe that she interviewed Henry James (as she had George Alexander) either prior to or after the St. James’s fiasco inasmuch as she was writing for a Boston audience. If she did, the review has been lost along with numerous others published in missing issues of the Transcript.

Alice Williamson’s piquant experiences as a journalist in England are reflected in her novel, The Newspaper Girl (1899). An earlier novel, The Barn Stormers (1897), had portrayed her failure as an actress in America. What has not been recognized is that, following in the footsteps of Henry James, she was very much an American expatriate, bridging the cultural divide between James (last exponent of the Genteel Tradition) and the Lost Generation--bridging, in point of time, the late-Victorian, Edwardian, and early-twentieth century eras. Unlike James, who by temperament was a spectator of life rather than a participant, Alice was restless and peripatetic, continually seeking life-experience. Both in her life and in her fiction there is a sense of optimism, distancing her from the cynicism and pessimism of James.

Regardless of genre, her novels were written to please. Her social commentaries are humorously benign, but no less incisive for being so. Her adventure stories are truly exciting, while her more gruesome plots frequently achieve their purpose by means of suggestion and anticipation, building tension in advance of actual terror. For instance, the description of a narrator’s approach to The House by the Lock where terror is sure to follow: Desolate as the place had appeared at the hour of sunset, it had had an air of hospitable welcome at that time compared to that which it wore now. Never, it seemed to me, had I seen a habitation so grim, so silently suggestive of haunting, evil things. The face of the moon, as it rose, lost the ruddy hue which had coloured it nearer the horizon and its paling disc was swept by black and ragged storm clouds. The wind moaned through the trees like the wail of a lost soul, and there was a stealthy, monotonous lapping of the dark waters so close at hand. More often than not there is a fusion of genres, as in her serial, The Screen, the title referring to a Highland Scots girl who, believing her sister’s fiancé unworthy, attempts to seduce him in order to prove her point. The fiancé, suitably torn between his pledge to one and attraction to the other, attempts to understand his emotions. In a crucial scene his sleep is interrupted by a portent of fear, in which the author artfully interweaves sensual suggestion with gothic presentiment: The only sound he could hear was the lazy whispering of the sea fifty or sixty feet below the open window. This gave an effect of brooding peace. It was difficult to feel that stealthy, secret things might be happening in the old castle. Troy had thought it would be but too easy to lie awake. Surely he had enough to think of! But the moments seemed to slip imperceptibly into one another, gliding on and on in tune with the music of the sea. The soft lullaby murmured in his ears monotonously, and sang his thoughts to rest. Nothing was left of his daylight impressions, except the memory of a girl’s dark eyes. They were looking, looking into his, those wonderful eyes, and in another instant he would have been dreaming of them, when suddenly a sharp sound brought him back to realities with a start. Ultimately, as in many of her stories, it remains for each reader to decide which form of fiction he or she prefers, whether it has to do with the psychology of emotion or the psychology of motive --neither of which is necessarily better or more real than the other.

Good and eminently re-readable today as are her novels, which remain remarkably undated, her short stories and serials are no less interesting, easily capturing and holding a reader’s attention from start to last. Those written for the Strand Magazine, perhaps the most readily available, are representative. It is surely no coincidence that the great commercial boom in magazine and newspaper fiction, beginning to take wing in the late 1890s, coincided with her decision to forgo journalism as a full-time correspondent in order to become a full-time author. But it would be several years before the phenomenal success of The Lightning Conductor (1902), and a handful of other novels written in the same vein, catapulted her to international fame. Time and fate have obscured that fame, but the passage of time has also resulted in the greater availability of her work, courtesy of the Internet, permitting a new generation of readers to rediscover the pleasure of her company.

Alice Williamson

There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.

--Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

In the 200th issue of the Strand Magazine, issued September 1907, there is a celebratory double-page illustration of an imaginary reception for the leading literary contributors to this magazine, who are shown advancing up a grand staircase--each of the fifty authors identified by caption number. At the top of the staircase, identified by the number 1, the first author shown being received by the Editor-in-Chief is Mrs. C. N. Williamson, followed by her husband. While it cannot be supposed that the overall order in which authors are depicted has any relevance to their importance, one wonders if the prominence accorded Mrs. Williamson, placed at the top of the staircase (at the top of the literary tree, so to speak), does indeed reflect the high regard in which she was held by her editor--a regard owing in part to the enormous success of her long-running series of stories, The Scarlet Runner, the tenth episode of which appeared in this same issue. If so, it is all the more ironic that few readers today, perusing this drawing, would have any idea who she was, or why she was famous, whereas in 1907 she was one of the world’s most famous authors. Whatever may be said about the literary merit of her work (and there are many avenues for discussion), the incontestable fact remains that she was a major figure in late-Victorian and early 20th-century literature--a writer of unusual skill and extraordinary imagination whose world-wide popularity was as great as, or greater than, almost any of her author contemporaries. Of few ways to measure popularity in the first decades of the twentieth century, none is better than the evidence provided by newspaper publication. Enormous circulation in large cities, extended by syndication to the smallest, ensured that newspapers carrying fiction in those early decades would reach readers in numbers far surpassing those who might purchase books or borrow from lending libraries. And because much of this fiction was in the form of serials appearing daily or weekly over the course of many months, the writer of serial fiction additionally gained a level of name recognition, along with legions of devoted followers, denied to authors writing only short stories or novels. Because few authors, if any, had serial stories, or any stories, placed in as many newspapers as did Alice Williamson, she may well have been (from this perspective) the most popular author in the English-speaking world for the three decades preceding her death in 1933.

Critics have long been reluctant to find literary merit in works of joint authorship--a stigma deriving from the difficulty, if not impossibility, of assessing individual contributions in such works. Rather, the assumption has been that collaborative writing, ipso facto, lacks artistic integrity. An example of this line of thought may be taken from an editorial in The Dial (November 1, 1910):

The partnership novel, or work of fiction executed by two collaborating writers, such as Mr. and Mrs. Egerton Castle and Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson are now abundantly producing, and such as Mssrs. Besant and Rice and Messrs. Erckmann and Chatrian used to favor us with, must always seem to some readers less satisfying, less convincing, than the work of literary art conceived by one mind in a moment of inspiration, and finished by one hand ere the flush of that first enthusiasm has faded from the cheek. The appearance of two authors’ names on a novel’s title page is a virtual confession that the plot has been laboriously pieced together by two workmen in consultation, that each chapter has been deliberately assigned to this or that one of the literary firm, that the fate of each character has been wordily discussed and finally determined, and that after the patchwork has at last been completed a finishing hand has had to go over it all to pull out the basting threads and fell the seams. Such work must lack unity and homogeneity. What lover of Stevenson has ever thoroughly enjoyed the stories he wrote in collaboration with his stepson? A recent literary letter from London suggests that an interesting book might be written about literary partnerships.…Is there a single first-rate novel of double authorship?

Some such sentiment presumably accounts for the paucity of notice given Alice Williamson in the years since her death, owing simply to the fact that her name was linked to her husband’s on the title page of most of the novels she published between 1902 and 1920, before their partnership ended with C. N. Williamson’s death. Because this notion bears so profoundly on any assessment of her work, statements made by reviewers and by Alice herself pertaining to joint authorship deserve careful scrutiny.

The first novel to appear by C. N. and A. M. Williamson was The Lightning Conductor, first published in October 1902. Its epoch-making success was acknowledged in September 1904 by The Idler: About two years ago there appeared, without any fuss or boom, a book entitled ‘The Lightning Conductor,’ written by C. N. and A. M. Williamson. In England it sold slowly at first, but in steadily increasing quantity as time went on, until it became one of the acknowledged successes of the season. In America it took like wild-fire, and for months stood at the head of the list out-selling all other books then in the market. The advent of the book formed a sort of international episode. One of the authors is British, the other American. The wild-fire in America, according to Publishers Weekly, resulted in sales of more than one million copies.⁵ An earlier reviewer in The Nation (March 26, 1903) had accurately predicted the novel’s forthcoming vogue with armchair adventurers enchanted by the potentialities of automobile travel: The plot, as has been implied, is slender, but we are not dependent upon plot in the case; we are only too well satisfied to go on with such delightful people, and especially through such delightful scenes on any terms.…The line of travel is among the châteaux of the Loire, to Bordeaux, a corner of Spain, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Marseilles, the French Riviera, the Italian Riviera, Pisa, Rome, Naples, Capri, and finally Taormina. This is old ground, but the unusual method of locomotion and a fresh touch give it a new and living interest. It is difficult to cover so much ground in a narrative and escape mere cataloguing, yet this is capitally done here, with a light, graceful, accurate mention devoted to some places and very satisfactory fulness to others. The book will foment the automobile movement. A reviewer for the Adelaide Observer (July 9, 1904) observed that the motor car has introduced a new feature into literature--that despite an earlier motor story by Kipling, for the real fascination of motor travel one turns to ‘The Lightning Conductor.’

Alice recounted many times during her lifetime how this novel came to be written. Replying to a query in September 1904 from Wallace Farrington, then editor of the Honolulu Evening Bulletin and later Govenor of Hawaii, she gave this account (perhaps her first) of its origin: "The way we happened to write it, is quite simple. We had just taken the trip which we describe in the book, and had arrived at Taormina in Sicily, where the story closes. There we found a great