Twenty Years of My Life

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

I should have mentioned Beatrice Harraden before. When you see this small, slight, delicate-looking woman, with her bright eyes, you are forcibly reminded of the invalid heroine of Ships that Pass in the Night. But Beatrice Harraden is a public school woman; she was at Cheltenham College—the ladies’ College—and has taken the liveliest interest in all the interests of women since. She was cured, I fancy, of some pulmonary disease by going to California. She now has one of the most unique flats in Hampstead. I do not remember how I met her, but it was a long time ago, and I was very elated, because I always thought Ships that Pass in the Night one of the best-written short novels in the language.

Helen Mathers has for many years been a dear friend of ours. She was another of the authors whose acquaintance it elated me to make. Although she is much about the same age as myself, she made her two successes with Comin’ Through the Rye and Cherry Ripe when I was a boy at school. Her husband, Henry Reeves, the eminent orthopædist, was one of the very first doctors to make practical use of the X-rays. She had a son in the army who promised to be her worthy successor in literature had he lived, as the writing which he achieved proved. Her real name was Mathews. She was a cousin of the Estella Mathews who married my near neighbour, George Cave, K.C., M.P., who was in my team, as was Mr. Justice Montague Shearman, when I was Captain of the Public Schools Football Club at Oxford, and who now occasionally plays golf with me when he can get a day off from the Courts, and from the case against Home Rule.

Frances Hodgson Burnett I first met in Washington, where she was the wife of a well-known doctor, and the mother of two beautiful boys in velvet Patience suits, locally called Fauntleroy suits, in honour of her book Little Lord Fauntleroy. But she was not an American; she was an Englishwoman born in Manchester, who had made her fame with a book about the north of England, called That Lass o’ Lowrie’s. Eventually she came back to live in her native England, first of all in a house in Portland Place and afterwards in a manor house in Kent. Her gigantic success with books and plays did not turn her head; she was always the same gracious human woman she had been when she was making her way.

John Oliver Hobbes, on the other hand, though she lived so much in England, and wrote all her books over here, was an American-born, the daughter of John Morgan Richards, who was at one time Chairman of the American Society in London, and had as much to do with entente cordiale between England and the United States as any American Ambassador at the Court of St. James’. He was, as it were, a sort of social ambassador. The great house in Lancaster Gate in which he lived till he retired from business was a focus of entertainment for both branches of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Mrs. Craigie was a friend of our present Queen. She was extraordinarily clever and extraordinarily charming. She always gave every one to whom she was talking the knowledge that for the time being nobody else existed for her. In intellect she was the equal of any contemporary woman writer; added to this, she was very pretty, very engaging, very well dressed, and certainly proved the truth of the proverb “Whom the gods love, die young.” She had the gift of bringing out the wit as well as the best qualities of others.

Another American authoress who has spent most of her life and done all her writing in England is Irene Osgood, who came here as a very beautiful young bride of fabulous wealth, and rented a house which was one of the shrines of English literature—Knebworth, the home of Bulwer Lytton. She did not write Servitude, the book by which she will be remembered, there, but at Guilsborough, in Northamptonshire, another seat which she took for the hunting.

Yet another American authoress, who was also young and beautiful when she came to England, was Amelie Rives, who was at that time wife of J. A. Chanler, a great-grandson of the original Astor, but is now Princess Troubetzkoi. The daughter of a Virginian country gentleman, she simply leapt into fame with a book called Virginia of Virginia, which took the Americans by storm. She was irresistibly clever, and very striking-looking, with her pale gold hair, clear dusky complexion, and big blue eyes.

Gertrude Franklin Atherton, a remarkable-looking Californian with the same pale gold hair and rather the same complexion as Amelie Rives, whose mother was a great-grandniece of Benjamin Franklin, was at one time a very frequent visitor of ours. She was a long time getting her recognition, and then suddenly leapt into her full fame. But those who used to meet her socially knew from the first that she was a woman of commanding intellect. She had an odd trick of wearing a quill thrust through her hair.

Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson are among my oldest literary friends. I made Williamson’s acquaintance when he was sub-editor of the Graphic, and asked me to write an illustrated article on Adam Lindsay Gordon. Alice Livingston was an American girl, who came over to England to spend a year with some friends, and has never been back in her own country for more than three months at a time since. She had a letter of introduction to C. N. Williamson, who introduced her to a number of London editors, and thus gave her a chance of success in story-writing. After their marriage she wrote many serial stories, some of which appeared in book form; but the first great “Williamson success” was The Lightning Conductor, suggested by their earliest motoring adventures in France and Italy. C. N. Williamson having expert knowledge as a mechanical engineer (he intended to be one, before he determined to become a writer), it was easy to mingle amusing mechanical details of motoring with the story, a feature which appealed to lovers of automobiles in the days, ten or eleven years ago, when the sport was an uncertain adventure.

They both love story-telling—Mrs. Williamson used to “print” stories when she was six years old, before she could write—and have written a good many popular travel novels since The Lightning Conductor. They love also to see the far corners of the world, though they contrive to spend two or three months each winter in their Riviera house, and a month or two in summer among their friends in London.