Next to travelling, they love to build houses, and make them beautiful. If they see some land on a hillside with a splendid view, they can hardly resist buying it, and planning exactly the sort of house which ought to exist there. This means that they sell their last house, and begin another, with a different sort of garden, but there must always be a bull-dog in it, rejoicing in the name of Tiberius, or “Tibe.”
Madame Albanesi, one of the most successful novelists of the day, and wife of the well-known musician, is an old friend of ours. She had long been one of the most successful writers of serial fiction in popular journals, but it was not until after her marriage with Signor Albanesi that she turned her attention to novels—one of the earliest of these books receiving remarkable reviews. She conceived the idea of advertising these reviews herself, with the result that she was approached by a number of leading publishers for her next book, and happily followed with the book which established her name—Susannah and One Other, a book which has been running for over ten years, and is still selling. The book-reading public only required to have its attention adequately drawn to her novels, to see what admirable stories they were—faithful to life, pulsing with human nature.
I asked Madame Albanesi what first made her write. She said that she could not remember when she had not tried to write in some form or other, and that happily for her, when she was quite a girl circumstances threw her into a circle where her gift of imaginative writing was warmly encouraged, and opportunities were found for turning this gift to the most satisfactory results. I remember Madame Albanesi telling me that an interesting fact in connection with her earlier writing was that her imagination was so fertile that she used—before she was twenty years old—to keep three or four serials running at the same time. She never had less than two going at once, and wrote them in instalments from week to week, and never took a note. Everything was published anonymously, and a new serial would begin before the old one was finished. Madame Albanesi regards her serial work as being the very best training for telling a good story.
I ought to have mentioned earlier, since she belonged to that generation, John Strange Winter, a shining light in Bohemia at the epoch of which I am writing. She made her first success when I was at Oxford, with Bootles’ Baby, and Hoop-la, but she had lost her vogue before we went to live at Addison Mansions, though her name remained a household word, and she continued to publish a number of popular books. She was then living in an old house at Merton near Wimbledon, but shortly afterwards came to live at West Kensington, because she found Merton too far out.
She was a woman of inexhaustible energy, and had a very kind heart. She was exceedingly good to young authors and journalists; she made their cause her own; she welcomed them to her house, and visited theirs. She was a sister-in-law of George Augustus Sala. She was unfortunate in losing her public; she would have it again if she were alive now. But at that time a wave of preciousness and morbidness, which left her stranded, was passing over the country.
“George Egerton” and “Roy Devereux,” very pretty and clever women, were at the top of that wave among women, the former with books like Keynotes, the latter, and George Egerton’s beautiful sister, Miss Dunne, with brilliant and virile journalism in the Saturday Review, the Pall Mall and elsewhere. Lane was their publisher, Beardsley was their illustrator, H. G. Wells headed the list of their male rivals, followed by Arthur Machen, H. D. Lowry and others. I have all their books—such slim books for novels. Fisher Unwin had another school of them, headed by John Oliver Hobbes, as daring from the sex point of view, but lighter in touch, which he published in long slim books with yellow paper covers at eighteenpence each. Some Emotions and a Moral came out in this series, which I heard some one ask for at Smith’s Library quite seriously as Some Morals and a Reputation. These were Wells’s Time Machine, Stolen Bacillus, and Wonderful Visit days.
I asked George Egerton, who was in camp at Tauranga during the Maori war as an infant, and as a child was in her uncle Admiral Bynon’s fleet while he was bombarding Valparaiso, and who I knew was intended for an artist, what had made her turn writer. She told me—
“Why I wrote? Because I had to. Why I wrote as I did? Because I felt woman could only hope to do one thing in literature—put herself into it. Write not in breeches, but in corsets. That I took the name of George Egerton was partly because I did not think any publisher would take stories of that kind written by a woman, partly to see if my sex would make itself felt. Keynotes went into seven languages in two years. I am not dead abroad. At the Goethe Centenary in Weimar the Dr. Professor who gave the lecture on literature of the century, spoke of Rudyard Kipling and George Egerton as the two who had introduced a new note, a new method, into English literature ‘in our time.’
“I gave up writing books when I found that authors are ‘unsecured creditors’—not worth the candle unless one can reel off popular stuff. I can’t. I go to America with plays. I make any money I make there. I shall arrive here too. I am doing a big book now, and I am starting a book of recollections. If one attaches credence to the fortune-tellers, I am to live to be an old woman. It might be amusing, if only to demolish the men and women of straw one has seen lauded to the skies, in one’s memory.”
Marie Belloc, who had not then married Lowndes of The Times, was a constant visitor. She belonged very much to the Idler and Vagabond set of which we saw so much, and was already longing to write novels, though many years were to go by before she was able to fulfil her wish. She is a sister of Hilaire Belloc, the free-lance M.P. of the last Parliament, one of the wittiest writers of the day, who has the further distinction of having been a driver in a French artillery regiment and a Scholar of Balliol afterwards. It should be added that he was twenty-three when he went up to Oxford.