Mrs. Brown’s latest book is a war book but of a quite exceptional character. To understand its genesis you must remember that she is, though by her marriage an American citizen, a Greek by race. Her love for Greece, her hopes for its future, are pretty clearly disclosed in the opening chapter of Haremlik. And so when the European War had passed its first stages and the political situation in Greece had developed into a struggle between King Constantine and Venizelos, a struggle in which the King’s attitude threatened national dishonor, Demetra Kenneth Brown resolved to go over to Greece, interview the leaders of both factions, and save Greece for the Allies—at least endeavor to see that Greece fulfilled her treaty obligations, such as those entered upon with Serbia.
Looking at the enterprise now Mrs. Brown is the first to concede its quixotism, its hopelessness, its ridiculousness from the start. And yet it proved immensely worth while in unsuspected ways. Going to London, the novelist succeeded in getting to Lloyd George; afterward she had access to other high personages in the Allied countries. Besides French she knows Italian. At Athens all doors were open to her. She interviewed not once but many times King Constantine himself and his generals. Afterward she went to Salonica and talked with Venizelos. When she had done she was able to write, purely as a reporter, In the Heart of German Intrigue, one of the notable exposés of the war. Out of the mouths of Constantine and his aides she convicted them. Her series of interlocking interviews built up a complete and fatal revelation of what Germany, with the connivance of Constantine’s government, had planned to do.
Mrs. Brown’s work as a reporter of royalties and others and even her autobiographical books such as A Child of the Orient and Haremlik are, strictly considered, outside the scope of this sketch, which has to do with her primarily as an American novelist and a woman. As a novelist she has several books to her credit besides her initial offering, The First Secretary. The Duke’s Price, written with her husband; Finella in Fairyland, In the Shadow of Islam, and The Grasp of the Sultan, which was first published anonymously (“by?”), are all hers, as well as The Heart of the Balkans. Of all these The Grasp of the Sultan, which received serial publication and sold well even before the disclosure of the author’s identity, is the most interesting and most deserving of detailed consideration in this place.
The novel was published in 1915 (as a book in June, 1916) and represents Demetra Vaka’s skill after some ten years’ apprenticeship at writing in English. A young Englishman, having wasted a fortune, drifts to Constantinople, and is appointed, through the agency of a countryman who has become a Turkish admiral, tutor to the imperial Ottoman princes. The youngest in his charge is 4-year-old Prince Bayazet, whose mother is a beautiful Greek girl of the harem. She has dared to defy the Sultan, who, failing in entreaty, strives to break her will by taking her son away from her. By a ruse of the head eunuch, she recovers the child and obtains the Sultan’s pledge that they shall be unmolested for five years.
This is the background for a romance. The young English tutor falls in love with the Greek girl and plans to escape with her and the little Prince Bayazet.
The story is told with expertness, without indirection, with a fine control of suspense and with thrill after thrill. The finest thing about it is the constant discovery to the reader of the author’s thorough knowledge of her people and her setting. Assuming that it could have been written by an American, it must have been preceded by weeks of study supplemented by foreign travel; whether a person not born and bred as Demetra Vaka was could have written it, even after extensive “documentation,” seems doubtful. We should say the thing would be quite impossible were we not mindful of the late F. Marion Crawford, of whose ingenious and convincing tales Mrs. Brown’s inevitably remind us. He, too, wrote one or more novels of Constantinople, with what historical accuracy we can’t undertake to speculate. Possibly Mrs. Brown can pick a hundred holes in them respecting matters of fact! However, they had, for the American reader, an effect of perfect verisimilitude, and it is this effect precisely that Mrs. Brown’s stories are enriched with. Only, in her case, we know that the likeness to truth is felt because the truth is there. She should do for us hereafter, if her restless spirit will permit, what Crawford did. Give us romances, Demetra Vaka, give us the East; stay with us, write for us novel after novel of the sort that used to come, one or two a year, from that villa at Sorrento where lived so long and wrought so faithfully the creator of Dr. Isaacs and the chronicler of the braveries of Prince Saracinesca!
Books by Demetra Vaka
The First Secretary, 1907.
Haremlik, 1909.
The Duke’s Price, 1910.
Finella in Fairyland, 1910.
In the Shadow of Islam, 1911.
A Child of the Orient, 1914.
The Grasp of the Sultan, 1916.
The Heart of the Balkans, 1917.
In the Heart of German Intrigue, 1918.
Demetra Vaka’s books are published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.