Chapter XIII
ALIAS RICHARD DEHAN
i
At that, I think I am wrong. I think the title of this chapter ought to be “Alias Clotilde Graves.”
The problems of literary personality are strange. Some time after the Boer War a woman who had been in newspaper work in London and who had even, at one time, been on the stage under the necessity of earning her living, wrote a novel. The novel happened to be an intensive study of the Boer War, made possible by the fact that the writer was the daughter of a soldier and had spent her early years in barracks. England at that time was interested by the subject of this novel. It sold largely and its author was established by the book.
She was forty-six years old in the year when the book was published. But this was not the striking thing. William De Morgan produced the first of his impressive novels at a much more advanced age. The significant thing was that in publishing her novel, The Dop Doctor (American title: One Braver Thing), Clotilde Graves chose the pen name of Richard Dehan, although she was already known as a writer (chiefly for the theatre) under her own name.
I do not know that Miss Graves has ever said anything publicly about her motive in electing the name of Richard Dehan. But I feel that whatever the cause the result was the distinct emergence of a totally different personality. There is no final disassociation between Clotilde Graves and Richard Dehan. Richard Dehan, novelist, steadily employs the material furnished in valuable abundance by Clotilde Graves’s life. At the same time the personality of Richard Dehan is so unusual, so gifted, so lavish in its invention and so much at home in surprising backgrounds, that something approaching a psychic explanation of authorship seems called for.
ii
Clotilde Inez Mary Graves was born at Barracks, Buttevant, County Cork, Ireland, on June 3, 1864, third daughter of the late Major W. H. Graves of the Eighteenth Royal Irish Regiment and Antoinette, daughter of Captain George Anthony Deane of Harwich. Thus, the English Who’s Who.