Grandma's Romance Novels - "The Restless Sex" by Robert W. Chambers

[sid]

First off, let me say that to my astonishment this novel proved to have a fannish connection for me! In the 2008 gateverse_remix , synecdochic  did marvelous things with one of my stories, and she based her remix on a famous book by... Robert W. Chambers! Read about my squee here, with appropriate linkage.

Now on to the book!  It's copyrighted 1918, but I think it may have been serialized in a magazine before that.  Our plot: young Stephanie Quest, the child of druggie ne'er-do-wells, is not-so-tragically orphaned at age 9.  She is taken in by the kindly immigrant family next door, but they can barely feed their own children, and two years later her name appears in the newspaper on a Christmas charity list.  Enter John Cleland, well-to-do widower with a teenage son away at school.  He adopts her.  Er, and finally gets around to telling his son when he meets the kid at the train station when he comes home from school for vacation.  I guess he really didn't have any choice at that point!

Anyway, the little girl absolutely adores her big brother.  Skip ahead a few years, observe some heavy-handed foreshadowing, and find Mr. Cleland dead on the floor.  In his will he instructs Stephanie to learn a trade (so she takes up nursing) and tells his son Jim, who wants to be a writer, to go spend two years in Europe.

Jim makes the mistake of staying in Europe for three years instead, and only comes home when Steve (for so she is called) wires him that she's gotten married to Oswald Grismer, an old schoolmate (but not chum) of Jim's.

Let the idiocy begin! 

 

I will spare you the suspense, and tell you that Steve married Oswald because their car broke down out of town and they had to stop at a hotel, where she ran into people she knew.  1918, baby.  She was forced to introduce Oswald as her husband!  (I've actually read this trope countless times in Harlequin Romances set in places like Greece and Spain.  Of course those books I read were twenty years ago, I don't know if authors are still getting away with it, lol.)

And in a complete WTF, apparently their 'marriage' consisted of saying "I'll marry you" in front of a witness.  Seriously!  That's it.  And yet this marriage is standing in the way of Jim and Steve falling in love and living happily ever after?!?  Seems that Oswald and Steve have what she calls a "trial marriage".  Now, normally, as Jim delicately points out to her, that means that two people live together without benefit of clergy to see if they like it.  In Steve's case?  It means this bizarre "marriage" (which she swears is legal, btw) takes place, but then they go off and live separately!  But she's promised Oswald that she'll make up her mind in two years time as to whether she thinks she can return his love and consummate the darn thing.

As Jim and Steve fall in love (he all at once, she in idiotic stops and starts), she hints at deep dark secrets that she can never reveal and ultimately says that she can never leave Oswald.

Again, I will spare you the suspense (and a good deal of plot-stuff related to inheritance issues due to Steve and Oswald being cousins or something) and reveal to you that Steve stopped Oswald from putting a bullet through his head, and then married him.

Now Oswald realizes that Jim and Steve are in love, and knows that she would never leave him, and why.  So he tells Jim that he's setting Steve free and that she mustn't worry about him.  He doesn't feel in the least little bit suicidal.  Uh-huh.  He keeps saying that for about six pages (I did mention heavy-handed foreshadowing, did I not? *g*)

So Jim invites Oswald to come down to their country house for a while, and Oswald says he'll wrap some things up and then take the night train and be there in the morning.  Jim drives there in his car and is reunited with Steve, and they're going to be so happy.  Dawn is breaking, they're gambolling in the fields... meanwhile, back at the house, the phone rings.  Steve's friend Helen takes the message.  Oswald lost his suitcase off the edge of the station platform and climbed down to get it and was electrocuted by the deadly third rail.

Since POV jumps around merrily, we already knew that, and watched Oswald reach out with both hands and grab the rail deliberately.  Because, you know, it's 1918, and our heroine can't be a divorcee!  Or something.  (He managed to send a young prostitute home to her family first, though.  Seriously.) 

So there's our happy ending, folks!  Stephanie and Jim, laughing and chasing each other around while Helen cries over the message about Oswald.

Close your jaws, people.

To top it off?  And really make you wonder what Mr. Chambers was smoking?  Here are the final lines:

Then, from the hall came Stephanie's ecstatic voice: "Helen!  Wake up, darling, and come down!  Because Jim and I have the most wonderful thing in the world to tell you!"

But on the paper in her lap was written something more wonderful still.  For there is nothing more wonderful than that beginning of everything which is called the end.


I don't know.  Do you think he was just glad to be done writing this damn book?

Oh, and the title is all about modern 1918 women, all trying to be independent and wanting suffrage and college educations and freedom from out-moded conventions.  I wonder what ever happened to those silly notions?  *g*
 

 

Comments

[delphia2000.livejournal.com]

I bet F. Scott Fitzgerald was pea-green with envy that he didn't write this one first! :oD

[sid]

*nods vigorously* Yep! No doubt about it!

[theemdash]

(He managed to send a young prostitute home to her family first, though. Seriously.)

I think this is my favorite part. ♥

Wait, no.

For there is nothing more wonderful than that beginning of everything which is called the end.

What the eff kind of closing line is that?

[sid]

Srsly, suddenly there was an entire chapter in Oswald's POV, with a convenient hooker under his corner streetlamp and a check that Jim had just written him in payment for a fountain he designed for the country house (cue the foreshadowing as Oswald murmurs that he won't need the money....). Cue more foreshadowing as Oswald endorses the check over to her but tells her that no bank will cash it in the morning, due to some silly rules, but he knows this guy....

Et voila, he puts her on a train back home and goes to his own platform and slides his suitcase over the edge with his toe. Heigh ho! :-D

As for the closing line: there were actually two suicides in this book. I think our Mr. Chambers might have had a wee obsession. His life must have sucked if he had to write books like these to earn money!

[lunachickk.livejournal.com]

I love these posts. *giggle*

Makes me want to go back in time and smack a few people.

[sid]

What were they using for brains? *shakes head*

*giggles at your icon*

[melayneseahawk.livejournal.com]

*snerk* And I thought the '90s sci fi lesbian romance novels I've been reading were bad.

[sid]

Well....

:-D

I have no way to compare the two, but that certainly does sound like a spiffy little genre that would simply be awash with bad writing!

[melayneseahawk.livejournal.com]

Oh, it is. With the set I just finished (two novels with a tenuous prequel-sequel connection), it looked like the editor gave up about halfway through the second one, because suddenly there were lots of typos.

[green-grrl.livejournal.com]

Oh, DEAR! I feel an attack of the vapors coming on! :D

[delphia2000.livejournal.com]

Comment FTW! (Now I have to go clean all that nasally flavored coffee off my keyboard!)

[sid]

You didn't say that properly. It should go like this: "Oh. Oh, dear. I - - I feel an attack of the vapors coming - - on!"

:-D

[green-grrl.livejournal.com]

Hmm. And some sort of *flutters eyelashes* and *fan self* type things. Yes, yes ...

[chattycatsmeow.livejournal.com]

Well, I know I feel all kinds of romantically satisfied after such a sweet heroic tale of lovers overcoming all odds!

What? Why are you looking at me like that? :P

[sid]

Yes, I agree. It's so uplifting to achieve your heart's desire. So what if it takes someone else's suicide? :-P Fortunately, these two are far too stupid to ever realize it was not an accident.

One can only hope they don't have children and spread the idiocy. *g*

[starting-gate.livejournal.com]

For there is nothing more wonderful than that beginning of everything which is called the end.

Huh. Orry's great-grandfather was a writer, too?

[sid]

Yes, Angel! :-D

[thothmes.livejournal.com]

I'm here via your comment on penknife's post about a Victorian melodrama, because I do love an OTT Victorian melodrama myself.

I had to drop you a line here to point out that I have a great-great grandfather by the name of John Cleland. I have a picture of him, his wife, and his 12 children all lined up in age order on my mantlepiece. It was probably taken sometime around the turn of the century. My great-grandmother was towards the tail end of the line.

More amusing is the picture we have of him and his wife on their wedding day, in the Civil War era. He is seated, sprawling and comfortable, lord of all he surveys, in a chair, one arm leaning on a nearby table with a fringed lamp upon it. She stands behind him, clearly hot, tired, dishevelled, and a mite out of sorts. Clearly she'd been toiling away readying all the details of the wedding breakfast, etc., when she wasn't busy getting married and sitting for the portrait. Obviously though, given the 12 strapping children (more boys than girls) she was normally a woman of great energy!

That John Cleland was a doctor, but he shared his name with a rather more famous direct ancestor, the John Cleland who wrote the rather renowned oft-banned book, Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure. Wikipedia article here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Hill)

Obviously the blood has thinned out over the generations, because I really suck at writing the pr0n. Clearly I'm a disgrace to the family!

Edited because apparently I kant spel either. Or close out my HTML brackets. D'oh!

[sid]

Cool stuff! I've heard of Fanny Hill, but never knew the author's name. And I love old photos! I have one from 1917 of my paternal grandmother and her four sisters and one brother taken surrounding their parents. Grandma inherited premature white hair from her mother, and passed it down to me. *g* In that photo, great-grandma looks like she should be her husband's mother!