From 1892, THE FATE OF FENELLA is an odd novel with something — but not much — for enthusiasts of Victorian sensation fiction; fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker; and readers interested in literary experiments.
Magazine publisher Joseph Snell Wood, who edited “a newspaper de luxe, indispensable to every Gentlewoman” called, well, THE GENTLEWOMAN, came up with a publicity gimmick that he thought would stimulate sales: He would sign 24 popular authors — 12 men and 12 women — to write a single novel, with each person writing one chapter. The writer who began the book would have no idea where the story and characters would end up.
You might think that this peculiar arrangement would result in an unreadable hodgepodge
of styles and plot directions. Yes and no. Styles, yes. If THE FATE OF FENELLA is representative, for instance, of the style of the author of chapter 23, heaven help her readers. The entire chapter of 11 pages is comprised of only nine paragraphs. A single sentence chosen at random is made up of 112 words, 12 commas, two semicolons and a dash. (Her name was Jessie Catherine Couvreur and she wrote using the pseudonym “Tasma.” Care to guess why she’s no longer in print?)
“Tasma” is only one of the 21 authors of whom you have never heard. F. Anstey might be familiar to students of Victoriana as the author of the comic novel VICE VERSA, about a father and son who exchange bodies for a week. The book was the source of the Judge Reinhold/Fred Savage movie from 1988.
But back to Fenella: “Her hair, gloves, and shoes were tan-colour, and closely allied to tan, too, was the tawny, true tiger-tint of her hazel eyes. For the rest, she was entirely white save for her dark lashes and brows, the faint tint of rose in her small cheeks, and a deeper red in her lips …”* She’s basically a nice young woman with a wealthy husband and a son upon whom she dotes. Starting to sound dull? Wait for it.
She has a German lover, while her husband has a French mistress. Fenella also has dangling after her a romantic young man named Clitheroe Jacynth (pardon the Dave Barryism but, no, I’m not making this up). The German lover is murdered, and Fenella, who didn’t do it, takes the blame and goes to trial. Before the story ends, the son will be kidnapped by the mistress and taken to America; the father will follow and end up committed in an insane asylum; the mistress’ husband will escape prison in France and come after her; the son will be given to a Dickensian band of thieves in the slums of New York; there will be a few attempted murders; and one of the major characters will die of exhaustion.
Surely, at least some of the writers involved with this project had their tongues firmly in cheek as they wrote. This stuff is so wild and wooly, it could have made an episode of RIPPING YARNS. If you think you could pick out the chapters by Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes) and Stoker (author of DRACULA), I doubt you could. There is nothing particularly notable about their contributions. In fact, I wonder if they didn’t just churn something out and then wait for their checks to arrive.
I think THE FATE OF FENELLA will be enjoyed best as a pastiche of the sensation novel — a form developed in the 1860s, novels that self-consciously excited the emotional sensations of middle- and working-class readers, instead of attempting to appeal to their intellects. It was the sensation and Gothic novels that evolved into the kind of popular fiction BOOKGASM readers enjoy today. —Doug Bentin
*NOTE: This description of Fenella, taken from the first chapter, was written by Helen Mathers, a photograph of whom adorns this book’s cover. She gets high marks from me just for the phrase “tawny, true tiger-tint.”
Related posts:
- The Fate of Katherine Carr
- The Book of Fate
- As Fate Would Have It
- The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction
- The Palace Tiger
