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Anna Katharine Green and the Invention of the Historical Mystery Pt. II
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Pragas, Bruxas e Guerras: Os Mundos da Ficção Histórica
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19th Century Historical Fiction
This module dives into the works of Anna Katharine Green and Professor Holsinger provides an overview of the forces that are effecting the craft of historical fiction.
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Bruce HolsingerProfessor
English
I want to finish this lecture by talking about Anna Katharine
Green's The Forsaken Inn, as a book, as a physical book.
One of the things that I love to do with my students is
bring them into special collections to
talk about physical books, books as artifacts.
In this age of the Kindle and the eBook,
it's nice sometimes to, to really sit down with books
in their original forms, and think about what they meant,
and how they were experienced as, as objects by their
original readers.
So there's a number of things to point out here.
What I, what I have in front of me, this is
a first edition of The Forsaken Inn, by Anna Katharine Green.
it was published in 1890 by Robert
Bonner's Sons, a New York publishing house.
and there's just a few things to point out here.
The first is that this book, the cloth cover
that we have, is missing its original paper wrap.
In other words the
paper cover sheet that wrapped around the
cloth binding when the book was originally sold.
Luckily over here, we also have the original first paperback
edition, published the same year, by the same publishing house.
So we have a sense if we, if we think about these two books together
of, of how the, the original cloth would
have looked in its, in its first incarnation.
second, I want to talk about advertising,
and how these books advertise their author.
If you look inside the paper cover.
I see another advertisement for, or rather an
advertisement for another book by Anna Katharine Green,
A Matter of Millions, pitched as a great novel by the author of, The Forsaken Inn.
This brilliant artistic novel will enhance the great
reputation of the popular author of The Forsaken Inn.
It is a story of today.
So unlike The Forsaken Inn, it's a story
set in the present, it's not a historical novel.
costs $1.50.
and if you look on the back of the paperback, you'll see the series
that this was published in, The Choice Series, again by Robert Bonner's Sons.
Advertising quite a few other novels in the same series,
including another one by, by Anna Katharine Green.
So this is a, a way that the, the book,
Then is Now, really advertises other books by the same publishers.
Think if you, if you read a Kindle book, and you
get a recommendation for other titles that, that might appeal to you.
This is exactly what's going on in an original 19th century list like this.
And on the inside back
cover we get a book by a man named Herbert Ward, Five Years with The Congo Cannibals.
So, maybe appealing to global themes, international leadership.
okay third, I want to talk about the, the man who did the
illustrations for these two copies, for Anna Katharine Green's, The Forsaken Inn.
His name was Victor Perard.
He's pulled out here in these, these red letters on,
on the the paperback cover.
Victor Perard now he was a really interesting figure.
We, we, we don't know much about him.
As far as I know no one's ever written a, a piece of scholarship on Victor Perard.
but he did the cover illustration for The Forsaken Inn, as
well as a number of the internal illustrations that I'll show you.
He was a French born illustrator, he was educated in Paris.
he emigrated to the United States in the early 20th century.
And in fact he taught at Cooper Union in New York City for a while.
He trot, taught drawing there.
and it exhibited widely in the Northeast in a number of galleries.
now Perard was a prolific illustrator.
He illustrated anatomy textbooks, novels and magazines.
He wrote manuals on drawing techniques.
and he also illustrated a number of
Anna Katharine Green's novels, including The Forsaken Inn.
Beginning with this really extraordinary
cover illustration.
Now, if you'll remember I read you a passage from, from the novel.
In which the, the main narrating character this is Miss True
Max, is watching this unnamed Madame in the back garden of the Inn.
Hovering around the stone that's covering the, the
grave, the grave, the burial place of the murder
victim from the beginning of the novel.
And here she is, peeking out, looking at looking at this unnamed madame.
So Victor Perard did that cover illustration, and he did all
of the the pen and ink drawings from within the book.
And we can, we can look through a number of these
to, to see how word and image go together in this book.
So here's a really wonderful example.
This comes from the beginning of Chapter Five.
Again, the same
chapter in which this unnamed madame is hovering around
the grave suspiciously in the backyard of the Inn.
And you can see here, this capital letter H,
which begins the chapter on the word how fearful.
How fearful to hear a spade in the night, and to know that this
spade is digging a grave, the passage I read to you a little while ago.
This capital H actually becomes the window in her hall
that she peeks out of to see this unnamed madame in her garden.
So if you look at the cover illustration along with
this, this really beautiful little elegant illustrated capital from the
beginning of chapter five, you can see how cleverly Victor
Perard is thinking about the illustrative program for this mystery novel.
Another great example comes from later in the book.
Here we have an actual
diagram of the secret chamber where Mrs. Erkehart's body was found.
And Green is giving you even some of the details of where exactly this secret
chamber was located in relationship to the oak
parlor, the bedroom, the kitchen, and so on.
And so in illustrating the book, Perard is actually pulling
out the details, the architectural details of this Inn, and
using them to illustrate this, this diagram that he gives the reader.
another example, this is really beautiful.
A number, one of a number of his full page illustrations.
and this, depicts, this is actually the, the direction that it should be pointing.
it, it's depicting the Marquis, a character that
we meet later in the novel, helping a man
named Isador from falling to his death from a beam.
You can see the really extraordinary detail in this closeup
as the ladies watch and watched frightened from a doorway.
And then finally the last illustration that I'll show you
comes at the very end of the novel. And this is something that you wouldn't
know from the cover page or rather from the yes from the cover page on the novel.
Is that this Forsaken Inn is called the Happy Go Lucky Inn.
And here we see the sign that greets visitors who come by on the road.
So there an interesting, ironic kind of disjunction
between this, this very pleasant kind of pastoral depiction
of the inn's marquee, the sign hanging out on the street.
And the more forbidding and a mysterious cover, The Forsaken Inn.
Where this woman in the garden is, is glimpsing at the, at
a, at a grave, an unmarked grave, where a body is buried.
So that gives you a sense of the really marvelous conjunction of word and image
making up this book, The Forsaken Inn, as it was known to its original readers.
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