My Mother's Books, Part 6: D. E. Stevenson (1892-1973)

Before Susan Elizabeth Phillips had her Seppies, D. E. Stevenson had her Dessies. In the case of the latter, they pay visits to Moffat in Dumfriesshire where Stevenson lived for the last three decades of her life rather that showing up for book signings, but their loyalty to Stevenson is just as intense and their knowledge of her characters just as detailed as that of any SEP fan. My mother never made any pilgrimages to Moffat, but she loved Stevenson’s books and passed that love on to me. My fascination with Scotland began with Stevenson’s books, and I still halfway believe that if I ever visited the Scottish Border country, I would find Dunnian with some descendant of Celia Dunne living there. When I think of romances set in Scotland, the books of Stevenson are among the first that come to mind. Even after many rereading, her characters come alive for me, and the world of her novels offers an escape to a simpler, less harried place.

Dorothy Emily Stevenson was born November 18, 1892, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her father was a first cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson, and D. E. Stevenson claimed that writing was “in her blood.”  She began writing as a child, hiding in a closet to do so since her parents discouraged her efforts. Stevenson persisted even in the face of their disapproval, although she conformed in other ways. She made her debut in Edinburgh in 1913, and three years later, she married Major James Reid Peploe, a young officer home recovering from war wounds. Their first child was born with a year, followed by three other children over the next fourteen years. 

Stevenson published two volumes of poetry, one in 1913 and one in 1926, with a novel, Peter West (1923) between them, none of which attracted much attention. But it wasn’t until the early 1930s that she began writing the books that would earn her an international following. A friend whose daughter was engaged to an army officer borrowed Stevenson’s diary to gain an understanding of the life her daughter could expect to lead, and she found Stevenson’s account of military life so engrossing that she urged Stevenson to publish her diary. Instead, Stevenson drew on the diary to write Mrs. Tim of the Regiment (1932), the fictional diary of Hester Christie, the wife of army officer Tim Christie. Stevenson maintained the diary form in her subsequent Mrs. Tim books that carried Hester and her family through World War II and the post-war period: Golden Days (1934), published with Mrs. Tim of the Regiment as Mrs. Tim Christie (1940) in the U. S., Mrs. Tim Carries On (1941), Mrs. Tim Gets a Job (1947), and Mrs. Tim Flies Home (1957).

The Mrs. Tim books proved critically and commercially successful. Stevenson went on to write more than forty novels, but the Mrs. Tim books and the Miss Buncle books (Miss Buncle’s Book, 1934; Miss Buncle Married, 1936; The Two Mrs. Abbots, 1942) remain her most popular novels. I like the Mrs. Tim books, but I adore the Miss Buncle books. Barbara Buncle writes a book to augment her dwindling income, and she decides she can write only what she knows, she writes about Silverstream, the village where she has always lived, and the people who live there. The publisher to whom she sends it recognizes a bestseller when he sees one, but he changes the title from Chronicles of an English Village to Disturber of the Peace, a title that proves prophetic as the book wreaks havoc in Silverstream. The satire is gentle, but the revelations are unrelenting. A romance between author and publisher, who proves himself the right kind of dragon slayer, is a bonus, and the two sequels show their HEA in process.

Stevenson herself had this to say about her fiction: My books are all novels as it is the human element which interests me most in life; some of my books are light and amusing and others are serious studies of character, but they are human and carefully thought out, and perhaps it is for these two reasons that my public is so diverse and ranges from university professors to old ladies and small boys!

” Her happy endings led many critics to dismiss her later books as light reading, but her popularity continued. At the time of her death, more than seven million copies of her novels had been sold in the United Kingdom and the United States and her work had been translated into half a dozen different languages.

One of the recurring themes in Stevenson’s books is the house as the center of familial identity and stability. In Celia’s House, the opening page introduces Dunnian as the emotional and spiritual heart of the "generations of Dunnes, born and bred at Dunnian and afterwards scattered to the four corners of the earth.” In 1905, ninety-year-old Celia Dunne decides to leave Dunnian to her great nephew Humphrey Dunne on the condition that it pass to his as-yet-unborn daughter, another Celia Dunne. The novel follows four decades of life at Dunnian, following not only the younger Celia but also her siblings as they move through two world wars.  Amberwell (1955) centers on the five Aryton siblings, a dysfunctional family before the term became popular, who grow up at Amberwell. Summerhills (1956) covers the Arytons during the immediate post-war years and they appear in minor roles in Still Glides the Stream, (1959). &nbsp Limbourne, the ancestral mansion of the English Wentworths, figures prominently in Katherine Wentworth (1964) and Katherine’s Marriage (1965). Years later I fell in love with the fictional worlds of Jo Beverley, Mary Jo Putney, and Liz Carlyle in which the paths of characters from other, seemingly unrelated books intersected or ran parallel to one another, but it was Stevenson who first introduced me to a world where such things happened.

Like most of the gentle romance authors, Stevenson experienced a decline in popularity after the romance revolution of the 1970s. Although her books could still be found on library shelves and large print editions occasionally appeared, new readers who wanted to own copies of her books found that they were out of print. Used copies could be found but often prices were steep with some copies of hard-to-find titles selling for over $500. Then, in the twenty-first century, there was a reawakening of interest in Stevenson. The Bloomsbury Group, announcing itself as “a new library of books from the early twentieth-century chosen by readers for readers” reissued Mrs. Tim of the Regiment in 2010. That same year, Persephone Books reissued Miss Buncle’s Book and Miss Buncle Married. The following year, Greyladies Books in Edinburgh published three new books by Stevenson based on manuscripts discovered by the author’s granddaughter in an attic: Emily Dennistoun, The Fair Miss Fortune, and Portrait of Saskia. Two more, Jean Erskine’s Secret and Found in the Attic (a selection of unpublished short stories, poems, plays, and talks on books and writing) will be published in 2013. (All available in North America from Anglophile Books.) Sourcebooks reissued Miss Buncle’s Book (my review here) and Miss Buncle Married in 2012 and will release The Young Clementina (originally Divorced from Reality, U. K. title, Miss Dean’s Dilemma, U. S. title, 1935) in July 2013.

When Connie Brockway asked her fans to name their favorite Scotland-set novels last month, Listening Valley (1944) and Blue Sapphire (1963) by D. E. Stevenson, both out of print, were on the list. And the reissued books are winning Stevenson new fans. Jayne of Dear Author named Miss Buncle’s Book one of her top reads of 2012. Bookfoolery called Barbara Buncle a “delightful” character and the book “a breath of fresh air.” “Charming” was a word frequently used to describe Stevenson’s novels by early critics, and it is the adjective of choice for many of her recent readers. “Comfort read” is another term used often by Stevenson’s new readers, who affirm the judgment of critics writing more than half a century ago. A. F. Wolfe, reviewing Amberwell in the Saturday Review in 1955 wrote, "Opening a D. E. Stevenson novel is like entering the home of a hospitable old friend."   That effectively sums up my feelings when I reread the Stevenson books I own: the Mrs. Tim books, the first two Miss Buncle books, and Celia’s House. But life’s been tough lately, and I feel the need of comfort and a visit with a hospitable old friend. I just put half a dozen Stevenson books on hold at the library, and I’ll definitely be downloading The Young Clementina to my Kindle come July.

Are there books that you classify as “hospitable old friends”? What are your comfort reads? What makes them comforting?

Note: This is the last of the series of posts on my mother’s books. On Saturday, April 20, I will begin a new series on the 2013 RITA finalists that will be posted on alternate Saturdays through July.

Reading My Mother's Books: An Introduction

Girl Reading by Charles Edward Perugini

You don’t hear much about them these days, but before the romance revolution that began with the publication of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower in 1972, women were reading romance fiction. The first romances I read were my mother’s books. One muggy Georgia summer weekday, a short time before I turned ten, I was complaining because I had nothing to read and my dad couldn’t take me to the library until Saturday. Tired of my whining, my mother pointed me toward her books and said “Read.” I did. 

By Saturday, my reading interest had changed because I had discovered romance. I had read Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and a half dozen romances by Emilie Loring and Grace Livingston Hill. I was an avid reader from the time I was five, but it was that summer that my appetite for more and more to read became voracious. I carried a book with me everywhere, snatching a few moments to read lying on a towel at the swimming pool, following my mother down the aisles of the grocery store, even a few times stealing minutes during a Sunday morning sermon. (The last reached a forcible conclusion when my mother found me out.) Over the next couple of years, I discovered other treasures on my mother’s bookshelves—books by Faith Baldwin, Elizabeth Cadell, and D. E. Stevenson.

These were the books that started my life-long love affair with romance. I still have a double handful of my mother’s romances on my keeper shelves. I have since discovered that my experience was not unusual. Some studies suggest that most women who think of themselves as heavy readers began reading for pleasure between the ages of five and nine (63%), and a significant number (44%) read books that were recommended by their mothers or another close relative. (Many of my earlier favorite books—the Anne of Green Gables books and Louisa May Alcott’s books, for example—were also books my mother had loved and wanted me and my sister to read.)

It was many years later when I was in graduate school that I discovered just how popular the romance writers whose books my mother loved and shared with me had been. When I left my romance-reading closet where I had lurked throughout most of my academic career and joined the online romance fiction community, I was bothered by the fact that Loring and the others seemed largely forgotten. I toyed with the idea of writing a book about these gentle romance authors whose books tens of thousands of women readers devoured in an age when the only steam in romance fiction was that rising from the heroine’s tea cup. I even did some research and filled notebooks with copious notes, but other writing for profit and for pleasure always seemed to take precedence.

This week I did some cleaning and decluttering, and one of the decisions I had to make was whether to trash my notes on gentle romance along with some of the books by these authors. Somehow it seemed a betrayal of my mother and the gift she gave me that long ago summer to do so. That’s when a new idea was born: to use this blog for a series of posts paying tribute to the five romance writers I discovered on Mother’s bookshelves. So, beginning tomorrow and continuing through March, appropriately Women’s History Month, every other Saturday, I’ll be posting a tribute post to one of these writers. I’ll still do my regular Tuesday reviews and irregular bonus reviews on Thursdays, but the Saturday posts for this period will be focused on my mother’s books. I hope you will enjoy them.

How old were you when you discovered reading for pleasure? Who introduced you to romance fiction?

Miss Buncle's Book: Vintage Romance

Miss Buncle’s Book

By D. E. Stevenson

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark

Release Date: September 1, 2012

When Barbara Buncle’s dependable dividends suddenly become less dependable in the early 1930s, she needs to add to her income. She rejects keeping hens because they are “such fluttery things,” and she rejects paying guests because Dorcas, her cook/maid/parlor maid/friend who used to be her nurse, didn’t like the idea. The only thing left for a diffident, middle-aged spinster to do is to write a book--and she does. Since she believes she can write only what she knows, she writes about Silverstream, the small English village where she has lived for all of her life, and its inhabitants. She sends Chronicles of an English Village to Abbott & Spicer because they are first in an alphabetical list of publishers.

Arthur Abbott, like all publishers, is in search of a bestseller. He doesn’t have much hope that he’s found one when his nephew Sam, newly employed by the firm, gives him a manuscript with the pedestrian title Chronicles of an English Village written by John Smith. But Sam’s insistence that “the feller who wrote this book is either a genius or an imbecile” persuades him to read it. He reads it twice. He concludes that Sam was wrong.

It was not written by a genius, of course, neither was it the babblings of an imbecile; but the author of it was either a very clever man writing with his tongue in his cheek, or else a very simple person writing in all good faith.

Either way Abbott decides he may have his bestseller, and he sends a request that John Smith pay a visit to the office of Abbott & Spicer to discuss their buying his book. He’s rather charmed when “John Smith” turns out to be the naïve, devastatingly honest Miss Barbara Buncle whose blue eyes and good teeth are all she has to rate her as physically attractive for a woman of her years.

Abbott &Spicer publish the book with a change in title. Chronicles of an English Village becomes Disturber of the Peace, and Disturber of the Peace becomes a bestseller. Those hens Miss Buncle decided not to keep could scarcely have had more ruffled feathers than the villagers of Silverstream when they discover themselves in the book. There are threats of legal action, demands that the book be pulled from bookstores, and plans to horsewhip John Smith when his identity is revealed. No one suspects that the reviled author is the self-effacing Barbara Buncle who is busily taking notes for a sequel, but both Miss Buncle and Mr. Abbott realize that if the villagers don’t find out who John Smith is before the sequel is published, they will certainly have their answer then. 

The first romances written for adults I ever read were my mother’s books, all of them written before the romance revolution of the 1970s. I loved those “gentle romances” and devoured all that my mother owned and all I could find on the shelves of the local library. The novels of D. E. Stevenson were among my favorites. They were written decades before I read them as a preteen, but they had a warmth and a charm that kept me searching for more of them. I was delighted when I saw that Sourcebooks Landmark was reissuing Miss Buncle’s Book, originally published in 1934. Rereading it, I easily understood why Stevenson’s books sold three million copies in the United States.

Barbara Buncle is not the typical romance heroine. She’s older, she’s dowdy, and she’s about as far removed from a “kick-ass heroine” as one can imagine. She provokes laughter, but it’s affectionate laughter, and she moves the reader to sympathy as well. Her problems are real. When Mr. Abbott gives her a hundred pounds as an advance, she signs the receipt with tears in her eyes.

It really was rather astonishing (when you come to think of it) what that tiny piece of paper represented—far more than a hundred sovereigns (although in modern finance less). It represented food and drink to Barbara Buncle, and, perhaps, a new winter coat and hat; but above all, freedom from that nightmare of worry, and sleep, and a quiet mind.

I loved the description of her reaction to the reviews of her book, and seeing the HEA of a character who never even dreamed of one was immensely satisfying.

The cast of secondary characters is large, quirky and memorable. There are some a reader will dislike intensely because she recognizes them, although they may dress differently and speak with a different accent: the domineering, hypocritical Mrs. Featherstone-Hogg; the controlling emotionally abusive Mr. Bulmer; and the cunning, gold digging Vivien Greensleeves. But they are balanced by the hard-working Dr. Walker, still wildly in live with his pretty, intelligent wife; the good-hearted, if misguided, vicar, Ernest Hathaway; and the lively, impulsive Sally Carter. And Stevenson gives her readers three romances—four, if we count the good doctor’s love for his beloved Sarah.

I highly recommend this for readers of sweet romances. But I also recommend it for those who would like a change of pace, are looking for something light and amusing, or find appealing the promise of a book that has the charm of vintage photographs and the comfort of a hug.  I hope that Sourcebook follows up with Miss Buncle Married (1936) and The Two Mrs. Abbots (1943), but I can’t wait. I put them on hold at my library. 

Sourcebooks also reissued Georgette Heyer’s romances and mysteries, the electronic editions of which are on sale for $2.99 each through August 20 in celebration of Heyer’s birthday. I love the idea of making vintage romances available to modern readers. Are there older romances you’d like to see reissued? What do you think makes the difference between enduring appeal and hopelessly dated?