Details

Title

The Princess Virginia

Author

Williamson, C.N.
Williamson, A.M.

Place of Publication

New York

Publisher

A.L. Burt

Date of Publication

1907 Show more1907-01-01T00:00:00.000Z
1907-01-01T00:00:00.000Z Show less

Collection

L.M. Montgomery Institute.

Donor

Donated by Emily Woster.

Note

In a long journal entry dated April 8, 1898, Montgomery recounts stories of her time teaching and boarding in Lower Bedeque, PEI. The entry discusses the many events of the previous year, including the death of her maternal Grandfather Macneill, the end of her engagement to Edwin Simpson, and her romantic “affair” with Herman Leard. Through the fall and winter of 1897-1898, Montgomery and Leard spent many a romantic evening together, but she would not (could not, according to her) marry him. At the beginning of the journal entry, Montgomery pasted in a small illustration clipped from a magazine. It is a black-and-white sketch of the head and shoulders of a handsome young man in some kind of uniform. His face, lit by what looks like moonlight, gazes downward. Montgomery captioned the image “Picture cut from magazine. As much like Herman Leard as if it were his photograph.” She did not note which magazine she clipped it from. But the curator of the L.M. Montgomery Bookshelf, Emily Woster, stumbled across its source material in 2008 when she found a copy of this novel, ‘The Princess Virginia’ (1907) by C.N. and A.M. Williamson and recognized the dashing man on the cover. Montgomery’s clipping of “Herman” is none other than the chivalrous Prince Leopold of Rhaetia from the pages of ‘The Princess Virginia.’ The novel was published in April 1907 by Charles Norris and Alice Muriel Williamson, prolific authors of romantic and sensation fiction, publishing 44 novels between 1903 and 1925. ‘The New York Times’ called ‘The Princess Virginia’ a “galloping romance,” and it includes many hallmarks of the genre: characters in disguise, mistaken identities, disapproving parents, and the promise of wealth with a “happily ever after.” Most interesting in this case, however, is that the novel was serialized, with illustrations in black and white by Leon Guipon, from August 1906 to January of 1907 in ‘The Ladies Home Journal.’ No doubt, this is where Montgomery found her clipping. Each month, the magazine featured a different one of Guipon’s illustrations, and Montgomery found her “Herman” in the November 1906 issue. The full photo, linked here, shows our hero and heroine, saying tearful goodbyes in the moonlight. Since Montgomery didn’t mention it specifically, there is no way to know whether she read the entire story from the magazine, whether or not she read the novel, or even confirm exactly when she added the clipping to her journal (Was it in her original handwritten journal? Did she add it in later? Did she add it when she was copying out the journals in the early 1920s?). But it is interesting to note that the source of her clipping was another romance story. Even if she didn’t read the text closely, Montgomery must have felt at least somewhat akin to the heroine, Virginia, in the image, parting ways with her Leopold. Of note, too, is Alice Williamson’s 1915 interview with the ‘New York Times,’ in which she made a point to highlight that her “heroines are much too sensible to marry the wrong man.” You can read more about this novel, about Herman Leard, and about the sources for some of her other scrapbook material in The Shining Scroll newsletter from 2008.

Genre

novel