


Produced by David Widger and Andrew Sly





MRS. FALCHION

By Gilbert Parker




INTRODUCTION

This novel was written in the days of the three-decker, and it went out
to sea as such. Every novel of mine written until 1893 was published in
two or three volumes, and the sale to the libraries was greater than the
sale to the general public. This book was begun in 1892 at the time when
the Pierre stories were being written, and it was finished in the summer
of 1893. It did not appear serially; indeed, I made no attempt at serial
publication. I had a feeling that as it was to be my first novel, it
should be judged as a whole and taken at a gasp, as it were. I believe
that the reader of Messrs. Methuen & Company was not disposed to publish
the book, but Mr. Methuen himself (or Mr. Stedman as he was then called)
was impressed by it and gave it his friendly confidence. He was certain
that it would arrest the attention of the critics and of the public,
whether it became popular or not. I have not a set of those original
three volumes. I wish I had, because they won for me an almost
unhoped-for pleasure. The 'Daily Chronicle' gave the volumes over
a column of review, and headed the notice, "A Coming Novelist." The
'Athenaeum' said that 'Mrs. Falchion' was a splendid study of character;
'The Pall Mall Gazette' said that the writing was as good as anything
that had been done in our time, while at the same time it took rather a
dark view of my future as a novelist, because it said I had not probed
deep enough into the wounds of character which I had inflicted. The
article was written by Mr. George W. Stevens, and he was right in saying
that I had not probed deep enough. Few very young men--and I was very
young then--do probe very deeply. At the appearance of 'When Valmond
Came to Pontiac', however, Mr. Stevens came to the conclusion that my
future was assured.

I mention these things because they were burnt into my mind at the time.
'Mrs. Falchion' was my first real novel, as I have said, though it had
been preceded by a short novel called 'The Chief Factor', since rescued
from publication and never published in book form in England. I realised
when I had written 'Mrs. Falchion' that I had not found my metier, and I
was fearful of complete failure. I had come but a few years before from
the South Seas; I was full of what I had seen and felt; I was eager to
write of it all, and I did write of it; but the thing which was deeper
still in me was the life which 'Pierre and His People', 'The Seats of
the Mighty', 'The Trail of the Sword', 'The Lane That Had no Turning',
and 'The Right of Way' portrayed. That life was destined to give me
an assured place and public, while 'Mrs. Falchion', and the South Sea
stories published in various journals before the time of its production,
and indeed anterior to the writing of the Pierre series, only assured me
attention.

Happily for the book, which has faults of construction, superficialities
as to incident, and with some crudity of plot, it was, in the main, a
study of character. There was focus, there was illumination in the book,
to what degree I will not try to say; and the attempt to fasten the
mind of the reader upon the central figure, and to present that central
figure in many aspects, safeguarded the narrative from the charge
of being a mere novel of adventure, or, as one writer called it, "an
impudent melodrama, which has its own fascinations."

Reading Mrs. Falchion again after all these years, I seem to realise
in it an attempt to combine the objective and subjective methods of
treatment--to combine analysis of character and motive with arresting
episode. It is a difficult thing to do, as I have found. It was not done
on my part wholly by design, but rather by instinct, and I imagine that
this tendency has run through all my works. It represents the elements
of romanticism and of realism in one, and that kind of representation
has its dangers, to say nothing of its difficulties. It sometimes
alienates the reader, who by instinct and preference is a realist, and
it troubles the reader who wants to read for a story alone, who cares
for what a character does, and not for what a character is or says,
except in so far as it emphasises what it does. One has to work,
however, in one's own way, after one's own idiosyncrasies, and here
is the book that represents one of my own idiosyncrasies in its most
primitive form.


CONTENTS:

     BOOK I

     BELOW THE SUN LINE

          I.    