“Alas, we historians have so little scandal. We are not palaeontologists to display our Piltdowns.”
Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956)
THE SPINSTER CAME INTO MY LIFE with a footnote. I had been doing some research involving a Canadian historian, Frank H. Underhill, who had been a prominent and controversial public figure. I thought I knew his lengthy and distinguished career well, but halfway through the only biography of him, Frank H. Underhill: Intellectual Provocateur, by R. Douglas Francis, I was stumped.1 In 1930, he had played an important part in a sensational international legal and literary controversy involving one of the most famous authors in the world, some leading publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, and an unknown Toronto woman. The woman’s name was Florence Deeks. The author was H.G. Wells.
This was news to me. Wells, of course, I had heard of. Who had not? He was a founder of modern science fiction, a great social prophet, and the author of The Outline of History, one of the most popular works of history in the twentieth century. But who on earth was Florence Deeks? What was this curious business all about? The Underhill biography said little about the controversy and even less about Miss Deeks.
This is where the footnote came in. It mentioned a collection of “Deeks versus Wells Papers” and pointed in the direction of the Toronto Public Library. I resolved to visit it when an opportunity arose. Meanwhile, some preliminary digging in my university library was in order. Soon I knew a little more, for the journalists Donald Jones and Robert Fulford had written briefly about the story of Deeks and Wells.2 Works of reference indicated that corporate papers of one of Wells’s publishers, Macmillan & Company, Limited, were preserved in the British Library in London, and that those of Macmillan of Canada were at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
In his several guises – as writer of science fiction, as advocate of progressive causes such as the liberation of women, and as social prophet – Wells has inspired a very large body of writings about him, scholarly and otherwise. A quick check in the university library suggested that study of the various threads of his life had become almost an industry unto itself, and much of it was easily accessible. Fortunately, Wells’s voluminous papers were in North America, at the University of Illinois. The private papers of some of his friends and correspondents could be found in archives at Oxford, Brighton, and elsewhere.
Doing history can be fun, especially when a subject promises a compelling story or an unresolved mystery, and early in my career it had been my good fortune to discover a long-suppressed biography of the Upper Canadian radical William Lyon Mackenzie languishing in a dusty archive, and to have it published.3 I therefore felt twice blessed. No historian who has had such good luck can forget the thrill of discovery it entails. The curious encounter between the spinster and the prophet piqued my interest in just such a way, as if its details sought release from an unbidden past. An unknown spinster. A famous author. Literary theft. Scandal and intrigue. Courtroom drama. Above all, the spinster. Who was she? And had she really written her own history of the world?
The conventions of scholarship are my stock-in-trade, and this was a story that would require the careful layering of circumstantial detail in order to convince. But fidelity to the factual record alone, I sensed, could not entirely get at the deeper truths of some characters central to the story I wished to tell. Much of it is about silences, about things said and done in the interstices of private life. The conventions of the academic monograph lend themselves poorly to the reconstruction of this kind of world. This was a story, it seemed, that needed to be informed by scholarship on a variety of subjects; but it was also clear to me that the apparatus of scholarship by itself could not adequately address the particular silences of more than one of its main characters.
In Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), Simon Schama quotes from The Sense of the Past, an unfinished novel by Henry James. A historian named Ralph Pendrel wants desperately to communicate with the dead, but the conventional practice of history denies him this. “He wanted the unimaginable accidents, the little notes of truth for which the common lens of history, however the scowling muse might bury her nose, was not sufficiently fine. He wanted evidence of a sort for which there had never been documents enough or for which documents mainly, however multiplied, would never be enough.”4 Exactly.
In The Spinster and the Prophet, the inner life of characters is at times suggested, but only if empirical evidence points to the likelihood of the interior monologue or of the private act. If, then, I portray Miss Deeks sitting alone in her parlour, or Mrs. Wells taking tea, again alone, in an armchair in her garden, and if I suggest that these women may have been thinking about something, I hope readers will forgive these and other small inventions. For they are inventions only when measured against the empirical, which affords itself certain privileges even as it excludes. The great irony is that most working historians recognize that the seemingly objective order of event-driven history dissolves into the realm of the interpretive in the actual practice of their craft. They, too, largely work within the framework of inferred probability.
This is a story that hinges on likelihood. As a legal mystery, its resolution is constructed of circumstantial evidence, and considered as a whole it is powerful stuff. As a domestic drama, the story has come to involve two women, and their voices are often silent just when we want them to speak their minds. But Florence Deeks and Catherine Wells did spend time alone in their parlours and their gardens, just as they ate lunch and combed their hair; and at times they were lonely even when surrounded by others. Often they left only indirect testimony of such mundane details of their lives, but it is testimony of such implicit resonance that not to address it would be tantamount to suppression of a vital element of likely truth.
In his March 1999 keynote address, “The Great War and the Historical Imagination,” given to the annual Frank H. Underhill Colloquium in Carleton University’s Department of History, the eminent historian Modris Eksteins reminded his audience, “For facts to become memorable, an element of fiction [is] essential.” If at times I violate convention, I do so in order to reconstitute likely occurrence. Such passages, fully consistent with the facts as I know them, are invoked as angels of a deeper truth.
The great American historian Carl Lotus Becker once reflected on his experience in writing. His work might not be history, he wrote to a friend; maybe it was moonshine. But Becker wrote in the only manner he could in order to tell his tale. Similarly, my story, history or moonshine, is told in the only way I have thought might do justice to the remarkable entanglement of Miss Deeks and Mr. Wells, who met but once, and to the little-known inner life of Catherine Wells. Besides, moonshine casts its own illumination and it, too, can reveal shadows of hidden figures lurking behind bushes.
A.B. McKillop
Ottawa, Ontario / Messines, Quebec
May 2000