A Lady of Good Family (25 page)

Spoiler alert: A Conversation with Jeanne Mackin and the Questions for Discussion that follow tell more about what happens in the book than you might want to know until you read it.

Q. Which interested you more about Beatrix Farrand—her passion for gardens or her connection to writer Edith Wharton?

A. The two worked together for me. The bond between Beatrix and Edith, aside from family kinship, was that they both loved gardens. In fact, Edith used to call her writing time her “secret garden,” and when she decided to build her home at the Mount, the garden was one of her primary concerns and delights. It made such a strong impression on me that Edith Wharton’s niece became one of our country’s most famous garden designers.

Edith and Beatrix didn’t always agree on gardens and their designs: Edith favored a more classical, European approach. Beatrix had a strong sense of place, and she thought gardens
in America should reflect that sense of place. Perhaps the two women helped balance each other’s proclivities and provide a sounding board for their ideas.

I am myself a passionate gardener, have been since I moved to the house I now live in, more than thirty years ago, so I understand that twitching in the thumbs that gardeners feel when they see a weed and want to pull it, even in someone else’s garden. It’s as automatic a response as brushing lint off your darling’s jacket before he goes out, and it’s a response I believe Beatrix would have had. And, as a writer, I am a great admirer of Edith Wharton’s work; in fact, I am more in awe of her than I am of Henry James’ novels, so I very much appreciated the time I spent rereading some of her work in order to also understand Beatrix. They were both groundbreakers but also very much women of their time.

If Beatrix hadn’t been related to Edith, I’d still want to write about her and her passion and her gardens. She was a fascinating person and she made gorgeous gardens.

Q. In
A Lady of Good Family
,
you focus on a small part of Beatrix’s life rather than covering a major portion of it. Can you tell us more about the genesis of the novel?

A. When I finished college, I packed a knapsack and spent a year traveling in Europe and some of the Middle East. It wasn’t the grand tour that earlier generations made; it was
hitchhiking and hostels. In some ways that wanderyear was more important to my education than what I received in formal classrooms. The impressions were so strong and memorable: the taste of autumn beer in Germany, spicy with herbs; the heat of the Sahara; the colored light streaming through rose windows in French cathedrals. When we travel, our senses are more alert, and our memories more ready to hold impressions. At least that is so for me.

So when I knew I wanted to write a novel about Beatrix, I decided to begin it with her travels and some of her impressions: the information she took back with her to New York and Maine as she began her professional life. I wanted to choose a particular moment and place—that accidental meeting with Amerigo in the Borghese gardens—and make that the beginning of an arc that wasn’t a full life story, but a story about how she became a professional gardener.

Q. The epigraph—“One felt more and more that some moonlight nights in May . . . the ghosts of the people who once lived there must come back”—suggests why you wrote the novel as not just a love story but also a ghost story. Care to elaborate?

A. Gardens are such haunted places! Some of my earliest memories are of my grandmother’s garden behind her house on Elisha Street, in Waterloo, New York. I still dream about that garden, and when I began planting mine I realized, one day,
that I was more or less trying to re-create her garden, to get back to that place and to those people, many long dead. Sit in a garden, any garden, and you can’t help but feel the presence of the other people, dead and alive, who may have sat in the garden.

Gardens are mystical places, part natural and wild, full of green and growth, and part manufactured and artificial, in the true meaning of the word, with laid paths, wooden benches, and terra-cotta pots. The old Celts believed that whenever there was an important transition and overlap—when day meets night, or when one season gives way to another—that’s when magic happens and doors open into other worlds. In a garden, wild meets cultivated, nature meets human made, so a garden, for me, has always been one of those transitional places, where magic comes alive and mystery abides.

And isn’t lost love always a kind of ghost story? The lover may be nowhere around, and yet he’s always with you in some sense. Ghost stories are about loss and regret and failure; hauntings are about unfinished business.

I love ghost stories, and so did many people of Edith’s generation. She herself wrote several and they are my favorites, especially one called “Afterward,” which was another touchstone for this novel. And of course there’s Henry James’
The Turn of the Screw
, one of the greatest haunting stories ever. It made sense, when I was writing about gardens and those characters, that a ghost would also emerge.

When I found Beatrix’s quote that opens the novel, I was ecstatic.

Q. The novel contains obvious references to two Henry James novels—
Daisy Miller
and
The Turn of the Screw
—and to Edith Wharton’s
The House of Mirth
. Why was it important to you to explore and echo these writers’ work?

A. I was never satisfied with the way Henry James ended Daisy Miller, by simply killing her off.

Daisy, as James created her, is a great character, all innocence and feistiness. She is full of potential, as we say now, and I wanted to explore her potential, to take her places James did not. When he wrote his play version of
Daisy Miller
, Daisy and Winterbourne (I changed his name to Winters) actually have a happy ending, but James ends the play quickly, with the embrace of the two lovers. I wanted to pursue the story, test Daisy with problems and difficulties, and see what kind of woman she would grow into.

Daisy Miller and Lily Bart from
The House of Mirth
have much in common: they are both social outsiders, both on the lookout for advancement, both aware of the limitations their culture places on them, but hopeful that they can avoid those limitations. When I reread
The House of Mirth
, I found some two dozen places in the text where marriage is referred to as a financial transaction, and a woman, the potential bride, is a
“good” or “product” to be sold or at least exchanged. John Galsworthy’s novel
The Man of Property
is my third touchstone for this concept: the property referred to in the title is not just the Forsyte wealth, but the Forsyte wife. She is her husband’s property.

As for
The Turn of the Screw
, it is one of my favorite novels. When Henry James wrote or talked about this novel, he said that the evil was in the reader’s mind, not in the story itself, so we all become coconspirators with the governess when we read this story. Do the ghosts really exist or are they the result of a fevered imagination? It is the question that every good ghost story needs to ask.

Q. It’s tempting to be drawn to the wealth and glamour of New York’s “aristocracy” during what came to be known as the Gilded Age, until we’re reminded of the social restrictions they lived under. Especially shocking is the male attitude that he could do what he wanted—even drive his family into financial ruin—and his wife had no right to question his actions. What was life really like for these families?

A. Divorce, for any reason, was a terrible scandal and almost always seen as a failure on the wife’s part. Wives, happily married or not, were expected to endure, to simply look the other way, to cope. A man’s home was his castle, and he ruled that empire. If a woman married unwisely, that is, to a man with
bad habits such as gambling, visiting prostitutes, keeping a mistress, or conducting blatantly illegal business deals, the wife suffered the consequences along with the husband, although she had no say in the activities.

The law made wives subordinate to husbands, making women legally little more than children themselves. Once women married, they had no say over their own bodies (rape within marriage wasn’t legally recognized until recently) and no say over their children: the father was the authority, and if a couple did divorce, the father, not the mother, had the right to keep the children.

Do you see why mothers made such a to-do over whom their daughters married, and why?

It was a little different, perhaps a little easier, for the wealthy. Money is a form of power, and if a woman had money of her own, as Edith Wharton did from her writing and a family inheritance, she had more say over her own life. Being divorced and penniless could mean starving on the streets; being divorced and well-off with your own income meant having to survive gossip and harsh judgment from others—it wasn’t life threatening.

Q. The novel continually compares the Old World of Europe with the New World of America, and specifically of New York City. Can you expand upon the differences between the two in the years preceding the First World War? How did the war change that?

A. Europe, the Old World, had—still has in most places—the aura of long history and culture. In Rome, for instance, some of the buildings have foundations that date back to the Roman Empire; new apartment buildings lean up against Roman amphitheaters and medieval churches. When you walk in cities like Rome and Paris, you walk through centuries and centuries of history and art.

New York in the eighteenth century was still a village of wooden houses and Native American footpaths turned into mud roads; by the nineteenth century the city had grown tremendously, and by Beatrix’s childhood there were the wide avenues, the stone mansions, the new hotels and department stores that came to define New York, as well as the downside of quick growth and unequal wealth: the tenements, the homeless. By 1913, New York Harbor was the world’s busiest port, even more important than London’s. The New World represented energy and speed and optimism for the future.

Still, when people wanted “culture,” they looked to the Old World, to the art and the museums, and they traveled there. That was the point of the grand tour, to acquire that sense of history and art and culture still based in the Old World. Remember, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York didn’t open its doors until 1870!

Artists like Henry James had a perplexing relationship with their native country, admiring America for its energy and
novelty and opportunities, yet choosing to live in what they perceived as the more cultured Old World. James settled in England, Edith Wharton in France. It’s revealing that when Henry James wrote the happy ending for the play version of
Daisy Miller
, the last thing that Daisy and Winterbourne say is that they are going home to America to be married. “Oh, yes; you ought to go home!” Daisy says. Yet James did not.

After the First World War, New York and the other American cities became even more important. We won the war without suffering damage to our own infrastructure; we moved forward even faster than before. There were important societal changes: women who had done war work outside the home, replacing male labor, were not always happy about being sent back to the nursery and kitchen. And many servants who had gone to offices and factories were even less eager to return to stables and sculleries to work. There was a large shift in labor from servants to employees. While the rich will always have their maids and assistants and private chefs, the middle class had to become much more resilient and self-sufficient. Daisy learns to pack lightly and carry her own bags.

Q. Can you expand upon the many changes in attitude and opportunity that women increasingly enjoyed in the twentieth century? When did laws regarding marriage begin to alter, and when did women really get the vote?

A. Marriage and attitudes about divorce changed drastically in the 1960s, with no-fault divorce. Before that, when couples wanted to divorce, either the husband or wife had to prove that the other spouse had committed adultery, deserted the family, or been violently cruel. That’s why divorce was such a scandal: it meant either that the wife had been a sinful, deceitful person or that she had been a victim of some terrible action.

A hundred years before no-fault divorce, in the mid-nineteenth century, laws and attitudes about marriage and divorce began a slow, important change. Property rights and other rights of married women were decided by the states rather than by the federal government, and varied greatly. In New York State in 1845, the legislature established that working married women could keep their salaries—before that, any income they earned became the property of their husbands.

The Married Women’s Property Act of 1848 further altered the law regarding the property rights of married women, saying that a wife’s property kept in her own name couldn’t be sold without her approval or used without her permission to pay her husband’s debts. That’s why Daisy wants to put the New York house in her own name, once she realizes how dangerous her husband’s gambling impulse has become.

The decision to allow women to vote was made on a state-by-state basis. The Fourteenth Amendment, of 1868, said that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of sex,” yet not all states immediately agreed, so the
Nineteenth Amendment was introduced in 1878 . . . and debated for the next forty years! During those years, the women’s rights movement grew ever stronger and more politically savvy, thanks to leaders like Alice Paul, who, with other members of the National Woman’s Party, picketed the White House for the first time in history. During the First World War, women marched with posters reading, “How long must women wait for liberty?” They burned effigies of President Wilson; they went to prison; they went on hunger strikes.

The last state legislature needed to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment was Tennessee, and the deciding vote in favor was cast on August 18, 1920, by Harry Burn. Supposedly, his mother told him to be a good boy and vote “aye.” His mother should be canonized. What is discouraging is that Alice Paul and the other members of the NWP believed that once all states allowed women to vote, an Equal Rights Amendment would soon follow. We’re still waiting for that one!