Some entertaining Flight of the Heron titbits

[regshoe]

As promised, a happier post!

I have plans afoot regarding Flight of the Heron, of which more anon, but for now I thought I’d share some of the more amusing things I’ve found in the course of my research.

Firstly, a couple of contemporary reviews. This reviewer, writing in Country Life for 14 November 1925, has their priorities in exactly the right places:

An historical novel—and, moreover, a novel of the ’45—which can keep a hardened reviewer out of bed and impatient of every interruption, must be something very much out of the ordinary. This is what Miss Broster’s latest novel certainly is. She has come very near to writing a remarkable historical novel on one or two occasions, and now she has done it. Her plot turns very much on the second sight of one of Ewan [sic] Cameron’s retainers and his prediction of his chief’s [sic] five meetings with a man who first crosses his path through the flight of a heron. This man turns out to be a Captain Keith Windham, for all his Scottish first name an Englishman fighting on the other side, and it is the love which grows between these two young men, the sacrifices and suffering to which it brings them, which give the book its fine quality. Bonnie Prince Charlie, tartans and dirks, satins and powdered hair, all the proper material of the Jacobite novel is here. But the Highland hills and lochs lower and shine from its pages, the Highland winds blow through it, and the romance of heroic fighting and loving—the love of David and Jonathan—lifts it far above the ordinary.

And from Punch for 2 December 1925, a charming poetical review!

Until I read Miss Broster’s tale
I entertained the firm conviction
That quite exceptionally stale,
Flat and unprofitable fiction
Was fairly certain to be found
In any book which tried to render,
As though the theme were virgin ground,
The doings of the Young Pretender.

Well, I was wrong, for, though The Flight
Of (thus it’s named) the Heron centres
Around a topic fairly trite,
And much familiar history enters,
The yarn (from Heinemann) so stirred
My stagnant fount of admiration
That I withdraw each single word
Of my Shakespearean quotation.

The plan is simply told; it shows
The grim perplexities that tether
Two friends whose duty makes them foes,
Yet brings them constantly together;
This to embroider so that thrill
And charm combine to give you pleasure
Needs something more than common skill,
And that is here in ample measure.

Secondly, some information on the genesis of The Flight of the Heron. From a letter written by Broster herself at the request of The Horn Book Magazine in late 1928 or early 1929:

Until three years ago my books had all had either an entirely or a partially French setting. But in 1923, as it happened, I paid a first visit to Lochaber, that district in the Western Highlands of Scotland so saturated with memories of the last Jacobite Rebellion of the “Forty-five.” I was there five weeks (in almost constant rain) and had not when I went the slightest intention of writing about the Forty-five, which, as an overwritten period and one which I knew very little about, rather bored me. But the spirit of the place got such a hold upon me that before I left I had the whole story planned almost in spite of myself. Directly I came south I started to read for it.

(There’s some other very interesting stuff in there: Broster read and liked Dorothy L. Sayers’s Unnatural Death—I'd very much like a more detailed opinion there!—and FotH got a glowing letter to the publisher from a historian descended from the MacDonells of Glengarry; no wonder Broster felt the need to disguise 'Pickle' Glengarry under a fictionalised identity in the two later books!)

The Dictionary of Literary Biography's entry on Broster goes into more detail, quoting from what seems to be an expanded version of that letter:

The picture in her mind that proved the seed for the book was the scene from the middle of the book “where my English hero Keith Windham rescues my Scottish one, Ewen Cameron, from being shot by the English redcoats after Culloden in front of a mountain shieling.” She ruefully comments that she had great trouble with Windham, “who refused to be called anything but Keith, though he was not a Scot, and in fact disliked them.”

Of course the image with which the idea of the book began was that scene. :D And there’s even more interesting stuff in that article also—it’s the longest and most thorough discussion of Broster’s work that I’ve found anywhere so far.

Comments

[hyarrowen]

What fabulous reviews. All of them go straight to the point with no messing about whatsoever. Kudos to those reviewers, and to you for posting them here for our enjoyment!

I really love that Keith was so adamant about his name - that's him in a nutshell, isn't it? Cranky right from the start. And that his gallant rescue of Ewen was the spark of the whole thing. What a lovely insight into Broster's writing process. I had the feeling that it might be Captain Sweetenham's adventures that sparked the whole thing off, but no! First things first, for our author.

(Alas, the link to the DNB's entry led me to a 404...)

[regshoe]

I know, right, that's totally Keith :D It sounds as though Broster usually started her stories with one vivid but contextless image like this, and then planned the rest in around it—I can imagine her starting with that idea of Keith saving Ewen, then reading about Sweetenham and the High Bridge debacle and figuring out from that how this Keith fitted into the historical situation.

(Whoops, thank you—links fixed now!)

[philomytha]

It makes perfect sense that the whole book grew out of that scene! It is so very much the heart of the story, and it is precisely the sort of fantastically iddy sequence that would require an entire novel to hold it and contextualise it.

[regshoe]

Exactly :D Elsewhere in that letter Broster says that she usually started her stories with one vivid image like that, before working the rest in around it, and I have to wonder what the starting point for The Wounded Name was...

[hyarrowen]

I'm guessing the hair-stroking in the orchard!

[regshoe]

An excellent guess :D

[osprey_archer]

That first reviewer truly GETS IT. This is the 1920s equivalent of "You guys, read this book! It's super slashy!", isn't it?

I also love the fact that the scene where Keith rescues Ewen was the seed of the book. That whole sequence is so vivid and bright, it makes perfect sense that the whole book grew from that.

[regshoe]

This is the 1920s equivalent of "You guys, read this book! It's super slashy!", isn't it?

XD Totally.

And yeah, I know—it's such a memorable image, and so well worth working out the rest of the book to make sense of it!

[luzula]

Oh, what lovely finds! Thank you for your digging! : D

and FotH got a glowing letter to the publisher from a historian descended from the MacDonells of Glengarry; no wonder Broster felt the need to diguise 'Pickle' Glengarry under a fictionalised identity in the two later books!
Did you find that glowing letter? I'd love to read it. And ha, that could indeed be a reason to fictionalise Pickle the spy!

[regshoe]

:D

Alas, I do not have the whole letter, but Broster quotes from it in the Horn Book Magazine article (the writer assumed she was a man):

“I have just finished the book, which has moved me more profoundly than anything else I have read for years. I had no notion I was so Highland and so Jacobite. . . . The landscape is marvellously true; not a false touch, not an overstrained note. . . . He has touches, too, that only a poet could have written, so quiet and so full. . . . But how the devil (damn him) did the author get this intimate, inside knowledge of the Highland character? . . . It is marvellous, and makes this book far and away the finest Highland Jacobite story I know.”

[luzula]

Awesome. I wonder what he would have said if he knew she was a woman? : D

[regshoe]

Well, hopefully exactly the same things but with 'she' substituted for 'he' :P But I don't know. The Dictionary of Literary Biography entry makes the interesting comment that '[Broster's] lack of confidence ... may have had a bearing on her taking no steps to correct the assumption of many of her readers for some time that her novels were written by a man. She was averse to personal publicity, but when her gender was discovered she found it necessary to insist that women could write convincingly about men.'