Every time there was a brief discussion about male romance authors, I mentioned Charles Garvice and each time no one had heard of him, which can be surprising because I thought by now some would know that:
a) as Charles Garvice and as Caroline Hart, he sold over seven million copies of his romance novels worldwide between 1902 and 1914
b) he was frequently subjected to ridicule, satirical cartoons, jokes and such because he apparently was proud of being a romance novelist and a believer in HEA.
c) he was a huge influence on the Edwardian-era generation of romance authors including Heyer
I hadn’t heard of him until a fellow researcher put Garvice’s name forward as a potential subject for a six-strand factual series on forgotten English authors. She discovered his existence during the 1950s when she found a stash of his books at her grandmother’s house. The researcher described his works as “Mills & Boonesque” and “predictable but consistently devoted to chasing happily ever after”.
At the time there wasn’t much information on him. Only a couple of footnotes and a brief biographical summary in a reference book here and there. However, the researcher managed to track down three of Garvice’s eight or nine children and was able to obtain interviews with them, discussing their father’s career and works. Our series producer, however, decided not to include Garvice because he was “insignificant” (read: a romance author = no cultural value) so the idea was dropped.
About five or six years ago, I decided to transcribe those audio interviews for the regulars at All About Romance (they were discussing the U.S. history of romance novels and I knew Garvice as a romance novelist was extremely popular in the U.S., so I thought those interviews would provide insights as the adult children apparently mentioned their father’s contemporaries) and went to the BBC archives, but they couldn’t find it anywhere. It could mean they were deleted, discarded or mis-categorised. I had no idea how to contact the surviving children and the researcher (she disappeared from the radar a year or two after that project). So I moved on.
A brief chat with Laura Vivanco recently got me curious enough to check Wikipedia to see if there was an entry on Garvice and to my surprise, there is. And for a neglected and forgotten author, it’s surprisingly quite extensive: Charles Garvice at Wikipedia.
It has a lot more information than what we had a few years ago. A nose around revealed it was mostly due to Steve Holland’s efforts:
In 2010, English freelance author and editor Steve Holland did an exhaustive search of baptismal records, genealogy databases and census records to build a picture of his early life.[4]
And to Laura Sewell Matter whose essay Pursuing the Great Bad Novelist was published in a journal, The Georgia Review, in 2007. I found and read Pursuing the Great Bad Novelist online, and it was entertaining as feck.
It revolves around her journey that begins with the accidental discovery of a ripped Icelandic-translated page that leads her to discovering it’s from Charles Garvice’s romance novel The Verdict of the Heart, a book that no one – not even The British Library – has a copy of, which hardens her determination for her search. It results with her digging up information about the mysterious Charles Garvice.
You can read her amusing essay here (PDF – if you prefer not to read it online, right-click and scroll down to “save as…” and download; if you need a PDF viewing program, try Foxit Reader, it’s tiny and blisteringly fast).
You can download Garvice’s books (1875 – 1919) from Google Books via the Internet Archive:
- The Outcast of the Family; Or, A Battle of Love and Pride: A Novel
- A Life’s Mistake Or Love’s Forgiveness
- By Devious Ways
- Farmer Holt’s Daughter
- In Cupid’s Chains, Or, A Slave for Life
- Kyra’s Fate Or, Love Knows No Bonds
- The Mistress of Court Regna
- Maida: A Child of Sorrow
- The Story of a Passion
- A Heritage of Hate
- Maurice Durant
- The Woman who Came Between (the only Caroline Hart book to be digitally available)
There are four more books available at manybooks.net including
- Adrien Leroy
- At Love’s Cost
- Nell, of Shorne Mill a.k.a. One Heart’s Burden
- The Woman’s Way
I know there are more forgotten romance authors so I’m thinking that I should try my best to bring them into light, especially those from the late Victorian era and the Edwardian era. Cinema will be my tracking tool as there are numerous silent films based on best-selling romance novels.
As to whether they were actually influential, that’s something I’ll leave for another time because I need to figure out which are novels of melodrama and which romance, and like so. Actually, I think it’s best left to the others who have superior skills and brains. Heh. Right now, though, I’m more interested in tracking and fetching lost lambs of time.
Thanks so much for finding and sharing all this information with us. I’ve done a bit more Googling and, very tantalisingly, there’s a book called Some Victorian Men which includes two pages about Garvice, but it’s only available in “snippet view.”
Clive Bloom writes that Garvice wrote more than 150 novels and that “His work, although containing the usual romance or mystery elements, was written in a naturalistic style and often displayed an acute awareness of social problems and divisions” (119)
I don’t quite feel up to trying to track down 150 titles, and I wouldn’t want to just copy what’s in the Wikipedia entry, but it seems like he really ought to be in the Romance Wiki.
Thank you. Some Victorian Men – that’s a fantastic find. I’ll try to track down a copy.
About Garvice, there are six silent films and one talkie based on his novels and a play:
1938 Marigold (play)
1920 Nance (novel)
1920 With All Her Heart (novel)
1919 Linked by Fate (novel “Nance”) a.k.a. Broken Shadows
1918 De kroon der schande (novel “The Coronet of Shame”)
1918 The Rugged Path (novel)
1916 Just a Girl (novel)
It’s interesting to note that Nance was filmed twice within a year in the UK, which suggests it was a popular novel or story. Both are 60-minute silent films, to boot.
IMDB: Charles Garvice
I can help with Romance Wiki by providing info on Garvice. Where could I send the info?
“I can help with Romance Wiki by providing info on Garvice. Where could I send the info?”
Anyone can add to the Romance Wiki. All you have to do is give yourself a user name and password and you can start adding content (the “log in/create account” link is right up at the top, in the right-hand corner). There’s a template for adding an author page here which can be adapted, e.g. for someone like Garvice it might be good to add a section on films based on his books. Or you could just base a page on an existing one which has similar tags e.g. Madeleine Ker’s has the “male romance authors” tag.