Reviews of Mary Tappan Wright’s The Charioteers

Reviews of Mary Tappan Wright’s The Charioteers (1912)

compiled by Brian Kunde

Reviews from:
| The American Year Book, 1912 | The Atlanta Constitution, 7/14/12 | The Atlantic Monthly, 11/12 |
| Book Review Digest, 12/12 | The Boston Transcript, 5?/12 | Chicago Daily Tribune, 6/28/12 |
| The Morning Oregonian, 6/23/12 | The Nation, 8/1/12 | The New York Times, 5/26/12, 7/14/12 |
| Sunday Mercury and Herald, 8/18/12 |

These contemporary reviews of Mary Tappan Wright’s The Charioteers are reproduced complete, with both positive and negative judgments intact, in the order of their original publication. —BPK, March 31, 2008.
As of the latest update, this page features 11 reviews. —BPK, October 15, 2009.

<— The Boston Transcript, [May, 1912?], page [?]:
[The following is quoted in an Appletons display advertisement; the full review has not yet been located.]
The Boston Transcript says: “Mrs. Wright’s treatment of the most delicate, the most serious problem of life is masterly. “The Charioteers” is a novel of marked distinction.”

<— New York Times, May 26, 1912, page BR324:

LATEST FICTION

The Novels of the Week Seem to
be Better Than Usual

Really Good
THE CHARIOTEERS. By Mary Tappan Wright. D. Appleton & Co. $1.30.
     A novel of unusual literary excellence, of some originality and of a verisimilitude not always to be found in American novels has been written by Mrs. Wright in her account of how Octavia Fanshawe undertook to steer the chariot of her life with a high hand, confident in her own conviction of rectitute and purity of intent. The scene of the greater part of the story is laid in a college town, and Mrs. Wright’s own long residence within the shadow of Harvard’s walls has enabled her to recreate the atmosphere with telling effect. Part of the action carries the reader to Greece, and there again much literary skill is evident in the settings. But that for which the novel especially deserves attention is the fineness and virility with which the character of the heroine is portrayed. Not often are such complete, true, ruthlessly but faithfully drawn portraits found in novels by american authors. The book is concerned with spiritual rather than material affais, or, rather, with material things chiefly as they express the conflicts and the progress of the inner drama and mark its crucial moments. It deserves to be welcomed as another evidence of a stirring of the spirit in American fiction which promises to free it from that domination of the material to which it has long been subject, and infuse it with idealistic inspirations and tendencies.

<— The Morning Oregonian, June 23, 1912, page 11:
     The Charioteers, by Mary Tappan Wright, a novel of a daring woman who sets love before marriage. A moral tempest is skillfully pictured, also a Greek background. $1.30 (Appleton & Co., N. Y.)

<— Chicago Daily Tribune, June 28, 1912, page 9:

Among the New Books
Books for Summer Reading.

     In “THE CHARIOTEERS” (Appleton’s) Mary Tappan Wright has written an interesting story, of straight moving plot, well drawn characters, and much keen philosophy about life and love—mostly the sort of love that is “a deception, a fever, a delirum, a device of the flesh.”
     After a painful experience the heroine, at the age of 44, is done with the old dream and ready for the new. Not what she had planned to make over her life, but the best she can do after those misspent years. It ends in compromise, but then, for that matter, so, often, does life.

<— The Atlanta Constitution, July 14, 1912, page C7:

BOOK REVIEWS IN TABLOID
Conducted by Flo Heme Watts.

     The Charioteers. By Octavia Fanshaw. [sic] (Publisher, D. Appleton & Co., New York.) “For it is a yoke of horses that the charioteer of man’s soul driveth, and, moreover, of his horses, the one is well-favored and of good stock, the other of evil stock and himself evil.” That strikes the keynote of the story. It shows the power and perfidy of the evil horse which has succeeded in persuading its charioteer into the broad and open highway. The devil is always clever enough to allow one’s self-respect, beruffled and adorned, to enter the garden of dreams with a blaze of trumpets, but we soon find it, naked and miserable, floundering in a wilderness of weeds. The author succeeds in rescuing her heroine, thereby robbing the climax of some bitterness yet leaving sufficient to teach an important lesson. Octavia Fanshawe, in her narrowing and unsympathetic family life, feels that her love for a man whose wife has deserted him for the stage is her only hope of happiness and salvation. She drives her chariot with unflinching nerve and courage, even though she discovers her mistake in choosing the horse of evil stock. The story is a new treatment of an old theme and is one of the important novels of the season.

<— The New York Times, July 14, 1912, page BR412:

AMONG THE AUTHORS
     Mary Tappan Wright, author of “The Charioteers,” a story of the social life and environment of college professors and their families, lives in Cambridge, where her husband was formerly Professor of Greek in Harvard University. She has also lifed in Greece, where her husband was at one time a professor at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

<— The Nation, August 1, 1912, page 102:

CURRENT FICTION.
The Charioteers. By Mary Tappan Wright. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
     If a fable writer chose to make his animals change spots at every paragraph so that the leopard of the outset became successively a mongoose and a woodchuck, there would be neither limit nor criticism for the antics in which his creatures might be involved. On only some such theory of disorderly evolution may one follow the characters in “The Charioteers.” Professor Manson of Great Dulwich College, Grecian and archaeologist, husband of a dissolute wife and father of two growing boys, begins with a reasonable thoughtfulness for the reputation of the woman whom he would like to marry. After he falls ill in Greece and she has nursed him into health, passing as his wife, he still is the prudent, practical planner for appearances and the conventions. On their return to America, when a divorce has made marriage possible, he is insistent on festivity and a wedding journey—in even exaggerated ways showing himself a stickler for conformity. Can this be the same man who, having obtained his wish and found no flaw in the woman, should suddenly at fifty go utterly to pieces? Octavia, on her part, having once flung herself into the situation, is too lofty-minded to conceal anything and regards her “rehabilitation” by marriage as almost insulting. Yet it is she who will not go to him, desperately ill in the South, partly because she suspects that another woman is taking care of him, but also because she is “not sure she has the right,” since doubts have been cast upon the validity of the divorce. And it is she who, finding him faithless to her, can say, “But you, my poor Ned, can be a true husband to no woman. If you had stood by Nellie” (the drunken wife), “I should not be here to suffer.” The horrid limit of inconsistency for a supposed gentleman is reached when wife number two finds wife number one gayly taking tea with the dying husband who says, hospitably, “Come in; this is truly delightful; Nellie and I have been having the most charming talk.” “I don’t believe,” he adds after the intruder has departed, “there’s another woman in the world that could have played up to my game as she did. It has been most amusing—but tremendously exhausting.”
     Even granting the characters, a literary chaos confuses the main issue. The irregular connection between hero and heroine is a failure, yet neither seems to regret it. The climax is not its rueful ending, which might have lent tragic import to the story. But we are called upon to follow Octavia’s subsequent heart adventures. These were, Item: one thwarted love for a youth eleven years her junior; one friendly acceptance of an elderly suitor. The secondary characters are as incoherent as the principals. Billy, the soul of chivalry, does not await the answer to his proposal of marriage before engaging himself to another woman. Calvert, who enters the scene like a satyr—a man who, “with but two exceptions, always makes the good women uncomfortable”—is he who emerges the good genius of unselfishness. Beyond illustrating the tendency of the large Bent family to “drift” in matters of the affections, no focal motive is discoverable in this novel. All else is a pathless jungle. The flora is minutely pictured; the fauna is often found in pungent conversation; but the scene is a quagmire of no bottom and of none too sweet an odor.

<— Sunday Mercury and Herald (San Jose, California), August 18, 1912, page [39]:
     Mary Tappan Wright, author of “The Charioteers,” a story of the social life and environment of college professors and their families, lives in Cambridge, where her husband was formerly Professor of Greek in Harvard university. She has also lived in Greece, where her husband was at one time a professor at the American School of classical Studies in Athens.

<— The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1912, page 686:

SOME RECENT FICTION
by Margaret Sherwood
     In The Charioteers,⁴ by Mary Tappan Wright, appears a sombre tale, finely wrought to an ethical issue, concerning a high-minded New England woman, who took the great false step and suffered the consequences, slowly growing wise. There is a dignity, a reserve in the treatment; there is no ready display of lavish sentimentality, but a quiet record of slow character-change and growth. To the American academic background, glimpses of the hillsides and the sky of Greece bring welcome contrast and relief, and these suggestions of outer beauty are reinforced by the inner beauty of idealism showing in the initial quotation of Plato.
     ⁴ The Charioteers, By MARY TAPPAN WRIGHT. D. Appleton & Co.

<— Book Review Digest, December, 1912, page 492:
WRIGHT, MARY TAPPAN (MRS. JOHN HENRY WRIGHT). Charioteers *$1.30 (1 1/2 c.) Appleton. 12-11707
     Set among college town folk this story follows analytically the course of a young woman who believed her life, narrowed down to its circumscribed routine, could expand to usefulness and power thr[o]u[gh] marriage with a certain member of the college faculty—a man unhappily wedded to a woman with leanings towards the stage. Tho[ugh] sincere enough in her aims, her means of attainment are unlawful. Yet she persists and drives her chariot unswervingly to bitter disillusionment and disappointment. Her struggle in this false position is portrayed with understanding and power.
[Note: excerpts are appended from the reviews in the Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and the New York Times, here provided separately in full.—BPK.]

<— The American Year Book, 1912, page 63:

AMERICAN LITERATURE
(Oct. 1, 1911, to Nov. 15, 1912)
ARTHUR HOBSON QUINN
     The Charioteers, by Mary Tappan Wright (Appletons), is a rather forceful story of moral issues, with a nervous, slightly overstrained style, but presenting some good character drawing.

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These reviews were originally published in the journals credited. The works here reproduced are in the public domain. All other material in this edition is ©2008-2009 by Brian Kunde.