By Steve Flairty
NKyTribune columnist
Recently, I paged through a copy of an old book I noticed at a yard sale in Versailles. It piqued my interest as soon as I recognized it to be set in central Kentucky, and with the opening scene taking place in Versailles and mentioning both Frankfort and Lexington.
And since I enthusiastically collect old Kentucky books, especially at the right price, I gladly dug down deep into my pocket and handed the woman the quarter she requested.
The book was titled Tempest and Sunshine: Or Life in Kentucky, and it introduced me to author Mary J. Holmes. I quickly jumped into research mode and found that this was her first book, and the original was published in 1854 when she was 29. It is thought that two important characters in Tempest, sisters Fanny and Julia, who were polar opposites and, in time, it caused a contentious event.
A few other facts jumped out, too. First, Holmes was a prolific author, selling 250,000 copies of Tempest and Sunshine, and she wrote 38 other books, selling over two million copies in total. And though she received less than her deserved notoriety, her sales were not far behind those of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who counted the iconic Uncle Tom’s Cabin as her signature offering.
Besides Tempest and Sunshine, four other of her books were set in Kentucky, inspired by her few years living in Versailles. They were: Lena Rivers (1856), The Homestead on the Hill (1856), Marian Grey (1863), and Hugh Worthington (1865).
But the most fascinating tidbit I found was that Mary Holmes had lived in Versailles a couple of years, where she and her husband taught school. She also taught in nearby Glen’s Creek, a place that people in Woodford County recognize today.
She was born in 1825 and died in 1907, likely deserving more credit for her substantive writing contributions. The Nation, a progressive periodical founded by abolitionists in 1865, known as America’s oldest weekly magazine, spoke these words in her obituary: “It is an eternal paradox of our world of letters that the books which enjoy the largest sale are barely recognized as existing by the guardians of literary tradition.
Mrs. Mary Jane Holmes, who died Sunday at Brockport, N.Y., wrote thirty-nine novels with aggregate sales, it is said, of more than two million copies, and she had not even a paragraph devoted to her life and works in the histories of American Literature.”
In Tempest, Holmes draws a sharp contrast between two sisters, Julia and Fanny Middleton (thought to be modeled after an aristocratic Woodford County family of the period, John Singleton and his daughters Bettie and Susan). Julia was physically attractive but had a nefarious nature, while Fanny was not quite as alluring physically, but of exquisite character. Fanny, consequently, was portrayed as the victor by Holmes.
According to William Ward’s A Literary History of Kentucky, Holmes had an ethical system in her writing, recognizing “only black and white so far as conduct is concerned, virtue is also rewarded, evil punished, and no immediate gray is allowed to confuse the reader or lead to compromise.”
And though Holmes might not find such a following in today’s literature, where characters are most often shown to be a mixture of moral complexity, she answered the call of readers in her era.
Her second novel, Lena Rivers, was also quite popular and became, like Tempest, a stage production performed on showboats. Lena Rivers, according to Ward, “rewards good and punishes evil, as beautiful and virtuous Lena Rivers is snubbed by the haughty kinsfolk with whom she lives and, in Cinderella fashion, turns out to be an heiress and wins an adoring and wealthy husband.”
And whether or not one considers Holmes a true Kentuckian–as she and her husband were residents of the state for only three years, her literature was certainly influenced by her time in Woodford County in the mid-1800s. She is another shining star for Kentucky’s rich heritage of writers.
I’ve not been a big Christian romance book reader, but I recently read Lexington author Victoria Bylin’s Together with You and am currently reading her Someone Like You, both published by Bethany House. Bylin is a real good writer, and I like how her characters are shown to be highly believable and realistic representatives of us all—showing even her Christian protagonists in their very “human” state.
For more information about her work, visit http://victoriabylin.com/books.html or go to her Facebook page, “Victoria Bylin, Author.”
My friend Bill McCann, from Cynthiana, let me know about an exciting artistic expression project involving a prison outreach of the Pioneer Playhouse in Danville. A film, an anthology of plays, and a festival of plays are an outgrowth of the Playhouse’s Voices Inside program, which “focuses on incarcerated poets and playwrights who use the power of creativity to change the direction of their lives.
Their poems and plays reflect hard lives lived, tough environments negotiated, past mistakes made,” according to the press release.
Inmates at the Northpoint Training Center, at Burgin (near Danville), are the subjects of the endeavor and reflects their “wish, a will to survive, to grow as human beings and embrace an architecture of change.”
McCann is the editor of the anthology, called I Come From: A Voices inside Anthology. Contact Bill at 859-940-9510 or Wmccann273@gmail.com for information about the anthology or the film, I Come From, written and directed by Robby Henson; also, the Pioneer Playhouse has a link on its web site with plenty of information.
Along with that, Antagonist Productions will produce these plays at the MoonDance Amphitheater, in the Beaumont Subdivision in Lexington, over the four-day period from Sept. 21-24.
Sources for the Mary J. Holmes article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Jane_Holmes; A Literary History of Kentucky (University of Tennessee Press, 1988)
Steve Flairty is a teacher, public speaker and an author of six books: a biography of Kentucky Afield host Tim Farmer and five in the Kentucky’s Everyday Heroes series, including a kids’ version. Steve’s “Kentucky’s Everyday Heroes #4,” was released in 2015. Steve is a senior correspondent for Kentucky Monthly, a weekly NKyTribune columnist and a member of the Kentucky Humanities Council Speakers Bureau. Contact him at sflairty2001@yahoo.com or visit his Facebook page, “Kentucky in Common: Word Sketches in Tribute.” (Steve’s photo by Connie McDonald)
