Now! Then! John Strange Winter, a military novelist from York, presents her husband with twins, to general amazement

Excerpt

Husband and wife must mutually bear and concede, if they wish to make home a retreat of bliss and joy. One alone cannot make home happy. There must be unison of action, meekness of spirit, and great forbearance and love in both husband and wife, to secure the end of happiness in the domestic circle.

Mr. Stannard, who was an excellent man of business, managed all his wife’s affairs. When they were married in 1884, Mr. Stannard was under engagement to proceed to Brazil as an engineer in charge of the construction of the North Brazilian sugar factories, at £1,000 a year, on behalf of a firm of contractors with whom he had been connected for some years.

While waiting for sailing orders Government troubles in Brazil disturbed the guarantee to the concessions, the contractors went bankrupt, and Mr. Stannard was suddenly without employment. While seeking a new sphere he interested himself in disposing of unsold MSS. in Mrs. Stannard’ s possession.

These brought an immense influx upon the author of correspondence and work of all kinds, far beyond the capacity of any one woman to cope with. Mr. Stannard naturally dealt with the business part and henceforward found incessant work in this, while Mrs. Stannard devoted herself assiduously to writing, in order to confirm and maintain the success she had so suddenly attained. For ten years she had been accustomed to rapid output, and by having to give no thought to the disposal of her work, she was able to sustain the burden of production, the cares of a young family, and the many claims made upon a genial and successful woman.

It took some years to attain an income equal to her needs, as Mrs. Stannard was much sought after, and the temptations of social life were irresistible; in fact it seemed most desirable and necessary to her that she should give outward confirmation to her success by living in accord with it. In truth the great difficulty of her life was to resist the claims made on her by reason of her popularity, which were always in advance of her income.

At the time of her first success, Mr. Stannard, after long seeking, had been offered a position with the Great Western Railway Company, but, as it would have involved residence in Cornwall, he felt that he could not take Mrs. Stannard from the centre of her world at the moment everything in her career seemed to make absence a bar to a brilliant future. It was clear that she would miss more than the salary he could earn.

Much as he would have liked to follow his profession, he could not reasonably so imperil her future, and he declined the opening with the intention of seeking a London engagement.

As time went on it was obvious that he could not do this without injury to her interests and abandoning to some extent a delightful partnership in which he took the greatest pride, and so he decided to forsake his profession.

Mrs. Stannard had four children. The first was a daughter christened Audrey, to which Noel was added because she was born on Christmas Day (1884). Then came twins, a boy and a girl, who were named Eliot and Violet Mignon, after two of their mother’s creations in fiction.

The announcement that John Strange Winter, the well-known novelist, had presented her husband with twins was the first intimation that the skilled writer of military life was of the fairer sex.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.
Abbreviations:

ER: East Riding
GM: Greater Manchester
NR: North Riding
NY: North Yorkshire
SY: South Yorkshire
WR: West Riding
WY: West Yorkshire

Comment

Also, from the same source:

Between the age of nineteen and twenty-seven, Mrs. Stannard wrote no less than forty-two novels, some of these three-volume length, besides numerous short tales and sketches.

These were published in the Family Herald, London Society, and other periodicals, chiefly under the pseudonym of “Violet Whyte.” Many of these army stories were subsequently incorporated in “Cavalry Life.” It was when this book was issued that the authoress was advised by her publishers to assume a masculine nom de plume, as they considered that the avowal of feminine authorship might prejudice the sale of such a work. She accordingly chose the name she had bestowed on one of the characters in a tale, and so came before the world as John Strange Winter.

And:

It may here be remarked that Mrs. Stannard holds very strongly the opinion that there should be “no sex in art,” and whilst never desiring to conceal her identity, deprecates the idea of receiving indulgence or’ blame on the ground of her work being that of a woman, as both unjust and absurd (Black 1893).

This story and the Black quote via John Bibby (Bibby 2022). I hope that the fact that the twins were born shortly after the couple’s move from York to London will not be held against me.

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