Finding Miss Dilettant: Rose Hawthorne Lathrop's Recovered Novel

Abstract

Rose Hawthorne's only complete novel exists in the Boston Public Library's microfilm department. Reference librarians at the Library of Congress and at the Boston Public Library helped me recover, Miss Dilettant, (1) Rose Hawthorne Lathrop's only published novel. I mention it now to include it in the Rose Hawthorne Lathrop chronology published in the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review (Fall 2010). Partially completed novels by Rose exist in the Rosary Hill archives, but Miss Dilettant (1879) is Rose's only recovered complete novel. Interestingly, it looks back to The Scarlet Letter with Hawthorne's characterization of Hester as "self-ordained a Sister of Mercy" (2) and forward with Rose's characterization of her heroine's first encounter serving the poor of New York as a "fresh sister-of-mercy." (3) Both characterizations foreshadow Rose's later work with destitute cancer patients. George Lathrop, Rose's husband and editor of the Boston Courier (1877-1879), published Miss Dilettant, almost 70,000 words and eighteen chapters, in sixteen installments in the newspaper's weekend edition from 5 April to 29 July 1879. George's assistance in the publication and preservation of Miss Dilettant cannot be discounted. One may safely say he was the novel's first editor. With no manuscript currently available, the Boston Courier and the Boston Public Library protected the work for two centuries--no mean service for an editor, a newspaper, and a library. With increased literacy, improved printing capability, and better distribution procedures, serialized fiction gained acceptance in England during the Victorian period (1837-1901) about the time Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and William Thackeray for economic reasons selected installment publication for their new novels. This literary trend caught hold in the United States where serial novels, printed inexpensively, increased newspaper and journal circulation by readers eager for the next episode. Scribner's, Harper's, and the Atlantic Monthly gained credibility as serious serial periodicals, offered readers the best of America's literary talent, and provided incomes for writers. Aware of literary trends and economic reality, editor George Lathrop increased weekend circulation for the Boston Courier when he placed his wife's novel in the mainstream of publication practice. Gradually more American writers preferred to offer their work in installments before it appeared in book form. Rose gave birth to Francis Hawthorne Lathrop 10 November 1876, but she spent months in recovery from post-partum depression, returning home from hospitalization in early 1877 with joy in motherhood that stirred the first chapters of a novel during that year. (4) An early biographer, Theodore Maynard, in A Fire Was Lighted dismissed the existence of a finished book, noting that Rose "made one of her many incompleted attempts to produce a novel." (5) He added that she received a letter from Thomas Niles 28 December 1877 of the Boston publishers Robert Brothers who had read the first seven chapters of a novel, "rather noncommittally." In truth, Niles wrote on that very date that "I have read with much interest" the first seven chapters and have "been expecting the balance of Miss Dilletante." His spelling of "Dilletante" is significant in that it allows readers to trace where biographers discovered the novel and indicates that the title's spelling changed from the time he read Rose's draft to its actual publication. He added, "The character drawing, especially of the heroine, is excellent--the style original but with a peculiarity which, I think, obscures the meaning." Niles concluded, "It is not fair, however, to say much about an unfinished work which I am quite anxious to see the whole of." (6) Niles's letter gives an additional bit of information: by 28 December 1877, Rose had completed seven chapters of a novel that would ultimately comprise eighteen chapters by March 1879. Maynard evidently did not pursue Miss Dilettant, because no manuscript exists in the Rosary Hill archives whose records helped him write his biography. …