HARRIETT JAY - A BIOGRAPHY

[Photo courtesy of Frankfurt University Library]

HARRIETT JAY - A BIOGRAPHY

Early Life

     Harriett Jay was born on September 2nd 1853 in the town of Grays, Essex. Her father, Richard Jay, was a labourer (later becoming a foreman) at the Grays Chalk Pit. Harriet (the second ‘t’ was added later) was the fifth daughter of Ann Jay, and by 1861 two sons had also been added to the family. In the latter part of 1861 (according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography September 2nd) Harriett’s elder sister Mary Ann Jay married the writer, Robert Buchanan. In her biography of Buchanan, Harriett Jay writes:

“In the eye of the law I was his sister-in-law, but that relationship could not possibly convey any idea of the tie which bound us together. Briefly told, the story is as follows: When my sister had been married some three or four years, and was still childless, she resolved to adopt me. In doing this she was anxious that any love which I might have to give should be given to herself and to her husband, so I was taken from my home at a very tender age and for many years was never allowed to revisit it. When at length I was permitted to see my mother I remember looking at her very much as little Paul Dombey looked at Miss Pipchin, wondering all the time whether she could possibly be my mother, or whether she was some ‘strange person’ whom I was told to regard in that light. I turned away with a great sob and threw myself into my sister’s arms, clinging to her as the only mother whom I was thenceforth to know.”

     In the spring of 1865 Buchanan moved to Bexhill, near Hastings, and the biography includes a brief description of the house and garden, which perhaps suggests that this was when Harriett Jay was ‘adopted’ by the couple. If so, Harriett Jay would have been 11 at the time. One of the problems with Jay’s biography of Buchanan, which is also the main source of information about Jay, is that she obscures some of the facts in an attempt to hide her real age. There is some evidence in the census returns that she did lie about her age - in 1891 she gives her age as 36 which is just a year younger than her real age, but in 1901 her age is recorded as 38, when in fact she was 47. In Chapter 15 of the Buchanan biography she also includes the following referring to Buchanan’s illness in 1869:

“You do not remember,” wrote one of his old friends to me during his last illness, “because you were only a child, but I remember that as far back as those Oban days he had a slight stroke of some kind. He was very ill then, and his brave young wife nursed him back to life.”

Harriett Jay would have been 16 in September, 1869. Buchanan seems to have been complicit in this attempt to conceal her age - in his memoir of Charles Reade, published in The Pall Mall Gazette in 1884 he wrote:

“The occasion of our first meeting was peculiarly interesting to me. A near relation of mine, Miss Harriet Jay, then a very young girl in her teens, had published an anonymous novel, The Queen of Connaught, which had been attributed in many quarters to no less a person than Charles Reade himself.”

The Queen of Connaught appeared in September 1875, when Harriet Jay was 22.
     The winter of 1865 was spent at Etrétat in Normandy. They returned to find Buchanan’s father seriously ill. He died at his son’s house in Bexhill on 4th March 1866. Buchanan’s mother, Margaret Williams Buchanan, continued to live with her son for the rest of her life.
     Until his later success in the theatre, money was a constant problem for Buchanan. He had no financial sense whatsoever and in Chapter 15 of Robert Buchanan Harriett Jay wrote:

“The struggle for existence which darkened his whole life was mainly the result of his early training—a taste for luxury of all kinds had been instilled into him by his mother, while from his father he inherited a love of speculation. From neither had he learned the value of money; when he had it he spent it like a lord, when he hadn’t it he lived upon credit, and then, finding himself in difficulties, he endeavoured to extricate himself by hard work, or by plunging into hazardous speculations which very often had the effect of sinking him still deeper in the mire.
     To such a man a wife fashioned on the lines of Jane Welch Carlyle would have proved a blessing, but my sister had unfortunately been cast in much the same mould as himself. She had no idea of managing, or saving, or thinking of to-morrow. “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof” was her motto, and so like a couple of babies they muddled through life, tasting sometimes of its joys, but oftener of its sorrows.”

     In 1868 Buchanan left Bexhill and moved his family to Scotland, eventually settling at Soroba Lodge in Oban. In 1869 he made an attempt to raise money through a series of public readings, but this had to be abandoned because of ill health. In January 1870, through the intercession of Robert Browning, Buchanan was awarded a Civil List Pension of £100 per year. At this point Buchanan’s main literary endeavour was poetry, but the ‘Fleshly School’ incident effectively put paid to his ambitions in that area. In 1873, Buchanan left Scotland and seeking a cheaper place to live, moved to Rossport, County Mayo, Ireland. It was here that Buchanan first considered writing novels as a solution to his financial problems and towards the end of 1874 he began a writing partnership with William Canton, working on the novel which was later published as The Shadow of the Sword. However Buchanan dissolved the partnership in the early stages and the first novel written at Rossport was the work of the youngest member of the Buchanan household.

Harriett Jay - novelist

     In 1875 Harriett Jay’s first novel, The Queen Of Connaught, was published (anonymously) by Richard Bentley and Son. In a letter to Robert Browning of 27th October, 1875, Buchanan wrote:

“You will be glad to hear that my sister-in-law, whom you know, and who has lived with us from childhood, has had a great success with her first story – “The Queen of Connaught.” A large first edition has been sold, & the second is out. You may guess how far more this delights me than any success of my own.”

     Jay’s first novel seems to have been well received by the Press (according to the cuttings included in the endpapers of her subsequent works) and is summed up by Stephen J. Brown, S.J. in his Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances, and Folk-Lore (Dublin and London: Maunsel and Company, Ltd., 1916 - p.121) as follows:

“How an Englishman, John Bermingham, fell in love with and married the descendant of an old western family. How he tried, but failed, to reform with English ideas the Connaught peasantry. Told with considerable power and insight. Note especially the description of a police hunt over the mountains in the snow.”

     Buchanan’s first novel, The Shadow of the Sword began its serialisation in the Gentleman’s Magazine in January 1876 and was published in November of that year. Harriett Jay’s second novel, The Dark Colleen, was published around the same time, again anonymously (‘By the Author of “The Queen of Connaught.”’) by Richard Bentley and Son.

“Scene: an island off the W. coast. Morna Dunroon finds a French sailor, survivor of a shipwreck. She afterwards marries him, but he abandons her and goes back to France. She follows him, and passes through strange adventures, but he is still false to her. Nemesis follows in the end. Father Moy is a fine portrait of a priest. The dialect and the scenery are both true to the reality, the description of the storm at the close is particularly well done.”
(Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances, and Folk-Lore by Stephen J. Brown, S.J.)

     On 15th January 1877 the first theatrical collaboration of Jay and Buchanan, an adaptation of The Queen of Connaught was produced at the Olympic Theatre, London, starring Ada Cavendish. The extent of Jay’s involvement in the adaptation is open to question. It is usually credited to Buchanan alone, but the section concerning the genesis of the play and Charles Reade’s involvement, in Chapter 24 of Robert Buchanan, gives the impression that as well as providing the initial story, she was also involved in the adaptation process:

“As the work proceeded we went, on Mr. Reade’s invitation, from time to time to Albert Gate, to read him certain scenes and talk over others, and many delightful evenings were so spent.”

The dramatisation of The Queen of Connaught achieved a three month run of 53 performances closing on 17th March 1877. However it was the success of Buchanan’s first novel, The Shadow of the Sword which gave him the means to move back to London and in the autumn of 1877 the family left Ireland. Buchanan spent the next year producing his own weekly journal, Light, which only lasted for six months. In September 1879, Madge Dunraven, Harriett Jay’s third novel, was published by Richard Bentley and Son. The review in the January 1880 edition of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine read:

“Madge Dunraven, is essentially an Irish tale, although the scene is shifted very early to England, and the narrative has little of the rollicking abandon of the conventional Irish novel. The characters for whom our sympathies are most keenly excited are indeed Irish of the Irish in their tastes and feelings; but the alchemy of love converts them to many English and thoroughly un-Irish ways, while their Irish virtues exert a mellowing influence upon their English associates. The author describes a “Castle Rackrent” which is no less dilapidated, and is even more genial in its dilapidation, than Miss Edgeworth’s. The narrative is seasoned with a double love story, several poaching adventures, a brace of homicides, and an exciting trial scene. It is, however, less sensational than might be inferred from these rather startling incidents.”

     In October 1879 Buchanan (and family) visited Ireland again. They arrived in Mulranny, near Westport, County Mayo, on the day when Mr. Sidney Smith, Lord Sligo’s land-agent, had been attacked by an armed gang, one of whose number was killed by Smith’s son. The incident was later used by Buchanan in his play, The English Rose, but it could also account for the change in tone in Harriett Jay’s next ‘Irish novel’, The Priest's Blessing, or Poor Patrick’s Progress from this World to a Better. The Buchanans cut short their visit to Ireland and returned to London.
     In 1880 Mary Buchanan was diagnosed with cancer. She had never been in the greatest health - in Chapter 12 of Robert Buchanan Jay describes her “more or less an invalid” - suffering from various ailments over the years, but this was the final blow. In Chapter 20 of Robert Buchanan Jay uses her sister’s illness to explain the falling off in quality of Buchanan’s novels after God and the Man, but in fact that novel was published just a few weeks prior to his wife’s death. However, there is probably some truth in the following passage:

“His young wife, who had never been strong, was stricken with the cruellest of all diseases, cancer, and for two long years she was slowly dying. He was too poor a man to be able to sit down and nurse his grief, work had to be done, and he did it, though not with the same heart, the same enthusiasm. His great ambition now was to make money, and so he scribbled at fiction in order to attain this end.”

Buchanan’s last book of poetry had been Balder the Beautiful, his last play, the adaptation of The Queen of Connaught in December 1877 and he had not published a novel since his first, The Shadow of the Sword in 1876. Most of 1878 had been taken up with his failed weekly journal, Light, but he does not seem to have produced anything at all in 1879 or for most of 1880. So Harriett Jay’s assertion that Buchanan’s “great ambition now was to make money” is probably correct, although as well as fiction (which he was still taking seriously), he was also concentrating on the theatre, particularly since Harriett Jay had ambitions to be an actress.

Harriett Jay - actress

     According to a profile of Harriett Jay in The Theatre (April 2, 1888), “it was in 1879 that Miss Jay first trod the boards with a touring company to get a little insight into theatrical life”. She made her London debut on Thursday November 18th, 1880 (at the age of 27) at the Crystal Palace in a matinée production of The Queen of Connaught, in the title rôle, of which event, ‘Cherubino’ in the The London Figaro wrote:

“Much curiosity, was awakened by the novelty of an authoress appearing as an actress—an event scarcely paralleled in the present generation. The result, on the whole, warranted the very hazardous attempt, chiefly on account of the young lady’s very unusual personal advantages. Miss Jay is very young, tall, and graceful, with a good voice and expressive face, and her acting, though far from perfect, showed careful study and preparation. At the conclusion, in answer to a boisterous call, Mr Neville led Miss Jay forward, and warmly shook hands with her before the audience. There is no doubt that the lady will be an acquisition to the stage.”

The matinée was the curtain-raiser to the main event a month later when Harriet Jay starred as Lady Jane Grey in a new play by Robert Buchanan, The Nine Days’ Queen. The play was first tried out at a matinée at the Gaiety Theatre on December 22nd 1880 before transferring to the Royal Connaught Theatre on February 14th 1881 for a month’s run. The play was then taken on tour. A review in The Scotsman of the Gaiety matinée was generally favourable towards both the play and Harriett Jay:

“The principal character, Lady Jane Grey, was played by Miss Harriet Jay, a lady who, as the authoress of “The Dark Colleen” and “The Queen of Connaught,” has won a high reputation as a novelist. Miss Jay has only once before made her appearance on the stage, and her performance was indubitably one of high promise. She has, as was only to be expected, much to learn, but still her acting is sympathetic and intelligent, and she evidently spares no pains to embody the author’s ideas. With more experience and confidence, and a more entire abandonment of herself to the situation, she will one day be an acquisition to the stage.”

     In the 1881 census, Buchanan is listed as ‘Author and Dramatist’, Harriett Jay as ‘Authoress and Actress’ (Jay also gives her age as 24 rather than 27). After The Nine Days’ Queen Buchanan’s next play to feature Harriett Jay was an adaptation of his most successful poem to date, his satire on the Mormons, St. Abe and his Seven Wives (published anonymously in 1871). The play was originally titled, The Exiles of Erin: or St. Abe and his Seven Wives, then changed to The Mormons: or St. Abe and his Seven Wives. It opened at the Olympic Theatre on May 7th 1881. On May 9th another play of Buchanan’s, his adaptation of his novel, The Shadow of the Sword was produced at the Theatre Royal, Brighton. (Buchanan had also published his second novel, A Child of Nature in March). The Mormons lasted for just under a month, closing on June 2nd, and the following night there was a benefit performance for Harriett Jay, the programme consisting of A Madcap Prince (in which she appeared as the heroine, Elinor Vane) and the final act of The Nine Days’ Queen.
     In July 1881, Harriett Jay’s fourth novel was published by F. V. White and Co. This was The Priest's Blessing, or Poor Patrick’s Progress from this World to a Better, a devastating and quite relentless attack on the influence of the Roman Catholic Church on the people of Ireland.

“A most objectionable book from a Catholic point of view. Very hostile picture of the priesthood of Ireland, who keep the people in ‘bovine ignorance.’ The two specimens that appear in the story are villains of the worst type. One is 25, and has been seven years a priest! He drinks heavily, and works miracles. By another a respectable peasant is incited to murder. The views of politics can only be described as ‘Orange.’”
(Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances, and Folk-Lore by Stephen J. Brown, S.J.)

It is no surprise that Stephen Brown (S.J.) is so critical in his appraisal, although it should be said (to avoid any misconception that there is some supernatural element in the book) the curate does not actually ‘work miracles’ - that is how he is perceived by his ignorant flock. This is no romantic tale of old Ireland, it is a savage indictment of the Catholic Church. The novel is written in a very spare style, there is no hero as such, just a victim (the ‘Poor Patrick’ of the title) and a truly Machiavellian villain in the person of the parish priest, Father Malloy. It was the first of Harriett Jay’s novels to appear under her own name (rather than ‘by the author of’) and was obviously inspired by the incidents of October 1879. Robert Buchanan provided a preface to Harriett Jay’s next Irish novel, My Connaught Cousins (1882), defending The Priest’s Blessing and his sister-in-law, but also indicating that their views on the ‘Irish question’ differed:

“The Authoress of My Connaught Cousins, smarting under a certain misconception, but thinking that polemics of any kind ill befit a lady’s pen, has asked me to write a few prefatory words explaining how this book and its predecessors came to be written, and how unjust is the charge, made in one influential quarter, that she is an enemy to Irish nationality. The task is a difficult one, especially as I sympathise more strongly than she does with the present political movement, and am, indeed, much more of an advanced Liberal; but we are entirely at one in our sympathy with the social life and aims of the Irish people, and in our love for what is best and noblest in the Irish nature. In these days of haste and folly, anything really original in literature is certain to be misunderstood. ... In a subsequent but far less successful work, unpopular from its rigid and terrible truth of delineation, the Authoress put her finger on the canker which now, as heretofore, poisons the wholesome life of Ireland; but the Priest’s Blessing, though neglected now, will live as perhaps the most powerful social study that ever came from the mind of a young girl. No unprejudiced person who reads that work, and takes it in connection with other works from the same pen, will doubt its deep insight—I should say, its unparalleled insight—into the nature of the Irish peasant.”

     Harriett Jay’s next novel, Two Men and a Maid, published by F. V. White and Co. in November 1881, was a return to the usual romantic business, although this time the story was set in Wales. A review in The Scotsman summed it up as follows:

“This preposterous story is told with a certain amount of narrative and dramatic vigour; but no literary power could give real interest or vitality to a plot which is one long violation of probability. It is impossible for the reader to have the smallest sympathy with the personages of the tale, most of whom would inevitably, in real life, be consigned to a lunatic asylum before they had committed half the follies here ascribed them.”

     November 1881 also saw the publication of Buchanan’s third, and perhaps best, novel, God and the Man. However the month had a greater significance for Buchanan and Jay. In the summer of 1881 they had moved from London to the nearby town of Southend-on-Sea, and it was there, on November 7th, that Mary Buchanan died. She was buried in the churchyard of St. John the Baptist in Southend on 13th November 1881. Following the death of his wife Buchanan spent some time in France and then returned to London to take up the theatrical challenge again.
     On 8th April 1882 Lucy Brandon (adapted from Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford) was produced at a matinée at the Imperial Theatre, Westminster, with Harriett Jay in the title role. On the same day the production of The Shadow of the Sword opened in London after its provincial tour, at the Olympic Theatre. Neither play was a success. The review in The Stage included the following mention of Harriett Jay’s performance:

“Mr. Buchanan was unfortunate in the lady who represented his heroine, for no matter how well Miss Harriett Jay may dress on the stage, or how becoming she may look, this will not atone for her want of dramatic instinct.”

And a London correspondent for The New York Times opened his piece reviewing the two plays with:

“The Easter holidays have this year been specially marked by some notable new pieces and revivals at the theatres. Mr. Robert Buchanan, poet, novelist, and dramatist, has had the exceptional distinction of filling the programmes at two theatres. Never a popular man, either as author or playwright, it cannot be said that this good fortune has contributed to advance either his interests or his reputation. Endowed, as he undoubtedly is, with somewhat remarkable powers as a picturesque writer in the double domain of fiction and poetry, he appears utterly to fail in the direction of dramatic construction. It is true his experiences of the stage have been more or less unfortunate; his pieces have rarely been either well-mounted or fairly represented, yet he has had some chances as a dramatist which many a better playwright sighs for in vain. To be “put up” at two London theatres during the Easter holidays is surely no small matter, and it is a calamity quite as great for authorship in general, and the stage in particular, that in neither instance has Mr. Buchanan reached even a moderate success.”

     Buchanan returned to his novels, and Harriett Jay, apart from two matinee performances of A Madcap Prince and The Nine Days’ Queen at the Gaiety Theatre in November 1882, joined him with her fifth novel, My Connaught Cousins, published by F. V. White and Co. in December 1882.

“Jack Kenmare goes to his uncle’s place in Connaught, and has a pleasant time in company with his cousins. He becomes engaged to one of them, who writes stories. Several of these are given. An excellent moral tale, and a glimpse of happy Irish life in a country house. The political point of view is not Nationalist; neither is it hostile to Ireland.”
(Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances, and Folk-Lore by Stephen J. Brown, S.J.)

     In 1883 Buchanan’s theatrical fortunes changed with the production of Storm-Beaten, an adaptation of God and the Man, at the Adelphi Theatre. It opened on 14th March and ran till 8th June. Buchanan also managed to sell the play to Messrs. Shook & Collier of New York where it opened at the Union Square Theater on 26th November. Harriett Jay was not in Storm-Beaten, but Buchanan’s next play, Lady Clare, featured her in a supporting role as the Hon. Cecil Brookfield. This was Harriett Jay’s first performance as a male character (although in her matinee performances of the heroine in A Madcap Prince she would have impersonated Charles Stuart) and indicates a change in her approach as an actress. Although she would play the heroine again, her strength as an actress seemed to lie in supporting roles, especially if she could switch gender. The reviews of her performance were uniformly good and included this from The Scotsman:

“Miss Harriet Jay played a lad with infinite truth and many pleasant touches of humour. This lady has, indeed, rarely been seen in a part which showed her to so much advantage.”

Lady Clare (the plot taken - without permission - by Buchanan from Georges Ohnet’s Le Maître de Forges) was another success, running from 11th April to 29th June at the Globe Theatre and being sold to the American producer, Lester Wallack. It opened in New York at Wallack’s Theatre on 13th February 1884 and despite some controversy over its disputed origins, was described by The Brooklyn Eagle as “the solitary success at Wallack’s this year. It has caught the public fancy and is doing an immense business.”
     When Lady Clare closed at the Globe Theatre, Buchanan produced a revival of J. B. Buckstone’s 1847 play, The Flowers of the Forest. It was not a success but is worth noting  since it included Harriett Jay’s second appearance in a supporting role as a male character, Lemuel, the gypsy boy. The review in The Stage suggested the following reason for the revival:

“The revival has probably been thought of so that Miss Harriett Jay might repeat the success that she made as the boy in Lady Clare. But her Lemuel possesses no realisation whatever of the character, and the attempt can only be regretted.”

     On October 15th 1883, Buchanan’s next play, A Sailor and his Lass, a collaboration with Augustus Harris, opened at Drury Lane. Harriett Jay was back playing the heroine, Mary Morton, the ‘Lass’ in the title, although in this elaborately staged melodrama, the actors took second place to the scenes of exploding bombs and shipwrecks. The play closed on 8th December to make way for the Drury Lane pantomime.
     During the run of A Sailor and his Lass, F. V. White and Co. published Harriett Jay’s sixth novel, Through the Stage Door. Another fairly conventional romance - Lottie Fane, a burlesque actress is betrothed to Colonel Sedgemore, whose sister opposes the match and puts various obstacles in the way - there is additional interest in its setting in the theatrical world, which by this time, Harriett Jay knew well. The review in The Graphic did not rate the book as highly as Jay’s Irish novels but concluded with the following:

Miss Jay holds the balance evenly throughout, between whatever reasons have in any period injured the stage in social estimation and those dull and stupid prejudices which go far to keep the stage from vindicating itself, and gaining the full recognition bestowed upon other arts so freely. In short, the novel admits the due amount of right and wrong on both sides of the question, and amply shows how much more human interest attaches to the life of the stage as it really is than to those monstrous illusions hitherto given to the world as theatrical novels. That actors and actresses are just men and women is a piece of knowledge which is still uncommon; and Miss Jay’s interesting and able story will help to promulgate this truth.

The book was also the subject of two contrasting reviews in The Spectator, which caused Harriett Jay to write a letter to the Standard and this incident was later referred to in George Gissing’s New Grub Street.
     In November 1884, when Robert Buchanan and Harriett Jay were both in America, an adaptation of Through the Stage Door, retitled Lottie, was produced at the Novelty Theatre in London. There was no author’s name attached to the play but it was subsequently attributed to Robert Buchanan and it seems reasonable to assume that Harriett Jay was also involved in the adaptation. The play was not a success.

Harriett Jay - playwright

     In 1884 Buchanan and Jay turned their attention to America. Storm-Beaten had its 75th performance at the Union Square Theatre in January, and Lady Clare opened at Wallack’s Theatre, New York in February. In April an item appeared in the Brooklyn Eagle announcing that Harriett Jay would be “going to the United States under the management of Colonel Sinn, of Brooklyn. She will appear in Mr. Robert Buchanan’s historical dramas.” This was not strictly correct, but Buchanan and Jay did travel to America in the summer of 1884. In Robert Buchanan Jay deals with the American visit, which lasted almost a year, in one brief paragraph. The trip did not get off to an auspicious start since the play which Buchanan had hoped to sell to Messrs. Shook and Collier, A Hero in Spite of Himself, a satire on American life, was rejected by the managers of the Union Square Theatre as being unsuitable for an American audience. Buchanan then tried Lester Wallack with another play, Constance, which opened on 11th November and was a dismal failure. Harriett Jay then entered the fray with her American debut in a matinée of Tom Taylor’s Lady Clancarty at the Madison-Square Theatre on 26th November. The New York Times had this to say:

“Miss Jay is a lady of stately presence, with an interesting face, and her methods as an actress were evidently derived from a careful study of good models. Her voice is sufficiently strong, though her utterance is lacking in variety of tone, and therefore somewhat monotonous. In moments of excitement Miss Jay’s speech is apt to be thick, as if her mouth were filled with pebbles. This defect, however, may be partly attributable to the nervousness due to her first appearance before a strange audience. As a whole, her performance yesterday produced a decidedly favorable impression, and it is safe to predict that this lady will always please in characters which do not demand too great a display of emotional power. Her Lady Clancarty is a sweet and lovable gentlewoman, more at ease while hearing good tidings of her absent husband from the lips of the pseudo Hazeltine than in the subsequent scenes of sorrow and despair. Her graceful manner and her earnestness, however, pleased everybody, and she was warmly applauded.”

This was not too bad a review for The New York Times, considering that earlier in the year (18th May) the paper had printed the following item about Buchanan and Jay:

“Mr. Robert Buchanan, the adapter of “Lady Clare,” has written a new comedy which he is trying to get produced in London. Mr. Buchanan is led to this reckless course through the success of “Lady Clare” and the large royalties which have poured into his pocket from this country ever since the production of this piece. In London Mr. Buchanan is not regarded with enthusiasm by theatrical managers. In the first place he has written a large number of pieces, none of which, barring “Lady Clare,” has been successfully performed in the English metropolis. In the second he has a sister-in-law named Harriet Jay, who is the cause of travail and sorrow in managerial circles. Whenever Mr. Buchanan writes a play he insists, as far as he can, upon having Miss Jay perform the principal character. The lady is an amiable and interesting person when she does not try to act. But the quickest preparation for a London exodus lies through the appearance of Miss Jay in public. It is because Mr. Buchanan, metaphorically speaking, goes around with a bundle of manuscript under one arm and his sister-in-law under the other that he is not enthusiastically regarded by English managers.”

Prior to Harriett Jay’s appearance in Lady Clancarty, The New York Times on 2nd November had also mentioned that:

 “The principal design of this stage representation seems to be to prove to the great American public that Miss Jay is a vastly more beautiful woman than Mrs. Langtry.”

And it was not just The New York Times, which seemed to have something against Harriett Jay. The Brooklyn Eagle in a piece published on 7th December also seemed unimpressed:

“In connection with this last failure, another one occurs to me. It is that of Miss Harriet Jay, the sister in law of the author, Robert Buchanan, whose last play fell so flat. Mr. Buchanan said that his sister in law was considered the handsomest woman in England, and that he considered her a great actress. The first statement didn’t go for much; the faith of the American people in the appreciation of the English for female beauty grows beautifully less as the years roll on. There was, therefore, no surprise when Miss Jay proved to be a very long, square shouldered, sharp featured and awkward lady. As for her histrionic ability, it may be said that she made one appearance only, and that the effect of her acting was somnolent, solemn and trite. It was a comedy part, too.”

     Harriett Jay tried again in January 1885, with a couple of performances of Lady Clare in which she reprised her supporting role as Cecil Brookfield. Again The New York Times had a little dig at her prior to the performance:

“The other item of interest in connection with the “Lady Clare” production is in the statement that Miss Harriet Jay will appear in masculine attire in the part played at Mr. Wallack’s theatre by young Mr. Buckstone. It is reported that when it was decided Miss Jay was to play the part she immediately sent all the way to London for the raiment in which she originally appeared in this character. It has hitherto been supposed that there were plenty of clothes in America.”

Although the paper’s review of the production did concede that:

“Miss Harriet Jay appeared as the Hon. Cecil Brookfield, originally played by her in London, and gave a charming performance.”

     So, the adventure was not going that smoothly for Buchanan and Jay when in March, 1885 they tried their final shot at American success. The New York Times (12 March), as usual, had no faith in the venture:

“Mr. Robert Buchanan has succeeded in disposing of one more play in this country. This piece is called “Alone in London,” and it is to be tried on in Philadelphia some time in May next. If “Alone in London” proves successful it will be brought out in New-York at the beginning of the following season, and after that it will be sent through the general country. “Alone in London” has a material attachment in the shape of Miss Harriet Jay, who appears to be generously thrown in with the most of Mr. Buchanan’s theatrical bargains. Miss Jay is regarded by Mr. Buchanan as the most beautiful woman and the most accomplished actress in the world, and this fact indicates the degree of generosity which induces him to insist that managers who accept his plays shall also receive the further boon of having them performed by the radiant and accomplished Miss Jay.”

But this time the paper got it completely wrong. Buchanan’s production of Alone in London, or, A woman against the world, written by himself and Harriett Jay, which opened at the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia on 30th March, 1885 was a complete success and the American rights were immediately snapped up by Col. Sinn of Brooklyn. It toured America for the next two years and made a star of Cora Tanner who played the hapless heroine, Annie Meadows. In the original production Harriett Jay played the supporting role of Tom Chickweed, “a waif and a stray” (to quote the programme). Another male character for Miss Jay, but this one got to kill the villain in the final act.
     In May 1885, Harriett Jay’s seventh novel, A Marriage Of Convenience, was published by F. V. White and Co. The Graphic, a paper which had previously been very complimentary about Jay’s novels, was not impressed and felt that the book “bears all the signs of fatal hurry.” The review went on to say:

“The characters are stagey to extravagance—the melodramatic Spanish Duke, the man who has vowed life-long vengeance against him and follows him like a sleuth-hound, the stern old lady who also lives for an incomprehensible or rather lunatic revenge, the persecuted heroine, and all the rest of them. ... We have had so constantly to speak with unqualified admiration of Miss Jay’s work that we are the more bound to note the first symptom of indifference to what is due from an artist to her art. Nobody can be always at his or her best: but novels like “A Marriage of Convenience” are best left in the limbo of the magazines—in one of which, to judge from the periodical recurrence of a fainting fit or some other temporary climax, the story probably first appeared.”

After A Marriage Of Convenience there was a gap of twelve years until the publication of Harriett Jay’s next, and final, novel.
     With an assured success in America with Alone in London, Buchanan and Jay returned to England, settling for a time in Southend, to replicate that success in London. The play was put on at the Olympic Theatre under the management of Mrs. Anna Conover, although Buchanan involved himself in the production, spending so much money on the elaborate scenery and stage-effects to the point where the play would not have turned a profit even if it played every night to a full house. Harriett Jay reprised her role as Cecil Brookfield in a revival of Lady Clare at the Pavilion Theatre, London, which opened on 24th August before changing into Tom Chickweed’s trousers for the London premiere of Alone in London on 2nd November 1885. The critical response to the play was mixed. It was, after all, merely a melodrama. The Times summed it up as:

“Alone in London is a sound and vigorous play of the type which has been popularized at Drury-lane and the Adelphi. It is acted by a superior company, and it is placed upon the stage with all the advantages of scenic effect to be derived from whirling scenery and the other appliances of modern stage management. The public who may have come to scoff, as they did at the unfortunate interpolation of a nigger minstrel scene in the first act, remain to applaud; and if there is perhaps too much sordid realism in the scenes of low London life for the taste of the superfine playgoer, there runs through the play a healthy vein of dramatic interest, well calculated to arrest and to hold the attention of a popular audience.”

Whereas The Stage had this to say of Tom Chickweed:

“We have had quite enough poor Jo on the stage and to spare, and Gipsy Tom alias Tom Chickweed might easily be dispensed with, so far as the play is concerned, and greatly to its improvement. There is no use in making a character of this sort so prominent, even supposing it to be at all necessary, which we very much doubt, and even granted that it is well acted. In the hands of Miss Harriett Jay the part becomes tiresome, for the lady is not sympathetic, and she is distinctly not suited to the character, for she is “more than common tall for a woman” on the stage.”

     On December 3rd, Amy Roselle, who had been contracted to play the heroine, Annie Meadows, at a salary of £30 a week, was fired. The play was losing £200 a week and the actors had been asked to take a 50 percent wage cut, which Amy Roselle had refused to do. Harriett Jay took over as Annie Meadows for the remainder of the run at a salary of £10 a week. On 15th January, 1886, Mrs. Conover handed over the management of the Olympic Theatre to Robert Buchanan and the play limped along to its 100th performance on 12th February. The play finally closed on 20th February and was then taken on a provincial tour by Harriett Jay, starting in Liverpool on 22nd February.
     Prior to this, on 10th February, Harriett Jay had found time to appear in the title role of Sappho, a one-act lyrical romance by Harry Lobb, with music by Walter Slaughter. The matinée at the Opéra Comique was in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street. This was one of the few appearances of Harriett Jay in a work not written by Robert Buchanan or the Buchanan/Jay partnership. The review in The Stage (12 Feb.1886) said that “Miss Harriett Jay looked the character of Sappho”.
     To Buchanan it must have seemed that Alone in London, despite the American reception, was not the great success he had hoped for. He was also bothered about becoming known as a writer of mere melodramas. And then there was his inability to manage money (which was one of the reasons for the apparent failure of Alone in London at the Olympic). Whatever the reason, Buchanan sold the rights to the play to J. F. Elliston who successfully toured the play in the provinces for at least the next sixteen years. In Chapter 24 of Robert Buchanan Harriett Jay writes the following:

“But the play which made the most money was “Alone in London,” the very one for which he cared the least; indeed, he could never bring himself to speak of it with anything but contempt. However, it has never failed to make money for everybody connected with it, but the money so earned brought him no satisfaction, for he was always ashamed of the source from which it sprang, and so, taking my consent for granted, he sold the piece for an absurdly small sum to Messrs. Miller and Elliston, and so parted with the goose which laid the golden eggs.”

And the same point is made by Henry Murray in Chapter 26:

“If he took a theatre he invariably lost by hundreds and sometimes by thousands, and that too on the very plays which founded the fortunes of others, as, for instance, when he sold “Alone in London” for a mere song, to see it patrol the provinces year in year out, reaping a golden harvest for its lucky purchasers, who confessed that within ten years they had amassed £14,000 clear profit by the transaction.”

Harriett Jay’s annoyance, particularly considering what was to happen in 1894, is understandable but it is partly due to hindsight. Alone in London was not the only successful play to which Buchanan sold the rights as soon as he was able. Besides, in April 1886 he had a legitimate theatrical success on his hands with Sophia, his adaptation of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. Sophia opened at the Vaudeville Theatre on 12 April 1886 and ran for over 350 performances. Add to this the fact that Amy Roselle had brought a couple of court cases against Buchanan and Mrs. Conover, for unfair dismissal and slander, the first going to trial in January 1887, when both Buchanan and Jay were called as witnesses, and the second in June 1887, it is not surprising that Buchanan sold the rights to Alone in London.
     Jay never mentions how much Buchanan sold the rights to Alone in London for but in the Roselle v. Conover court case, a Mr. Burnham (one of the two acting managers at the Olympic) mentions the figures £250 and £350 in relation to the sale of ‘the piece’.
     By August 1886 the Buchanan and Jay were working on another play, Fascination, which had already been sold to Col. Sinn of Brooklyn as a replacement starring vehicle for Cora Tanner once the American tour of Alone in London had finished. In September 1887 Buchanan sold the rights of Sophia (to Thomas Thorne for £600), and Harriett Jay took over the management of the Novelty Theatre in London. On 12th September she appeared as Lady Ethel Gordon in Buchanan’s play, The Blue Bells of Scotland (based on his novel, A Child of Nature) which got another lukewarm reception from the critics. However on 6th October, there was a matinee performance of Fascination at the Novelty, starring Harriett Jay in what was probably her most successful role as Lady Madge Slashton.
     Fascination was subtitled, “a new and improbable comedy,” and after the Novelty matinee, it opened at the Vaudeville Theatre on 19th January 1888. Harriett Jay played the heroine, whose fiancee has become ‘fascinated’ by another woman, so she assumes the identity of Charles Marlowe (another chance for Harriett Jay to play a male role), follows her fiancee to various exclusively male haunts, indulges in various male activities and makes a play for the attentions of ‘the other woman’. The critics were united in their praise for Harriett Jay’s performance.

“Miss Harriett Jay, as Lady Madge Slashton, had a difficult rôle to sustain, and one which in less competent hands might easily have degenerated into vulgarity. Fortunately, however, it was played with intelligence and spirit and was a clever piece of acting.” (The Times 8/10/87)

“Miss Harriett Jay played with such consummate tact and judgment as Lady Madge Slashton as to secure the success of her character. Never for one moment did she lose sight of the fact that she was a high-born lady, and her assumption of the male impersonation was original and highly finished, whilst every now and then, when she fancied she had wasted her deepest affection on a worthless object, her uncontrollable bursts of womanly feeling were powerful yet full of tenderness.” (The Theatre 1/11/87)

“On the other hand, it may be observed that a more plausible representative of the heroine in her dual capacity could hardly be found than Miss Harriett Jay. In her most feminine moments this versatile actress is never quite free from a suspicion of mannishness, and she wears a coat and trousers as though to the manner born. The piece owes much, therefore, to the presence of Miss Harriett Jay in the cast. Whether without her aid or that of some actress of similar physique the public would accept a modern Hippolyta or Rosalind is a question.” (The Times 20/1/88)

“Of Miss Jay’s Lady Madge, we can only repeat what we have before said. She is artistic throughout the part, what might be made ridiculous by many is, through her talent, made to stand out as a triumph of dramatic art.” (The Stage 27/1/88)

Fascination played at the Vaudeville Theatre until 29th February 1888, when it gave way to another Buchanan adaptation of Fielding, Joseph’s Sweetheart. The American version of Fascination, starring Cora Tanner, opened at the Fourteenth Street Theatre, New York on September 10th 1888 where it ran for over 50 performances before being taken on tour.
     The Theatre published a feature on Harriett Jay in their April 1888 issue, which concluded with the following:

“Miss Jay was the original Lady Ethel Gordon in “The Blue Bells of Scotland” at the Novelty, but her most remarkable performance was that of Lady Madge Slashton in “Fascination,” which was universally admitted to be one of the most original, clever, and artistic characterisations that had been seen.”

Despite her personal success with Fascination there now followed a two year lull in Harriett Jay’s activities. An item in The Stage on 1st June, 1888 announced a matinée of Buchanan’s The Bride of Love to be produced by Harriett Jay at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre, on June 21st, but there is no record that the performance took place. Her next appearance on the stage was in The Bride of Love, but that did not occur until 21st May, 1890, although she did appear at a benefit concert in aid of Dr. Eldridge Spratt’s Sanatorium for Diseases of the Heart and  Nervous System at the Steinway Hall, Seymour Street, London on November 13th 1888. She also contributed a piece to The Era Almanack of 1888 for their feature: “What is the most striking incident in your professional experience?” Harriett Jay’s choice was an incident which had occurred at the Pavilion Theatre in August, 1885. The piece has added interest since, like all the other contributions, it is printed in its original form, so not only preserving a copy of her handwriting, but also her rather cavalier approach to punctuation.
     Buchanan, on the other hand, was enjoying a prolific period of success. Joseph’s Sweetheart proved nearly as popular as Sophia and he had another hit with Partners, which he had written for Herbert Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket Theatre. Even his poetry was beginning to be recognised again, A City of Dream being praised by W. E. H. Lecky at the annual banquet of the Royal Academy of Arts in May 1888. Unfortunately at the same occasion Robert Browning made his dismissive remark about Buchanan “the writer of plays”, which reinforced Buchanan’s doubts about the artistic merits of his theatre work and perhaps led to his attempt to create something a little more elevated with The Bride of Love. Buchanan’s successful run continued into 1889 with That Doctor Cupid at the Vaudeville Theatre and A Man’s Shadow at the Haymarket. Harriett Jay was not involved in any of these productions but on May 31st 1889 she did attend the first ‘Literary Ladies’ Dinner’ at the Criterion Restaurant, London, where according to a report in the New Zealand paper, the Te Aroha News (10/6/89):

“Massive Miss Harriet Jay (gorgeously arrayed in pink liberty silk) replied to the toast of the drama.”

     On 21st May 1890, Harriett Jay returned to the stage in a matinée performance of The Bride of Love at the Adelphi Theatre. The Stage printed the following item on 28th March:

“In last week’s London appeared an interview with Miss Harriett Jay, during the course of which that clever lady confessed that before long she would undertake a part in Robert Buchanan’s new four-act blank verse play, The Bride of Love, promised at a matinée. In this Miss Jay has a character over which she went into raptures with her interviewer, for she said to him in answer to his question, “Have you a good part?”: “Such a one as it has been the dream of my life to play. It is a piece which one should play and be satisfied with having lived long enough to do so.” From which I take it that a rare intellectual treat is shortly to be placed before the critics.”

In Chapter 24 of Robert Buchanan Harriett Jay writes the following about The Bride of Love:

     “Meantime, not satisfied with his ventures at the Vaudeville and the Adelphi, he had produced on his own responsibility at the last-named theatre, for a matinée performance, a poetical play founded on the story of “Cupid and Psyche,” and called the “Bride of Love.” It was written in blank verse throughout, and was highly poetical and imaginative, too much so for the English public, who will only tolerate such experiments when they are made the occasion for gorgeous scenery. The scenery at the Adelphi, though correct and adequate, was inexpensive. In this production I myself played the part of Psyche, Miss Letty Lind that of Euphrosyne, Mr. Thalberg that of Eros, Mr. Lionel Rignold that of Zephyr, and the late Miss Ada Cavendish that of Venus Aphrodite. The reception of the “Bride of Love” on its first production was so encouraging that Mr. Buchanan was induced to take the Lyric Theatre and to reproduce the play there for a “regular run.” This was a serious mistake, as he made no attempt to improve the scenery, but trusted to the mere poetry of the piece to draw the public. After his long experience of the stage he ought to have known better.
     There is no modern instance, I think, of a poetical play attracting audiences on its own merits apart from the arts of the showman and the tricks of the scene-painter. This experiment cost him some thousands of pounds, nor was he much consoled, I fancy, by the almost daily receipt of letters from unknown admirers congratulating him on the work.”

Of Harriett Jay’s performance as Psyche, The Scotsman’s review of the matinée included the following:

“The play was competently acted. Miss Harriett Jay, as Psyche, has good intentions and is evidently an earnest student of acting, but her execution leaves a good deal to be desired. She has tenderness, but she lacks power.”

Whereas The Times thought “Miss Harriet Jay played the part of Psyche admirably”. And The Theatre, in a review illustrated by drawings of the cast (including Harriett Jay), commented:

“Miss Harriett Jay, for whom the part of Psyche has been written, after the first few lines delivered the text with sympathetic grace and true poetic feeling.”

The Bride of Love opened in the evening bill of the Lyric Theatre on June 9th 1890 and closed a month later on July 11th. It was replaced with Buchanan’s adaptation of Rhoda Broughton’s novel Nancy. Sweet Nancy starred Annie Hughes as Nancy and Harriett Jay as her sister, Barbara. Buchanan’s lease of the Lyric Theatre ended on 1st August, but Harriett Jay later took over the management of the Royalty Theatre and produced Sweet Nancy, opening on 6th October and closing on 17th November. Annie Hughes was the star of the play receiving excellent reviews, whereas those for Harriett Jay in her supporting role were mixed:

“Miss Harriet Jay as Barbara is amateurish.” (The Scotsman 14/7/90)

“Miss Harriett Jay was a very sweet brave girl as Barbara; but I am inclined to think that the love of the sisters would have been sufficiently apparent without quite so much embracing and twining of arms about each other.” (The Theatre 1/8/90)

“Miss Harriet Jay’s staid, subdued Barbara afforded a valuable foil to the exuberant vitality of Miss Hughes’s Nancy.” (The Guardian 7/10/90)

According to Harriett Jay, in Robert Buchanan, the play’s run was curtailed by Annie Hughes falling ill:

“An attempt was made to find a substitute for this delightful comédienne, but the only possible one was Miss Norreys, who was not at that time available. Without Miss Hughes “Sweet Nancy” was absolutely worthless, so perfect in its captivation had been her rendering of the character, so the piece was withdrawn.”

     Although The Bride of Love and Sweet Nancy had not been that successful, and Buchanan had lost a great deal of money on the former, he had recently begun collaborating with G. R. Sims to produce a series of melodramas for the Adelphi. The first of these, The English Rose, premiered on 2nd August 1890 and was an immediate and tremendous hit. As soon as its success was assured, Buchanan sold his share in the play for £2500. By this time Buchanan had moved from Southend to 25 Maresfield Gardens, South Hampstead - their next door neighbour was the future Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. In the 1891 census, the household consisted of Robert Buchanan (widower, 49, author), Margaret Buchanan (mother, widow, 74, ‘living on her own means’) and Harriett Jay (sister-in-law, single, 36, authoress and actress). Also listed is Louise Dear (niece, single, 25 - the daughter of Harriett Jay’s sister, Eliza) and three servants: a housemaid, a cook and a coachman.
     The years spent at Maresfield Gardens, from 1890 to 1894, were perhaps the most successful of Buchanan’s career. His collaboration with Sims and the Adelphi gave him another hit with The Trumpet Call and there were four more plays to follow, albeit with diminishing returns. His poetry was also noticed again in 1893 with the publication of The Wandering Jew. On the other hand, Harriett Jay - authoress and actress - was doing little of either. After Sweet Nancy Harriett Jay seems to have given up her acting ambitions, and there were no new novels or plays, just a short story, ‘My Luggage’, published, in two parts, in The Theatre in August and September, 1890.
     1894 opened with another theatrical success for Buchanan, The Charlatan, starring Herbert Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket. In February Dick Sheridan started a two month run at the Comedy Theatre. However, despite Buchanan’s apparent financial stability, his grasp of economics had not improved over the years. He still had debts from the failures at the Lyric Theatre and although G. R. Sims had provided him with some of his greatest successes, he had also introduced Buchanan to the dubious pleasures of gambling on horse races.
     Buchanan’s next play, written in collaboration with Henry Murray, was A Society Butterfly, a vehicle for Lillie Langtry. Buchanan financed the entire production which opened at the Opéra Comique on 10th May. The play was an unmitigated disaster and on 12th June, 1894 a receiving order was made against Buchanan and he was declared bankrupt with debts of £15,672. The details of Buchanan’s finances were reported in the papers and it was revealed that he had lost £5000 on The Bride of Love, £1500 on A Society Butterfly and his gambling debts amounted to £1200. A greater blow to Buchanan was the death of his mother in November 1894. Buchanan’s great friend Roden Noel had also died in May of that year.
     Harriett Jay, opens Chapter 29 of Robert Buchanan, with the following sentence:

“From the blow of his mother’s death he never really recovered, and though he returned to his work it was not with the same heart, the same enthusiasm.”

     On 29th November 1894 Buchanan applied for an order of discharge in the bankruptcy court, hoping to clear all his debts. However the judgment given (according to the report in The Times) was as follows:

“Mr. Registrar Giffard, in giving judgment, said it appeared that the debtor had been able to earn £1,500 a year in the past by his writings, and there was no reason why he should not do so in the future. He was a man of great ability and versatility, and his works were very popular, and it was only reasonable that some provision should be made for the creditors. The offences alleged by the Official Receiver had not been displaced, and the order of the Court would be that the debtor be discharged subject to his setting aside one half of his income over and above £900 per annum until the unsecured creditors had received dividends amounting to 7s. 6d. in the pound, the debtor to file accounts annually of his receipts.”

     On 14th May 1895 Harriett Jay was also declared bankrupt. Her debts amounted to £385 and according to a report in The Scotsman: “The debtor further asserts she has no property or assets, and that her income since 1890 has been very small.” By this time Buchanan and Jay had left 25, Maresfield Gardens. According to a report in The Times (13/6/95) of her meeting with the Official Receiver:

“Her insolvency was attributable to a liability of £380 on a bill which she accepted about four years ago for the accommodation of her brother-in-law, Mr. Robert Buchanan. She never expected to be asked to meet the bill. Some furniture of which she was possessed had been sold by the landlord in respect of rent due from Mr. Buchanan. Replying to Mr. Colyer, the debtor stated that she became obliged to discontinue acting owing to an accident.”

     Harriett Jay had been in virtual retirement for the past five years, however at this point, when Buchanan had lost everything, she seems to take charge and collaborates with Buchanan on a series of plays. The first of these, The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown opened at the Vaudeville Theatre on 26th June 1895. It was produced by Frederick Kerr, who took the title role - the play is a variation on Charley’s Aunt - and was an immediate success. This was the first play by Robert Buchanan and ‘Charles Marlowe’, the latter the pseudonym of Harriett Jay, the name of the male character she assumed in their earlier collaboration, Fascination. Why Harriett Jay chose to adopt a pseudonym is not known. Perhaps since the play appeared while she was still officially bankrupt (she was not discharged until August), there might have been a legal or, at least, a financial reason. On 7th October The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown transferred to the Terry’s Theatre and on 2nd December it was produced at the Standard Theatre in New York.
     Buchanan continued to write novels to make some money: a novelisation of The Charlatan, written in collaboration with Henry Murray, appeared at the beginning of 1895 and Diana’s Hunting and Lady Kilpatrick at the end of the year. He also rose to the defence of Oscar Wilde, after his arrest, with a series of letters in The Star in April 1895. And he does not seem to have lost his love of financial speculation, since, presumably on the strength of the success of The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown, in February 1896 he embarked on another wild scheme and set up in business as his own publisher. His main intention was to publish his own poetry, both reissuing old titles and his new works. However he did publish one novel under the ‘Robert Buchanan’ imprint, a novelisation of The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown, by Harriett Jay. This appeared in February 1897 and was Harriett Jay’s final novel.

“A three-act comedy has already been founded on The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown, and perusal of the tale might even suggest that it was originally written for stage presentation. The characters are the beings of modern comedy; the main incidents demand of the reader a certain blindness to probability commonly required in drama. The story is that of the marriage of a ward in Chancery to a young military captain. The marriage ceremony is scarcely performed when Angela is recaptured by her guardian, and conveyed back to the boarding-school from which she has fled. Thither her husband follows her, dressed in female attire; and the doings of the harmless Don Juan, who goes by the name of Miss Brown, are amusing enough. In the end, when everything has reached a crisis, it is announced that the captain has succeeded to a peerage. The objections to the marriage are thus removed, and the course of true love is smoothed. The tale is entertainingly written.”  
                                                                                                          (The Scotsman 8/2/97)

     After the success of The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown, which had its final performance at Terry’s Theatre on 8th February 1896, their next production was The Romance of the Shopwalker which opened at the Vaudeville Theatre on 26th February 1896, starring Weedon Grossmith. Grossmith had been offered another play, Good Old Times, a variation on Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but he had turned it down. An item in The Stage (6/2/96) revealed the identity behind ‘Charles Marlowe’:

“The Romance of a Shopwalker has been written by Robert Buchanan and “Charles Marlowe,” the latter nom de guerre standing, I think, for clever Miss Harriett Jay.”

The Romance of the Shopwalker took its inspiration from Samuel Warren’s Ten Thousand a Year. It lasted a month at the Vaudeville and then Weedon Grossmith took it on tour.
     Buchanan and Jay’s next effort was The Wanderer from Venus; or Twenty-four Hours with an Angel which opened at the Grand Theatre, Croydon on 8th June 1896. On the opening night, Harriett Jay appeared on stage as a last-minute replacement for Miss Vera Beringer. This is the last known appearance of Harriett Jay, the actress.
     George Bernard Shaw had this to say about the play:

“The play is a variation on the Pygmalion and Galatea theme. It is full of commonplace ready-made phrases to which Mr. Buchanan could easily have given distinction and felicity if he were not absolutely the laziest and most perfunctory workman in the entire universe, save only when he is writing letters to the papers, rehabilitating Satan, or committing literary assault and battery on somebody whose works he has not read. I cannot help suspecting that even the trouble of finding the familiar subject was saved him by a chance glimpse of some review of Mr. Wells’ last story but one. Yet the play holds your attention and makes you believe in it: the born storyteller’s imagination is in it unmistakably, and saves it from the just retribution provoked by the author’s lack of a good craftsman’s conscience.”

Shaw had also admitted to liking both The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown and The Romance of the Shopwalker.
     After this series of comedies, Buchanan and Jay returned to melodrama with their next play, The Mariners of England, which, after a week at the Grand Theatre in Nottingham, opened at London’s Olympic Theatre on 9th March 1897 and closed a month later. There were similarities in plot to Buchanan’s earlier nautical drama, A Sailor and his Lass, but the main attraction of the play was the inclusion of Lord Nelson and scenes of Trafalgar. There was a gap of twenty months before their next play, Two Little Maids from School (an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ Les Demoiselles de St. Cyr). In November 1898, Buchanan hired the Metropole Theatre in Camberwell for a week and produced the play himself, hoping to transfer it to the West End the following year. Although he lost money on the production and despite the lukewarm reviews, Harriett Jay, in Robert Buchanan, says that the play was a success and the transfer would have gone ahead if Buchanan had not fallen ill in January 1899.
     Buchanan suffered an attack of angina in January 1899, which was followed by influenza and double pneumonia. In March 1899 Buchanan applied to the Royal Literary Fund for a grant of £150.  In June, Buchanan and Jay left London for Pevensey Bay, a seaside resort in the East Sussex.

“We remained at Pevensey Bay till the second week in October, and had a very happy time there. The roads were good, and he took up his cycling with relish, and he equally enjoyed his dips in the sea. We made one or two excursions to Bexhill, visiting together the places which we had known so many years before; we put up a tent on the shore and spent most of our time in the open air, taking our meals in the tent even on wet days. We had a succession of visitors, and only a few hundred yards from our front door stood the house occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Walter Slaughter, both jovial and most delightful companions. They, too, had their visitors, and we formed a little colony in ourselves. We all cycled, we all played cricket, we all enjoyed to the full the sunny blue skies and the rippling waves of the sea, and it seemed to me that Mr. Buchanan was laying in a stock of health which would last him for many years.”
                                                         (Robert Buchanan, Chapter XXIX: “Closing Scenes.”)

     The following item appeared in The Stage on 6th July, 1899:

“Robert Buchanan and Charles Marlowe are at work on a new play for Mrs. Langtry—of the Marie Antoinette period.”

This was The Diamond Necklace, the U.S. copyright of which was registered at the Library of Congress by Mrs. Langtry on 2nd March 1900. In April 1901 Lillie Langtry produced A Royal Necklace by Pierre and Claude Berton at the Imperial Theatre, London. Whether this owed something to the Buchanan/Marlowe version is not known.
     In October Buchanan and Jay returned to London. In December they went to Hastings so that Buchanan could try the Nauheim Baths treatment which was touted as a cure for heart disease. They returned to London at the beginning of 1900. In the Spring they moved to Deal in Kent and spent July at Cap Gris-nez in northern France. They returned to England in August and early in September moved to Boscombe near Bournemouth. Buchanan continued cycling and returned to writing poetry. Buchanan’s health and mood improved and on 8th October 1900 they moved back to London and took rooms at 9, Duchess Street, Portland Place, where later that month the following occurred:

     “The next morning, Friday, October 19th, his high spirits had not deserted him, for I heard him whistling merrily before he came in to breakfast. I asked him if the muddled vision had troubled him again, and he replied in the negative, assuring me that he felt particularly well in every way. Breakfast over and the morning papers read, we set off on our bicycles together.
     After a ride in Regent’s Park, which lasted close upon two hours, we returned home. He partook of a hearty lunch, and then fell asleep in an easy chair beside the fire. He awoke refreshed, and after he had drunk a cup of tea and had written some half-dozen letters, proposed that we should cycle again. “I should like to have a good spin down Regent Street,” he said. Those were the last words he ever spoke, for five minutes later the cruel stroke had descended upon him which rendered him helpless as a little child.”
                                                         (Robert Buchanan Chapter XXX: “The Last Scene Of All.”)

     Buchanan did not recover from the massive stroke which left him in a paralysed state for the next eight months. The news of his condition was reported regularly in the press for the first few weeks, then Buchanan was forgotten. On November 1st 1900 Buchanan was moved by ambulance to Streatham. On 21st November another application was made to the Royal Literary Fund on Buchanan’s behalf. His application was supported by John Coleman and J. M. Barrie and he received a grant of £150.
     In the 1901 census (taken on the night of 31st March), Buchanan and Jay are living at 90 Lewin Road, Streatham. Eliza Dear, Harriett Jay’s older sister, is also listed as a ‘Sick Nurse’. Buchanan is described as ‘Author, Poet & Novelist’, whereas Jay is an ‘Author and Novelist’. There is no mention of the stage. Harriett Jay also gives her age as 38, although she is 47 at the time. Presumably Harriett Jay provided the information for the census return since she gives Buchanan’s birthplace as Caverswall, Lancashire, a mistake which she repeats in Robert Buchanan.
     The following item appeared in The Guardian on 16th April 1901:

“Mr. Robert Buchanan, whose illness a few months back aroused widespread interest, is still lying in a half-helpless condition; and it is now announced (says the “Westminster Gazette”) that his devoted attendant, his sister-in-law, Miss Harriet Jay, the well-known authoress and actress, is confined to bed with an attack of pneumonia supervening on influenza.”

     Robert Buchanan died on the morning of Monday, 10 June, 1901, at 90, Lewin Road, Streatham. The immediate cause of death was congestion of the lungs. He was 59 years old. The funeral took place on June 14th and he was buried alongside his wife and mother in the churchyard of St. John the Baptist in Southend-on-Sea.

Harriett Jay - Biographer

     On June 18th a receiving order was made against the estate of Robert Buchanan, which led to another hearing in the bankruptcy court. According to the report in The Times (6/7/1901):

     “The Chairman said he was informed that the debtor possessed no assets, and it was probably within the knowledge of the creditors that he was adjudged bankrupt some years ago. In the course of those proceedings an order was made that he should set aside any income in excess of £900, but the order was unproductive.
     No resolution being passed, the matter remained in the hands of the Official Receiver.”

Another report, this time in The Scotsman (29/6/1901), gives some more information regarding Harriett Jay’s financial situation at this time:

“In October last, when Robert Buchanan was suddenly stricken down by a paralysis from which he never recovered, his personal friends and admirers subscribed a fund for his relief. It served an admirable purpose by soothing and, as far as possible, making comfortable the last hours of the novelist. The end came so quickly that the money was not fully expended. After paying all expenses, including the cost of the funeral, there remains a balance of over £150. It is intended, in pursuance of what is recognised as comfortable with Buchanan’s wishes in the matter, that this shall be handed over to his adopted daughter, Miss Harriett Jay, who nursed him through his long illness.”

     In August, 1901 Harriett Jay launched a public appeal for a memorial to Robert Buchanan. As well as local events, details of the appeal were also printed at least twice in The New York Times. At this time Harriett Jay was also working on her biography of Buchanan. On 22nd May 1902 the following item appeared in The Stage:

“Miss Harriett Jay’s life of Robert Buchanan will not be published until after the Coronation. Miss Jay, who has just written a play with Mdme. Sarah Grand, has been staying at Southend while completing the work. Among the contributors to the Buchanan Memorial Fund are many eminent names, notably that of Mr. Herbert Spencer. It is understood that many of the dramatist’s admirers incline towards the erection of a drinking fountain in Southend, opposite Buchanan’s former residence, as the most suitable form for the memorial.”

The play which Harriett Jay had ‘just written with Mdme. Sarah Grand’ was The Heavenly Twins. The first reports of this play had appeared in 1896 when it was a Buchanan/Marlowe project. If it was ever finished, it does not seem to have ever been performed.
     Harriett Jay’s Robert Buchanan. Some Account of his Life, his Life’s Work, and his Literary Friendships was published by T. Fisher Unwin in February, 1903. The critical response to the book was lukewarm, E. V. Lucas in The Times Literary Supplement questioning whether Buchanan deserved a biography at all:

“Robert Buchanan, neither by performance nor by character, was subject for the near-of-kin pedestrian biographer; but he was eminently fitted for the brief monograph by a student of men and letters. The facts of his life, after his childhood and youth were over, were unimportant. His work was rarely better than second-rate in any of the many departments of intellectual industry which he attempted; his friends were not notable, nor was his own personality conspicuous. He wrote nothing that will endure, such was his fecundity and want of distinction and style. He wrote a little good poetry, but much that was indifferent; he wrote little good criticism (although much that by its wrongheadedness made other people think); he wrote second-rate novels and second-rate plays. We dislike to have to put the case thus baldly; but it is necessary to show why Robert Buchanan, in common with too many other men whose biographies make heavy volumes, was no subject for the painstaking treatment which has been accorded him.”

It is true that the book is not a critical biography of Buchanan, more a cut-and-paste job, bringing together extracts from Buchanan’s own unpublished autobiography, letters and odd chapters of appreciation written by his friends. The areas which one might expect Harriett Jay to illuminate with her personal knowledge, such as Buchanan’s marriage and their theatrical collaborations, are disappointing. There is an obvious attempt by Harriett Jay to disguise her age in relation to her early recollections of Buchanan but there is no obvious reason for her reticence in the later period.
     On 25th July 1903 the memorial to Robert Buchanan was unveiled over his grave in the churchyard of St. John the Baptist in Southend-on-Sea.
     The subsequent career of Harriett Jay was still linked with that of Buchanan. The biography was the last work to appear solely under her own name. On 6th April 1905, The Maiden Queen, a comic opera in two acts, written by Buchanan and Harriett Jay, with music by Florian Pascal, was given a copyright performance at Ladbroke Hall, London. The libretto was published in 1908 but there is no evidence that the piece was ever produced theatrically apart from that 1905 performance. Jay does not mention it in the biography and one can only presume that it was written sometime around the time of Buchanan’s novel, The Rev. Annabel Lee: a tale of to-morrow (1898), since it is also set in the future and the Rev. Annabel Lee makes an appearance.
     On 6th June 1905 Harriett Jay applied again to the Royal Literary Fund. She was sponsored by Hall Caine and R. E. Francillon and received a grant of £100. One presumes at this point that she was still living in comparative poverty. This was about to change. On 9th September she signed a contract with the actor James Welch regarding the performing rights of the play Good Old Times (the 1896 play which had been offered to Weedon Grossmith, who had turned it down in favour of The Romance of the Shopwalker.) Under the agreement James Welch was granted the sole right to perform the play in any place or country whatever, and also the sole right to license the performance of any adaptation or translation of it, and he was also at liberty to make any reasonable alteration in the play. Harriett Jay was to receive for every performance in any West-end London theatre three guineas, and one pound ten shillings for each performance in any provincial town and London suburban theatre specified in a schedule to the agreement, and £1 for every performance in any other provincial town in Great Britain. Welch paid Jay £100 for a year’s option on the play and a year later, on September 17th 1906, Good Old Times by Robert Buchanan and Harriett Jay, had its first performance at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham under its new title, When Knights Were Bold. The sole writing credit was ‘Charles Marlowe’. The play opened in London at Wyndham’s Theatre on 29th January 1907 and was an immediate success. It ran for 579 performances, closing on 22nd August 1908. In the list of long-running plays in London’s West End between 1875 and 1919 When Knights Were Bold comes in at number 41. Not only was it Harriett Jay’s greatest success in the West End (Alone in London had only clocked up 107 performances), it was also Robert Buchanan’s, despite the absence of his name.
     Why Harriett Jay chose to remove Buchanan’s name from the play is not known. Considering she had not had anything produced since Two Little Maids from School in 1898, and had published nothing since the biography in 1903, and in 1905 was still reliant on grants from the Royal Literary Fund, it is doubtful that she had any idea of how successful a ten year old play like When Knights Were Bold would become. Perhaps the fact that she had given James Welch carte blanche to alter the text in any way he saw fit, made it more suitable to remove Buchanan’s name and have it appear under her own pseudonym. Perhaps there was still a problem with Buchanan’s debtors and the bankruptcy court. Whatever the reason, When Knights Were Bold was performed at Wyndham’s Theatre with the sole writing credit of ‘Charles Marlowe’. And it continued to be performed around the country, and the world, for the next thirty years. It became a regular Christmas entertainment in London until the outbreak of the Second World War. When James Welch became too old for the part of Sir Guy De Vere, he handed it over to Bromley Challenor. On Welch’s death in 1917, Harriett Jay took his widow to court and claimed back the full rights to the play. She then made another agreement with Bromley Challenor who continued to tour the play until his death in 1935.
     As well as the stage version, When Knights Were Bold was also filmed four times, three in the silent era (twice in 1916, one featuring James Welch, the other an Italian version, and once in 1929) and a 1936 version starring Jack Buchanan and Fay Wray. In 1915 Harriett Jay had also been involved in a deal between Chatto & Windus and British Cinema Productions for the rights of all Buchanan’s novels, from which Harriett Jay was to receive royalties from any of the films produced.
     By 1925 Harriett Jay was living at ‘The Cottage’, 20, Seymour Gardens, Ilford, Essex, where she died on 21st December 1932. She was 79 years old. The obituaries in The Scotsman and The Times mentioned that she had died “after a long illness”. She was buried alongside Robert Buchanan in the churchyard of St. John the Baptist in Southend-on-Sea on 24th December 1932.
     In her will she left the bulk of her estate (including the rights to When Knights Were Bold) to her nephew, William Paul Jay. According to her will she left £4,041. Her cook and housekeeper were to be allowed to live in her house until their deaths at which point it would revert to William Paul Jay. She also requested that 30 shillings a week be set aside for the maintenance of her dog, Peter. She also set aside £200 to be held in trust for the upkeep of Robert Buchanan’s grave. Aside from some personal bequests of jewellery (and her parrot), the rest of her estate was to be divided between her nephews.
     Following her death, there was a 1935 musical version of The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown called Tulip Time, which ran at the Alhambra Theatre, London for 425 performances.  Then in 1936 the first sound version of When Knights Were Bold. The play continued to be revived at Christmas in the West End until 1938 and a musical version, Kiss The Girls opened at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle-on-Tyne at the start of a provincial tour on 26th April 1943. The musical was renamed The Knight Was Bold and made its London debut at the Piccadilly Theatre on 1st July 1943. It closed after only 10 performances.
     Harriett Jay’s literary career was so entwined with that of Robert Buchanan that it’s no surprise that as he plunged into obscurity he effectively took her with him. She seems to have published nothing after the biography of Buchanan and although When Knights Were Bold went out under her pseudonym alone, this was based on an earlier collaboration. It is probably true that if her sister, Mary, had never met Buchanan, then Harriett Jay would never have become a writer, or an actress for that matter. She was the daughter of a labourer in a chalk pit and her mother (judging by the mark on her birth certificate) was illiterate. Without Buchanan she would not have published novels and of course it is impossible to discern who wrote what in the plays on which they collaborated. But there is enough evidence in The Priest’s Blessing to show that she did have an individual voice - Buchanan in his darkest, anti-religious mood could never have written anything so cold and spare. Also one would think in this age of ‘gender studies’ that there would be something to interest scholars in Fascination and The Maiden Queen. And although popular success is no measure of artistic merit, it should also be noted that she co-wrote two of the most popular plays of their time (Alone in London and When Knights Were Bold). But in the end her reputation will rest with that of Buchanan. Without him she would probably never have written anything. Without her, at the very least, we would not have the biography. And it should also be noted that not only did Harriett Jay look after Buchanan during his final illness, the nine months of paralysis and silence, she stood by him in 1894 after the bankruptcy and the death of his mother, and rekindled his creative spirit in those last years. So perhaps the final word of this first attempt at a biography of Harriett Jay should be left to Robert Buchanan, the dedication which prefaced the section of ‘Miscellaneous Poems and Ballads’ in the 1884 edition of his Poetical Works:

DEDICATION

To HARRIETT.

HERE at the Half-way House of Life I linger,
Worn with the way, a weary-hearted Singer,
                      Resting a little space;
And lo! the good God sends me, as a token
Of peace and blessing (else my heart were broken),
                      The sunbeam of thy face.

My fear falls from me like a garment; slowly
New strength returns upon me, calm and holy;
                      I kneel, and I atone. . .
Thy hand is clasped in mine—we lean together. .
Henceforward, through the sad or shining weather,
                      I shall not walk alone.

 

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