I first came across the name May Agnes Fleming in the introduction of
Investigating Women: Female Detectives by Canadian Writers, a Canadian
Anthology edited by David Skene-Melvin, in which a short story of mine, Dark
Reunion, appeared. Listed in the beginning pages were brief biographies of past
and present authors. Among them was the remarkable story of Saint John, New
Brunswick writer, May Agnes Fleming.
May Agnes Fleming? I had never heard of her, and I thought I had a pretty good
handle on who had gone before me, certainly in my own neck of the woods. I
checked the name of the city again, certain I must have read it wrong. But I
had not.
Skene-Melvin writes in his introduction to Investigating Women that heroines
made their first appearance in Canadian crime fiction in 1861 in the
‘sensational novels’ of May Agnes Fleming.
“She wrote forty-two novels in seventeen years, fifteen published during her
short lifetime and twenty-seven after her death. The books were all
unrestrained, highly sensational melodramas, filled with plot twists, mystery,
disguise, startling events, murder, evil women, suspense and true love. The
villainous woman – dark, passionate, and exotically foreign – was one of
Fleming’s stock characters.”
I spoke with many people over the next several days about Fleming, and was
generally met with blank stares, and comments like: “Who?” “That right?” “No
kidding?” “Never heard of her.” It seemed a sad commentary, particularly since
upon doing some digging, I found out she was one of the most popular novelists
of her time. I was sure Canadians would want to know about one of their own.
And Americans, too, since she resided in New York for many years. She seemed to
whisper at my shoulder, prodding me to tell her story. I hope you will find it as
fascinating as I did.
This is her story.
“Do you know that woman has thoroughly mastered the secret of putting words
together in such a way as to form a complete and symmetrical plot?” asked a
gentleman who had the experience of making and doctoring many successful plays.
He gestured toward a huge placard announcing the publication of May Agnes
Fleming’s new story. “This, upon my word, sir, that woman does. Remarkable
woman, sir. Remarkable.” So saying, this man, nodding pleasantly, moved away,
while the reporter went to pay a visit to May Agnes Fleming. This New York
World reporter writing 122 years ago, describes his arrival “at a neat little
white-painted two-story house in one of those outlying eastern avenues of
Brooklyn – in journeying to which the tourist is made to feel that the city is
elastic and is being pulled out at the edges, for his personal discomforture.
“I was shown into a small room but evidently not the workshop of the story
writer, inasmuch as it was spic and span, with snowy tidies on the
bright-colored satin furniture, and not a suggestion of a book or of the tools
for making one.
“Wax flowers were set about here and there under shining glass globes, and a
few pictures were on the white walls, indistinct in the dim light that found
its way through tightly closed window shutters. It was like the ‘best parlour’
of the New England housewife, and the lady was not unlike the lady one would be
expected to see there.
“She was tall – her height perhaps a little increased by the long morning
wrapper in which she was dressed – and a gentle case of features. Her face was
pale, showing to better advantage the richness of auburn tresses which she wore
brushed well back from her forehead. In voice and manner, Mrs. Fleming confirms
the opinion that her appearance forms. Her eyes are pale blue and modestly seek
the ground when she speaks, looking frankly into your face when she listens.
Growing earnest as she did upon the subject of the recent outrage that has been
put upon her by some Canadian publishers (who were republishing all her books
without her permission) and selling them at reduced prices in the United
States) her earnestness is shown only by a nervous and interlacing of her
fingers.”
“I live a quiet life,” she told the reporter. “Simply following the bent of an
inclination that was formed when I was a very little girl, the inclination to
romances.”
The reporter suggested it would interest her readers to know what methods she
used in her writing.
“Will it?” asked Fleming, with a pleasant smile. “Well, I fancy they are a
little peculiar. In the first place, I cannot write with any advantage except
in the spring. I seem to have to get thawed out. I usually begin my stories
about the first of May and finish them in the middle of June. I lock myself in
a room at 9 o’clock in the morning – the merest sound disturbs me – and I write
steadily, if I can, until 12 o’clock. Then I stop and do not allow myself to
think of the story until 9 o’clock the next morning. It is sometimes difficult
to do this, but I find it necessary to my health.
“You know, I find the most effective means for putting my work quite out of my
mind is a ride up and down Broadway in the stage. The hurrying masses of people
distract my thoughts completely.”
She had “become a very fast penman”, she told the reporter, working every day
but Sunday, filling between 700 and 1000 pages of foolscap to complete a novel.
When the first draft was complete, she would then take her manuscript out into
the countryside for the final polish, but rarely made any major changes in the
actual story line.
Before beginning a story she required that the entire plot be completely
thought out – although occasionally, new characters would obtrude themselves in
the middle of a book, “often so persistently that I am obliged to introduce
them, but I take good care that they shall not interfere with the tale that I
have arranged.” A title was also necessary, “thereby giving reality to the
fiction before I can write a single word.
“For the inventions or discovery of a plot, I do not allow myself to begin to
toil until a few weeks before the first of May. If ideas suggest themselves, I
merely put them away undeveloped, but labeled, so that I can call them out when
the time comes to begin."
May Agnes Fleming was born in 1840 to Irish immigrants Bernard and Mary Early.
At the time of her birth, her parents lived in Carleton, West Saint John, where
her father worked as a ship’s carpenter. She received her early education at
the Convent of The Sacred Heart on Waterloo Street, which later became the
School of the Good Shepherd.
She was a voracious reader. “Somehow, you know, girls can always manage to
smuggle their favorite authors into their schools,” she said. “I read anything
that I could lay my hands on.” Charles Dickens was a favorite, and she read his
work incessantly. David Copperfield was published when she was 10 years old.
Soon, she began to make up her own stories. “I can remember when only a little
thing at school in a convent in Saint John, New Brunswick, composing fairy
tales with which I used to edify the other children, who, to do them credit,
were never so completely taken with my tales as I could have wished,” she said.
“Perhaps it was this unappreciativeness of my audience that turned my thoughts
to the pen.”
Feeling she might do as well as her contemporaries, and “unable to resist the
temptation”, she carefully initiated a tale and slyly sent it off to a paper.
“I shall never forget the period during which I waited to hear from my story.
It was the most pretentious composition entitled The Last of the Montjoys: or,
A Tale of the Days of Queen Elizabeth. I had just in my study of history
reached that epoch and was full of the Queen and her doings.”
At the tender age of 15, Fleming sold her first story under the pseudonym of
“Cousin May Carleton” to The New York Mercury. “I received for it three little
gold dollars, which I treasure to this day,” she said.
The encouragement acted like a spur. She did nothing but write, dividing the
fruits of her labor between The Mercury, The Boston Pilot, The Metropolitan
Record, and another New York story paper, as they were then called. She wrote
day and night during this period, devoting herself to the writing of short
stories and serial novels, which appeared in such papers as Western Recorder
and The Weekly Harold, in Saint John. The longest of these stories were Silver
Star, Erminie, Hazel Wood and Sybil Campbell. All were subsequently published
in a book by Brady and afterwards by Beadle. Soon after, she received her first
exclusive engagement with the publishers of Saturday Night in Philadelphia.
Among those books were: Lady Evelyn, The Heiress of Glengower and Estella.
Later works included A Leap in the Dark, Carried by Storm, and many others,
occasionally written under the pseudonym, “M.A. Earlie.”
She taught school for a short period until the family moved to 69 Britain
Street and Bernard Street and opened a grocery store. Right next door at number
71 lived John W. Fleming, who operated a boiler and blacksmithing business on
Trentowsky’s Wharf, Lower Cove Slip. His son William married Agnes May in 1865,
following a courtship of only 3 weeks.
Ten years later, following the death of her father, May Agnes Fleming and her
family moved to the United States. (Her mother, Mary Early, died in 1905,
outliving her daughter by 23 years.)
The Flemings lived for a brief time in Boston, then settled in Brooklyn, N.Y.
It was the place for a writer to be. New York was the hub of the publishing
industry and offered writers some copyright protection for their work – the
copyright laws of the day in Canada offered little protection to writers.
While the author rose to fame in the United States, she received only passing
notice in the town of her birth. The story in the St. John Sun after her death
said simply: “May Agnes Fleming, a native of St. John, was a very prolific
writer of romances for the story papers, and a large number of her novels have
been published by the cheap libraries, as well as many that are not hers, but
having been written since her death, have been accredited to her in order to
give them circulation.”
(Perhaps Fleming’s name acted in a similar way to the name of the late
romance-mystery writer V.C. Andrews, who was so popular that they continue to
buy anything with her name on it, whether she wrote it or not.)
May Agnes Fleming was a master storyteller. Her books were filled with exotic
characters, excellent description, flashes of humor and dialogue that leapt off
the page. The plots were complex and tightly drawn.
Although her fiction was primarily written for British and American audiences,
Fleming remembered her Canadian readers and took pains to introduce Canadian
episodes and characters into most of her novels, at times with considerable
ingenuity. Her work was so highly valued that publishers granted her exclusive
contracts under the terms of which every installment could appear
simultaneously in each paper or magazine. Consequently, she was one of the
highest paid women of her day, earning in excess of $10,000 per year, which was
a huge amount of money in the 1870s.
Guy Earlscourt’s Wife was one of Fleming’s most popular novels, while Lost For
A Woman was considered her best work, the protagonist being the lovely and
exotic Mimi Fulton, a circus entertainer who drinks and carries on in a
scandalous manner with questionable men, a woman who foreshadowed contemporary
feminists by running from a bad marriage and getting a job.
Perhaps she drew more heavily on her own life for this novel, since she left
her husband, who had become an alcoholic, soon after they moved to New York.
William Fleming later told a reporter what happened to the marriage. “Well,
it’s simple enough. She grew wealthy and famous and I remained what I was – a
hard-working, hard-fisted mechanic.”
On March 20, 1880, just two years after her interview with the New York World
reporter (perhaps foretold by that reporter who described the paleness of her
complexion and her concern for her health), May Agnes Fleming died of Bright’s desease.
She was 40 years old.
She left behind a controversial will, drawn up in 1876, that intended to ensure
that her children – two sons and two daughters – should be brought up in the
Roman Catholic Faith and that her husband should have as little as possible to
do with them or their inheritance.
Her husband challenged the will in court, more than once, but he ultimately
failed in his efforts. She left instructions in her will stating that if
William Fleming did assert paternal rights and take charge of the children,
“from that moment on the income she left them should not be paid, but should go
on accumulating until each child arrived at majority.”
As that playright, who, in 1878 (a brief six years after Susan B. Anthony was
arrested for voting), gazed upon the huge placard announcing May Agnes
Fleming’s new story, and said to the New York World reporter: “Remarkable
woman, sir. Remarkable.”
Remarkable indeed.
*****
Originally published in The New Brunswick Reader –The Telegraph Journal,
Saint John, NB Canada
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