“John Trevena”: Ernest George Henham

IT IS ALWAYS INTRIGUING to learn about lost writers, particularly because the debate about literary canons has progressed to the point that, as Joanne Shattock says, “we will never again think in terms of major and minor writers” (“Where Next in Victorian Literary Studies?—Revising the Canon, Extending Cultural Boundaries, and the Challenge of Interdisciplinarity,” Literature Compass, 4.4 [2007], 1280–91). Gerald Monsman’s slim yet illuminating biography of Ernest George Henham (1870–1948), pseudonym “John Trevena,” is a fine example of recovering and reclaiming a forgotten or neglected author. Monsman’s project in John Trevena: His West Country Novels is twofold: first, to “reintroduce his writings to renewed critical consideration” (vii) and, second, to argue for Trevena’s place “alongside his more famous West Country compatriot, Thomas Hardy” (1). His first objective is successful, the second less so.

The challenge of recovery and rehabilitation becomes apparent quickly. Trevena is an elusive subject. Nearing the end of his retired life, Trevena appears to have destroyed his diaries, letters, photos, and personal records. Thus, even recreating a timeline of his life is no small task. Trevena, Monsman writes, has been “so forgotten that even his date of death, 1948, was long in error” (19). Nevertheless, through public records, book reviews, the introductions to his novels, assorted magazine articles, Myrtle C. Henry’s 1935 dissertation (which includes a correspondence with the author), and a certain amount of speculation regarding biographical connections within the novels, Monsman has pieced together a picture of Trevena’s early life in England, his sojourn to Canada as a young man, his return to England, and his move to Dartmoor as a result of tuberculosis, where he lived until his death.

In Canada, Henham wrote eight novels and published numerous Canadian stories in magazines such as the Cornhill Magazine, the Illustrated London News, and Temple Bar, among others. Upon his return to England, he published A Pixy in Petticoats (1906) anonymously, but his next novel, Arminel of the West (1907), was published under his pseudonym. In 1910 Trevena married Selina Rose McDonald and they lived a retired life out of the public eye. His last novel, Typet’s Treasure, was published in 1927. In total, he wrote some twenty-seven novels, numerous short stories and several essays. Despite his popularity in England and America, John Trevena: His West Country Novels is the first book-length critical study of Trevena in over seventy-five years.

Monsman’s generous compilation of book reviews bolsters his argument for Trevena’s recovery. Of Wintering Hay, the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1914: “Russia has produced the most powerful novelists. Beside Turgenief and Dostoievsky we know of no American and but one Englishman who is fairly entitled to a place. John Trevena alone writes with the force, the dynamic power of the brooding Slavic titans” (17–18). After reading several of such glowing reviews, readers, as Monsman does, might well ask “How can such a writer as Trevena … be so neglected today?” (15). And yet, the reviews also demonstrate that although readers recognized his originality, his disregard for form and attention to description left them at times “in a constant state of bewilderment” (12). Monsman argues that these “atmospheric delineations or personifications of the forces of nature” are not “unconnected events or careless digressions” (11); rather, Trevena’s writing emphasizes “inner experiences” rather than plot.

Chapter one, “The Case for Trevena,” places him in context with two other regional authors, Thomas Hardy and Eden Phillpotts. All three authors create characters rooted in their homes and villages and shaped by the landscape. Like Hardy, Trevena “is a regional novelist whose work, set among the Dartmoor valleys and rocky hilltops, exhibits a strong feel for social customs and realistic dialogue” (2). He considers “the comedy and tragedy of the Bronze Age confronting modernity” (3). However, while Hardy is “cinematically visual,” Trevena uses “an intimately psychological presentation of character reflecting the emerging complexities of consciousness in modern fiction” (3...