Pretty Typewriters, Melodramatic Modernity: Edna, Belle, and Estelle

Edna Boynton, Belle Randall, and Estelle Everett share several traits: all are fictional, young, American women; all work as secretaries or, in the terminology of their day, are "typewriters" or "typewriter girls," and, as those terms will signal to connoisseurs of period idioms, they thrive in the decades between 1890 and 1910. Their stories are all set in what were then the largest cities of the United States, New York (Edna, Estelle) and Chicago (Belle). Two of them work for bankers or banker-brokers (Belle, Estelle), those critical components of finance capitalism, while the other (Edna) works for a shipowner. At first glance these fictional young women epitomize the modern experience, situated (as they are) at the intersection of changing gender roles, new technology, metropolitan experience, and modern capital. And certainly their real-life counterparts were viewed by contemporaries in cognate terms; Daniel Shepp, in his 1894 travel book on New York, noted:

One of the most striking features of the industrial life of New York to-day is the conspicuous and increasing part played in it by the female sex. Not so many years ago it was rather an uncommon thing to see girls or women employed in business offices . . . . With the invention of the typewriting machine a vast new field was opened to wage-earners of the gentler sex. On few subjects have more jokes been made, and ill-natured slurs cast, than on the "pretty typewriter." But . . . ¹

Shepp goes on to defend their "modest, industrious" character. Yet Edna, Belle, and Estelle share two further traits not common to their real-life contemporaries: first, they are found in books that are extremely rare (only two copies each for Estelle and Edna, six for Belle), and second, they are the chief protagonists of works belonging to the genre of melodrama, and in particular to a sub-genre called sensational melodrama, one typified by stylized plot structures that repeatedly culminate in moments of thrilling or sensational spectacle.² Yet for most readers today, nothing is more intuitively self-evident than the deep, irremediable gap between the melodramatic and the modern. Melodramas, dictionaries tell us, consist of sensational plots "intended to appeal to the emotions" (OED). They epitomize a histrionic sentimentality that seems the very antithesis of the cool sobriety or the austere functionalism we associate with modernism. So, are these recognizably modern protagonists in melodramatic works merely an instance of new wine in old bottles? Or do our received dichotomies, however useful as thumbnail descriptions, conceal genuine complexities that warrant further attention, complexities that might enable us to better understand not only the apparent disparity between subject matter and form in these three narratives, but a crucial chapter in the history of popular culture's reformulation of modern subjects as modern spectacle?

Estelle's Millionaire Lover, or the Prettiest Type-writer in New York is a novel first published in 1893.³ Its cover and title-page ascribe it to one Julia Edwards, a pseudonym adopted by popular writer John Russell Coryell (1851–1924) with encouragement from his publisher, Street & Smith (then the firm that dominated the field of dime novels), who feared his credibility might be lost with male readers if it were discovered that he wrote women's stories. Previously a failed shipping broker, then an author of juvenile stories in the early 1880s, Coryell published his first serialized novel, The American Marquis; or a Detective for Vengeance, in 1885 in the New York Weekly, a periodical for fiction also issued by Street & Smith.⁴ It was only the beginning. Between 1885 and 1892 he produced fourteen novels, all but one serialized and then published as a book by Street & Smith: eight under the name of detective Nick Carter, including the first three in that celebrated series, three under that of Julia Edwards, another under Geraldine Fleming (a wholly fictitious author whose works were written by various writers with Street & Smith), and two more under Coryell's own name.⁵ When Coryell once more donned the name of Julia Edwards and turned to Estelle, he was already a veteran of the popular fiction...