The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1893-02-05
MY FIRST NOVEL.
The Trail of the Serpent by NJ. E. Brad
don.
Copyright 1898. BY the Author.

copyright 1898, by the Author.l
! My first novel! Far back in the dis
tinctness of childish memories / see a
little girl who has lately learnt to write,
who has lately been given a beautiful
brand new mahogany desk, with red vel
vet slope, and a glass ink bottle, such a
desk as might now be bought for three
and sixpence, but which in the forties
cost at least half a guinea. Very proud
is the little girl, with the Kenwigs pig
tails, and the Kenwigs frills, of that ma
hogany desk, and its infinite capacities
for literary labor, above all, gem of gems,
its stick of variegated ceiling wax,
| brown, speckled with gold, and its little
glass seal with an intaglio representing
two doves-Pliny's doves perhaps. ia
nous in mosaic, only the little girl had
never heard of Pliny, or his Laurentine
i Villa.
1 Armed with that desk and its supply of
! stationery, Mary Elizabeth Braddon-
/ very fond OF writing her name at full
length, though the word g Middlesex'
age on the broad high road of fiction,
which was destined to be longish one.
So much for the little girl of eight years
old, in the third person, and now to be-
come strictly photographed.
My first story was based on those fairy
tales which first opened to me the world
OF imaginative literature. My first at
tempt in fiction, and in round-hand, on
carefully penciled double lines, was a
story OF two sisters, a good sister and a
wicked, and / fear adhered more faith
fully to the lines of the archetypal story
than the writer's pen kept to the double
fence which should have ensured neat
ness.
The interval between the ages of and
IL was prolific period, fertile in unfin-
ished MSS, among which | can now
trace a historical novel on the s'Siege OF
| Calais an eastern story, suggested by q
passionate love of Miss Pardoe's Turkish
tales, and Byron's 'tBride OF Abydos, -
which my mother, devoted Byron wor-
shipper, allowed me to read aloud to her
and doubtless murder in the reading-a
story of the Hartz mountains, with au-
dacious flights in German diablerie; and
| lastly, very seriously undertaken, and
very perseveringly worked upon, a do
nestle story, the outline of which was
suggested by the same dear and sympa-
thetic mother.
| Now it is curious fact, which may or
may not be common to other story spin
ners, that / have never been able to take
kindly to plot-or the suggestion of a
plot-offered to me by anybody else. The
moment friend tells me that he or she is
DESTROYS of imparting series of facts
strictly true-as if truth in fiction mat
tered one ioti-which in his or her opin-
ion would make the ground plan of an ad-
mirable, startling and altogether three
volume novel. / know in advance that
my Imagination will never grapple with
those startling circumstances; that my
thoughts will begin to wander before my
friend has got half through the remark
able chain of events, and if the obliging
purveyor of romantic incidents were to
examine me at the end of the story,
should be spun ANONYMOUSLY. For the
most part such subjects as have been pro-
posed to me by friends have been so hope
lessly unfit for the circulating library; or,
where not immoral, have been utterly
dull; but it is, believe, fixed idea IN
the novel-reader's mind that any combi-
nation of events out of the beaten way of
life will make an admirable subject for
the novelist's art.
well remember writing 'sThe Old Arm
Chair" in penny account book, in the
school room of Cresswell Lodge, and that
I was both surprised and offended at the
laughter of the kindly music teacher who,
coming into the room to summon pupil,
and seeing me gravely occupied, inquired
what / was doing, and was intensely
amused at luy SGOllu HSuHou Vi compost
ton, plodding on undisturbed by the
voices and occupations OF the older girls
around me. ssfhe Old Arm Chair was
certainly my first serious, painstaking eff
fort in fiction; but as it was abandoned
unfinished before my eleventh birthday,
and as no line thereof ever achieved the
distinction of type, it can hardly rank as
my first novel.
There came very few years later the
sentimental period, in which my IN
tious form, and were modelled chiefly
upon ssJane Eyre" with occasional tenta-
tive; limitations of Thackeray. Stories of
gentle hearts that loved in vain, always
ending in renunciation. One romance
there was, well remember, begun with
a resolute purpose, after the first reading
of Esmond, and in the endeavor to
give life and local color to story of the