Reviews of Mary Tappan Wright’s The Charioteers (1912)
compiled by Brian Kunde
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| American Year Book, 1912 | Atlanta Constitution, 7/14/12 | Atlantic Monthly, 11/12 | | Book Review Digest, 12/12 | Bookseller, 4/1/12, 7/15/12 | Boston Daily Globe, 6/15 | Boston Transcript, 5?/12 | | Chicago Daily Tribune, 6/28/12 | Christian Advocate, 12/5/12 | Cleveland Plain Dealer, 5/25/12 | | Morning Oregonian, 6/23/12 | Nation, 8/1/12 | New York Sun, 5/18/12, 6/22/12 | | New York Times, 5/26/12, 7/14/12 | New York Tribune, 6/21/12 | Oakland Tribune, 6/9/12 | | San Francisco Call, 6/16/12 | San Francisco Chronicle, 8/12/12 | Sunday Mercury and Herald, 8/18/12 | | Trenton Evening Times, 7/21/12 | Vogue, 8/15/12 | These contemporary reviews of Mary Tappan Wright’s The Charioteers are reproduced complete, with both positive and negative judgments intact, in the order of their original publication. —BPK, March 31, 2008. As of the latest update, this page features 24 reviews. —BPK, Jan. 11, 2018.
<— The Bookseller, April 1, 1912, page 228:
D. Appleton & Co. New York
The Charioteers. By Mary Tappan Wright.
12°, net, $1.30. (May 24.)
<— The Boston Transcript, [May, 1912?], page [?]: [The following is quoted in an Appletons display advertisement; the full review has not yet been located.] The Boston Transcript says: “Mrs. Wright’s treatment of the most delicate, the most serious problem of life is masterly. “The Charioteers” is a novel of marked distinction.”
<— The Sun, New York, May 18, 1912, page 10:
In her favorite setting, a delightful little
college town in which Episcopalians predominate,
where everybody knows everybody
else but the distinction between the
college families and the townspeople is
sharply drawn, Mrs. Mary Tappan Wright
in "The Charioteers" (Appletons) places
a woman's rebellion against her surroundings
and her fight against the prejudices
and conventions of society. Mrs.
Wright is one of the few American writers
of fiction who use good English without
deviating into affectations or preciosity
or corruscating with brilliant epigrams.
There are plenty of bright things in her
book, but they fit in naturally with the
situation or the people who are talking.
the story turns on one person; it is an
honest and closely reasoned study of
a type, or perhaps a side, of woman that
has always existed, though it has shown itself
in strange forms in late years and has
therefore attracted more notice. She is
surrounded by many pleasant, amusing
or interesting people, who are merely
outlined, but whom the reader will be glad
to meet.
<— Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 25, 1912, page 6:
BY EDWIN MEADE ROBINSON. Mary Tappan Wright has approached her masterpiece in “The Charioteers.” The story is not altogether satisfying, for the reader hates to see the heroine lose everything and then have to be half satisfied with the few sweet dregs of the cup of life. This is the story of Octavia Fanshawe, who fell in love with a married college professor, gave herself to him, and then suffered. It is the story of the narrow life of a small university town—but, after the characters try for a wider sphere, one longs to get back to safe and sane provincialism. It is not a comfortable story; the ending is only a compromise--but don't miss “The Charioteers” or you will miss one of the really enthralling novels of the season.—D. Appleton & Co., New York. Burrows Bros., Cleveland.
<— New York Times, May 26, 1912, page BR324:
be Better Than Usual
THE CHARIOTEERS. By Mary Tappan Wright. D. Appleton & Co. $1.30. A novel of unusual literary excellence, of some originality and of a verisimilitude not always to be found in American novels has been written by Mrs. Wright in her account of how Octavia Fanshawe undertook to steer the chariot of her life with a high hand, confident in her own conviction of rectitude and purity of intent. The scene of the greater part of the story is laid in a college town, and Mrs. Wright’s own long residence within the shadow of Harvard’s walls has enabled her to recreate the atmosphere with telling effect. Part of the action carries the reader to Greece, and there again much literary skill is evident in the settings. But that for which the novel especially deserves attention is the fineness and virility with which the character of the heroine is portrayed. Not often are such complete, true, ruthlessly but faithfully drawn portraits found in novels by American authors. The book is concerned with spiritual rather than material affairs, or, rather, with material things chiefly as they express the conflicts and the progress of the inner drama and mark its crucial moments. It deserves to be welcomed as another evidence of a stirring of the spirit in American fiction which promises to free it from that domination of the material to which it has long been subject, and infuse it with idealistic inspirations and tendencies.
<— Oakland Tribune, June 9, 1912, page 10:
Reviews of the Latest Books of Fiction, Travel and Science By MOLLIE E. CONNERS SUMMER BOOKS. Two really good books, just for summer reading, are entitled, “The Charioteers,” by Mary Tappan Wright, and “The Lovers of Sanna,” by Mary Stewart Cutting. Of “The Charioteers” we read [in the New York Times review, quoted in toto]: “It is a novel of unusual literary excellence, of some originality and of a verisimilitude not always to be found in American novels that has been written by Mrs. Wright in her account of how Octavia Fanshawe undertook to steer the chariot of her life with a high hand, confident in her own conviction of rectitude and purity of intent. The scene of the greater part of the story is laid in a college town, and Mrs. Wright’s own long residence within the shadow of Harvard’s walls has enabled her to recreate the atmosphere with telling effect. Part of the action carries the reader to Greece, and there, again, much literary skill is evident in the settings. But that for which the novel specially deserves attention is the fineness and virility with which the character of the heroine is portrayed. Not often are such complete, true, ruthlessly, but faithfully, drawn portraits found in novels by American authors. The book is concerned with spiritual rather than material affairs, or, rather, with material things chiefly as they express the conflicts and the progress of the inner drama and mark its crucial moments. It deserves to be welcomed as another evidence of a stirring of the spirit in American fiction which promises to free it from that domination of the material to which it has long been subject, and infuse it with idealistic inspirations and tendencies.” ”The Charioteers” is from the press of D. Appleton & Co.
<— Boston Daily Globe, June 15, 1912, page 11:
Mary Tappan Wright’s "The Charioteers" Tells of an Unusually Strong and High-Minded Woman.
“The Charioteers,” by Mary Tappan
Wright, is the story of an unusually
strong and high-minded woman who
falls in love with an intellectual man
with whom she believes she can make
her life bigger and broader. This she
attempts to do in spite of the fact that
he is married, but she finds herself
hampered by convictions and the false
position which she bravely struggles
against.
<— San Francisco Call, June 16, 1912, Book Page:
By MARY TAPPAN WRIGHT. Published by D. Appleton & Co., New York. Price $1.30.
Octavia Fanshawe, a woman past 30,
is one of the several children of a
widow. She and her mother are sympathetic,
but her brothers and sisters
are narrow, bigoted, conventional,
envious and disagreeable, and if it
were not for her mother Octavia would
long ago have left the home. They
live in a college town, and Octavia
assists the professor of Greek occasionally,
and in this work finds her
only pleasure, for she loves him
deeply, though she believes no one
knows her feeling. She is an unusually
brilliant woman, and the intellectual
excitement appeals to her. It seems to
her that everything she wishes for in
life can be found only in life with
him--but he is married.
<— The New-York Tribune, June 21, 1912, page 8:
and CRITICISM
All Sorts.
THE CHARIOTEERS. By Mary Tappan Wright. 12mo. pp. 346. D. Appleton & Co.
It is somewhat surprising to find Mrs.
Wright among the belated writers on a
subject of which we are growing heartily
weary in fiction–the triangle. Still, in
the performance she talks plain common
sense; her realism implies a sound lesson,
even though she artistically refrains
from teaching it outright. Her characters
are every day, average men and
women. Her hero is of common clay,
not the Superman of the “Higher Morality”
twaddle; her heroine, through of
nobler stuff, pays the price of disillusion.
Heroics look fine in the pages of a story,
or the third act of a play, but life and
society assert themselves in an unemotional,
determined manner against
which there is no defence, against which
defiance wears itself out, becoming as
dispirited as the narrowest conventionality
itself. And there is here a happy
phrase, put in the mouth of one of the
minor characters, that speaks volumes:
“The Higher Selfishness.”
<— The Sun, New York, June 22, 1912, page 12: Mary Tappan Wright, who pictures college life in her new book, "The Charioteers," lives in Cambridge, where her husband was formerly professor of Greek in Harvard University. The scenes of the book shift from America to Greece, and Mrs. Wright has been able to use for the latter scenes the knowledge [of which] she gained while living in Greece at the time her husband was professor at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
<— The Morning Oregonian, June 23, 1912, page 11: The Charioteers, by Mary Tappan Wright, a novel of a daring woman who sets love before marriage. A moral tempest is skillfully pictured, also a Greek background. $1.30 (Appleton & Co., N. Y.)
<— Chicago Daily Tribune, June 28, 1912, page 9:
Books for Summer Reading.
In “THE CHARIOTEERS” (Appleton’s)
Mary Tappan Wright has written an interesting
story, of straight moving plot, well drawn
characters, and much keen philosophy about
life and love—mostly the sort of love that is
“a deception, a fever, a delirium, a device
of the flesh.”
<— The Atlanta Constitution, July 14, 1912, page C7:
Conducted by Flo Heme Watts. The Charioteers. By Octavia Fanshaw. [sic] (Publisher, D. Appleton & Co., New York.) “For it is a yoke of horses that the charioteer of man’s soul driveth, and, moreover, of his horses, the one is well-favored and of good stock, the other of evil stock and himself evil.” That strikes the keynote of the story. It shows the power and perfidy of the evil horse which has succeeded in persuading its charioteer into the broad and open highway. The devil is always clever enough to allow one’s self-respect, beruffled and adorned, to enter the garden of dreams with a blaze of trumpets, but we soon find it, naked and miserable, floundering in a wilderness of weeds. The author succeeds in rescuing her heroine, thereby robbing the climax of some bitterness yet leaving sufficient to teach an important lesson. Octavia Fanshawe, in her narrowing and unsympathetic family life, feels that her love for a man whose wife has deserted him for the stage is her only hope of happiness and salvation. She drives her chariot with unflinching nerve and courage, even though she discovers her mistake in choosing the horse of evil stock. The story is a new treatment of an old theme and is one of the important novels of the season.
<— The New York Times, July 14, 1912, page BR412:
Mary Tappan Wright, author of “The Charioteers,” a story of the social life and environment of college professors and their families, lives in Cambridge, where her husband was formerly Professor of Greek in Harvard University. She has also lived in Greece, where her husband was at one time a professor at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
<— The Bookseller, Newsdealer and Stationer, July 15, 1912, page 55:
“The Charioteers,” by Mary Tappan Wright, which the Appletons published in May, is growing in popularity and each week is marked by increasing sales. It is a story of the modern marriage problem, exceptionally well written, and skillfully developed. The heroine is one of those women—striving for culture—who feels that the perfect development of her soul depends upon her union with a married man—a Greek professor. Her character is really brilliantly portrayed and she and the professor stand out as individuals among the hundreds of dummies who are the heroes and heroines of much modern fiction. Net, $1.30.
<— Trenton Evening Times, July 21, 1912, page 18: Mary Tappan Wright, who pictures college live in her new book, “The Charioteers,” lives in Cambridge, where her husband was formerly professor of Greek in Harvard University. The scenes of the book shift from America to Greece, and Mrs. Wright has been able to use for the latter scenes the knowledge she gained while living in Greece at the time her husband was professor at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
<— The Nation, August 1, 1912, page 102:
The Charioteers. By Mary Tappan
Wright. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
<— San Francisco Chronicle, August 11, 1912, page 6:
<— Vogue, August 15, 1912, page 50:
THE CHARIOTEERS, by MARY TAPPAN WRIGHT, is a tale of a woman’s love for a Professor of Greek who is already married, and of her determined hold upon that affection as a refuge from the unsympathetic household into which she was born. Neither the man nor the woman is young; the former, indeed, is past forty, but the author manages to interest the reader in their romance, in spite of the occasionally tedious dialogue. Certainly the situation is pushed to the utmost when the unmarried lovers are living with the two sons of the man, and the wife is elsewhere nursing her wrong and her hatred. (New York: D. Appleton & Co., $1.30 net.)
<— Sunday Mercury and Herald (San Jose, California), August 18, 1912, page [39]: Mary Tappan Wright, author of “The Charioteers,” a story of the social life and environment of college professors and their families, lives in Cambridge, where her husband was formerly Professor of Greek in Harvard university. She has also lived in Greece, where her husband was at one time a professor at the American School of classical Studies in Athens.
<— The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1912, page 686:
by Margaret Sherwood In The Charioteers,4 by Mary Tappan Wright, appears a sombre tale, finely wrought to an ethical issue, concerning a high-minded New England woman, who took the great false step and suffered the consequences, slowly growing wise. There is a dignity, a reserve in the treatment; there is no ready display of lavish sentimentality, but a quiet record of slow character-change and growth. To the American academic background, glimpses of the hillsides and the sky of Greece bring welcome contrast and relief, and these suggestions of outer beauty are reinforced by the inner beauty of idealism showing in the initial quotation of Plato. 4 The Charioteers, By MARY TAPPAN WRIGHT. D. Appleton & Co.
<— Book Review Digest, December, 1912, page 492:
WRIGHT, MARY TAPPAN (MRS. JOHN
HENRY WRIGHT). Charioteers *$1.30
(1 1/2 c.) Appleton. 12-11707
[Note: excerpts are appended from the reviews in the Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and the New York Times, here provided separately in full.—BPK.]
<— The Christian Advocate, December 5, 1912, page (3) 1731:
The Charioteers, by Mary Tappan Wright, will doubtless draw to itself a multitude of readers. The theme is the old, old story of an ardent soul who sees happiness as a right to be attained at any price and without the consideration that others may have to pay the price. The heroine, a talented woman in a cramping environment, sees her only escape and her only hope of happiness in her love for a charming man, a college professor. His wife has gone on the stage. She is fully satisfied of the justice of her position and willing–with a trifle of bravado in her consciousness of a superior outlook–to bear any condemnation which her actions may receive from the exceedingly conventional or “narrow” people of this college town. The story is skillfully, wittily, even brilliantly told, but the end is the same that has befallen all noble souls who have tried the experiment of demanding a personal right without due consideration of the rights of others. She learns at the end the higher truth and the higher justice of the law, “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee,” and that the greatest good of the greatest number is what our hard-won laws and conventions mean. The weak spot in the book, and it is very weak indeed, is that after her dearly-bought lessons, the lesson that “she had betrayed her kind, and all for love, that most ephemeral of passions, love that depends upon youth, and strength, and hot blood,” she should have turned to a youth fifteen years her junior, with an almost girlish outreaching for the same thing. Here, in spite of the author’s high purpose and her lofty treatment of the subject, she has confused the clarity of the issue between physical love and spiritual love. The unconventionality or irregularity of the heroine’s first love affair argued no lack of spiritual quality and her nobility of character, which the author impresses upon the reader, is evident throughout it, but the lesson which it taught her should have been a permanent one. In this emotional crisis, however, the author breaks down the structure she has so carefully built up. That the heroine should in the end accept the convention of an honored name and the considerate and affectionate protection of an elderly man, experienced in the ways of life and love, is not strange, it is only the recoil of her nature to those things of law and order which she has despised and esteemed of no account. The author, however, does not make this point as clear as she might, but leaves the undiscerning reader to think the reason is merely her heroine’s horror of loneliness. (D. Appleton & Co., New York. Price, net. $1.20.)
<— The American Year Book, 1912, page 63:
(Oct. 1, 1911, to Nov. 15, 1912) ARTHUR HOBSON QUINN The Charioteers, by Mary Tappan Wright (Appletons), is a rather forceful story of moral issues, with a nervous, slightly overstrained style, but presenting some good character drawing.
These reviews were originally published in the journals credited.
The works here reproduced are in the public domain. All other material in this edition is
©2008-2018 by Brian Kunde.
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