Reviews of Mary Tappan Wright’s The Tower (1906)
compiled by Brian Kunde
last section
| main page |
next section
|
| A.L.A. Booklist, 5/06 | Advance, 5/3/06 | American College Novel, 1981 | | American Monthly Review of Reviews, 6/06 | Appleton’s Magazine, 9/06 | Athenæum, 6/9/06 | | Baltimore Sun, 9/12/06 | Book Buyer, 2/06, 4/06, 5/06, 6/06 | Book Review Digest, 8?/06 | Bookman, 6/06, 8/06 | | Chicago Daily Tribune, 4/5/06 | Chicago Record-Herald, 6?/06 | Christian Advocate, 5/17/06 | | Churchman, 8/18/06 | Congregationalist and Christian World, 5/12/06 | Dallas Morning News, 4/30/06 | | Evening Mail, 6?/06 | Independent, 5/24/06 | Insurance & Commercial Magazine, 1906 | Interior, 8/16/06 | | Life, 9/6/06 | Literarische Echo, 10/1/06 | Massachusetts Ploughman, 5/26/06 | | Nassau Literary Magazine, 6/06 | New York Evening Sun, 5?/06 | New York Observer and Chronicle, 5/3/06 | | New York Sun, 4/13/06, 4/14/06 | New York Times, 5/5/06 | New-York Tribune, 4/9/06, 5/26/06 | Reader, 6/06 | | Richmond Times Dispatch, 7/14/06 | Salt Lake Tribune, 4/22/06 | Scroll of Phi Delta Theta, 12/06 | | Smith College Monthly, 5/06 | Springfield Republican, 7/1/06 | Standard, 11/17/06 | State, 2/11/06 | | Williams Literary Monthly, 5/06 | Washington Evening Star, 6/2/06 | World To-Day, 7/06 | These contemporary and later reviews of Mary Tappan Wright’s The Tower are reproduced complete, with both positive and negative judgments intact, in the order of their original publication. —BPK, March 11, 2008. As of the latest update, this page features 46 reviews. —BPK, July 17, 2015.
<— Insurance & Commercial Magazine, 1906, page 120:
The Tower.
By Mary Tappan Wright. Charles Scribner’s Sons. Cloth, 12no., $1.50. Again Mrs. Wright demonstrates that she is entitled to serious and thoughtful consideration. She showed it in “The Test” and in “Aliens”—that fine story of the South, and now she repeats her impressiveness in “The Tower.” In some important respects she is at her very best in this latest story. It is a study of life in an American university, and from the viewpoint of the faculty exclusively. The president, senior and junior professors and their families, with an occasional student, comprise the characters. The color is of college life, vigorous and true. As the story progresses everything gives way before the development of the love-theme, which is simple and genuine. The book abounds in fine passages of humor and description; and the people are bright and companionable without being oppressively smart.
<— The Book Buyer, February 1906, page 3:
NOTES ABOUT BOOKS AND AUTHORS
“The Tower,” by Mary Tappan Wright, which will be published shortly, is at once a story and a picture, and the delicate art with which the two are blended endues it with the individuality characteristic of all this writer’s refined and distinguished fiction. The story is a love story as pathetic as it is outwardly placid and as profoundly realistic as it is superficially simple and romantic. The picture, of which atmosphere is the main element, is of the life of a college community taken on the faculty instead of the student side, and it has a remarkable typical as well as strikingly individual interest in the variety of its firmly drawn characters and their mutual relations in a social medium of sufficient closeness to constitute a true society.
<— The State [Columbia, S.C.], February 11, 1906, page 18:
WITH WRITERS AND BOOKS
“The Tower,” by Mary Tappan
Wright, which will be published shortly,
is at once a story and a picture.
The story is a love story. The picture,
of which atmosphere is the main element,
is of the life of a college community
taken on the faculty instead of
the student side.
<— The Book Buyer, April 1906, page 1:
NOTES ABOUT BOOKS AND AUTHORS
The list of new fiction in April includes . . . “The Tower,” a novel by Mary Tappan Wright, the author of “The Test,” “Aliens,” etc., a most unusual and powerful story of life in a college town from the point of view of the faculty.
<— Chicago Daily Tribune, April 5, 1906, page 18: AMONG THE NEW BOOKS Mary Tappan Wright has written many good short stories and one sympathetic novel, “The Test,” but in spite of all she has done to induce expectancy her latest novel, “THE TOWER,” is a disappointment. It is a story of college faculty life, and she takes us out of our own affairs and plunges us into the intimacies of an overrefined, gossiping, egotistical, and rather small spirited community, as if she expected us to have a clairvoyant knowledge of all that is going on there, or as if we would think the matter worth talking about if we did know. There are curious little piques, odd little jealousies, some mild despairs, a good many disarrangements of gentle lives, and a strong odor of afternoon tea to be found in the pages, but there is not impetus enough in the tale to make it leave the slightest impression on the mind. The reviewer looked forward to the perusal of it, remembering a certain wonderful short story written by this author, but found that half an hour after laying the novel aside the recollection of it was already dim. It has style and delicacy, of course—Mary Tappan Wright wrote it. But it cumbers the publisher’s list, and has the appearance of having been written too easily. Intellectual women like Mrs. Wright often take a keen enjoyment in psychological gossip, which cannot hold any save those who are personally acquainted with the persons about whom the gossip is made. In the present instance a meddlesome, hypochondriacal heroine, a manque of a hero—a sort of amateur Amiel—and a company of narrow academical men who disapprove of coeducation, make the atmosphere stifling. (Scribner’s Sons.)
<— New-York Tribune, April 9, 1906, page 5:
LITERARY NOTES
Mary Tappan Wright has written a story of college life, as seen from the side of the faculty, in her novel "The Tower," which was published by Charles Scribner's Sons last Saturday. Professors, their wives and daughters, rather than the students, are the characters on whom the story mainly depends for its interest.
<— The Sun, New York, April 13, 1906, page 7:
BOOKS AND AUTHORS
Mary Tappan Wright's new novel, published on Saturday, is a story of the life of a college community taken from the faculty side, which is a new point of view. The background is formed by the most humorous and delicate picture of the professors, their wives and daughters and the faculty life.
<— The Sun, New York, April 14, 1906, pages 7-8:
NEW BOOKS.
Love in a College Town.
A much lighter vein than in her previous
books is struck by Mrs. Mary Tappan
Wright in "The Tower" (Charles Scribner's
Sons). It is full of bright talk, without
smartness, and, we fancy, will stand admirably
the test of being read aloud. The
author starts apparently with the idea of
writing the story of a college community,
and introduces us to a number of interesting
people. There is an autocratic business
president, who is also a Bishop; there are
various professors, with their wives and
families, and a student cropping up here
and there. She casts all these aside, however,
to follow up the love affairs of her
hero and heroines.
<— The Salt Lake Tribune, April 22, 1906, page 6:
LIVES WELL LIVED.
The Tower: a Novel. By Mary Tappan Wright. Published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. This is a college story; but it differs from the usual college story, which deals mainly with the undergraduates, in that this deals with the "upper crust," the president, the married professors, and their wives and daughters. Let no one think mor a moment, however, that the narrative lack[s] anything of liveliness or sentiment on this account. On the contrary, the young people of the president's and the professors' families are fully awake to their opportunities, and there is no lack of amiable antipathy, tongue-rasping, and heartburnings. Withal, there is a keen humor, and the scholarly, candid atmosphere that should surround people of culture is always at the foundation, but is never obtruded. There is an amount of love-making that is mostly superficial, but there is one delightful love-story that charms the reader with its simple and romantic progress. This very well-conceived and skillfully-written novel discloses the professors as altogether human, once one digs beneath the crust of dignity and reserve that is appropriate to their calling, and they are blooded old boys, who know life, not only in the way it is lived, but in the way it ought to be lived; and their offspring show that they are true to the breed. It is a delightful story; keen, true, and clean.
<— Dallas Morning News, April 30, 1906, page 6:
“The Tower,” by Mary Tappan Wright.
<— The New York Evening Sun, [May?, 1906], page [?]: [The following is quoted in brief in a Charles Scribner’s Sons display advertisement, May 1906, and more fully in others in The Atlantic Monthly and The Book Buyer, June 1906; the full review has not yet been located.]
Mrs. Mary Tappan Wright’s novel
“The Tower,” rises like the structure
which provided her with her title,
high above the other American novels
of the season. Her characters are created
with deftness, and where they
have an importance in her scheme
are vivid and have the color of life.
Her humor is subtle and pervades the
story unobtrusively.
<— A.L.A. Booklist, May, 1906, pages 150, 155:
FICTION
Wright, Mrs Mary (Tappan) The tower; [sic] a novel.
6-12137/2
<— The Book Buyer, May 1906, pages 85-87:
THE TOWER†
“Of all kinds of horned cattle,” remarked Horace Greeley on one occasion, “deliver me from college graduates.” The college graduate has, however, come to stay. He exists in herds and droves. Greeley would be amazed at his present numerousness, and though he might prefer the bison of the plains, would be obliged to admit the latter’s displacement by the newer and more vigorous variety of what seemed to him substantially the same genus. The college graduate of present days, moreover, counts so energetically as well as numerously that the life of the community at large has come to appear largely but a late phase in the evolution of the college community. Alumni so about as alumni that civilization now wears a collegiate aspect. At fifty a man’s friends—a little later his pall-bearers—are his former college associates. The result naturally has been to direct a great deal more of general attention on college life than it has ever received before. No small literature—so to call it—has grown up about it. Few of the principal colleges are so small as not to boast their volume of College Stories, written not from the juvenile, but from a measurably adult point of view. The colleges at any rate have taken their niche in the temple of fiction. With all that it is a little singular that public interest of this kind has been so largely confined to the college man as such, graduate or undergraduate. The faculty has been forgotten. Yet nothing has been more distinctive in the American sociological situation of recent years than the rise into a positive social factor of—tout bonnement—the college faculty. The great increase in the number of colleges, the great increase in the faculty membership of already existing colleges, has distinctly provided a new and considerable element in the constitution of our society. A sort of independent and quite sharply defined class has come into existence, set off quite definitely from the rest of American society. It has, in fact, already become somewhat tyrannical and exclusive—even to the point in some communities, doubtless, of “giving itself airs.” Education is the great theme of the time. Everyone educates. It has been acutely if acidly remarked that most American artists, for example, are engaged not in producing art, but in teaching others to do so, who, however, are destined in their turn to teach not to practice. The great universities at all counts and the many smaller colleges provide a body of cultivated men and women interested in the things of the mind, which has its own characteristics, and is to be accounted, as we say, a social element of the times. The various college faculties and their families constitute in this way a class of the community—similar in some degree and kind to that class of the educated which Matthew Arnold was so grateful to Charles Sumner for pointing out as varying the monotony of the higher, middle, and lower classes of English society. Hitherto, nevertheless, this class has been neglected by literature and the fiction of the day has passed it by. Mrs. Wright, in “The Tower,” has abundantly repaired this omission. The dramatis personæ of the book are the faculty not the students of a college community. She knows her subject intimately and one does not have to read far to perceive that she is depicting it from the inside. Great Dulwich is a small town and has a small college. But its faculty constitutes a world in miniature. And this world is Mrs. Wright’s subject. It would be most misleading to say that she has exploited it after the manner of the realistic novelist in search of material to exploit. So far is this from the fact that it is to be doubted if the author herself has had any idea of treating novel material. She has simply written a story of man, nature, and human life such as might happen in such a community as she has had in mind. Nor is it to be said that the incidental portraiture of this really novel material constitutes the main strength of her story. Only that his constitutes its essential novelty. The story itself is one of a quiet power which would singularize it in any competition or if told of any community. It is singularly human—that is to say, studied at first hand instead of routine and merely “literary.” The characters are people and not lay figures with realistic or other tags and labels. Readers of Mrs. Wright’s former fiction, prepared for masterly handling of tense situations and passionate dramas, will be perhaps surprised at the quiet tone and low notes of “The Tower.” But they will find the tragedy of human existence underlying the placid narrative and appreciate the solid and significant substance that is only superficially disguised by the vaporous and poetic atmosphere of every-day life which she has known how to envelope it with. A better study of an irresolute, impressionable and American Hamlet, half in love with two women at once and wholly with neither and yielding to the stronger pressure of the apparently weaker nature, has not been made. The novel, in short, is not only remarkable for the originality and novelty of its donnée, but for its absolute insight, force and—speaking quite within bounds—really exquisite and delicate art. † THE TOWER. By Mary Tappan Wright. $1.50.
<— The Smith College Monthly, May, 1906, page 518:
The Tower, by Mary Tappan Wright. (Charles Scribner’s
Sons.) K. E. C.
<— Williams Literary Monthly, May, 1906, page 52:
The Tower: A Novel, by Mary Tappan Wright. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. A college story, but a novelty in that its interest centers in the faculty rather than in the students. “Great Dulwich” is a small college. One of its graduates comes back after a number of year’s [sic] absence to take a place on the teaching staff. His experiences afford many opportunities for keen and quietly humorous descriptions of social and intellectual life in a small college town. Old professors, young instructors, townspeople, all come upon the stage. The love story of the hero unifies the novel.
<— The Advance, May 3, 1906, page 565:
—In her new book, The Tower, Mary Tappan Wright returns to the American college environment. The story is a complicated and not particularly fascinating romance, in which several pairs of young lovers come into their own, while the affairs of a man and woman who are approaching the forty line slowly take shape. There is no happy ending. The question whether the finish is logical will be debated. But at least one will perceive that Mrs. Wright has foreseen the end from the beginning and has shaped all things, even to the character of Robinson, accordingly. Robinson lives in rooms high up in the college tower. Hence the title of the story. At thirty-nine he is able to run up the stairs two at a time. This may interest some people. (New York: Scribner’s, $1.50)
<— New York Observer and Chronicle, May 3, 1906, page 570:
“The Tower: A Novel.” By Mary Tappan
Wright. $1.50. Charles Scribner’s
Sons, New York.
<— The New York Times, May 5, 1906, page 286:
THE TOWER. A Novel. By Mary Tappan Wright. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. $1.50.
If this story of faculty life in a college
town had been told in two hundred
pages it might have been a gem. Expanded
into four hundred and twenty-two
pages it grows wearisome. The author
has somewhat of the insight and delicacy
of touch that might have turned out a bit
of Cranford-like description of the dullness
and narrowness of faculty life in a
small college town; but the many pages of
uninteresting detail and conversation rob
the book of real charm.
<— Congregationalist and Christian World, May 12, 1906, page 690:
The Tower, by Mary Tappan Wright. pp. 422.
Chas Scribner’s Sons. $1.50.
<— The Christian Advocate, May 17, 1906, page 732 (28):
The Tower is a well wrought piece of fiction by Mary Tappan Wright. A college town, American and of marked denominational bias, gives opportunity for discussion of college problems among the faculty, and development of the author’s convictions as to the purpose and management of life. The characters are excellently drawn, the wit attractive, and the several situations most interesting. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. 12no. $1.50.)
<— The Independent, May 24, 1906, page 1223: The Tower. By Mary Tappan Wright. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. $1.50. The faculty side of college life has lacked hitherto an interpreter. Mary Tappan Wright touches her new theme with a careful and loving hand; the faculty circle at Great Dulwich College consists of a masterful president and bishop, several young professors, a few pathetically overworked and underpaid old ones, with their wives, children and personal friends. They are well-bred and well-read—but are they quite alive? If we cannot feel any flesh-and-blood reality about them, is it their fault, or the author’s, or our own? Certainly they life in a rarefied atmosphere, and under glass. Like all very limited circles, they know each other too well, and indulge in delicate vivisection of the emotions of their friends in a way that would appall the stoutest-hearted of psychological novelists. Life under a social microscope is confined to externals; as in ordinary village gossip, but we protest that it must be unendurable when the examination pierces deeper, into dreams, motive and emotions, and forces the most reserved of men and women to yield up their inmost heart secrets. That strikes us as being much more of a trial than the long hours, hard work and meager salaries of which the author makes use to tragic ends. There is plenty of clever characterization in the book, and the people are sufficiently differentiated to be interesting. They invariable [sic] talk well. Miss Langdon is a charming type of the managing woman we all have known, who is so serenely sure that her friends cannot get on without her advice, and who does not hesitate to jog the elbow of Destiny, if the social jackstraws are not arranging themselves to her liking. It is a triumph of the author’s skill that her heroine’s meddlesomeness does not cost her our liking and sympathy. The book is a tragedy of a dream. The attempt to relive a part of life which has been a memory for many years is sure to be a spiritual failure—we cannot unite the thread dropped and broken eighteen years before; the fingers are clumsy, the hands tremble, and the bungled knot will show. The Tower is the story of how a brave man attempted the impossible feat of living over again a cherished dream of his youth, and it contains, also, some pretty love-stories about his friends.
<— Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture, May 26, 1906, page 2:
This new story, by Mary Tappan Wright, is another illustration of her ability as a writer of clear and wholesome fiction that has rare literary finish and natural and impressive characterization. Like her other novels it relates to university life, with which she is intimately familiar, but in this tale she confines herself more exclusively to this field than she has in her other works of fiction. The heroine is of an unusual type, and so is the hero for that matter. They are not young lovers. They meet, after years of separation, with their love undeclared, when the man returns to teach in the institution where he was graduated, and where she is the head of the household of her widowed father, the president of Dulwich College. He takes up his residence in his former quarters in the Tower. It is the oldest building in the park, and it plays an important part in the narrative, which has an air of refinement throughout, suggestive of the culture that comes from gentle breeding, far removed from the vulgar ostentation of mere rapidly acquired wealth. The book is one that will appeal to those readers who are not looking for sensational developments, though its incidents are not lacking in interest and healthful excitement. The people who figure in it are real flesh and blood creations, and the incisiveness and truthfulness of their depiction will make them linger long in the memory. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Price, $1.50.)
<— New-York Tribune, May 26, 1906, page 5:
Stories of College Life, Graft and Adventure. THE TOWER. By Mary Tappan Wright. 12 mo. pp. 422. Charles Scribner’s Sons. Ideas, like some diseases, seem to be epidemical. Only the other day we were reviewing Herbert M. Hopkins’s novel, “The Mayor of Warwick,” in which the heroine was the daughter of a bishop who managed the affairs of a small American college, the hero being one of the professors, whose rooms were in a tower. The three leading characters in Mrs. Wright’s latest story, “The Tower,” occupy similar relations to one another and to another small American college. There, however, the similarity ceases. The people in Mrs. Wright’s novel are far less positive in their characters, far more circumscribed in their interests and more wavering in their purposes than were the people in Mr. Hopkins’s tale, or than were those of Mrs. Wright’s previous story, “The Test.” “The Tower” gives a truthful enough picture of life in a second class denominational college, with its narrowness, its jealousies, its social relaxations and its incidental romances, yet it is a little difficult to conjure up any great amount of interest in the personages of the tale or in their rather insignificant activities and inconsequential love affairs. There is a lack of vitality in the characters and of direction in their aims and efforts that baffles the sympathies of the reader. Nobody seems to know his or her mind for any appreciable space of time, with the exception of the bishop’s daughter, whose otherwise colorless character is dominated by the persistence of her girlhood love for an old-time student who returns after eighteen years as one of the instructors in the institution. Consistently enough, she reaps her reward, in which there is, nevertheless, an element of tragedy and disappointment. There is plenty of realism in the story, but it is the realism of the commonplace.
<— Chicago Record-Herald, [June?, 1906], page [?]: [The following is quoted in brief in a Charles Scribner’s Sons display advertisement in The Bookman, June 1906, and more fully in The Book Buyer, June 1906; the full review has not yet been located.] “The Tower,” Mary Tappan Wright’s keen study of a college community, as seen from the faculty side, is distinguished by character, insight, and a quiet humor, unusual both in degree and quality. The people presented are many, but each is endowed with distinct personality, and the indefinable something that makes for conviction. The love story to which Great Dulwich and its residents form a background is simple in form, but deeply realistic in tenor. The whole provides a picture none the less realistic for the lack of conventional finish in regard to the simple plot and the seeming inconsequence of the general feminine regard for the quiet, non-committal Robinson. In books such mildly sardonic situations occur comparatively seldom, but they are of frequent occurrence in actual life.
<— The Evening Mail, [June?, 1906], page [?]: [The following is quoted in The Book Buyer, June 1906; the full review has not yet been located.]
The atmosphere of the life, its
restrictions, its advantages, and disadvantages
are worked into this title of
human relationships in an unobtrusive
but telling manner. Its material
rewards, so scant always and so
uncertain at the approach of old age,
are drawn upon in the making of the
plot; but throughout the foreground
remains a study of human nature in
its larger aspects. Special interest is
given to the story by its clever unveiling
of the changing viewpoints
and ways that accompany the coming
of middle age.
<— The American Monthly Review of Reviews, June 1906, page 758:
LOVE STORIES. Miss Frothingham’s “The Evasion” (Houghton) may be mentioned as dexterously displaying the workings of that complicated machine, “the New England conscience.” Two love stories of lighter texture than Miss Frothingham’s, both involving neat pleasantry aimed at scholastic loftiness, are offered by Beatrice Harraden and Mary Tappan Wright,—see “The Scholar’s Daughter” (Dodd, Mead) and “The Tower” (Scribner’s).
<— The Book Buyer, June 1906, pages 109-110:
Mary Tappan Wright’s new novel,
“The Tower,” which is so original
and unusual in the point of view of
the author and the way in which the
subject is handled, has aroused the reviewers
to a less conventional form of
notice than is usually the fate of a
novel.
Mrs. Mary Tappan Wright’s novel
“The Tower,” rises like the structure
which provided her with her title,
high above the other American novels
of the season. Her characters are created
with deftness, and where they
have an importance in her scheme
are vivid and have the color of life.
Her humor is subtle and pervades the
story unobtrusively. The Evening Mail said:
The atmosphere of the life, its
restrictions, its advantages, and disadvantages
are worked into this title of
human relationships in an unobtrusive
but telling manner. Its material
rewards, so scant always and so
uncertain at the approach of old age,
are drawn upon in the making of the
plot; but throughout the foreground
remains a study of human nature in
its larger aspects. Special interest is
given to the story by its clever unveiling
of the changing viewpoints
and ways that accompany the coming
of middle age.
And the Chicago Record-Herald
in a long review said:
<— The Bookman, June 1906, page 463: Charles Scribner’s Sons:
The Tower. By Mary Tappan Wright.
<— The Nassau Literary Magazine, June 1906, page 79: The Towers [sic] In The Towers, a new book by Mary Tappan Wright, an old problem again comes up. A man, bound to a girl by more or less stringent ties, falls in love with another. His constancy means the world and all to the first girl; what is he to do? Robinson, the hero, solves the problem by remaining true to his earlier, unvoiced pledge. It is not the place here to take sides on this much-vexed question, affected as it is by such varying circumstance. However, putting aside the psychological motif, the book is well written and is remarkable for the acute observations of a narrow sphere of life, and for the subtle humor in which it abounds. (The Towers, by Mary Tappan Wright, Chas. Scribner’s Sons, New York.)
<— The Reader, June 1906, page 94:
MARY Tappan Wright is the wife of Professor John Henry Wright, of Harvard, and it is thus that she writes about the higher education for women in her latest novel, “The Tower”: “Men can not teach women and retain their self-respect,” she makes one of her professorial characters say. “It is morally disintegrating! Women emanate a spiritual X-ray to which no man—not even one encased in triple armor—can expose himself. * * * How can you expect to come out from those—those emotional greenhouses [the girls’ schools] fit fiber for the society of any wholesome, sane, good, common-sense woman? Those girls—those miserable moon-faced, sheep-eyed girls! They make everything personal, from the binomial theorem to the Punic wars; they weep if they can’t remember the answers, and expect you to stop and take up their individual problems when the class is dismissed; they—but the subject is one which should not be discussed! There is not a man of you here that doesn’t agree with me. The place for the ordinary school girl is a—is a nunnery! Shakespeare knew!” As Mrs. Wright put the words in the mouth of her hero, of whom she manifestly approves, and as she caused no other character to gainsay him, it is safe to suppose that she expresses through this medium the opinion she really holds—which is also, perhaps, the opinion that represents a consensus of conviction on the part of some of the faculty of the leading colleges. It is difficult to tell precisely what she means to imply by saying that the subject is one which can not be discussed. Every reader will be able to call to mind a goodly company of college women who can be discussed in all their actions, moods, purposes and meanings to the credit of the critic and the glory of the protagonist. It may be suggested—quite frankly in the way of argumentative retaliation—that college women must be curiosities indeed if they can excel in pettiness, stupid secretiveness and smallness of spirit the non-college women who figure in “The Tower,” and who, presumably, represent true femininity and charm to the author. For making a mountain out of a molehill, exhibiting morbid egotism, and interfering with the sane and natural course of things, these women are unrivaled. If they had taken a little more interest in the Punic wars, and a degree less in their neighbors’ affairs, the community—let us hope it was not meant to typify Cambridge—would have been a better and happier place than it was, as represented in Mrs. Wright’s inept novel.
<— Washington Evening Star, Washington, D.C., June 2, 1906, page 14:
BOOKS
& WRITERS The Tower: a Novel. By Mary Tappan Wright, author of "The Test," &c. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Washington: Wm. Ballantyne & Sons. Most stories of college life are told from the view point of or at least relate to the student body. The faculty is supposed to have passed beyond the range of possible romance. It is utilized chiefly as a background, a Greek chorus, or an element of complication. Mrs. Wright has chosen a novel view point from which to regard the educational field as the producer of fiction. The daughter of the president of a college and the wife of a university professor, she is ideally equi9pped to adopt this position. Her stories are all more or less colored by the faculty outlook. In "The Tower" she frankly relegates the student body to the rear. It appears only occasionally to meet subordinate purposes. Her chief male figure is that of a middle aged instructor in literature, a graduate of the college which has summoned him to take up the work of an invalid. In his student days he has loved and has been loved by the daughter of the president of the college, a bishop. One his return, after years of absence, the old romance awaits him. But new elements develop. The widow of a man with whom he has been somewhat closely associated in the past touches his life. There is a bitter struggle of conscience. Circumstances suddenly turn all the switches in a contrary direction and the climax comes swiftly and unexpectedly. The story is distinctly of the love affairs of the middle aged. But a somewhat unnecessary number of young lovers is in evidence, confusing the reader for several chapters. A charming study of scholarly and parental devotion to duty occurs in the case of Prof. Maxwell. This man's character stands out as one of the strongest factors of the work.
<— The Athenæum, June 9, 1906, page 695:
The Tower. By Mary Tappan Wright.
<— The World To-Day, July 1906, page 766:
A college community is not supposed to be troubled with dramatic moments, but it has its own problems none the less. Mary Tappan Wright has told of some of these in “The Tower” (Scribner’s, $1.50). If the characters were only a little more real and the motives for their action a little more obvious, the book would be something to be reckoned with. As it is the story moves along in the land of academic shades. In fact the only live soul in it is Annchen, a young woman who is not supposed to be a part of the college community. Perhaps that is why she really has flesh and blood.
<— Springfield Sunday Republican, July 1, 1906, page 23:
—— There is a curious sameness in stories of college life, or rather there are two quite distinct types, each marked by a monotony of its own. A few years ago it was the undergraduate story that was being exploited; just now we are hearing from the faculty. The curious family resemblance spoken of—much closer than mere identity of the subject would serve to bring about—is found in three quite recent novels, “The Tower,” by Mary Tappan Wright (Scribner), “The Mayer of Warwick,” by Herbert M. Hopkins, and “In the House of Her Friends,” an anonymous book published by Robert Grier Cooke, incorporated. While each has its own story, almost any comment made upon any of them would fit them all. Their resemblance is to be taken as evidence of their common accuracy; each writer bears independent witness to the character of life in a small college town. That in each case the daughter of the head of the college is the heroine is a matter of detail, probably not a coincidence, but the result of a common cause. In each case this head—president, bishop, dean, as the case may be,—is the central figure in the book and a well-drawn study of the “grand old man” of college life, contrasted with more modern types, smaller men, with more highly specialized training and contempt for the old ways. All the books are alike, too, in an unfortunate lack of concentration of interest, due to overmultiplication of characters, the absence of a true hero or heroine, the mingling of the love affairs of different generations in a way that spoils the perspective. [The remainder of the review, omitted, concerns “In the House of Her Friends” only, of which it concludes “this is the least successful of the three.”]
<— The Times Dispatch, Richmond, VA, July 14, 1906, page 6:
BOOK REVIEW AND MAGAZINE NOTES
THE TOWER.--By Mary Tappan Wright. Published by Scribner's Sons, of New York.
The man who lives in "The Tower" is
the central figure in this rather unusual,
yet really fascinating novel. The story
deals with the life created around an
American college; yet it is not the common
type of college story, for the reason
that the students themselves have very
little to do in the plot, and the reader
is wholly occupied with the thoughts,
deeds and lives of the little community
of professors and their children.
<— Book Review Digest, August? 1906 [from its annual cumulation, volume II 1906, page 387]:
Wright, Mary Tappan (Mrs. John Henry
Wright). Tower: a novel +$1.50. Scribner. [The entry concludes with quotes from The Athenæum, The Bookman, The Independent, The New York Times and The World To-Day, each provided in full here separately.]
<— The Bookman, August 1906, pages 628-630: MARY TAPPAN WRIGHT’S “THE TOWER.”* *The Tower. By Mary Tappan Wright. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
It is a common observation regarding
novels which deal with ordinary, commonplace
characters, that dulness is a
final and convincing proof of a successful
realism. Such a test undoubtedly has
been and will be applied to The Tower,
to the triumphant vindication of Mrs.
Wright’s “method” on the part of her
friends, to the damning of all realistic
novels on the part of fervid Corellians
and their ilk. Those who find in the fact
their strongest reason for admiring the
book may point out that the author has
courted the mild impeachment. She has
deliberately chosen to treat in fiction the
every-day doings of a little circle of professors
and professors’ wives and children
and hangers-on in a small college;
and what, to the uninitiated, is less alluring
and entertaining than the academic
life? Even those who have been of it
sometimes fail to discern the romantic
tinge that is supposed to overlie our college
days. I have known collegians,
newly escaped into a more bustling and
variegated world, to look back on their
student life as a horrible period of sleepy
inaction, and condescendingly pity those
mournful, half-fossilised remnants of humanity,
their professors and instructors.
Even the old graduate, whose eyes dim at
the mention of Alma Mater, is prone to
look back on his undergraduate self
through spectacles coated with rose-coloured
film. Actual reversion to the
life he pictures to himself so lovingly
would bore him to death.
Edward Clark Marsh.
<— The Interior, August 16, 1906, page 1074:
THE TOWER, by Mary Tappan Wright, reveals some of the jealousies as well as the brighter features of life within the faculty “family” of a college. Robinson, an instructor who shows remarkably good sense sometimes and enormous stupidity at others, is to be labeled as the hero and carries off the honors fairly well, as he succeeds in sacrificing himself in the end because in his uncertainty he lets himself be led by cir[c]umstance until he discovers—too late, of course—what he really would like to do. There is a secondary love story of scarcely less interest than the main action, and on the whole the author has contrived to make a very readable book out of far from sensational material. [Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. $1.50
<— The Churchman, August 18, 1906, page 250:
We have had several stories of college life recently, and one of the best of them is Mary Tappan Wright’s “The Tower.” (Scribner, $1.50.) So interesting are the glimpses which Mrs. Wright gives us into the microcosmic world of the college precincts, so lifelike are her characterizations of the secondary actors in the little drama, that one rather resents the intrusion from time to time of the affairs of the hero and heroine, who are engaged in a painful and unprofitable endeavor to revive the emotions and restore the illusions of youth, twenty years too late. “The Tower,” despite this handicap, is well worth reading, and the Misses Langden and Robinson, apart from their sentimental roles, admirably studied.
<— Appleton's Magazine, September 1906, page 382:
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
DULL and gray are the precise words to describe that tide of life in a college town that is the faculty’s—at all events, as set forth in Mrs. Mary Tappan Wright’s novel THE TOWER (Scribner). Mrs. Wright is a resident of Cambridge, Mass., and her husband, Professor Wright, is of the Harvard faculty. But in the novel the characters are set in what is called a fresh-water college, Great Dulwich. The bishop of the diocese is also president of the college, and his daughter, Sylvia Langdon, now late in the thirties, is a sort of perennial college widow. Classes have come to and classes have gone from Great Dulwich, trees have blossomed, drooped, and withered, but Sylvia Langdon is still languidly in love with Robinson, who was graduated eighteen years ago, and is but now come back after eighteen years spent mostly drifting about Europe. Does Sylvia remember him? the bishop asks. Remember him! “If I see him again, I shall ask him to come in to tea this afternoon. We can have it in the garden; the day is most unseasonably warm,” observes the bishop. “I hardly know whether I shall be able to receive,” replies the languid Sylvia. And yet, despite this passionate colloquy, Sylvia was so thrilled she felt her heart beat. Robinson comes, and a curious sort of courtship sets in. For instance, they discuss Denbeigh, a writer famous, though a humbug, whom Robinson had known and seen through abroad. Robinson had dropped Denbeigh. “Can you bear to let a soul drift by you in that way?” asks Miss Langdon. “Had Denbeigh a soul! Really, you go too far!” cries Robinson. After he left, Miss Langdon wondered whether after all she had regained her former sway over Robinson! No wonder books about the faculty side of college life are so rare. The chances are that, for some reason or other, that life may not seem very exciting. However, Robison goes on living his æsthetic life in the tower, and in a manner his soul and Sylvia’s yearn for each other. Robinson’s soul also yearns to a certain extent for Mrs. Denbeigh, who returns to Great Dulwich after Denbeigh’s death. Perhaps the chief value of this novel is in showing the drudgery and the poverty of the average college professor, and the penury that awaits so many teachers in old age. It is terrible to think that in one small college Professor Moncrieff actually committed suicide and Professor Maxwell almost did. Indeed, there are moments in reading this book when you marvel why the poor professors don’t go to Panama and help dig the “big ditch” instead of enduring the deadly grind depicted in the novel. Mr. Carnegie should read this book. Then he would rejoice at having set aside $10,000,000 in steel bonds for the purpose of pensioning aged professors. The æsthetic Robinson, be it added, married one of the two ladies in question.
<— Life, September 6, 1906, page 260:
THE TOWER, by Mary Tappan Wright, is one of the recent novels which, by comparison at least, has some claim to that designation in its more dignified usage. It is an intimate story of the faculty circle in an American college of the second grade. Not by any means so well rounded nor so boldly conceived as Miss Anna Sholl’s similar work, The Law of Life. Not, at first, more effective in presenting its many characters than to make us feel that they would be worth knowing could we only get to know them. Not at any time adding greatly to our sympathetic comprehension of life. But in the end successfully creating a coterie of men and women whose existence we do not question and whose affairs concern us. J. B. Kerfoot.
The Tower. By Mary Tappan Wright. (Charles Scribner’s Sons. $1.50)
<— The Baltimore Sun, September 12, 1906, page 11:
THE TOWER. By Mary Tappan Wright. (81/8x51/4, pp. 422. $1.50.) Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. [Eichelberger, Baltimore.] The author of “The Test,” “Aliens” and “A Truce and Other Stories” gives us a story of a college and college folk. “The Tower,” a quaint structure in the college grounds, is to us the central point of the action of the story, and whether occupied by the poor student or the tutor is the center of attraction for the heroine. The author has not given us a story of action, nor one in which plot plays a strong part. But the contrasting characters are well drawn, the play of emotions is well described and the love element carefully handled. Not a great story, not even an exciting story, but a quiet and restful one.
<— Das Literarische Echo, , October 1, 1906, page 17/18: Eine Welt für sich bilden die Kreise, die Mary Tappan Wright schon vor einigen Jahren n ihrem Roman “Aliens” geschildert, und deren Leben sie in “The Tower” (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons) von allen Seiten beleuchtet Sie entwirft Bilder akademischen Kleinstadtlebens, die sowohl durch ihre Objektivität wie durch ihre tiefe Einsicht überraschen. Nicht nur die gesellschaftlichen Konventionen, die traditionellen Rangordnungen und andere Formeln, in die das Leben der Professoren kleiner Universitäten gepreßt wird, sondern auch die ökonomische Seite desselben kommt in diesem Buche zur Darstellung. Es ist ein ruhig und matt dahinfließendes Leben, in dessen vornehm gedämpfter Färbung nur eine Gestalt, die temperamentvolle kleine Geigerin, hin und wieder im grellen Lichte eines kühnen Streiches auftaucht. Man hat die Empfindung, als ob die Würde ihrer Stellung und die Bürde ihrer Bildung auf den meisten dieser Menschen laste. Der Grundton des Buches, dem es an Handlung durchaus nicht fehlt, ist eine gemäßigte Ruhe, als sollte damit die Herrschaft des objektiv über dem Aktuellen stehenden Gelehrten angedeutet werden. Robinson ist ein Typus dieser Ruhe. Die Selbstverständlichkeit, mit der er nach jahrelanger Abwesenheit die Wendeltreppe zu dem Turm hinaufsteigt, wo es sich so gut arbeiten läßt, ist ebenso charakteristisch wie der Verdruß Sylvia Langdons, daß das friedliche, ruhevolle Bild des Turmes, das sie von ihrer Wohnung mit einem beinahe feierlichem Gefühl des Besitzes täglich in sich aufzunehmen pflegte, durch die Anwesenheit eines Bewohners gestört wurde. Das Buch ist reich an solchen kleinen feinen Zügen, die von tiefer Beobachtung zeugen. Der Komposition aber fehlt es an Straffheit und Klarheit.
[Rough translation:
<— The Standard, Chicago, November 17, 1906, page 14 (318):
FICTION. “The Tower.” By Mary Tappan Wright. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
A story of college life in which the athletic undergraduate plays
no part whatever, is a new thing under the sun. Let us be duly
grateful to Mrs. Mary Tappan Wright. Not once in “The Tower”
are we called upon to admire the broad shoulders, the brown skin,
the gleaming white teeth, the hair in shaggy masses of the mighty
hero of the “gridiron.” We are not expected to shudder at the
morose aspect of his bull terrier, nor to regard curiously the pipers,
the pillows and the souvenirs “swiped” form the Philistines, with
which his den is adorned. Here is an academic world in which
the flirtacious “co-ed,” with her mannish speech and air, does not
exist. Here the affairs of middle-aged people are of importance.
Here it is boldly assumed that an instructor who graduated
eighteen years ago may lead to the altar a bride of thirty-nine
summers. For this deliverance from the trite conventional college
story, many thanks! The reader who has long suffered with
meekness the heavy yoke of the callow collegian, though secretly
loathing the ineptitudes of his slangy love affairs, will hardly
credit his good fortune in coming upon a talked which ignores him
altogether.
<— The Scroll of Phi Delta Theta, December 1906, page 124: “The Tower,” a new novel by Mary Tappon [sic] Wright, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, is the story of a college community, introducing an autocratic business president, who is also a bishop, professors and their wives and daughters. The New York Sun says: “Two things stand out with cruel vividness—the merciless trafficking in men of the business president, and the hopeless struggle for sustenance of the professor with an inadequate salary.”
<— John E. Kramer, Jr. The American College Novel: An Annotated Bibliography, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1981, pages 40-41: Wright, Mary Tappan [Mrs. John Henry Wright]. The Tower, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906. Sylvia Langdon, the fortyish, unmarried daughter of the president of “Great Dulwich College” keeps house for her widower father and cherishes the memory of Robinson, a former student with whom she once had a romance. Robinson, who has been traveling in Europe for eighteen years, returns to Great Dulwich as an instructor of Greek. Sylvia watches and waits as Robinson pays court to a number of local belles. Only after Sylvia becomes deathly ill with a mysterious fever does Robinson begin to renew his old attentions. When Sylvia recovers she and Robinson are wed, and Robinson accepts an associate professorship. Robinson, whose brooding personality leads him to long, introspective debates with himself, is portrayed as a super-serious teacher. He hides away in his solitary room for weeks on end preparing lectures. Great Dulwich College is distinguished by having in its community a vast number of unwed faculty daughters and nieces, as well as a sizeable coterie of faculty widows. Most of the unattached ladies find the enigmatic Robinson attractive. The book contains a series of academically relevant sub-plots. These center on Robinson’s efforts to write a biography of a deceased professor, his aversion to teaching off-campus classes administered by the college, and his rejection of a full professorship offered him by “Coldston College,” Great Dulwich’s arch rival. Modern-day faculty may especially appreciate the interest in scholarship at Great Dulwich. When a book by one of the school’s professors is published, vendors roam the campus hawking the tome to eager purchasers. [Note: This excerpt from Kramer’s 1981 reference work reproduces only the material on the novel itself, omitting his additional biographical material on Wright. The work is a good overview and introduction to the general corpus of American college novels as of Kramer’s terminal date of 1979. Unfortunately, the second edition (2004), which adds some previously omitted and more recent novels but condenses the existing entries, is inferior in its treatment of the material common to both, as the abridgements, clearly made without re-reading the novels treated, sometimes make a hash of the descriptions. In the case of The Tower, the effect is that the 2004 entry seriously misrepresents the novel’s plot; therefore the original 1981 entry is preferred here.—BPK.]
These reviews were originally published in the journals and other publications credited.
The contemporary works here reproduced are in the public domain. The 1981 piece is
©1981 by John E. Kramer, Jr.; the excerpt used here is reproduced under fair use.
All other material in this edition is
©2008-2018 by Brian Kunde.
|