The Little Lady of the Big House
Encyclopedia
The Little Lady of the Big House (1915
1915 in literature
The year 1915 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* May 3 - In Flanders Fields is written by Canadian poet John McCrae....

) is a novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 writer Jack London
Jack London
John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...

. Biographer Clarice Stasz states that it is "not autobiography," but speaks of his "frank borrowing from his life with Charmian
Charmian London
Charmian Kittredge London was an American writer and second wife of Jack London.-Biography:...

" and says it is "psychologically valid as a mirror of events during [the] winter [of 1912–13]. The story concerns a love triangle
Love triangle
A love triangle is usually a romantic relationship involving three people. While it can refer to two people independently romantically linked with a third, it usually implies that each of the three people has some kind of relationship to the other two...

. The protagonist, Dick Forrest, is a rancher with a poetic streak (his "acorn song" recalls London's play, "The Acorn Planters."). His wife, Paula, is a vivacious, athletic, and sexually self-aware woman (in one scene, she rides a stallion into a "swimming tank," emerging in "a white silken slip of a bathing suit that molded to her form like a marble-carven veiling of drapery.") Paula, like Charmian, is subject to insomnia; and Paula, like Charmian, is unable to bear children. Based on a reading of Charmian's diary, Stasz identifies the third vertex of the triangle, Evan Graham, with two real-life men named Laurie Smith and Allan Dunn
J. Allan Dunn
Joseph Allan Dunn , best known as J. Allan Dunn, was one of the high-producing writers of the American pulp magazines. He published well over a thousand stories, novels, and serials from 1914–41. He first made a name for himself in Adventure...

. Even minor characters can be identified; Forrest's servant Oh My resembles London's valet Nakata. The long-bearded hobo philosopher Aaron Hancock resembles the real-life long-bearded hobo philosopher Frank Strawn-Hamilton, who was a long-term guest at the London ranch. Sculptor Haakan Frolich makes an appearance as "the sculptor Froelig" — and painter Xavier Martinez
Xavier Martinez
Xavier Timoteo Martínez was a California artist active in the late 19th and early 20th century. He was born in the Mexican city of Guadalajara, Jalisco, and, after becoming a naturalized citizen of the United States, died in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California...

appears as the character "Xavier Martinez!"

London said of this novel: "It is all sex from start to finish — in which no sexual adventure is actually achieved or comes within a million miles of being achieved, and in which, nevertheless, is all the guts of sex, coupled with strength." One reviewer disparaged the novel's "erotomania."

Clarice Stasz comments:
Little Lady upset readers in London's day for its gushing sexual imagery... [and] its close portrayal of the tempting pull of adultery. Modern critics, on the other hand, deride its Victorian coyness and sentimentality, its unrealistic characters. Both were correct—it was too sexy for readers in 1915, when it appeared, and not sexy enough for readers beyond the sexually free twenties.


Kevin Starr, in a brutally negative assessment, says the novel
provides a sort of last will and testament to California possibilities. His ranch life had begun in earnest in 1909 as a moratorium against chaos. Its last literary expression stank of madness and decay. Art and ranching converged in London's last effort, neither sustaining the other.


The novel ends with Paula wounding herself mortally with a rifle—the reader is not told explicitly whether it is suicide, as her lover Graham believes, or an accident, as she tells her husband—and convincing a doctor to inject her with an overdose of morphine. As she drifts off, she says goodbye to both of her lovers: “Two bonnie, bonnie men. Good-by, bonnie men. Good-by, Red Cloud.... Stretch the skin tight, first. You know I don’t like to be hurt."
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