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Carolina Chronicles - Chronological Order #2
Bennett's Welcome
Enslaved for helping Prince Charles escape Cromwell's armies, Richard Monington, Lord of Codington Manor, is sent to the Jamestown plantation of Bennett's Welcome
466 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1950
About the author
Inglis Fletcher
42 books30 followersInglis Clark Fletcher was widely traveled, but the home of her maternal ancestors—coastal North Carolina—provided the stuff of her successful fiction and the home of her later years. The eldest of three children, Fletcher grew up in Edwardsville, Illinois, a small town populated by many displaced Southerners. As a child she preferred reading, debating, and writing novels to other pastimes, but it was her drawing talent that sent her to study as a teenager at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University. Fletcher displayed some aptitude, but frankly said she was more interested in marriage than sculpture.
Her marriage to a mining engineer sent her directly to some of the roughest of the mining camps in California, Nevada, Colorado, and Alaska. Like many pioneer women isolated on male-dominated frontiers, Fletcher turned to writing as a way of coming to terms with experience. She sold film synopses and wrote poetry, articles, and reviews. When the Fletcher family moved to Oakland (1911) and San Francisco (1925-38), Fletcher found she enjoyed running a lecture bureau. In 1944 the Fletchers moved to historic Bandon Plantation, near Edenton, North Carolina. When Bandon burned in 1963, Fletcher retired to Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1928, Fletcher began her much-publicized tours of Africa, which she had wanted to see, she said, since she had been a child of twelve reading about Livingstone and Burton. From those tours came Fletcher's first novels: The White Leopard (1931) and Red Jasmine (1932). Both offer excellent observation of native craft, culture, and ritual.
The documents she found while researching her Tyrrel County ancestors and the Carolina campaigns of British General Cornwallis sparked her interest in the history of eastern North Carolina. Further research in Carolina libraries and extensive reading in public and private records of the period produced Raleigh's Eden (1940). The novel, the first of Fletcher's meticulously researched Carolina series of historical fiction, uncovered long-forgotten cultural facts of coastal Carolina settlement: Moorish architecture and Arabic residents, Oriental settlers and great estates. Many contemporary readers insisted that much of the novel's setting and events was imaginary, when in fact the novel was faithful to history. Each novel of Fletcher's Carolina series studies a specific era, beginning with the first attempted settlement in the 1580s.
The past provided Fletcher with plots, settings, and characters; it was also the inspiration for her themes. Through individual characters, Fletcher articulates her recurring theme: Land represents freedom and life, especially for Americans. Fletcher was intrigued by the possibility for altering identity that settling the colonies offered Europeans; she also studied the complex interaction of person and environment. The process of settlement provided a metaphor for individual experience: to attain knowledge of land is to attain knowledge of self.
This focus on the individual is circumscribed, however, by Fletcher's greater interest in—and skill in using as narrative—historical detail and fact. Thus, her works are most accurately titled historical romances; and melodramatic as some of her stories are, they attract readers decades after first publication, probably because they imaginatively recreate historical events—a form of fictional verisimilitude that comforts the average reader.
-Source: www.Novelguide.com
Her marriage to a mining engineer sent her directly to some of the roughest of the mining camps in California, Nevada, Colorado, and Alaska. Like many pioneer women isolated on male-dominated frontiers, Fletcher turned to writing as a way of coming to terms with experience. She sold film synopses and wrote poetry, articles, and reviews. When the Fletcher family moved to Oakland (1911) and San Francisco (1925-38), Fletcher found she enjoyed running a lecture bureau. In 1944 the Fletchers moved to historic Bandon Plantation, near Edenton, North Carolina. When Bandon burned in 1963, Fletcher retired to Charleston, South Carolina.
In 1928, Fletcher began her much-publicized tours of Africa, which she had wanted to see, she said, since she had been a child of twelve reading about Livingstone and Burton. From those tours came Fletcher's first novels: The White Leopard (1931) and Red Jasmine (1932). Both offer excellent observation of native craft, culture, and ritual.
The documents she found while researching her Tyrrel County ancestors and the Carolina campaigns of British General Cornwallis sparked her interest in the history of eastern North Carolina. Further research in Carolina libraries and extensive reading in public and private records of the period produced Raleigh's Eden (1940). The novel, the first of Fletcher's meticulously researched Carolina series of historical fiction, uncovered long-forgotten cultural facts of coastal Carolina settlement: Moorish architecture and Arabic residents, Oriental settlers and great estates. Many contemporary readers insisted that much of the novel's setting and events was imaginary, when in fact the novel was faithful to history. Each novel of Fletcher's Carolina series studies a specific era, beginning with the first attempted settlement in the 1580s.
The past provided Fletcher with plots, settings, and characters; it was also the inspiration for her themes. Through individual characters, Fletcher articulates her recurring theme: Land represents freedom and life, especially for Americans. Fletcher was intrigued by the possibility for altering identity that settling the colonies offered Europeans; she also studied the complex interaction of person and environment. The process of settlement provided a metaphor for individual experience: to attain knowledge of land is to attain knowledge of self.
This focus on the individual is circumscribed, however, by Fletcher's greater interest in—and skill in using as narrative—historical detail and fact. Thus, her works are most accurately titled historical romances; and melodramatic as some of her stories are, they attract readers decades after first publication, probably because they imaginatively recreate historical events—a form of fictional verisimilitude that comforts the average reader.
-Source: www.Novelguide.com
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 1, 2015
Rating Clarification: 3.5 Stars
July 16, 2014
I'm not going to try and excuse the casual racism of the book. Fletcher has a very clear worldview as expressed through the character of Richard Monington, defender of the King against Cromwell. There's the King, then gentlemen, then yeomen/craftsmen, then white peasants, then black slaves, then Indians. Women and girls have similar gradations, but the expectations are completely different. The good should be rewarded, the bad punished, but no one should be shifted out of their appropriate caste. People of color, whether African or Native American, are completely inscrutable, and magical. this sums it up pretty well, I think:
"She", is a young woman named Tamar, indentured and persecuted for bearing a still-born baby and not revealing the father.
Okay, so it's racist and sexist and rife with stereotypes. So, you might ask, why did I like it? Why does it get a pass when Gone With the Wind doesn't? They're both prey to the same sentimental view of the past as an idealized system. But Fletcher isn't trying to justify it: she's not moved by the plight of the slaves, certainly not compared to the honest white indentured servants, but she does gives us active rebellion and thoughtful consideration of just how back-breaking the work is.
What's really heart-breaking to me is a pure throw-away bit about a native tribe that's almost disappeared. There are cleared fields in (modern) NC, and no aggressive natives because they've died off. Disease has eliminated more than half the population, possibly as much as 90% in the hundred years since Roanoke Hundred. Just imagine the Cherokee landing in England after the worst wave of the black death. No wonder they felt like God had handed them Eden.
Library copy.
She became a symbol of the horrible tragedy of white servitude in its most noxious form. There was tragedy in black slavery also, but not the poignant, weary heart-break he saw in the girl, try as she would to conceal it.
"She", is a young woman named Tamar, indentured and persecuted for bearing a still-born baby and not revealing the father.
Okay, so it's racist and sexist and rife with stereotypes. So, you might ask, why did I like it? Why does it get a pass when Gone With the Wind doesn't? They're both prey to the same sentimental view of the past as an idealized system. But Fletcher isn't trying to justify it: she's not moved by the plight of the slaves, certainly not compared to the honest white indentured servants, but she does gives us active rebellion and thoughtful consideration of just how back-breaking the work is.
What's really heart-breaking to me is a pure throw-away bit about a native tribe that's almost disappeared. There are cleared fields in (modern) NC, and no aggressive natives because they've died off. Disease has eliminated more than half the population, possibly as much as 90% in the hundred years since Roanoke Hundred. Just imagine the Cherokee landing in England after the worst wave of the black death. No wonder they felt like God had handed them Eden.
Library copy.
September 25, 2017
First half of book is set in England during their Civil War. This gives a great background into English history but I was hoping for more content on Jamestown. I think the other books in the series has more on NC.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews