F. Marion Crawford

Crawford, F. Marion (2 Aug. 1854-9 Apr. 1909), novelist and historian, was born Francis Marion Crawford in Bagni di Lucca, Italy, the son of Thomas Crawford, an American sculptor, and Louisa Cutler Ward. The family lived in Rome, where Crawford began a cosmopolitan education in places that would later form the settings of his novels. Crawford's parents made certain that their children never lost sight of their American roots. After her husband's death in 1857 Louisa married Luther Terry, an American painter, and continued to make her home in Rome. Crawford's early education was conducted mainly by private tutors until 1866 when he was sent to St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire. After his return to Rome in 1869, he studied in a variety of places: Rome, England, Germany, and India. He left India in 1880, returned to Rome, and the following year came to Boston to seek literary employment and perhaps to enter politics.

With the advice of his uncle, Sam Ward, the well-known gourmet and lobbyist, Crawford wrote some articles and his first novel, Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India (1882), based on the life of Alexander M. Jacob, a jewel merchant whom Crawford had met while editing a newspaper in Simla, India. Encouraged by the novel's instant success, he wrote in quick succession Doctor Claudius (1883), To Leeward (1883), and A Roman Singer (1884).

Promising as this beginning was, Crawford still had not decided to devote himself to fictional writing. Rather, he hoped to enter American politics, unaware of how little he was suited to political life, a point underscored by his An American Politician: A Novel (1885). Crawford knew very little about American politics, having lived in the United States only briefly. His outlook was European, and he was essentially aristocratic. Meanwhile, his mother felt that he should marry. At her prompting Crawford went to Constantinople to pay court to Elizabeth Christophers Berdan, the daughter of General Hiram Berdan, a weapons expert and gun inventor. In 1884, Crawford and Miss Berdan were married in the French Catholic church in Pera (the European quarter of Constantinople), with the entire diplomatic corps in attendance. They would have four children.

For a time Crawford and his wife resided in Rome with his mother, but often they enjoyed the pleasures of Sorrento, where Crawford sailed his felucca in the Bay of Naples. Contracts for more novels and the birth of a daughter led him to realize that his career lay in the writing of fiction in Italy. In 1887 he purchased a magnificent villa on a cliff in Sant' Agnello di Sorrento to be his permanent home.

In the decade between 1885 and 1895, Crawford wrote much of his best work, including A Tale of a Lonely Parish (1886), Saracinesca (1887), Marzio's Crucifix (1887), Paul Patoff (1887), The Witch of Prague (1891), Don Orsino (1892), Pietro Ghisleri (1893), Katherine Lauderdale (1894), The Ralstons (1895), Casa Braccio (1895), and Corleone: A Tale of Sicily (1896). These novels, issued simultaneously in New York and London, established Crawford during these years as a major American writer.

By 1896 more than 600,000 books by Crawford had been sold in the United States, and he estimated that more than a million had been sold worldwide. In writing fiction Crawford first sketched a plot in its general outlines. He then filled it in with episodes imagined as he wrote. Each character spoke as Crawford himself would have in the same situation. He wrote rapidly, revising very little, and often in his almost microscopic handwriting put as many as 2,200 words on a single sheet about the size of modern typewriter paper.

The Saracinesca trilogy is representative of his best work. In Saracinesca Don Giovanni Saracinesca falls in love with Corona, the Duchesa d'Astrardente and wife of the Duca d'Astrardente, a "broken-down and worn-out dandy of sixty." Giovanni's resolve to keep his feelings to himself suddenly breaks down; but although Corona has married the old duke to save her father from financial ruin, she will not betray her husband. Not until the death of the duke does she reveal her love for Giovanni and are the lovers united in marriage. In Sant' Ilario, the second volume, the happiness of their union is disturbed by a variety of incidents. Don Orsino, the final volume, concentrates on Giovanni and Corona's son, a young man growing up in a united Italy. Political and social conditions have changed, and Orsino finds many difficulties in his way. At the end of the novel he has yet to find a vocation in life, but he has learned the value of true love.

In 1893 Crawford published a defense of his work in The Novel: What It Is. In it he declared that the novel was an intellectual luxury, a commodity, whose purpose is not to instruct but to entertain. In opposition to William Dean Howells's Criticism and Fiction (1891), Crawford argued that the novel must show men and women as they could or should be, not as they are in real life. Realism in fiction produced vulgar, if not dirty, pictures of boring, ordinary life. Crawford wanted his novel to be, in his phrase, a "pocket theatre" that one could read for amusement. Thus he became the spokesman for the literature of entertainment in the genteel tradition.

During the 1890s, prompted by the growing needs of his wife and children in Sorrento, Crawford made frequent trips to the United States to write novels, plays, and articles as well as to lecture and to oversee the claims of the Berdan Firearms Company against the government. He also renewed his long friendship with Boston socialite and art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. His letters to her and to his wife in these years form a valuable commentary on his activities.

Eventually, as Crawford's enthusiasm for fiction abated, he turned to historical writing. In two years he published two popular histories, Ave Roma Immortalis (1898) and The Rulers of the South: Sicily, Calabria, Malta (1900), and two historical novels, Via Crucis (1899) and In the Palace of the King (1900). In addition his lecture tour in the United States (1897-1898) contained a great deal of Italian historical material, including Italian Renaissance life and the biography of Pope Leo XIII. In 1905 he published the last of his histories, Salve Venetia: Gleanings from Venetian History. He left a history of Rome unfinished at his death in Sant' Agnello di Sorrento.

Crawford's more than forty novels tell compelling stories of love and adventure among the nobility in distant countries. He was one of the first writers in the United States to defend the romance as a fictional form. He increased its popularity and began a long line of popular novels of entertainment that has remained solidly in the mainstream of American fiction.

Bibliography

The largest single collection of Crawford letters and manuscripts is in the Houghton Library of Harvard University. Important letters are also held by the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), the Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library. Manuscripts of his novels are in the Library of Congress, Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Additional material may be found in the F. Marion Crawford Memorial Society, Nashville, Tenn. Among Crawford's novels not mentioned in this essay but noteworthy are A Cigarette-Maker's Romance (1890), Marion Darche (1893), Taquisara (1896), The Heart of Rome (1903), Fair Margaret (1905), Arethusa (1907), The Primadonna: A Sequel to "Fair Margaret" (1908), The Diva's Ruby: A Sequel to "Primadonna" and "Fair Margaret" (1908), and The White Sister (1909). The fullest bibliographical listing is found in John C. Moran, An F. Marion Crawford Companion (1981). The most complete biographical treatment and modern assessment is John Pilkington, Jr., Francis Marion Crawford (1964). Valuable information about Crawford and his career may be found in Vittoria Colonna, Duchess of Sermoneta, Things Past (1929); Maud Howe Elliott, My Cousin: F. Marion Crawford (1934); Louise Hall Tharp, Three Saints and a Sinner (1956); Pilkington, "F. Marion Crawford's Lecture Tour, 1897-1898," University of Mississippi Studies in English 1 (1960): 66-85; John C. Moran, Seeking Refuge in Torre San Nicola (1980); Alessandra Contenti, "La topografia del rimpianto: Roma al tempo di pio IX nei romanzi de F. Marion Crawford," Rivista di Studi Anglo Americani 5 (1990): 315-26; Gordon Poole, ed., The Magnificent Crawford: Writer by Trade: Acts of the International Conference Held in Sant' Agnello on May 7-8-9, 1988 (1990); and Alessandra Contenti, Esercizi di nostalgia: La Roma sparita de F. Marion Crawford (1992). Numerous articles about Crawford have appeared in the volumes of the Romantist, a journal published by the F. Marion Crawford Society, Nashville, Tenn.

John Pilkington

Source:

John Pilkington. "Crawford, F. Marion";

http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-00380.html;

American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

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