Amélie Rives

Amélie Rives (1863-1945), Novelist and playwright; former wife of John Armstrong Chanler, and later wife of Prince Pierre Troubetzkoy

Amélie Louise (née Rives), Princess Troubetskoy

http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp50273/amelie-louise-nee-rives-princess-troubetskoy accessed 10/23/2017

Rives, Amélie (23 Aug. 1863-16 June 1945), novelist and playwright, was born in Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of Colonel Alfred Landon Rives (CSA), a civil engineer, and Sarah Catherine Macmurdo. Amélie Rives spent much of her youth near Charlottesville, Virginia, at "Castle Hill," the estate of her paternal grandparents, William Cabell Rives and Judith Page Walker. Because Civil War hostilities bypassed Castle Hill, after the war it functioned largely as it had before, thus affording her a leisured, aristocratic, and cultured environment that few southerners were privileged to know after 1865. William Cabell Rives had been a friend of Thomas Jefferson, a U.S. senator, and twice minister to France, and he played a significant role in his granddaughter's education. Governesses and tutors were provided, and Rives was given free access to the several thousand volumes in her grandfather's library.

Rives's reading was broad and eclectic. A precocious child, she was reading by the age of four and produced much juvenilia, none of it intended for publication. However, in 1885, when Rives was twenty-three, a visitor from Boston discovered one of her manuscripts and recommended it to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. "A Brother to Dragons" was published in the March 1886 issue of the Atlantic. Although it exhibited a youthful naivete, as well as numerous flaws in language and structure, this first publication was well received; it appealed to the popular taste for romantic fiction that was still thriving in Gilded Age America. Set in Shakespearean England, this was one of several Rives plots to deal with faraway times and places.

However, the story gave only a limited indication of what was to come in her later work. In 1888 Rives published a novel that, like most of her subsequent work, was given a contemporary setting, obviously modeled upon Castle Hill. This novel, The Quick or the Dead?, also features the first in a long line of heroines whose background, physique, and temperament resemble those of their author. (The first edition of the novel, published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in April 1888, contained a steel engraving of Amélie Rives, as if to suggest this connection.) This character is beautiful yet self-effacing, vivacious yet sensitive, passionate yet somewhat tempered by social mores. In subsequent novels the heroine gradually matures and, after enduring trying vicissitudes, becomes wiser and more capable in matters of the heart.

However, in The Quick or the Dead? the protagonist, Barbara Pomfret, is a young widow faced with the dilemma of whether to remarry or remain loyal to the memory of her husband. This vexing question illustrates the changing tide of American literary tastes of the time: whether to adhere to sentimental custom or to follow a more independent course, one informed by reason. Probably unaware of the censurings leveled upon such realists as William Dean Howells and Mark Twain whose protagonists often veer from accepted norms of behavior, Rives allowed Barbara to come dangerously close to following the dictates of her heart rather than society's conventions of widowhood. She also had Barbara express sensual urgings by entreating her suitor, "Kiss me! Kiss me!" As a result, The Quick or the Dead? became a succès de scandale, calling forth a pious barrage from moralistic critics and ministers and eventually resulting in sales of over 300,000 copies in America and 100,000 in England.

While The Quick or the Dead? was in production, Amelie Rives had made her debut in Newport, where she met John Armstrong Chanler, a New York attorney and an Astor descendant, whom she married in June 1888. Balancing the furor generated by the novel with marriage to the eccentric Chanler proved something of an ordeal. However, she was warmly received on her belated wedding trip to Europe the following year. She was introduced to many of the British literati, such as George Meredith and Thomas Hardy, and became friends with George Curzon and "the Souls," a fashionable intellectual coterie that also included Arthur Balfour. She also began to study painting in Paris. In 1894 her marriage all but over as a result of Chanler's erratic behavior, Oscar Wilde introduced her to Prince Pierre Troubetzkoy, a young portrait painter recently arrived in London. In 1895 Rive returned to America and received an amicable divorce from Chanler; she married Prince Troubetzkoy in February 1896. The success of this marriage is reflected in an interview in the New York Times of 19 April 1914 concerning her views on feminism. The ideal for a woman, Rives asserted, was to realize in marriage equality with her husband; there should be "complete comraderie," with husband and wife friends as well as marriage partners.

Marriage to Prince Troubetzkoy marked the beginning of the happiest segment of Rives's life, but during this period her writing diminished in volume and quality. The uncertain, maudlin plot of A Damsel Errant (1898) was her weakest, and the narrative poem Selene (1905) was derivative of Greek myth and aesthete poetic tradition. However, a decade after her marriage she began to publish more accomplished works: Augustine the Man (1906), a closet drama, and World's End (1914), her most mature--and realistic--novel. World's End, Shadows of Flames (1914), and Firedamp (1930) embody a variant of the "international theme" associated with such contemporary American authors as Henry James (1843-1916) and Edith Wharton. Rives's typical heroine in such novels is depicted in a European setting, as much at home in London, say, as in her native Virginia, and still as striking and vital as in her earlier manifestations.

For almost two decades following their marriage the Troubetzkoys divided their time between Castle Hill and Europe. They enjoyed celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic: he through prestigious portrait commissions and she through literary reputation and physical beauty (she was one of the most frequently photographed women of her era). Always interested in spiritualism, and claiming to be psychic, Rives later avowed that in the spring of 1914 she had a premonition of an imminent cataclysm in England. Though not intending to travel abroad that summer, she and the Prince hastily changed their plans. During their stay at Lord Curzon's estate, Archduke Francis Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. They never returned to Europe.

After 1914 the Troubetzkoys' lives underwent major changes. Throughout the 1920s and into the depression years finances were often strained, though Rives enjoyed a certain success as a dramatist in New York in the late 1910s and early 1920s, and the prince obtained what painting commissions he could. By 1930, fifteen years before her death, Rives's creative years were nearly over. Although she completed The Young Elizabeth, perhaps her finest work, in 1938, this drama was neither published nor professionally produced. The sudden death of Prince Troubetzkoy in 1936 was catastrophic for Rives. Being childless, she all but lost the will to live. Though her health and spirits improved temporarily during the late 1930s, they declined steadily during World War II. She died in a Charlottesville nursing home. Obituaries and later commentators noted her striking beauty, her provocative body of fiction, and her courage in asserting an independence of mind while embodying the style of the international haut monde.

Bibliography

There is no single, all-inclusive collection of Amélie Rives's extant papers (most were burned at her request), but limited holdings are in the archives of the University of Virginia, the Virginia Historical Society, the Valentine Museum (Richmond), Harvard University, and Duke University (in the John Armstrong Chanler Papers). In addition to the works discussed above, other important titles are the novels Barbara Dering (1893, a sequel to The Quick or the Dead?), The Golden Rose (1908), The Queerness of Celia (1926), and Trix and Over-the-Moon (1909); the plays The Sea-Woman's Cloak and November Eve (1923); and the poetry collection As the Wind Blew (1920). The only published biography is Welford Dunaway Taylor, Amélie Rives (Princess Troubetzkoy) (1973); however, George C. Longest's unpublished dissertation, "Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy: A Biography" (Univ. of Ga., 1969), also is a full-length study. The most comprehensive source for bibliographical information is George C. Longest, Three Virginia Writers; Mary Johnston, Thomas Nelson Page and Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy: A Reference Guide (1978).

Welford Dunaway Taylor

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American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.

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