Ships that Pass in the Night.
An Early Piracy
Harraden, Beatrice. Ships That Pass In The Night. Boston: The United States History Co., [ND but ca.1894].
12mo.; light brown cloth, stamped in silver.
A bootleg American edition of Harradan’s 1893 novel, which was published in London by Lawrence & Bullen. G.P. Putnam & Sons published the authorized American edition in 1894, but at least seven other editions were published in the U.S. in 1893, including this one by the impressive sounding United States History Co. of Boston, which dispensed with a publication date and any copyright information. No doubt there were other printings by enterprising Yankees eager to cash in on the popularity of this best-selling romance about a bright, energetic young feminist, Bernadine Holme, who wins the love a man who accepts her as his intellectual equal. Miss Holme, however, dies in an accident before she can marry her new love, and this blend of tear-jerker romance and feminism proved a gold mine for its English publisher, which ran through sixteen printings by 1894 and twenty-five by 1912. It also turned the title into a popular by-word for failed or fleeting romance, still very much alive in the vernacular.
Harraden became a leading figure in the suffragette and tax resistance movement in early twentieth-century Britain. In 1913 she issued a manifesto explaining her refusal to pay taxes, “because it is obviously unfair and increasingly intolerable that a woman who earns her own living by direct use of her brain should be called upon to pay the tax on her earnings, and yet be denied any voice whatsoever in the choice of representatives to Parliament whose salaries she helps to pay by the direct use of her brain.” The wealth she earned from her books also caused some degree of political guilt. “I always feel I’ve failed by not giving up absolutely everything for the cause,” she wrote to a fellow suffragette. But as one student of Harraden writes, “by continuing her commercially successful career as a novelist, she was arguably able to get the feminist message across to far more people than she would have done by going to prison or giving up her writing to work full-time for the Pankhursts” (“Writing for the Vote: Suffragette Fiction and the Women’s Writers’ Suffrage League,” by Chris Willis, Paper delivered at Suffragette City conference, Downing College, Cambridge, February 1999).
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