Gallantry
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Gallantry (1922) is a collection of comic fantasy tales by James Branch Cabell. Set in a fictionalized version of 18th century England, Gallantry is a relative outlier among Cabell's body of work, and is included in a series of novels, essays, and poems known as the Biography of the Life of Manuel. "We begin at a time when George the Second was permitting Ormskirk and the Pelhams to govern England, and the Jacobites had not yet ceased to hope for another Stuart Restoration, and Mr. Washington was a promising young surveyor in the most loyal colony of Virginia." Moving away from his usual setting of 13th century France, Cabell transports his favorite themes of aristocratic life and romance to the tumultuous world of 18th century England. As the country rebuilds following a period of civil war, famine, and disease, its wealthy elite enjoy an existence of ease at Tunbridge Wells, a legendary spa town on the outskirts of London. Gallantry is a captivating collection of tales from a historical period not so different from our own. Cabell's work has long been described as escapist, his novels and stories derided as fantastic and obsessive recreations of a world lost long ago. To read Gallantry, however, is to understand that the issues therein--the struggle for power, the unspoken distance between men and women--were vastly important not only at the time of its publication, but in our own, divisive world. This edition of James Branch Cabell's Gallantry is a classic of fantasy and romance reimagined for modern readers.
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James Branch Cabell
James Branch Cabell (1879-1958), a Richmond, Virginia-born novelist and College of William and Mary graduate, was for a brief period one of the most talked-about writers in America: his 1919 novel Jurgen was prosecuted for obscenity by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and the resulting trial and acquittal made him a literary celebrity and a bestseller through the 1920s. He was closely associated with, and praised by, contemporaries including H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, and his eighteen-volume Biography of the Life of Manuel - a linked cycle of novels, essays, and poetry tracing a fictional medieval count and his descendants - was one of the more ambitious sustained projects in American fiction of its era. His reputation then fell sharply after his death, and he is now one of the more genuinely under-shelved major American novelists of the early twentieth century. The inclusion case for Cabell is not an identity argument but a recovery one: a writer who was a bestseller, a censorship-trial celebrity, and a peer of Mencken and Lewis has largely dropped out of circulating collections, not because the writing failed but because fashions in American fiction moved past ornate, ironic fantasy after the 1920s. The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck (1915), part of the Manuel cycle, is one of Cabell's more grounded entries - a satirical, realist novel of genteel Virginia family life and romantic self-delusion, set in the American South rather than in his invented province of Poictesme, and a useful entry point for readers wary of full-fantasy Cabell. Readers who enjoy dry, elaborately ironic prose - Cabell's sentences are built for savoring, not skimming - and social comedy at the expense of Southern gentility and romantic self-deception will find this a rewarding rediscovery. This Clearview Editions large-print printing - 18-point Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, ragged-right, with no word-division - returns a once-major, now-obscure American novelist to circulation in a format low-vision and aging readers can actually use.
More by James Branch Cabell
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