A Violet Season (30 page)

That’s interesting. Did you see them as being connected in some way?

Of course not; it’s just an observation. Though my mother certainly worked hard for the violets, and they never did a thing for her. They were tough little flowers. They liked the cold, and they would ship halfway across the country and arrive intact. But my mother was even tougher than that.

My. I haven’t looked through this box in a very long time.

That’s a beautiful locket.

Yes. It belonged to my grandmother. There used to be a lock of my grandfather’s hair in it.

It looks like this newspaper clipping is the most recent thing in here.

That might be so.

After your mother died, you stopped saving things?

My mother and I had a very difficult relationship.

Just the usual mother-daughter things?

Forgive me. I’m getting too personal.

You’re making me think, that’s all.

About what?

A lot of things.

Reading her last letter again . . . She really was a remarkable woman. I wish I had told her that. I always knew it.

That’s exactly what this project is all about. Remembering remarkable women from this area who might otherwise go unnoticed into history.

I’d like my granddaughter, Susan, to come in here and sit with
us. I have a few more things to say, and she’ll need to leave to pick up her children soon.

Do you have the time? Gracious, we’ve been talking for two hours? Maybe you need to go.

No, no. I can stay as long as you want.

Susan?

You don’t need to tape-record this part, do you?

It would be helpful.

I don’t want this recorded. And you’ll need to promise me that none of this will be published until I’m gone.

All right.

Susan. Sit right here, with us. When we’re done, I’m going to give this box to you. It has all my old letters and newspaper clippings and a couple of journals and your great-great-grandmother’s locket. But first I want to tell you something.

I want to tell you what happened to me in the winter of 1899, when I was just sixteen . . .

—End of tape. Excerpted from an interview with Mrs. Alice Vreeland for
The Women of Albany County,
July 6, 1972

T
he area around Rhinebeck, New York, was known in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the “Violet Capital of the World.” Remarkably, there is little evidence of that booming trade today, beyond the names of several local streets (including Garden Street in Red Hook, Violet Hill Road and Violet Place in Rhinebeck, and Violet Avenue in Poughkeepsie); a few remaining greenhouses growing other crops or standing in ruin; and the existence of one bed of Frey’s Fragrant violets in a greenhouse on the Battenfeld farm in Red Hook. The Battenfelds now grow anemones and Christmas trees. While the details of violet growing are as accurate as I could render them, I took authorial license with one particular aspect of the business: although the industry had declined by 1932, when it is purported in my fictional newspaper account to have ended, in reality, violets later experienced a short-lived resurgence in popularity, and the last Hudson Valley violet farm was in business until the 1980s.

I have retained the names of many Hudson Valley locales, including Poughkeepsie, Hyde Park, Kingston and Rondout Creek, Tivoli, Germantown, Hudson, Kinderhook, and Albany. However, the town of Underwood—its people, its geography, its businesses, and its streets—is entirely fictitious. The only true-to-life character
in the novel is Captain Eltinge Anderson of the steamship
Mary Powell,
whose brindle bull terrier Buster really did perform the trick of praying for the passengers. Donald C. Ringwald’s thorough book
The Mary Powell
provided that anecdote and many details of steamship travel on the Hudson.

The sermon preached by Dominie Jacobs on the Spanish-American War (now often referred to as the War of 1898) is excerpted directly from a sermon that was delivered by the Reverend Dr. Henry Van Dyke, pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church, New York City, on May 1, 1898. I am grateful to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University for access to that document.

Author Charlotte Perkins Stetson, whose book
Women and Economics
was widely read and discussed upon its publication in 1898, later became Charlotte Perkins Gilman and is perhaps best remembered today as the author of the oft-anthologized short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
Women and Economics
is still available in several different editions and provides an interesting picture of the women’s movement at the turn of the century and, by extension, of where that movement stands today.

The history of yellow fever during the Spanish-American War is also an interesting one. Most of its victims either died or made a full recovery. Avery’s unusual outcome is based on the story of John R. Kissinger, an army private who was one of several volunteers in an experiment to test the theory that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes. Unlike some of his peers, Kissinger survived the experiment, but he was left with permanent neurological damage. His story and the story of the Yellow Fever Commission, headed by Walter Reed, can be found on the University of Virginia website at
http://yellowfever.lib.virginia.edu/reed/commission.html
.

It was surprisingly difficult to obtain detailed information about the lives of prostitutes in late-nineteenth-century New York. While public health statistics are available, details of what day-to-day life was like inside the brothels are much more difficult to
come by. Ruth Rosen’s
The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918
and Karen Abbott’s
Sin in the Second City
were most helpful. Other details of life in the city for women of that time came from Dorothy Richardson’s fictionalized autobiography,
The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl
(1905), reprinted in
Women at Work
(ed. William L. O’Neill) and from visits to the excellent New York Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Other sources that were especially valuable to the research of this novel include Valerie Fildes’s
Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present
and Jacqueline H. Wolf’s
Don’t Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the 19th and 20th Centuries;
Harvey Green’s
The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America;
the
1897 Sears, Roebuck Catalogue,
edited by Fred L. Israel; H. Wayne Morgan’s
William McKinley and His America;
the classic
How the Other Half Lives
by Jacob A. Riis; Thomas J. Schlereth’s
Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life;
David Traxel’s
1898;
and the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn Heights. Many other sources contributed in small ways to the historical flavor of this work.

T
he first readers of this novel, in its many incarnations, helped to shape it from the beginning. For that work and for their faith that it would be more widely read someday, I am grateful to Mary Becelia, Tricia Dowcett-Bettencourt, Heather Jessen, Sharyn Nelson, Tracy Roberts, Mark Seidl, Alison Weems, and Robert Olmstead, whose generosity extended across a gap of more than twenty years.

A deep and heartfelt thank-you to Lisa Bankoff for opening this door and leading me through with her savvy and sage guidance, and to Trish Todd for her skilled readings and her enthusiasm for all things violet. Thanks also to all those who worked behind the scenes at ICM and Simon & Schuster to bring this novel to its readers.

Writing historical fiction requires the research assistance of many people. Rebecca Edwards lent her Gilded Age expertise to many passages in this novel. Kim Brinton told me what it’s like to deliver a calf, Anne Kusilek described the feel of sewing on an antique machine, Roger Leonard offered numerous details about the nineteenth-century church, and Rick Cohn checked my music history. I am especially grateful to Fred Battenfeld for showing me around his greenhouses and teaching me about growing violets. I
wish that Clare O’Neill Carr were here to celebrate with me the sharing of local history; she first told me about the violet past of my own hometown. My gratitude also extends to the staff and volunteers of the Museum of Rhinebeck History; the Egbert Benson Historical Society of Red Hook; the Albany Institute of History & Art Library; the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden; the Library of Congress; the Yale University Divinity School Library; Miller Memorial Library in Hamden, Connecticut; Wallingford Public Library; and most especially, my colleagues at the Arnold Bernhard Library at Quinnipiac University. Any errors I have made in the depiction of the Hudson Valley in the nineteenth century are mine alone.

Monica Bauer, Roxanne Hawn, and Bailey Walsh offered well-timed advice, for which I am especially grateful. Kim Herzog, a true friend, understood more than anyone what publishing this novel meant. Heartfelt thanks go also to the Czepiels—Anne, Bob, Susan, Jane, and Phil—for their enthusiasm and for making me their own. My colleagues in the First-Year Writing Program at Quinnipiac University constantly fuel my brain and have helped me more than they know. The encouragement of so many other friends and family members has kept me afloat.

The greatest thanks of all belongs to my family: to my parents, Bernice and Roger Leonard, who fostered the writer in me from the beginning; to my brothers, Doug and Greg Leonard, who tell the best stories ever; to Ellie and Meggie, with thanks for all the quiet Saturday mornings and for the joy of seeing their own writing blossom; and to Brad, always my first reader, my best friend, the one who in so many ways makes writing possible.

Simon & Schuster Reading Group Guide
A Violet Season

The violet industry is booming in 1898, and a Hudson Valley farm owned by the Fletcher family is turning a generous profit for its two oldest brothers. But Ida Fletcher, married to the black sheep youngest brother, has taken up wet-nursing in order to help her family, and her daughter, Alice, has been ordered by her father to leave school and find work or marry. As their family is about to lose their share of the farm, Ida and Alice make increasingly great sacrifices that set them against each other in a lifelong struggle for honesty and forgiveness.

The story is framed by an amateur historian’s 1972 interview with Alice, whose redemption will come only with her willingness to break a silence of more than seventy years and recognize her mother’s courage in the face of a changing world.

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1.
A Violet Season
is divided into four parts: “Whitewash,” “Harvest,” “The Stokehouse,” and “New Cuttings.” Discuss the significance of the book’s title and the part titles. What is the significance of the violet itself in relation to both Ida’s and Alice’s journeys?

2. Discuss the relationships between the various female characters. Do you feel that they could have done more to support one another? Consider the three sisters-in-law, Harriet, Frances, and Ida; the girlhood friends Claudie and Alice; and the women who work in Mrs. Hargrave’s house. Were you surprised that Alice never tried to write to Claudie? Do you think Ida might have had a better relationship with her sisters-in-law if she had tried opening up to them—and vice versa?

3. Compare and contrast Oliver, Avery, Norris, and Joe. How is each an illustration of the environment and societal expectations
that shaped young men during this time? How have expectations changed—or remained the same—today?

4. As demonstrated by the character Anna Brinckerhoff and the inclusion of
Women and Economics,
this was a time when women were beginning to question traditional gender roles and exploring what their place was in marriage and in the wider world. Discuss the various examples of relationships between men and women throughout the novel. Consider Dr. Van de Klerk’s reaction when he finds that Ida has “decided” to take on two babies or Frances’s confession that she believes William married her solely for her fortune.

5. There is a moment, right after Frank announces he’s left Alice in the city, when Ida storms out of the house, thinking to secure Alice’s return by turning to William and Frances. But then she stops: “William and Frances had been there, too. . . . They must’ve questioned his judgment. But what was there to demand, to say, to do now? No one would do anything. . . . She could rely on no one.” Do you think this is true, and that she did the best she could? Or do you feel Ida should have tried harder? How much of the blame do you feel lies with Ida? Do you agree with Alice’s angry accusation that Ida was “blind”?

6. In justifying what he did to Alice, Frank says, “She could’ve saved us,” even though he clearly cares only for the future of his sons. Discuss this irony in the context of the period and the way women were viewed and valued.

7.
A Violet Season
is told from both Alice’s and Ida’s perspectives. Why do you think the author chose to construct the novel this way? What does this add to the narrative? If you could have read more from one character’s perspective in this novel, whose would it be? Is there another character’s perspective you wish the author had included? What did you think of the interview sections of the novel, where Alice recalls her mother and everything that happened to them?

8. Do you think if Ida had mentioned the encounter she witnessed between Alice and Joe Jacobs to Frank, things could have turned out differently for Alice? What about if Alice had confided in her mother that she loved Joe right from the start? Why or why not?