Autograph manuscript of best-selling novelist Ethel Boileau’s most successful novel which tells the story of Alan Stewart of Ardbreck who brings his bride back to the Highlands where to survive he has to summon up the ‘courage and clan loyalty of his fighting ancestors.’ The author, Ethel Boileau (1881-1942) was a popular novelist in the 1920s and ‘30s who corresponded with Ayn Rand after writing to the American author about her 1936 novel, We the Living. Boileau has dated and placed the manuscript in a Highland spa town: ‘Strathpeffer Roiss-shire September 4th 1934’ which suggests that the book was written in Scotland.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: Boileau’s manuscript (10cm thick) is bound with with silk ties into worn buff card wrappers on which Boileau has written the title and her name. The text unfolds as: title page (with Strathpeffer statement) followed by the ‘Prologue 1747-1900’ which offers the book’s backstory of a Scottish family struggling to maintain their ancestral estates from just after the Jacobite uprising to 1900 with the main action of the novel taking place between 1900 and 1936. The book is dedicated to: ‘To all Scotsmen, at home, or in exile’. Chapter I opens with careful revision of the book’s opening lines about Stewart of Ardbreck coming ‘down from the hills’ in 1747 and Boileau’s pattern of careful correction continues across the manuscript. Each page is separately paginated up to the final Chapter XII - circa 70 pages per chapter; c 840 pages overall; c90,000 words - the book was promoted as Ethel Boileau’s ‘long new novel’. This is a working draft manuscript with occasional interpolated additional pages and corrections throughout. Boileau writes in a round hand, usually in black ink, legible with a little practice. The manuscript was probably sent to a professional typist before submission to the publishers who released it in 1936.
CONTEXT Clansmen is a Scottish family saga, drawing inspiration from contemporary examples such as the Forsyte Saga and deals with the economic threats which threaten any emotional attachments a man may make. Alan Stewart’s father is described as having died in the Boer War and he s able to survive as a Laird only because of the generosity of a Jewish financier, Sir Isidore, and his retainer (and secret half-brother) Hector, ‘with his silent stalker’s walk’. As well as being a novel of Highland life, Boileau sets her scene in Edinburgh, Calcutta, the trenches of the First World War, the battlefields of the Boer War, the fleshpots of New York and, very up-to-date, Nazi Germany. Given the novel’s scope and ambition it is no surprise that this is regarded as Boileau’s masterpiece.
