Miss Ludington's Sister

Miss Ludington's Sister

Edward Bellamy's "Miss Ludington's Sister" opens with Ida Ludington, once the beautiful young belle of Hilton, Massachusetts, whose looks and health are destroyed by a severe illness at twenty. Unable to reconcile herself to the loss of her vanished girlhood, she spends decades mourning her lost youth as though it were a dead person, treasuring an ivory miniature of her seventeen-year-old self and later an enlarged oil portrait copied from it. When Hilton is transformed by modernization, she cannot bear the changes to the landmarks of her girlhood. On inheriting a large fortune in middle age, she has an exact facsimile of old Hilton, including her family homestead, rebuilt on a farm on Long Island, and moves there permanently, treating the empty replica village as a shrine to her vanished self. She reluctantly takes in an orphaned cousin, the infant Paul De Riemer, who grows up in this isolated, backward-looking household enthralled by the portrait of the girl "Ida." As a young man he falls deeply in love with the picture, believing conventional notions of the soul's immortality are incomplete: he develops and eventually writes Miss Ludington a long argument that each stage of a person's life — infancy, youth, age — is a distinct person, and that all these successive selves must be immortal, meeting one another in eternity. Miss Ludington embraces this doctrine joyfully, removing the mourning crape from Ida's portrait. A chance reunion in Brooklyn with her old schoolmate Sarah Cobb, now Mrs. Slater, leads to a discussion of spiritualism, and Mrs. Slater suggests testing the theory through a materializing medium, Mrs. Legrand. At a seance conducted by Mrs. Legrand, assisted by her manager Dr. Hull and her daughter Alta, a spirit resembling the youthful Ida briefly appears to Miss Ludington and Paul, deeply affecting them both. At a second seance, arranged despite Mrs. Legrand's poor health, the apparition of Ida appears again but seems to lose her bearings; simultaneously Mrs. Legrand apparently dies in her trance in the cabinet. The materialized girl, now seemingly a living, breathing young woman with no memory of anyone present, is found bewildered in the room, unable to dematerialize because the medium who might have returned her to spirit form has died — fulfilling a theoretical possibility Paul had raised after the first seance. Overjoyed, Miss Ludington and Paul bring the girl home to the replica Hilton, where her instinctive familiarity with the house and village convinces them she truly is the resurrected Ida. Over following days Miss Ludington introduces her to mementos of all the intervening "selves" who bore the Ludington name, and the two agree to call each other "sister." Paul, at first paralyzed with awe in her presence, has Miss Ludington explain his lifelong devotion to Ida; when Ida hears the story she calls him to her and accepts him as her lover, and the two become engaged. Despite apparent happiness, Ida grows increasingly melancholy, weeping frequently and refusing to fix a wedding date despite professing love for Paul, to his bewilderment. When Miss Ludington, weakened by a sudden illness and warned she may die without warning, proposes to legally adopt Ida as her heir so she will be provided for, Ida grows still more distressed. That night, after Paul finds her sobbing and gently proposes that her reluctance to marry stems from her spiritual, otherworldly nature, Ida flees the house before dawn, leaving behind all the jewels and dresses given her, along with two confession letters. In her letter to Paul, she reveals she is not the resurrected Ida Ludington at all, but Ida Slater, daughter of Mrs. Slater (Sarah Cobb) and of "Dr. Hull," whose real name is Mr. Slater; Mrs. Legrand is his sister and did not die — the entire seance, including the trap-door "cabinet" and a chemically treated dress that crumbled the next day, was an elaborate fraud, conceived after Mrs. Slater noticed Ida Slater's striking resemblance to Miss Ludington's portrait and overheard Paul's theory about a medium's death stranding a materialized spirit on earth. The scheme was meant to secure Ida Slater a comfortable life, but she confesses she genuinely fell in love with Paul and with Miss Ludington's kindness, making the ongoing deception unbearable, and that she has fled rather than let herself be adopted or married under false pretenses. Miss Ludington and Paul, though startled, find their affection for the girl herself undiminished by the revelation, since their attachment to her character does not depend on the false identity. Unable to trace her directly, they place newspaper advertisements addressed to "Ida S――r," pleading for her to return or at least write. After an exchange of letters in which Ida repeatedly doubts they can still want her, she finally agrees to come back, returning to Miss Ludington's home and being welcomed with joy. Paul announces they will marry in two weeks, and Ida, still uncertain she deserves him, accepts. In the fortnight that follows, Paul finds himself falling in love with her afresh, discovering, in place of the imagined ideal he had worshipped in the portrait, an array of real and unexpected traits in this "glowing girl, so bright, so blithe, so piquant" — at which point the provided text breaks off.

By Edward Bellamy · First published 1878 · Genre: Science Fiction, Romance, Psychological Fiction · 15 chapters · 58,802 words

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The happiness of some lives is distributed pretty evenly over the whole stretch from the cradle to the grave, while that of others comes all at once, glorifying some particular epoch and leaving the rest in shadow. During one, five, or ten blithe years, as the case may be, all the springs of life send up sweet waters; joy is in the very air we breathe; happiness seems our native element. During this period we know what is the zest of living, as compared with the mere endurance of existence, which is, perhaps, the most we have attained to before or since. With men this culminating epoch comes often in manhood, or even at maturity, especially with men of arduous and successful careers. But with women it comes most frequently perhaps in girlhood and young womanhood. Particularly is this wont to be the fact with women who do not marry, and with whom, as the years glide on, life becomes lonelier and its interests fewer.

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Miss Ludington's Sister is listed on Textopian as a novel by Edward Bellamy, dated 1878 CE.

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Romance · Fiction · Novel · American Literature · 19th Century · Social Commentary · Utopian Fiction · Satire · Humor · Family Drama · Sisterhood · Women's Roles

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