Fair Play

Fair Play

Emma D.E.N. Southworth's "Fair Play" opens at Bellemont College on the James River, where four inseparable friends—the fiery orphan Britomarte Conyers, gentle preacher's daughter Erminie Rosenthal, mischievous Elfrida "Elfie" Fielding, and wealthy, cool-headed Alberta Goldsborough—debate love, marriage, and women's rights on commencement day. Britomarte, brilliant and embittered by an unspoken family shame, delivers a prize-winning essay demanding full civil and political rights for women and vows never to marry under laws that strip wives of property, liberty, and legal identity. At the ceremony she meets Justin Rosenthal, Erminie's scholarly brother, newly ordained and instantly captivated by her; Erminie herself becomes secretly engaged to the charming, secretive Colonel Eastworth, a Southern gentleman quietly involved in pre-Civil-War secession plotting. Traveling home, Britomarte receives a shattering letter and rushes toward New York in anguish, refusing to explain herself. A visit to her reclusive, embittered great-aunt, Miss Pole, at the sinister estate Witch Elms, only deepens the mystery of Britomarte's parentage and the "shame" haunting her life; the old woman violently disowns her. Rather than accept charity or marry, Britomarte resolves to support herself and offers her services as a missionary teacher bound for Cambodia, sailing from Boston on the East Indiaman Sultana. Unknown to her, Justin secretly signs on as the captain's clerk to be near her. Mid-voyage he declares his love again; she refuses him on principle even as her feelings visibly betray her. After a stop at the Cape of Good Hope, the Sultana is caught in a catastrophic hurricane and wrecked on a reef. In the chaos, the crew abandons ship in overcrowded lifeboats, saving only the women; Justin forcibly puts Britomarte into a boat while he remains behind with the captain and two fellow missionaries. Both principal lifeboats are subsequently lost in the storm; only Britomarte and the ship's Irish stewardess, Judith Riordan, survive, washed ashore on a lush, uninhabited island. Believing Justin dead, Britomarte finally confesses—too late, she believes—the depth of her love for him. Justin, meanwhile, survives on the grounded, half-wrecked hulk, salvaging supplies, tending the ship's marooned animals, and eventually finding a natural rock causeway to the island, where he is joyously reunited with Britomarte and Judith. The three castaways form an uneasy household: Justin proposes a "brother and sister" compact for as long as they remain marooned, while privately hoping Britomarte's shipboard cry of love was sincere. He makes repeated dangerous trips back across the tidal causeway to strip the wreck of tools, seeds, livestock, furniture, and provisions, discovering a cave that could shelter them and dreaming of transforming the island into a new Eden. Britomarte insists on sharing the labor and refuses any renewal of his marriage suit, still bound by her principles even as circumstance draws them together in intimate dependence. Interwoven with the castaways' survival story is the unfolding domestic drama in Washington, where Dr. Rosenthal welcomes Colonel Eastworth into his home during the tense winter of secession. Eastworth, torn between personal honor and his covert role in a conspiracy to seize Washington and block Lincoln's inauguration, grows increasingly agitated and evasive with the devoted, unsuspecting Erminie—most strikingly when he forbids her to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner," hinting darkly at "coming events" he cannot yet reveal. Erminie, trusting and self-effacing, presses her father to shorten their engagement, unaware that her fiancé's secret political loyalties threaten to collide catastrophically with her family's Unionist household just as the nation itself edges toward civil war. The narrative thus braids two contrasting tests of "fair play" between the sexes and between competing loyalties: Britomarte's uncompromising fight to reconcile genuine love with her principled rejection of unjust marriage law, played out in the elemental isolation of a desert island with the steadfast Justin; and Erminie's trusting, conventional devotion to a man whose divided allegiance to woman, nation, and cause threatens to shatter the very "holy of holies" of love she so reverently described to her skeptical friend. Southworth sets both romances against the gathering storm of the Civil War, using shipwreck and secession alike as trials that will force each heroine—and the men who love them—to define what genuine "fair play" between husband and wife, and between citizen and country, truly requires.

By Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth · First published 1868 · Genre: Romance, Adventure, Historical Fiction · 42 chapters · 133,615 words

First lines

"God created woman, a living soul, worthy to stand in His presence and worship him! and if it were only from the reverence she owes him, she should never degrade herself to be any man's slave! God endowed woman with individual life-with power, will and understanding, brain, heart and hands to do His work; and if it were only in gratitude to him, she should never commit the moral suicide of becoming the nonentity of which man's law makes a wife!"

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Fair Play is listed on Textopian as a novel by Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth, dated 1868 CE.

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Victorian literature · American literature · 19th century fiction · serialized fiction · melodrama · romance · moral themes · family drama · social commentary · justice · fortunes · secrets

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More by Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth