Transplanted

Transplanted by Gertrude Atherton

Lee Tarleton grows up in a San Francisco boarding-house, nursing her invalid mother, Marguerite Tarleton, a widowed Southern belle whose husband, Hayward Tarleton, shot himself after gambling losses. At eleven, Lee befriends Cecil Maundrell, a shy English boy newly arrived with his father. During an outing to the Cliff House they hire a fishing boat, are stranded across the bay in fog, and spend a frightening night lost on a mountain, surviving an earthquake together; Cecil promises Lee's dying mother he will marry Lee, and the two children seal a mock engagement. Cecil's father unexpectedly inherits an earldom, becoming Lord Barnstaple, and takes Cecil back to England, leaving Lee, soon orphaned, to be raised on Rincon Hill by the Montgomery family under Mrs. Montgomery's care alongside her children Tiny and Randolph. Lee matures into a striking, much-admired young woman, courted by Randolph, Tom Brannan, and Ned Geary, while corresponding irregularly with Cecil through his Oxford years of shifting enthusiasms—religion, radicalism, athletics. She formally releases him from the childhood engagement, but he returns to California, sees her again, and proposes in earnest; after negotiating how much of her independence she must yield to English domestic expectations, she accepts him. Following a courtship complicated by his hunting trip for a grizzly bear (which tests Lee's tolerance and is engineered partly by Randolph to reveal Cecil's priorities) and Randolph's own thwarted feelings, Lee and Cecil marry and travel to Maundrell Abbey. There she is introduced to the ancestral estate, the eccentric Lord Barnstaple, and her brittle, American-born stepmother-in-law, Lady Barnstaple, whose financial anxieties and social rivalries color Lee's first days as a member of the English aristocracy.

By Gertrude Atherton · First published 1919 · Genre: Historical Fiction, Coming-of-Age, Domestic Fiction · 58 chapters · 97,661 words

First lines

Mrs. Hayne's boarding-house stood on the corner of Market Street and one of those cross streets which seem to leap down from the heights of San Francisco and empty themselves into the great central thoroughfare that roars from the sandy desert at the base of Twin Peaks to the teeming wharves on the edge of the bay. On the right of Market Street, both on the hills and in the erratic branchings of the central plain, as far as the eye can reach, climbs and swarms modern prosperous San Francisco; of what lies beyond, the less said the better. On the left, at the far southeast, the halo of ancient glory still hovers about Rincon Hill,[A] growing dimmer with the years: few of the many who made the social laws of the Fifties cling to the old houses in the battered gardens; and their children marry and build on the gay hills across the plain. In the plain itself is a thick-set, low-browed, dust-coloured city; "South of Market Street" is a generic term for hundreds of streets in which dwell thousands of insignificant beings, some of whom promenade the democratic boundary line by gaslight, but rarely venture up the aristocratic slopes. By day or by night Market Street rarely has a moment of rest, of peace; it is a blaze of colour, a medley of sound, shrill, raucous, hollow, furious, a net-work of busy people and vehicles until midnight is over. Every phase of the city's manifold life is suggested there, every aspect of its cosmopolitanism.

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San Francisco · California · Coming-of-age · Childhood friendship · Romance · Courtship · Social class · Southern belle · English aristocracy · Cross-cultural romance · Female independence · Displacement

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Transplanted is listed on Textopian as a novel by Gertrude Atherton, dated 1919 CE.

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