The Victory

The Victory by Molly Elliot Seawell

The Victory, by Molly Elliot Seawell, is a Civil War-era novel of divided loyalty set at Harrowby, the Tremaine family's ancestral plantation on a Virginia tidewater river. The story opens at Christmas 1860, as secession fever sweeps the South following South Carolina's withdrawal from the Union. Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine preside over Harrowby with their three sons — Neville, a career United States Army officer; Richard, a brilliant young lawyer newly ambitious for public life; and Archie, an eager sixteen-year-old too young to fight — along with Angela Vaughn, an orphaned ward raised almost as their own daughter and educated unconventionally by the family's English tutor, Lyddon. The household's genial patriarchal order, with its devoted but comically unreliable slave butler Hector and its rituals of family prayer, dancing, and holiday feasting, masks the anxiety building beneath: everyone senses that Neville, alone among the men of the family, may not resign his commission when Virginia secedes, and that this will shatter the household's unity. Amid the festivities, Neville declares his long-suppressed love for Angela, and the two become secretly engaged, even as Lyddon and Richard privately recognize that Angela's deepest, unacknowledged feelings are stirred not by steady, honorable Neville but by an idealized, unmet figure — Richard's dashing university friend from New Orleans, Philip Isabey, whom Angela has worshipped in imagination for years through stories, letters, and a daguerreotype. Virginia's secession convention convenes, and Richard, elected as the youngest delegate from his county, throws himself into raising an artillery battery and is soon commissioned captain. Neville, however, wrestles in anguished silence with the conflict between his oath as a soldier and his loyalty to home and state. When Virginia finally secedes, he sails secretly up the river by night to Harrowby, granting himself only two hours' leave to announce, to his parents' horror, that he intends to remain in the United States Army. Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine, devastated and unbending in their code of honor, order him from the house. In the desperate hours before his departure, Neville marries Angela in a hurried, joyless ceremony on the family's wharf — using her childhood ring in place of a wedding band — so that he may send for her once his fate as a "traitor" to the Confederacy is settled. He departs before dawn, saluted formally rather than embraced by his father, leaving Angela his wife in name but bound to a household that can no longer fully claim her. Angela remains at Harrowby in an ambiguous, painful position: loved still by Richard and Lyddon, tolerated coldly by Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine, and shunned by the county at large, which regards Neville's choice as a family disgrace. Only the widowed Mrs. Charteris, herself proudly sending her underage son George off to seek glory, extends Angela any sympathy. Angela occupies herself with the era's wartime industry — scraping lint, sewing for army hospitals — while writing loyally to her absent husband, even as she struggles with guilt over feelings she cannot suppress. Those feelings crystallize when Philip Isabey, now a Confederate artillery captain on a military errand, finally arrives in the county and is introduced to Angela as Neville's bride. Handsome, cosmopolitan, and possessed of an effortless charm and a beautiful singing voice, Isabey embodies everything Angela has always longed for beyond Harrowby's insular world — art, sophistication, the wide life outside Virginia — and she finds herself irresistibly, guiltily drawn to him even as she reproaches herself for betraying Neville's memory. Isabey, perceptive and kind, recognizes both her unworldly innocence and the cruelty of her situation, and treats her with a gentleness that only deepens her fascination. Colonel and Mrs. Tremaine, with characteristic extravagant hospitality, invite Isabey's stepmother, Madame Isabey, and his elegant, worldly stepsister-in-law, Adrienne Le Noir — both refugees from New Orleans — to make Harrowby their wartime home. Their arrival introduces a new, sophisticated foreign element into the household, and Lyddon speculates that Isabey and Adrienne may be intended for each other by family design, a suspicion that quietly wounds Angela without her fully admitting why. As the novel's opening movement closes, the personal and the historical have become inseparable: Richard drills for a war he believes the South can win through spirit and honor; Neville has sacrificed home, family, and reputation to an interior code of duty his own people cannot forgive; and Angela, married to one man in crisis and haunted by longing for another, stands at the center of a household — and a country — about to be riven by forces of loyalty, honor, and love that no one, least of all the confident, romantic Virginians of Harrowby, yet understands.

By Molly Elliot Seawell · First published 1906 · Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Romance · 23 chapters · 125,327 words

First lines

Bright was the Christmas of 1860 at the old manor house of Harrowby in lowland Virginia. It lay upon the broad, bright river which ran laughing into the arms of the great bay, and from there bay and river rushed together to the windy floors of the wide Atlantic. Nearly two hundred years before, the first Tremaine, a discontented gentleman, who found life very uncomfortable in England after Monmouth's rebellion, had made the beginning of the Harrowby mansion. It was built quite flat to the ground, with the low ceilings and steep, narrow stairs of the seventeenth-century country house.

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historical fiction · naval fiction · maritime adventure · Napoleonic Wars · Battle of Trafalgar · British Royal Navy · Horatio Nelson · HMS Victory · early nineteenth century · sea battles · naval officers · British history

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