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The Administratrix
{ 14.60 x 22.86 cms} Leather Binding on Spine and Corners with Golden Leaf Printing on round Spine (extra customization on request like complete leather, Golden Screen printing in Front, Color Leather, Colored book etc.) Reprinted in 2021 with the help of original edition published long back [1889]. This book is printed in black & white, sewing binding for longer life, printed on high quality Paper, re-sized as per Current standards, professionally processed without changing its contents. As these are old books, we processed each page manually and make them readable but in some cases some pages which are blur or missing or black spots. If it is multi volume set, then it is only single volume. We expect that you will understand our compulsion in these books. We found this book important for the readers who want to know more about our old treasure so we brought it back to the shelves. Hope you will like it and give your comments and suggestions. - English, Pages 377. COMPLETE LEATHER WILL COST YOU EXTRA US$ 25 APART FROM THE LEATHER BOUND BOOKS. {FOLIO EDITION IS ALSO AVAILABLE.} [Please 1 Text Cut And 25 Text Black]. Complete The administratrix / by Emma Ghent Curtis. 1889 [Leather Bound] Curtis Emma Ghent.
373 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1889
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January 10, 2024
The Administratrix is sort of the anti-Virginian. Owen Wister’s Virginian, regularly hailed as “the first Western,” tries to create a cowboy mythos: Emma Ghent Curtis declares “I have endeavored to portray the cowboy as he is.” Wister tells cowboy tall tales as if they were truth, even after being warned the story he wanted to write up was a lie; Curtis pokes fun at a tall-tale-telling cowboy. Wister’s hero picks a woman whose fundamental beliefs are out of line with his, then demands that she conform to his principles; Curtis’ hero adores his woman precisely because she knows her own mind. Wister’s heroine demands her hero become a man of peace in a world of violence; Curtis’s heroine demands her man wear a gun when she knows his life is at risk. Wister goes to great lengths to support the sexual double standard; Curtis goes equally far to challenge it. Wister defends lynch law; Curtis' characters lynch an innocent man. Wister’s racism is glaringly apparent; Curtis’ heroes were abolitionists who see Indians as fellow human beings. On point after point, this book challenges Wister’s reality.
But perhaps I should instead theorize that Wister’s book was a response to Curtis’, because The Administratrix predates The Virginian by over a decade. The two respective authors were also a contrast; Owen Wister was elite easterner to the core; growing up in a wealthy and well-known family; attending schools in Switzerland and Britain, along with St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH, and Harvard in Cambridge, MA; hobnobbing with President Theodore Roosevelt and the like. He summered in the West but he never lived there. Curtis, the daughter of a farmer, was born and raised in what was then considered “the West”, and is now the Midwest (Indiana), then moved to Canon City, Colorado, where she married a rancher and lived out her life.
Of course The Virginian isn’t a response to The Administratrix, but while The Virginian represented many of the worst ideas of the early 20th century, The Administratrix lobbies for the progressive populists Wister so despised. Both books are full of social commentary, but since Wister was banging the more popular drum, both then and now (at least when it comes to Western fans), I think with most readers he gets away with it. But the first time I read The Virginian, after years of reading Zane Grey (my grandmother was a fan) and Westerns written in the 1970s (which is when I first got into them as a genre), I was shocked at how regressive it felt. Wister was a man of his times. Like Zane Grey, Curtis was out of step with the attitudes of her time and, in a totally different way, just as out of step with current attitudes, so I suppose her social commentary grates as hard with many Western readers now as Wister’s does for me.
Emma Ghent Curtis shapes her story to support her views as well, of course, and like Wister she sees her rancher hero as a noble human being. But she does not see that nobility as something a man is born with but rather as something he earns and develops, while her whole book is essentially a rant against the sort of inborn inequality Wister so firmly endorses. Nor does she support Wister’s Social Darwinist version of self-reliance. Her rancher hero is a man who has learned from and respects older and wiser men, and who serves as a mentor to both younger men and to his own wife, teaching her both how to shoot and how to be more thoughtful, wise, and patient in achieving her goals.
I found The Virginian woefully episodic but it does have an overarching plot behind all the nonsense. In contrast, The Administratrix has a straight-forward and coherent plot at the beginning and at the end, but she oddly abandons that plot through the middle. The first 15 or 16 chapters of The Administratrix are a lovely western romance on par with the “sweet” Western romances of today (she does later violate one of the fundamental rules of current romances, but it wasn’t a rule back then), with a few warnings of troubles brewing on the horizon, and the last 22 chapters of The Administratrix are a more typical western with a lone stranger showing up to bring rough justice to murdering rustlers who have an in with the local lawmen.
The chapters in the middle include some interesting or amusing explorations of character, and the characters constructing or sharing various fables and stories, but it’s rather as if Dickens decided in the midst of The Tale of Two Cities to make his characters sit around and exchange stories as if they were in The Pickwick Papers. The plot, tight and direct enough to this point, skids nearly to a halt, and much of this section is just a slog. I maybe see what she was trying to accomplish with these scenes a bit better now I’ve seen the whole, but they still don’t really work. From the first I understood why Curtis wanted to shift from romance to comedy and show more depth to her characters before she moved on to western drama and gunplay, but the route she chose does not work for a modern audience, and I doubt it worked much better for her contemporaries.
Which is a shame, because with a tighter center section, this could have been a good book. Once she picks up the plot again, the book held my interest and moves along sprightly to the end. I quite enjoyed the first and last parts and thought the story they told unique and entertaining, but that middle part desperately needed a good editor.
But perhaps I should instead theorize that Wister’s book was a response to Curtis’, because The Administratrix predates The Virginian by over a decade. The two respective authors were also a contrast; Owen Wister was elite easterner to the core; growing up in a wealthy and well-known family; attending schools in Switzerland and Britain, along with St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH, and Harvard in Cambridge, MA; hobnobbing with President Theodore Roosevelt and the like. He summered in the West but he never lived there. Curtis, the daughter of a farmer, was born and raised in what was then considered “the West”, and is now the Midwest (Indiana), then moved to Canon City, Colorado, where she married a rancher and lived out her life.
Of course The Virginian isn’t a response to The Administratrix, but while The Virginian represented many of the worst ideas of the early 20th century, The Administratrix lobbies for the progressive populists Wister so despised. Both books are full of social commentary, but since Wister was banging the more popular drum, both then and now (at least when it comes to Western fans), I think with most readers he gets away with it. But the first time I read The Virginian, after years of reading Zane Grey (my grandmother was a fan) and Westerns written in the 1970s (which is when I first got into them as a genre), I was shocked at how regressive it felt. Wister was a man of his times. Like Zane Grey, Curtis was out of step with the attitudes of her time and, in a totally different way, just as out of step with current attitudes, so I suppose her social commentary grates as hard with many Western readers now as Wister’s does for me.
Emma Ghent Curtis shapes her story to support her views as well, of course, and like Wister she sees her rancher hero as a noble human being. But she does not see that nobility as something a man is born with but rather as something he earns and develops, while her whole book is essentially a rant against the sort of inborn inequality Wister so firmly endorses. Nor does she support Wister’s Social Darwinist version of self-reliance. Her rancher hero is a man who has learned from and respects older and wiser men, and who serves as a mentor to both younger men and to his own wife, teaching her both how to shoot and how to be more thoughtful, wise, and patient in achieving her goals.
I found The Virginian woefully episodic but it does have an overarching plot behind all the nonsense. In contrast, The Administratrix has a straight-forward and coherent plot at the beginning and at the end, but she oddly abandons that plot through the middle. The first 15 or 16 chapters of The Administratrix are a lovely western romance on par with the “sweet” Western romances of today (she does later violate one of the fundamental rules of current romances, but it wasn’t a rule back then), with a few warnings of troubles brewing on the horizon, and the last 22 chapters of The Administratrix are a more typical western with a lone stranger showing up to bring rough justice to murdering rustlers who have an in with the local lawmen.
The chapters in the middle include some interesting or amusing explorations of character, and the characters constructing or sharing various fables and stories, but it’s rather as if Dickens decided in the midst of The Tale of Two Cities to make his characters sit around and exchange stories as if they were in The Pickwick Papers. The plot, tight and direct enough to this point, skids nearly to a halt, and much of this section is just a slog. I maybe see what she was trying to accomplish with these scenes a bit better now I’ve seen the whole, but they still don’t really work. From the first I understood why Curtis wanted to shift from romance to comedy and show more depth to her characters before she moved on to western drama and gunplay, but the route she chose does not work for a modern audience, and I doubt it worked much better for her contemporaries.
Which is a shame, because with a tighter center section, this could have been a good book. Once she picks up the plot again, the book held my interest and moves along sprightly to the end. I quite enjoyed the first and last parts and thought the story they told unique and entertaining, but that middle part desperately needed a good editor.
March 8, 2021
Not quite the impact as The Virginian. Can see why it didn't have a lasting effect.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews