Furze the Cruel (1907)
John Trevena, Edited by Gerald Monsman
When Furze the Cruel (1907) first appeared, The Academy hailed it as "a great book - almost a masterpiece," while the Dundee Advertiser predicted that "it will rank in forefront of modern fiction," and The New York Times declared that its author John Trevena was "unquestionably one of the most notable of living writers." And yet Furze the Cruel has been out of print for almost a century and its author and his other nearly thirty books have been all but completely forgotten.
Furze the Cruel is the first of Trevena's trilogy of novels focusing on life in Dartmoor, a land peopled by strange and often grotesque characters and haunted by pixies and witchcraft. Taking as its theme the cruelty of God, Nature, and Man, the novel tells the intertwined stories of the inhabitants of a Devonshire village. By turns tragic and comic, and richly evocative in its prose and characterizations, Furze the Cruel is a moving and powerful novel that readers will not soon forget.
This new edition, featuring an introduction and notes by Professor Gerald C. Monsman of the University of Arizona, restores this rare text to modern readers and argues for a reconsideration of Trevena as an important novelist of the Edwardian period.
John Trevena, Edited by Gerald Monsman
When Furze the Cruel (1907) first appeared, The Academy hailed it as "a great book - almost a masterpiece," while the Dundee Advertiser predicted that "it will rank in forefront of modern fiction," and The New York Times declared that its author John Trevena was "unquestionably one of the most notable of living writers." And yet Furze the Cruel has been out of print for almost a century and its author and his other nearly thirty books have been all but completely forgotten.
Furze the Cruel is the first of Trevena's trilogy of novels focusing on life in Dartmoor, a land peopled by strange and often grotesque characters and haunted by pixies and witchcraft. Taking as its theme the cruelty of God, Nature, and Man, the novel tells the intertwined stories of the inhabitants of a Devonshire village. By turns tragic and comic, and richly evocative in its prose and characterizations, Furze the Cruel is a moving and powerful novel that readers will not soon forget.
This new edition, featuring an introduction and notes by Professor Gerald C. Monsman of the University of Arizona, restores this rare text to modern readers and argues for a reconsideration of Trevena as an important novelist of the Edwardian period.
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BOOK DETAILS
ISBN: 1934555096 ISBN-13: 978-1934555095 $19.99 US, 414 pp. Trade paper Published 2012 |
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Ernest George Henham (“John Trevena”) was born in England in 1870, and as a young man travelled to America and Canada and lived for some time in the Canadian Northwest. His experiences in Canada, including his memories of the Riel Rebellion in the 1880s, provided the inspiration for some of his early works, which were published under his own name. As Ernest G. Henham, he published Menotah: A Tale of the Riel Rebellion (1897), which ran into at least three editions, God, Man & The Devil: A Novel(1897); the weird Gothic horror novel Tenebrae (1898); Bonanza: A Story of the Outside(1901); Scud: The Story of a Feud (1902); The Plowshare and the Sword: A Tale of Old Quebec (1903); ‘Krum’: A Study of Consciousness (1904); and The Feast of Bacchus: A Study in Dramatic Atmosphere (1907).
Suffering from ill health, he moved to Dartmoor around this time. In the words of a contemporary, “It is one of the strangest facts in literary history that a man, who had defined his place as a writer of fiction with nine novels or so, published under his own name, should have seen fit, after the Boer War, to begin his career afresh and write a long series of commercially unsuccessful novels under a pseudonym.” However, this was what Henham did, publishing A Pixy in Petticoats anonymously in 1906 before adopting the pseudonym John Trevena in 1907 for publication of Furze the Cruel. Furze was the first in a trilogy of novels focusing upon Dartmoor life, followed by Heather (1908) and Granite (1909). He continued to write prolifically, achieving widespread critical acclaim but little commercial success; his notable works include Bracken (1910), the story collectionWritten in the Rain (1910), Wintering Hay (1912), which the Los Angeles Times ranked with the works of Turgenev and Dostoevsky, Sleeping Waters (1913), and Moyle Church-Town (1915). Trevena’s life has become so shrouded in obscurity that as of the time of this printing even his date of death is not known, but he is believed to have died around 1946. Until Valancourt Books’ edition of Furze the Cruel in 2010, all his works were out of print, despite the near-universal critical consensus during his lifetime that his works would live on among the classics of English fiction.
Suffering from ill health, he moved to Dartmoor around this time. In the words of a contemporary, “It is one of the strangest facts in literary history that a man, who had defined his place as a writer of fiction with nine novels or so, published under his own name, should have seen fit, after the Boer War, to begin his career afresh and write a long series of commercially unsuccessful novels under a pseudonym.” However, this was what Henham did, publishing A Pixy in Petticoats anonymously in 1906 before adopting the pseudonym John Trevena in 1907 for publication of Furze the Cruel. Furze was the first in a trilogy of novels focusing upon Dartmoor life, followed by Heather (1908) and Granite (1909). He continued to write prolifically, achieving widespread critical acclaim but little commercial success; his notable works include Bracken (1910), the story collectionWritten in the Rain (1910), Wintering Hay (1912), which the Los Angeles Times ranked with the works of Turgenev and Dostoevsky, Sleeping Waters (1913), and Moyle Church-Town (1915). Trevena’s life has become so shrouded in obscurity that as of the time of this printing even his date of death is not known, but he is believed to have died around 1946. Until Valancourt Books’ edition of Furze the Cruel in 2010, all his works were out of print, despite the near-universal critical consensus during his lifetime that his works would live on among the classics of English fiction.