PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to Miss May Reside, 9 February 1971. MS-2-202 46.91.
Subject HeadingsJust over ten years after he had published his novel based on the life of Lady Frances Wentworth, T. H. Raddall is asked to enter into the ongoing debate on Lady Wentworth's character. Raddall gives a brief review of his Wentworth research. He repeats some often quoted stories about Lady Wentworth and notes which he felt were factual and which were mere hearsay. He concludes that Lady Wentworth was too choosy to be promiscuous.
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February 9,1971 Dear Miss Reside, Thank you for your very interesting letter. Miss Hinds wrote to me1 in 1968, asking about my sources for the New Hampshire part of Fanny's life.2 She was then writing something for the CBC. I have not heard from her since. On page 362 of "The Governor's Lady" I pointed out that gossip about her greatly exaggerated her amorous propensities. But that she had plenty of diable au corps there is no doubt. I don't know what Mr. Stayner meant3 by "spiteful references by jealous people". Dyott, for example, liked her very much.4 Back in the New Hampshire days, the hasty wedding ten days after her husband's death, and the birth of a child less than seven months later, are facts recorded, not mere gossip. The Massachusetts Gazette & Boston News Letter gave a full account of the wedding (which I used in writing my book), and the baptismal record of Queens Chapel in Portsmouth reveals the birth date of the child. The accounts of the love affair between Fanny and John, while her first husband was slowly dying of consumption, were related to me by Miss Dorothy Vaughan, at that time head of the Portsmouth Public Library and an acknowledged authority on New Hampshire history. When I questioned the feasibility of Fanny's lamp signals to Governor John (see Pages 80 and 85 of my book) Miss Vaughan drove with me to the site of the Atkinson house, and showed me that one can easily see the bedroom window in the Governor's house, which is still standing. Fanny was always a flirt, but as far as I could discover she had no serious amour in the New Hampshire days except of course the affair with John. He made a great mistake when, for her safety during the war5, he packed her off to London and the house of his kinsman Paul Wentworth. There in Soho, in the company of that shady adventurer, she mingled with the dissolute fashionable society of the time. I made a study of that society as part of my preparation for the book. From that stay, in that milieu, she came to Halifax, a very different creature from the rather naive little minx of the New Hampshire days. There were spiteful and jealous gossips in Halifax, of course. I don't think Fanny was promiscuous in the sluttish sense of the word. She was a beautiful snob, and therefore choosy. |
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2. THR refers to The Governor's Lady (Toronto & New York: Doubleday, 1960).
4. William Dyott, Dyott's Diary (London: Constable, 1907).
5. THR refers to the American Revolution (1775-1783), also known as the War of Independence.