The Princess Virginia

[from The San Francisco Call Jul 27 1907]

Of course, there is an automobile or two in this latest story of the Williamsons; we should not be able to accept it as genuine otherwise, but it is not an automobile story. Rather, it is a Zenda romance.

This tale is all about the emperor of the little country of Rhaetia and the Princess Virginia.

The princess is a marvelously beautiful girl, daughter of a poverty-stricken princeling and has some royal blood in her veins. The authors have given their princess a surprising pedigree.

"She's half German: on her father's side a cousin not too distant of William II," they put it. "She's half English; on her mother's side related to the king through the line of the Stuarts. And in her there's a dash of American blood which comes from a famous grandmother, who was descended from George Washington, a man as proud and with the right to be proud as a king."

A cursory investigation of the history of the Washington family would have saved the Williamsons from this ridiculous error. Washington was the father of his country, to be sure, but -- they should have selected some other famous American family name for "Virginia."

The princess is a romantic girl. She has made an ideal of Leopold the emperor, and when an offer is made for her hand, she is almost overwhelmed, but only momentarily. She refuses a crown because she wants the emperor's love for herself alone. She is not flattered by an offer which she knows imports no more than a desire upon the part of the emperor to seat a respectable Protestant princess on his throne.

She and her mother set out incognito for the emperor's domain to woo the kingly suitor. She is determined to make him willing to sacrifice his kingdom for her before she tells him the truth about her birth.

To reveal more would spoil the pleasure of reading the story. Adventures abound and complication follows complication till it seems to be well nigh impossible to extricate the poor little princess from her dilemma. The plot is ingenious and cleverly holds the interest. The denouement is satisfactory. It will prove a delightful bit of reading for a summer day.

It pains me to say this about a book featuring the line "Virginia! Virginia! It's a more beautiful name even than Helen!" (298) but The Princess Virginia is not good. Not good bordering on remarkably stupid. And this only a few years after their Lightning Conductor, which remains hands-down one of the best of the early motor romances. The Williamsons are just really uneven, and I'm not sure why.

Part of the reason in Virginia's case is that, here, they're trying their hand(s) at a Ruritanian romance, which is, at best, a tough genre to get right. It takes a lot of world-building skill to make a small fictional middle European kingdom feel real and the Williamson's Rhaetia ends up being a kind of clumsily alpine fairytale fail.

The whole thing's Germanic in a way that will be unthinkable from British writers a few years later (and for decades to come) -- from its "Iron Heart" chancellor -- Bismark to the letter -- all the way down (or rather up) to the young Emperor's pickelhaube. The royal house is Hohenlangenwald, Virginia's princess of the Hereditary Grand Duchy or Baumenburg-Drippe, and the meet cute happens when Virginia's stuck mountain-climbing and the Emperor, out chamois-hunting in lederhosen, happens to round the bend "cheerfully yodeling".

Leopold, our prinz charming, "a tall, dark-cold-eyed, warm-lipped, firm-chinned young man of thirty" (10) is nothing if not well-rounded: a soldier/mountaineer/hunter/artist/musician/scientist/inventor/playwright, who'd claimed his throne in an otherwise vague "great revolution eight years ago" (11). Virginia, rescued from rocky peril, immediately recognizes him from photographs of his multifarious exploits that she'd "contrived to buy secretly" and hidden in her locked desk since childhood. Feigning ignorance, she spends the next chapter alternately "farm boy"-ing him around and making cheeky asides about his emperor. He's intrigued by her impertinence and by the novelty of finding himself "Pegasus bound to the plow" (80) and this all makes it sound a lot more fun than it actually is. The problem is that Virginia's irredeemably two-dimensional -- she's beautiful and she wants to be loved for herself but it's never clear, beyond her beauty, what there is to "love for herself" about her. It's a shame because the Williamsons can do this well: take Molly in Lightning Conductor or Elizabeth in The Brightener -- here, it feels like they don't even make an effort. Leo, for his part, has more to offer (and a mildly better growth arc) but gets stuck with lines like "If I had been weak, I should have groaned aloud in the agony of renunciation." (193)

To be honest, it feels like they were angling to get Virginia adapted to film. Everything about it reads silent reel -- discrete, one-note scenes and dialogue that's tailor-made for intertitles. And, the fact is, the Williamons were very interested in movie-making -- their books together, or Alice's alone after Charles' death, ended up being made into at least 22 films and Alice visited Hollywood in the 20s (recounted in her Alice In Movieland) and even relocated there, briefly, in an (unsuccessful) attempt to recoup her Depression financial losses (as much as $150,000 per NYT -- $3.5 million in 2023) by selling scenarios.

And it actually could have made a better movie than book. One scene, for instance, where the Emperor races towards the railway station (in his "sixty horse-power car" that "could cover a mile in less than two minutes") to try to prevent Virginia's train from leaving Rhaetia, only to be pulled over by traffic cops for breaking the rules he himself instituted, then bursting a tire and having to drive on the rims has some entertaining visuals going for it. It's really the narration and characterization (or lack thereof) that bog things down.

Interesting introduction of morganatic marriage -- that was new to me -- and the illustrations by Leon Guipon are ridiculous fun, but, otherwise, gna' Fräulein, I'd pass on this one.

Side note: The Princess Virginia was originally serialized in Ladies' Home Journal (Oct-Dec 1906, Jan 1907) and was, also, unaccountably republished in 1909 as The Adventure of the Princess Sylvia with what appear to be minor changes: Virginia/Sylvia's American heritage is stripped out, Leopold is now Maximilian, and in the climax, he's a bit less of a sap, but I can't bring myself to more than skim, so there may be more substantial revisions somewhere...