By Wit of Woman
By Arthur W. Marchmont
“By Wit of Woman” is a Merchant adventure novel set in Hungary. It is a fast-moving story about state affairs, kidnapping, and forbidden love. I was soon familiar with the surface position of matters. Duke Alexinatz was dead: his son’s death was said to have broken his heart, and Duke Ladislas of Kremnitz was the acknowledged head of the Slavs. Major Katona was now Colonel Katona and lived a life of seclusion in a house in a suburb of the city.
Colonel von Erlanger had risen to be General and was one of the chief Executive Ministers of the local Hungarian Government—a very great personage indeed. The Duke had two sons, Karl, the elder, his heir, and Gustav. Karl was a disappointment, and gossip was very free with his name as that of a morose, dissipated libertine, whose notorious excesses had culminated in an attachment for Madame d’Artelle, a wonderful Frenchwoman who had come recently to the city. Of Gustav, the younger, no one could speak too highly. He was all that his brother was not. As clever as he was handsome and as good as he was brilliant, “Gustav of the laughing eyes,” as he was called, was a favourite with everyone, men and women alike, from his father downwards. He was such a paragon, indeed, that the very praises of him started a prejudice in my mind against him. I did not believe in idols—men’s ideals, that is.
Cynicism is this, if you like, unworthy of a girl of three and twenty, but the result of a bitter experience I had better relate to here, as it will account for many things and have a close bearing on what was to follow. As I told General von Erlanger, I am not a “usual person,” the cause is to be looked for, partly in my natural disposition and upbringing. My uncle Gilmore was a man who had made his own “pile” and had “raised” me, as they say in the South, pretty much as he would have “raised” a boy had I been of that sex. His wife died almost directly after I was taken to Jefferson City, but not before my sharp young eyes had seen that the two were on the worst of terms. His nature was that rare combination of dogged will and kind heart, and his wife perpetually crossed him in small matters and was a veritable shrew of shrews.
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Arthur W. Marchmont
A.W. Marchmont was a famous British author who wrote several best-selling novels around the turn of the century.
Biography
Unfortunately, biographical details are scarce. A New York Times obit merely states that upon leaving Oxford, he engaged in journalism, which is the field he left in 1894 to devote his time to fiction. Marchmont’s 1897 novel By Right of Sword remained on the Grosset & Dunlap best-seller list for over a decade after its initial publication, and in 1904, it was made into a successful Broadway production, which ran several seasons. It was often remarked that Marchmont’s novels sold better in the U.S. than in his own country. Marchmont specialized in the genre of “Imperial Intrigue.” His tales contain romance, action, duels, and narrow escapes. He also wrote several excellent mystery novels which have yet to be rediscovered.
A peculiarity of the Edwardian era, and especially for a ‘man’s man’ writer, many of his books are written from a woman’s point of view.
Arthur W. Marchmont
