Frances Waldeaux

Frances Waldeaux (1897) is a novel from the later years of the American writer Rebecca Harding Davis, consisting of twenty chapters. The story begins aboard a North German Lloyd steamer departing from Hoboken: Frances Waldeaux of Ville, Delaware, travels to Europe with her only son, George. George is determined to study for the ministry at Oxford in order to escape the artistic fantasies he has harbored since childhood; Frances, for her part, is finally making the journey to Europe she has dreamed of for thirty years. Among their fellow passengers are Perry, an associate magazine editor, Dr. Watts, and Clara Vance, a New York fashion teacher—Frances's cousin and one of the few people who knows the family secret. To readers, Mrs. Waldeaux appears a well-bred Southern lady living on her late husband's estate; in fact, the old house and the land belong to her, while the late Colonel Waldeaux drank and squandered and left nothing. For years she has supported George at Harvard and Oxford by growing flowers and fruit, raising fine poultry and livestock, and writing a humorous column for a New York newspaper under the pen name "Quigg." She deliberately conceals all of this from her son. During the journey, George meets an enigmatic European woman aboard the liner and is deeply drawn to her, gradually changing from a young man dependent on his mother into a man in pursuit of passion. The rift between mother and son deepens: George insists on marrying the woman and settling in France, sinking into a bohemian idleness and real hardship, while Frances begins to examine the love that has made her son her whole life. With the emotional tug-of-war between mother and son as its axis, the novel interweaves subplots such as an American girl's European education and a down-at-heel German nobleman's pursuit of an American heiress; set against the transatlantic travels of the late nineteenth century, it writes of the romance of travel, the gaps of class, and the clash of generational values, and of how a middle-aged woman rediscovers herself beyond the identity of "mother."