Family
Towards the end of December 1865, Charles A. Barrows (1841-1898), a veteran of the Civil War, married Caroline "Carrie" Pierson Hatch (1841-1918), originally of Genesee County, New York. They had three children:
1. Clark or Clarke Barrows (1873-1899) was born in 1873 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He studied biology or zoology at the University of Minnesota and was in the class of 1894. As a student, he was a member of an organization called Investigators and was an assistant in the Minnesota State Zoological Survey. After being sick at home for many months, Clark or Clarke Barrows died of tuberculosis on January 20, 1899, at age twenty-five. The place was his home at 1114 Hawthorne Avenue in Minneapolis. He was buried at Lakewood Cemetery in that city.
2. Reginald "Reggie" Barrows (1880-1896) was born in about the second half of 1880 in Minneapolis. He also died young, before his brother, in fact. Reginald Barrows' death came by suicide, on December 23, 1896, in Minneapolis. He was, in one way or another, mentally ill or mentally disturbed. On December 22, 1896, he checked into a hotel in Minneapolis and stayed for a day and more, taking meals in his room. When questioned by the hotel clerk, Barrows said he did not have any money to pay for his stay. He fled from the hotel and was followed by a bellboy, then by a gathering crowd. Barrows produced a pistol and fired at the crowd. He entered a ramshackle vacant house and refused to come out. Shortly afterwards, Barrows shot himself. Even before being informed of his death by reporters, his mother, Caroline Barrows, told them, "Nothing you could tell me about him would surprise me. Why, I am prepared for anything. It would not surprise me if he was lying dead at my feet." Reginald Barrows was buried at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, a little more than two years before his brother. See: "Tragic! Reginal [sic] Barrows, 16 Years Old, Commits Suicide--The Young Man Was Undoubtedly Insane.--He Was Discharged From His Position Monday" in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 24, 1894, page 1; also, "Crazed! Reginald Barrows Shot Himself through the Heart, [etc.]" in the Minneapolis Daily Times, December 24, 1894, page 1.
3. Gertrude M. Barrows (1883-1948) was born on September 18, 1883, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I don't know anything about her life before 1904 except that in less than a decade at the close of the nineteenth century, she lost her father, her two brothers, and her grandmother:
- Charles A. Barrows died on May 5, 1892.
- Reginald Barrows died on December 23, 1896.
- Clark or Clarke Barrows died on January 20, 1899.
- Clymene or Clymena Rebecca (Pierson) Hatch died on August 26, 1899.
That left only herself and her mother, Caroline "Carrie" Pierson (Hatch) Barrows (1841-1918).
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The first known published story by Gertrude M. Barrows was "The Curious Experience of Thomas Dunbar," published in The Argosy in March 1904, when she was just twenty years old. Gertrude used only her first and middle initials, writing as G.M. Barrows. After a gap of more than thirteen years, she returned to write under a pseudonym, Francis Stevens, one she would use for the remainder of her career as a published author. That career lasted a scant six and a half years.
Gertrude's first story under the Francis Stevens pen name was "The Nightmare," published in All-Story Weekly on April 14, 1917, just eight days after the United States had declared war on Germany. The story opens on board the RMS Lusitania, which was of course sunk by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915, a precipitating event in America's entry into the war. Her next story was "The Labyrinth," a three-part serial that ran in All-Story Weekly from July 27 to August 10, 1918. On the same publication date on which her story concluded, August 10, 1918, Gertrude's mother, Caroline "Carrie" Pierson (Hatch) Barrows (1841-1918), died in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at age seventy-eight. That left Gertrude alone, except for her only child.
To be continued . . .
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| "The Sinking of the Lusitania" by the American artist Charles Hopkinson (1869-1962), used in a poster during World War I and now in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. In her story "The Nightmare," Francis Stevens' protagonist goes into the sea with the sinking of the Lusitania. Fortunately, he survives. Francis Stevens' first husband was not so lucky when his craft was wrecked in 1910. Stay tuned for more on that story. |
Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley
I have read with interest your posts concerning Gertrude Bennett (Francis Stevens), both past and present. I also applaud your efforts to rebut the mistaken notions about her being the inventor of dark fantasy and that H.P. Lovecraft praised her writing in letters to The Argosy signed by Augustus T. Swift.
ReplyDeleteA couple of points are in order. First, the two common published photographs of Mrs. Bennett were supplied by her daughter, Constance Osbourne, to Robert Weinberg in 1988. Despite your reservations, I can think of no logical reason why Mrs. Osbourne would supply Bob Weinberg with photographs of another woman and claim that they were photographs of her mother.
Second, it was not Ray Zorn in The Lovecraft Collector who first stated that Augustus T. Swift was a pseudonym of H.P. Lovecraft. That dubious distinction belongs to Larry Farsaci who reprinted the letters in his fanzine Golden Atom # 9 (December 1940) among other letters actually written by Lovecraft to The Argosy years earlier.
Third, although you have not reached that point in biography yet, I hope that you are aware of her second marriage. Many details about Francis Stevens, including the photograph issue, are covered in Douglas Anderson's post on the Wormwoodiana blog from January 29, 2021.
The erroneous Swift identification has been bothering me for years. Farsaci published no evidence connecting Swift to Lovecraft. I suppose the "logic" behind the idea was that Lovecraft must have been the only literate person in the entire city of Providence who read The Argosy. Forgive my sarcasm.
Then we come to Sam Moskowitz's one great fault as a science fiction/fantasy historian: he believed what people told him without fact checking. He believed Farsaci, and put the idea out in the open with his Introduction to the mass market paperback edition of "The Citadel of Fear" in 1970. Fortunately, S.T. Joshi did not believe Lovecraft wrote the Swift letters. Like yourself, he decided to do some actual research and discovered that Swift was a real person. Joshi published that information in a pamphlet published by Necronomicon Press, "H.P. Lovecraft in the Argosy," in April 1994. Then Gary Hoppenstand comes along with his Introduction to "Nightmare and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy" ten years later and repeats the debunked Swift nonsense and adds the misguided dark fantasy garbage to Francis Stevens' reputation.
What you forgot to do in challenging Hoppenstand was to note that with the exception of the opening chapters of "The Citadel of Fear," Francis Stevens did not write anything that could be considered fantasy at all. The remainder of "The Citadel of fear" and all of both "Claimed" and "Serapion" are works of supernatural horror. Her other fantastic fiction novel, "The Heads of Cerberus," is an alternate universe/time travel novel, a concept sometimes labeled as sidewise in time, that is clearly science fiction. So where's the fantasy, dark or otherwise? And yes, we are obviously reading a Christian author in all the novels and stories. Note that "Serapion" would have been one of the bleakest noir novels of all time if not for the last paragraph.
I think that I have gone on long enough. Keep up the good work, and never back down from debunking falsehoods no matter how entrenched they become.
Hi, Kevin,
DeleteThank you for reading and for your support.
To clarify what I have written on the supposed photographs of Gertrude Barrows Bennett: my skepticism has to do with the way these photographs are presented on the Internet and nothing else. Put another way, there are missing links between any photos provided to Robert Weinberg by Mrs. Osborne and what we see today on the Internet. How did they get from Point A to Point C or D or Z? We still don't have an original source or provenance for any photos that are alleged on the Internet to have been of Mrs. Bennett. We don't have any metadata, if that's what you want to call it, on any of them, either. Where and when was the picture taken? Who took the picture and why or under what circumstances? Where are the originals? Who scanned and uploaded these images to the Internet? When did that happen and for what purpose? What is the original Internet source or location for them? If we are journalists or historians or fact checkers, then we are required to confirm our sources. That still has not been done with these photos.
Thank you for the history and chronology of the Lovecraft-Swift issue. I didn't know that it went back that far.
I tend to be a lumper versus a splitter. I usually think of fantasy in a really broad sense, encompassing lots of other genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres. I can see splitting science fiction from fantasy, but even that doesn't work very well sometimes. So I don't have a problem with calling Francis Stevens an author of fantasy stories, but I do have a problem with calling her an author--let alone the inventor--of dark fantasy. That simply is not true.
Thanks again,
TH