Men of Albemarle

Carolina Chronicles - Chronological Order #4

by Inglis Fletcher

North Carolina 1710-1712. This is a long, full panoplies novel of the period, with incidents in scale -- Cary's Rebellion, the hurricane, the plague of pigeons, the Indian uprisings, and the slow growth of unity after years of violent division of feeling, as the attitudes and ideas of the colonists change. Worthy successor to the first book, and another good tale in the rounding out picture of early North Carolina.

Genres: Historical Fiction

500 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1942

About the author

Inglis Clark Fletcher was widely traveled, but the home of her maternal ancestors—coastal North Carolina—provided the stuff of her successful fiction and the home of her later years. The eldest of three children, Fletcher grew up in Edwardsville, Illinois, a small town populated by many displaced Southerners. As a child she preferred reading, debating, and writing novels to other pastimes, but it was her drawing talent that sent her to study as a teenager at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University. Fletcher displayed some aptitude, but frankly said she was more interested in marriage than sculpture.

Her marriage to a mining engineer sent her directly to some of the roughest of the mining camps in California, Nevada, Colorado, and Alaska. Like many pioneer women isolated on male-dominated frontiers, Fletcher turned to writing as a way of coming to terms with experience. She sold film synopses and wrote poetry, articles, and reviews. When the Fletcher family moved to Oakland (1911) and San Francisco (1925-38), Fletcher found she enjoyed running a lecture bureau. In 1944 the Fletchers moved to historic Bandon Plantation, near Edenton, North Carolina. When Bandon burned in 1963, Fletcher retired to Charleston, South Carolina.

In 1928, Fletcher began her much-publicized tours of Africa, which she had wanted to see, she said, since she had been a child of twelve reading about Livingstone and Burton. From those tours came Fletcher's first novels: The White Leopard (1931) and Red Jasmine (1932). Both offer excellent observation of native craft, culture, and ritual.

The documents she found while researching her Tyrrel County ancestors and the Carolina campaigns of British General Cornwallis sparked her interest in the history of eastern North Carolina. Further research in Carolina libraries and extensive reading in public and private records of the period produced Raleigh's Eden (1940). The novel, the first of Fletcher's meticulously researched Carolina series of historical fiction, uncovered long-forgotten cultural facts of coastal Carolina settlement: Moorish architecture and Arabic residents, Oriental settlers and great estates. Many contemporary readers insisted that much of the novel's setting and events was imaginary, when in fact the novel was faithful to history. Each novel of Fletcher's Carolina series studies a specific era, beginning with the first attempted settlement in the 1580s.

The past provided Fletcher with plots, settings, and characters; it was also the inspiration for her themes. Through individual characters, Fletcher articulates her recurring theme: Land represents freedom and life, especially for Americans. Fletcher was intrigued by the possibility for altering identity that settling the colonies offered Europeans; she also studied the complex interaction of person and environment. The process of settlement provided a metaphor for individual experience: to attain knowledge of land is to attain knowledge of self.

This focus on the individual is circumscribed, however, by Fletcher's greater interest in—and skill in using as narrative—historical detail and fact. Thus, her works are most accurately titled historical romances; and melodramatic as some of her stories are, they attract readers decades after first publication, probably because they imaginatively recreate historical events—a form of fictional verisimilitude that comforts the average reader.

-Source: www.Novelguide.com

Reviews

[Sheldon Moss · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting story about the early days of the colony of North Carolina, written about 15 years after Margaret Mitchell wrote GONE WITH THE WIND. I mention this because the author's view of matters of race and slavery and other things that seem to find their way in the story might be less than acceptable. (This was written in the week that Paula Deen's life had an ugly public meltdown.)

It's an interesting storiy with lots of characters, some of which are somewhat multi-dimensional and she did a nice job bringing to life a long ago era about which relatively little has been written (especially fiction). At the time, (about 1709-1711), the northern part of Carolina was an isolated and sparsely settled backwater, with no easily accessible port.

If I had to fault it, I had a hard time buying some of the characters and their motivations -- and it has a high melodrama quotient. This is the only book by her I've read. Some have a called her books romances,though MEN OF ALBEMARLE did not have the classic ending for a romance (at least by today's standards.)