THOMPSON, Clara M.

Born circa 1830s; died death date unknown

Also wrote under: Logan

While Clara M. Thompson was one of the more important Victorian popular novelists, she is barely mentioned in contemporary literary encyclopedias. Her sentimental, moralistic novels are informed by complicated plots: young women seduced and ruined, families separated and reunited, insanity, miscegenation, kidnapping, ransom, and religious bigotry.

The Chapel of St. Mary (1861) is characteristic. Agatha Douglass comes to live with her uncle Rodney Douglass at Maple Cliff; she is befriended by Papsy, Douglass' black-Native American maid and neighbors Honora and Gregory Clarendon. Honora's friend Charlotte Morgan comes to Maple Cliff to teach Agatha and Anne Walbridge, whose dissolute brother Dick seduces Papsy. When Douglass goes to Scotland, Agatha's brother Chauncey arrives to run Maple Cliff and falls in love with Charlotte, who rejects him after being warned by Mrs. Douglass never to marry a Douglass.

Three other families are introduced: the pious, self-righteous Ridgeways, the scheming Winchesters, and the Fergusson sisters who provide further romantic complications. In the end Gregory and Agatha reject Isabelle and Duncan Winchester and marry each other. The Fergusson sisters are reunited with their brother Robert Walton; Charlotte marries Chauncey Douglass. Papsy and her brother Chet are discovered to be Rodney Douglass' children.

While plot construction is Thompson's strength, characterization is not. Most of the characters are conventional Victorian types; however, those Thompson says she based on real life—Papsy, Chet, and the Judge—are more fully developed, and the generous Aunt Polly, another black-Native American character, is a foil to the smug hypocrisy of the Ridgeways and their Ladies' Sewing Circle. Although the theme of this didactic novel is hypocrisy, the contrast between the Christian charity of the black-Native Americans of the Gorge and the narrow sectarianism of the other characters, The Chapel of St. Mary actually reflects the anti-Catholic nativism of the period in its allusion to Maria Monk and its mention of Ursuline nuns fostering vocations, perhaps a veiled reference to the burning of their convent by a Charleston mob in 1834.

Thompson is undistinguished as a stylist, but, as a writer of sensational novels, her work is of some interest to those concerned with the popular literature of the Victorian period.

—MAUREEN MURPHY