‘Cora sits at the bay window, writing, in a fat manuscript book with a lock, about a man she once married … and wishing in the nicest possible way that he was dead.’ At the beginning of this novel, Cora, former madame of the Hotel de Dream, Jacksonville, Florida, finds herself alone and lonely in Surrey, England, where she has no social, financial, legal or emotional status. Her lawful husband, the one she wants dead, is too concerned about his reputation to grant her a divorce. Her ‘real’, common-law husband is Stephen Crane, an American adventurer, acclaimed author of The Red Badge of Courage. He is the love of Cora’s life, but his wanderlust has driven him to report the war in Cuba, beyond her reach.
‘Some of this story is true’, asserts Paul Ferris by way of a preface. Stephen Crane is, of course, still a fixture on university reading lists for American Literature. Cora, older than Stephen, waited for him, got into debt for him, installed him — briefly — in Brede Place, a beautiful mediaeval house in Sussex, played hostess to literary friends like Conrad, Henry James and Ford Madox Ford, and outlived him. It was TB, not war, that carried Crane off at the age of 28. Cora returned to America and brothel life, but Ferris doesn’t follow her. His novel concentrates on the months of her life when Crane was in Cuba, on her friendship with Kate, a similarly compromised literary mistress, and her entanglement with Hooper, a sexually repressed detective who, in his attempts to investigate her life, unravels far more about his own.
‘Real’ characters, like Joseph Conrad, rub shoulders with characters invented to pull the story into shape.
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