“Belchamber, first published in 1904, is the portrait of a sissy…,” writes Edmund White in the introduction to the NYRB edition. The protagonist is charming, but Sturgis’s peers disliked the book and the critics were tepid. Sturgis’s friend Henry James was critical.

Perhaps we are more tolerant of sissies in the twenty-first century. I love Sainty, an idealistic, sickly hero who prefers knitting and embroidery to sports. (His mother fires the governess who taught him to do needlework.) Everyone, including Sainty, wishes that his athletic younger brother Arthur were the heir of Belchamber and the future Marquis: Arthur is a manly boy who plays sports and hunts, while Sainty is bookish and insists on finishing his classics degree at Cambridge even after he inherits Belchamber.

His practical mother soon appreciates Sainty’s virtues: he is a brilliant manager of the estate and also works to restore the house and grounds to the original plan. Meanwhile, Arthur has become a rake who repeatedly fails exams, courts showgirls, and gambles away his money. Sainty gives him a good income and money to pay his debts, but there are always more debts.

But the marriage question is disastrous for Sainty: Under pressure from their mothers, Sainty and a beautiful, lively young woman, Cissie, who like but do not love each other, get married. She turns out to be the adulterous spendthrift fortune hunter belle from hell, as well as a Mommy Dearest.

In many ways this reads like a Victorian novel: one can see the influences of George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch) and Mrs. Humphry Ward (Robert Elsmere). Sturgis raises interesting questions about education, money, philanthropy, and divorce: in the light of Cissy’s misbehavior, Sainty weighs the consequences of continuing the sham marriage vs. a scandalous divorce. He does not love the appalling Cissy, but realizes that, in different ways, a divorce would be ruinous for both of them. And there is no one he wants to marry anyway.

Sainty is a sweet, scholarly, radical man who suffered as a boy, hated riding and cricket, and now is the Marquis. Life has not been what he expected. He himself once dreamed of building a school for the working men in London. That dream is gone. But he and his mother work to improve the houses of the poor and raise their quality of living. (Very Dorothea Brooke-ish.) That is some consolation. And he has his books. Is that enough?

Is Sturgis a great writer? Well, I enjoyed this book, and I will reread it. In many ways, it reads like a pastiche of our modern culture with the Edwardian age. Or perhaps I should call it a post-Victorian novel gone rogue. Much of it is humorous, but I was saddened by the ending. Sainty deserved better, though he makes the best of things. I can’t think of any hero quite like Sainty.

By the way, it seems to be Sturgis month. I wrote about Sturgis’s On the Pottlecombe Cornice (1908) here.