Tag: USA

List of Frequently Reproduced Tales

The Society is indebted to author André-Marc Aymé for his list of European Magazine tales that were reproduced three or more times in other publications, often with false or incorrect attributions.

With M. Aymé’s permission, the list has been added to the Articles section of the main Vardill website.

Vardill in the United States

Author André-Marc Aymé has kindly drawn the Society’s attention to an early uncredited publication of Anna Jane Vardill’s Legends of Lampidosa in the United States.

  • The Legends of Lampidosa: Or the Seven Heroines. New York: W. H. Graham, 1844.

The stories had previously appeared in magazines such as:

  • The Atheneum, or, Spirit of the English Magazines. Boston, 1817
  • Robinson’s Magazine; A Repository of Original Papers; And Selections from the English Magazines. Baltimore: 1819.
  • Cabinet: A Collection of Romantic Tales; Embracing the Spirit of the English Magazines. New York: 1836.

M. Aymé has also identified references to AJV’s stories in a letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and a novel by John Neal.

In a letter to Evert A. Duyckinck dated 1st July 1845, Hawthorne writes:

A good many years ago, turning over a series of volumes called the “Athenaeum”—a selection from the English Magazines, published at Boston—I met with a series of stories called the Legends of Lampidosa. They struck me as very remarkable productions, quite a species by themselves. I do not know that they ever made any impression on the public; nor am I altogether sure that they would impress me, now, with any of the admiration which I felt then. But I wish you would look them over, and see whether they might no be profitably republished as a number of the Library of Choice Reading. It is twelve years, or more, since I saw them; and they were then of old date—published at least a dozen years before. If I recollect rightly, they were credited to the European Magazine.

In the second volume of Randolph, A Novel by the Author of Logan and Seventy-six (Baltimore, 1823. p. 58) “Edward Molton” in a letter to “George Stafford” comments:

Byron still perseveres; and so do several of your moderns, particularly Moore and Barry Cornwell; and all of ours, who, like Mr. Percival, are addicted, grossly, to Byron. By the way, you have a she poet among you, with a more brilliant plumage, and a finer song, by far, than any female that I ever heard of—and far superior to most of your males. She is the author of Legends of Lampidosa—and is called Mrs. Lehman, I believe.