"The Striding-Place" by Gertrude Atherton
In her autobiography (Adventures of a Novelist, New York, 1932) Atherton writes about a visit to England, and discusses her stay at a farm on an estate in the West Riding of Yorkshire. She reports that her investigation into local history there led her to learn of the River Wharfe, with its famous narrow spot, the Strid, where the water's suction, as it disappears under a ledge, is so great that no one can fall in and survive passage under the ledge, as of course her story demonstrates. She also mentions that "Wordsworth had been inspired to write a poem on 'The Boy of Egremond,' a venturesome heir of these ancestral acres who had been done to death in the Strid, and I read it in the local history" (245). Atherton was a just a little bit off: there is indeed a Romantic-era poem entitled "The Boy of Egremond," but it's by the little-known poet Samuel Rogers (1763-1855); Wordsworth's poem on this subject — a bit more gruesome than Rogers' — is "The Force of Prayer; or, the Founding of Bolton Priory. A Tradition"; Wordsworth's note to his poem mentions Rogers' work and the source from which Wordsworth drew. Atherton of course quotes a few lines from Wordsworth's poem in her story, and takes her (revised) title from Wordsworth as well.
Then she writes as follows:
I haunted that spot, fascinated, and consumed with a desire to write a gruesome story of the Strid, but could think of nothing. I anathematized my imagination, which, it seemed to me, should have been jarred into immediate action. One night I determined to try an experiment. Just before dropping off to sleep I ordered my mind to conceive that story and have it formulated when I awoke. And the moment I opened my eyes, there it was. I wrote it out before leaving the bed. It was called THE STRIDING PLACE, and eventually published in the London Speaker. I sent it first to The Yellow Book, but it was declined by the editor, Henry Harland, on the ground that it was "far too gruesome." It seems to me the best short story I ever wrote, and it was even more of a triumph to appear in the Speaker. (245)
Remember what Mary Shelley says of her inspiration to write Frankenstein? A striking similarity, and then when you consider that Atherton's original title was "The Twins," and that Victor's creature is often mistakenly identified by the name of his creator, and that they are doubles of each other — well, curiouser and curiouser....
- to "The Striding Place"
- to Gertrude Atherton page
"Discussion of 'The Striding Place' by Gertrude Atherton."
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