"The Violet Trilogy" Reviewed by the Canadian Association of Music Libraries

 New Review from the

Canadian Association of Music Libraries

by Kristin Franseen, School of Music, University of Ottawa

Mary E. Hughes’s Violet Trilogy takes a different approach to the question of gaps in the historical record. Instead of constructing a linear biographical or fictional narrative around her subject, her novels are an attempt to understand the coming of age, inner life, and broader world of a historical figure for whom scant documentation and facts survive. The primary focus and narrator of the series is Hughes’s grandmother, Violet Courtenaye, whose studies at the Leipzig Conservatory, marriage to pianist and conductor Frank Welsman, and eventual life in Toronto are documented in Imagining Violet (2018), Imagining Violet Married (2019), and Imagining Violet Blooming (2020). In the introduction to Imagining Violet, Hughes describes her project as “a work of historical fiction. It could also be described as very creative non-fiction.”

The concept of “very creative non-fiction” allows Violet’s story to serve as an entry into a variety of different topics relevant to the study of music history. The epistolary format (with occasional images of surviving photos and postcards) gives the reader something close to the experience of reading a personal archive. Throughout the series, Violet writes to several different correspondents—her parents and sister, her aunt, Frank (during her art studies in London), and various friends. The reader, however, only has access to her side of the conversation, leaving them, much like a biographer or musicologist, to piece together what they can of the complete narrative over time. Hughes also interweaves documented historical content into Violet’s letters, including the curricula of conservatories and art schools; the lives of British, Irish, and American students in Germany; and changing social customs around gender in Germany, England, and Canada. Many of her sources for this information are documented in the bibliographies included at the end of each book.

Violet’s fictionalized story is reminiscent in many ways of the real-life late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century memoirs of her fellow female conservatory students, including Amy Fay’s Music-Study in Germany (1880), Mabel Wheeler Daniels’s An American Girl in Munich (1905), and Ethel Smyth’s Impressions that Remained (1919). While these nonfiction works remain of interest to students of women’s musical history and the history of musical education, they were all carefully curated by their respective authors to reflect those topics deemed suitable for public readership at the time. By choosing to re-imagine Violet as a letter writer rather than a memoirist, Hughes takes the reader through any number of subjects of interest to Violet and her friends and family at various times. The reader thus empathizes with a series of deeply personal concerns, including her family’s eventual awareness of her parents’ aging, concern for her sister Birdie’s health, and worries about losing touch with school friends through her various moves. We also see Violet’s own excitement and anxieties surrounding her time in Germany in Imagining Violet, her move to Toronto and growing family in Imagining Violet Married, and domestic and musical uncertainties in Imagining Violet Blooming.

In many ways, Hughes emphasizes that music could be only one of Violet’s many concerns. Her later letters detail issues around hiring staff to help care for her home and children, her involvement in Toronto’s social scene, and the difficulties of living so far from her immediate family. In some familiar biographical narratives on female subjects, there is the temptation to make a woman’s life fit into a clean, if often ahistorical, narrative of struggle and triumph. By drawing out the everyday nature of Violet’s correspondence (both surviving and imagined), however, Hughes reflects and celebrates the complex nature of a life that was filled with privilege and opportunity, spoken and unspoken limitations, and above all a deep and abiding love for the arts, family and friends, and travel.

Violet’s discussions of concerts, touring performers, and the professional careers of Frank and her friend Flo Heins (a studio teacher in Ottawa) in Imagining Violet Married show her continued engagement with music as a part of her new life in Canada as a married woman. Violet’s accounts of performances conducted and organized by Frank are interspersed with references to and quotations from surviving newspaper accounts and reviews, and clearly reflect a deep investment on Hughes’s part in understanding the art music scene in Ontario in the decades prior to the First World War. As recent work on the history of women’s amateur musical clubs in Canada has demonstrated, music served an important social, artistic, and educational purpose in delineating certain kinds of Canadian urban identity during the early twentieth century.

The Violet trilogy would be particularly valuable for high school, cégep, and university libraries as a way to introduce students to methodological issues surrounding archival research, the blurring of fact and fiction in biographical writing, and Hughes’s process of bringing together family history and secondary contextual sources. It would also be useful for those interested in exploring the specific historical moments in which Violet finds herself—a female conservatory student during the 1890s and a young mother involved in Toronto’s musical society during the 1900s and 1910s. Music history and general education instructors could easily use this series to frame questions around the sorts of information one can often find (and not find) in personal archives, connecting Violet’s fictional letters to other surviving primary source documents in music history.

While Hughes’s novels are meticulously researched, how much the historical Violet Courtenaye Welsman resembled Hughes’s imagined Violet necessarily remains something of a mystery, one that can never entirely be solved. She notes in the afterword to Imagining Violet Blooming that her father, a young child when Violet passed away, “died before I was old enough to become interested in family history” and that the trilogy is “largely the product of a vast amount of research and my imagination.” Hughes’s project is an act of making Violet’s life and times knowable to a wider readership, to introduce them to people and scenarios they may initially find unfamiliar through the relatable medium of personal communication. All biofiction—indeed, all biography and life-writing, particularly of long-deceased subjects—involves some element of imagining and re-imagining our relationships with the past.