Gladys and Constant Huntington Papers

Background on Gladys and Constant Huntington

Background note by Laura Haskell and Catherine Peerson.

Born in Malden, Massachusetts on September 20, 1876, Constant Davis Huntington was the second son of George and Lilly Huntington. He attended St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., and graduated cum laude from Harvard College in 1899. He studied medicine at Harvard and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but abandoned both for publishing. In 1902 he joined G. P. Putnam's Sons, and in 1906 he went to London to work for the British branch. In 1916, the same year he married Gladys, Constant assumed the role of chairman of Putnam, a role he held until he retired. Under his direction Putnam published Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and works of Isak Dinesen.

Gladys Theodora Parrish was born on December 13, 1887, in Philadelphia to wealthy birthright Quaker Alfred Parrish and Katharine Broadwood Jennings. Gladys married Constant Davis Huntington on October 17, 1916. The couple first resided in Hyde Park Gardens in London and then at Amberley House in Sussex. They had one daughter on January 11, 1922, Georgiana Mary Alfreda (Urquhart). Gladys Huntington wrote many plays and novels, including the bestselling book Madame Solario, published anonymously in 1956. Other published titles include; Carfrae’s Comedy (1915, novel), Barton’s Folly (1924, play), and Turgeniev (c. 1930, play). During her lifetime, Gladys exchanged hundreds of letters between family members, friends, writers, and many prominent figures of upper-class European and American society. Despite claims that Gladys committed suicide, no conclusive evidence has been found within this collection. According to her death certificate, Gladys died at St. George’s Hospital (Westminster) on May 31, 1959, at the age of 71 from cerebral thrombosis due to atheroma.

Of all the family members, Gladys Parrish Huntington (1887-1959) arguably found the most literary success, although she would only be recognized for it over three decades after she was revealed as the author of the bestselling 1956 novel Madame Solario. This revelation came quietly a few months after the anonymous novel's publication; Life Magazine reported in its March 18, 1957 edition (which itself cites an earlier article in the London Express that had revealed Gladys's identity) that "the author was an elderly literary gentlewoman...living in the backwater of Kensington." Yet, speculation continued for decades. Acclaimed British author Mary Renault, in an interview with The American Scholar in 1970, claims Madame Solario to be "one of the finest novels of our century," going on to say: "After many inquiries in the publishing world, I learned the author was called Constance Huntington." Not quite. A 1992 French mystery novella entitled Qui a Écrit Madame Solario? made the bizarre claim that Winston Churchill was the author. Bernard Cohen's extensive research, published in the French newspaper Libération in 2009, is widely credited for definitively solving the not-so-mysterious mystery, although the novel had been published with Glady's name on the cover as early as the 1980s. The real mystery is why no one noticed.

Easily regarded as her magnum opus, Madame Solario drew high praise from writers and critics, including comparisons to the prose of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and E. M. Forster. Over half a century following its publication, the allure of the story persists, inspiring a 2012 French film adaption of the provocative tale of incest and social scandal, as well as translations into seven languages. The novel's consideration of such taboo topics has often been speculated to be the reason for which Gladys chose to conceal her identity as the author upon the initial publication. She published under the name Gladys Parrish as early as 1915 with her novel Carfrae's Comedy, published by Putnam while Constant was at its head. Her play Barton’s Folly was produced a decade later, receiving an overall unenthusiastic critical response. A packet of reviews of the play’s production we came across consistently categorized it as a disappointment, but recognized the sign of a talented new voice. "The play had that “something" which justified its performance by The Three Hundred. It lay in the dramatist’s sense of the interesting complexity of human relations. Though inexpert, confused, and full of bugbears, Barton’s Folly is the work of an imagination. I found it often absurd, but never dull,” wrote leading literary critic Desmond McCarthy, who would go on to become a close friend of Gladys. She did not publish or produce again for over 30 years, perhaps taking the time to hone her skill and voice as a writer. These efforts were well spent, for two of her stories were subsequently published in The New Yorker in 1952 and then again in 1954 under the name G.T. Huntington, a vague enough stylization of her married name to obfuscate both her gender and any connection to what she previously published. Whether or not this was her intention is unclear, for the runaway success of Madame Solario a few years later established Gladys, by this point in her 70s, as a brilliant new literary voice.