The Beulah Quintet by Mary Lee Settle

First published:Prisons, 1973; O Beulah Land, 1956; Know Nothing, 1960; The Scapegoat, 1980; The Killing Ground, 1982

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of work:Prisons, 1634-1649; O Beulah Land, 1754-1774; Know Nothing, 1837-1861; The Scapegoat, June 7, 1912; The Killing Ground, 1978-1980

Locale: England, Virginia, and the western frontier of Virginia, later the state of West Virginia

Principal Characters:

Prisons

• Jonathan Church, the protagonist, a young volunteer in the Parliament army
• Thankful Perkins, a friend and fellow soldier of Jonathan
• Gideon MacKarkle, an old soldier and a friend of Jonathan
• Nell Cockburn Lacy, the aunt of Jonathan and wife of Sir Valentine Lacy
• Oliver Cromwell, the shrewd, ambitious leader of the Parliament forces

O Beulah Land

• Hannah Bridewell, a transported felon and escaped Indian captive
• Jeremiah Catlett, a solitary squatter in western Virginia
• “Squire” Josiah Devotion Raglan, Hannah’s fellow prisoner in England, who is transported and bought by a young dandy, Peregrine Cockburn
• Jonathan Lacey, a Provincial captain and planter
• Sally Lacey, his young and frivolous wife
• Jarcey Pentacost, a Virginia printer
• Ezekiel Catlett, the son of Hannah and Jeremiah Catlett
• Sara Lacey, the strong-willed daughter of Jonathan and Sally Lacey

Know Nothing

• Johnny Catlett, the protagonist, the son of Peregrine Lacey Catlett and Leah Catlett
• Peregrine Lacey Catlett, a wealthy slave owner
• Leah Catlett, Peregrine’s Methodist-reared wife
• Lewis Catlett, Johnny’s cruel, obsessive brother
• Melinda Lacey, Johnny’s penniless orphan cousin
• Brandon Lacey, a wealthy cousin of the Catletts, who finds himself land-poor and desperate for cash
• Sally Lacey, Brandon Lacey’s “frail” wife
• Sara Lacey, the pampered but tenderhearted daughter of Brandon and Sally Lacey
• Annie Brandon, the cousin of Peregrine Lacey Catlett who lives with the Catletts, embittered because she had hoped to marry Peregrine
• Big Dan O’Neill, a “Black Irish” laborer

The Scapegoat

• Lily Ellen Lacey, the protagonist, an idealistic college student, the daughter of Beverley and Ann Eldridge Lacey
• Beverley Lacey, a well-meaning but weak mine owner
• Ann Eldridge Lacey, the wife of Beverley Lacey
• Mary Rose Lacey, Lily’s youngest sister
• Ann Althea Lacey, Lily’s boy-crazy sister
• Jake Catlett, the head of a union local but also a friend of Beverley Lacey
• Captain Daniel Chester Neill, a mine detective who loves violence
• Annunziata Pagano, an Italian matriarch
• Eduardo (Eddie) Pagano, the son of Annunziata and a friend of Lily
• Carlo Michele, a new immigrant, the “scapegoat” of the title
• Neville Roundtree, an English employee of the mine owners

The Killing Ground

• Hannah McKarkle, the protagonist, a middle-aged writer
• Johnny McKarkle, the brother of Hannah, who was killed in jail
• Kitty Puss Baseheart, formerly a mistress of Johnny McKarkle
• Charlie Bland, a womanizer and model for Johnny
• Thelma Leftwich, a spinster devoted to Johnny McKarkle
• Ann Althea Lacey Niell, Hannah McKarkle’s aunt and the widow of Daniel Chester Neill
• Jake Catlett, Johnny’s killer, the youngest son of Jake Catlett

Introduction

The Beulah Quintet has had a complicated genesis. At first, Mary Lee Settle projected a trilogy set in what is now West Virginia. She published the eighteenth century story O Beulah Land in 1956, followed in 1960 by a novel taking descendants of the characters in the earlier work up to the Civil War. After Know Nothing came a contemporary novel entitled Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday (1964). Settle was not happy with the published version of the third novel, however, and furthermore, she wished to take her story back another century in time, as well as across the Atlantic to England, in order to set up the themes that pervaded the trilogy already written. The result was Prisons (1973), whose very title emphasizes the dichotomy between freedom and captivity, which had been important throughout the Beulah novels written earlier. In 1980, Settle published The Scapegoat, which is set immediately before World War I and which, because it involves the battle between landless workers and the owners of land which is being mined, nicely bridges the gap between the three earlier works, with their emphasis on land as a source of wealth, and Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, a contemporary novel of business and industrial wealth, rewritten and published in 1982 with a new title, The Killing Ground. With this final novel, the Beulah Quintet was complete. The four later books in the series are all set in the same area, and all five of the novels shared the same family and Christian names, in varying conjunctions; the same character traits, appearing in men and in women; the same conflicts; and the same themes, embodied in the changing face of history.

The Novels

The first novel of the quintet, Prisons, is set in mid-seventeenth century England. From babyhood, Jonathan Church has been torn between his loyalty to his mother’s dour Puritanism and the appealing warmth of his young aunt, Nell Cockburn Lacy, who presides over a Royalist festival atmosphere at Lacy House. Jonathan’s mother has married a self-made man who has no love for the aristocracy; her younger sister, Jonathan’s aunt, married Sir Valentine Lacy, who does not question the right of his kind to govern an unchanging England. When Jonathan is sixteen, he discovers that his father can be heartless. He self-righteously judges and defies his father and leaves his home. Taking refuge at Lacy House, he encounters Nell, who is weeping over her elderly, dying husband. Her grief for Sir Valentine, her pity for young Jonathan, and the love she and her nephew have always felt for each other combine in some unforgettable hours, which result in Jonathan’s only descendant, a supposed son of Sir Valentine. The narrative begins as a confession at the point of death by Jonathan, now twenty, and the main story line traces his disillusionment as he learns that the Parliament forces, ostensibly fighting for freedom, are themselves as repressive as the Royalists and that the ambitious men who rule them are not only as tyrannical as the king’s men but hypocritical as well, mouthing prayers as they use and discard, sacrifice and execute the ordinary men who follow them in fear or in hope. To break the democratic spirit which the ordinary soldiers have developed, Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the Parliament forces, and his subordinates resolve to execute a number of ringleaders, Jonathan among them. Because of Jonathan’s youth and his substantial family, however, Cromwell is willing to spare the boy if he will agree to influence the troops as the leaders wish. Jonathan cannot desert his friends or his principles. He and his friend Thankful Perkins are among the young men with dreams who are murdered by the old men who have only ambitions. Like Prisons, O Beulah Land places its characters in the midst of violent conflict—in this case, the French and Indian War and the continuing Indian resistance against the settlers. In the prologue, Hannah Bridewell, a transported thief and prostitute, survives capture by the Indians and a long period in the wilderness, to appear at last at the cabin of the squatter Jeremiah Catlett, who saves her life and eventually marries her in the informal manner of a frontier to which the law and the church have not yet come. Moving backward in time, the novel follows Hannah and “Squire” Josiah Devotion Raglan from crime and prison in England to what amounts to sale in Virginia, a colony ruled by wealthy planters such as Jonathan Lacey, who leaves his young wife, Sally, to march toward Fort Duquesne with his own Provincial forces and with the British regulars. Hannah and Squire Raglan accompany their new masters on this venture, and the Squire’s theft of a tomahawk, along with the arrogant bad manners of the English commander, so anger the Indians that an ambush and a massacre result. After her captivity, Hannah escapes, as the prologue revealed. The Squire’s final act of rascality, some years later, results in his quite justifiable murder by Jeremiah Catlett. Jonathan Lacey and his spoiled young wife Sally venture west, along with Jarcey Pentacost, a printer whose passion for freedom has cost him his shop. Sally refuses to adjust to frontier life, treating her neighbors with contempt, and Jonathan begins to regard her as a stranger instead of the friend and wife for whom he had wished. Finally, a rough frontier prank at the wedding of the gently reared daughter of Jonathan and Sally, Sara Lacey, results in Sally’s madness. At the end of the novel, however, Sara evidences not only great love for her husband, Ezekiel, the son of the lower-class Catletts, but also great courage. Unlike her mother, she is worthy of Beulah Land. Like O Beulah Land, Know Nothing traces the social and financial histories of various family units in a society still in flux—in this case, torn by differences on the issue of slavery as well as by differences between the values of the frontier in western Virginia and the values of the settled East. To prosperous Peregrine Lacey Catlett come Brandon and Sally Lacey, who are rich in land and slaves but unable to meet their obligations. When Brandon takes the gentleman’s way out, Sally becomes a permanent fixture, glorying in her heredity. Other women who need the social status only a man can provide must compromise. Bitter Annie Brandon sleeps with Big Dan O’Neill, becomes pregnant, marries him, and spends years attempting to civilize him. Melinda Lacey, rejected as a wife for Peregrine’s son, Johnny Catlett, by Johnny’s mother, Leah Catlett, marries a wealthy man but finds life without Johnny so unhappy that she wills her own death. Without her, Johnny takes a slave girl and unwittingly causes the death of the girl’s husband, Johnny’s devoted servant. As aristocrats and new immigrants, rich and poor, become involved in this mating dance, the differences on the issue of slavery split existing families. Peregrine Lacey Catlett comes to despise his son Lewis, an abolitionist like his mother Leah. In her pity for him, Sara Lacey marries Lewis, who stifles her sweet and happy personality with his grim preoccupations. Returning from his escape to the West, Johnny takes up his father’s duties as farmer, slave owner, and protector of women and in the final pages of the book joins the Confederate army to fight in a war that he knows will be lost, hoping only that he will not have to kill his unionist brother Lewis. The next novel in the quintet, The Scapegoat, traces the defeat of friendship and decency in the conflict between mine operators and workers. In the middle of the conflict are Beverley and Ann Eldridge Lacey, decent people who hope that their mine can avoid the violence being urged by the operators of British-owned mines and their hired detectives and thugs on one hand and union agitators on the other. The presence of their daughters Lily Ellen Lacey, Mary Rose Lacey, and Ann Althea Lacey prevents an attack on their home, and for a time it seems that Beverley’s friendship with Jake Catlett, on whose property the strikers are living, will prevent the threatened violence. Yet those who hunger for a confrontation take advantage of the idealism of Lily, whose friendship with Eduardo Pagano, a young Italian striker, is deliberately misinterpreted by the war lover Captain Daniel Chester Neill and made the excuse for an attack on the strikers’ camp, to the delight of the union agitator, who will use the event for her own purposes. To protect her son Eddie, Annunziata Pagano permits the new immigrant Carlo Michele to be killed in Eddie’s place. Even the conspiracy between the well-intentioned Neville Roundtree, Lily, and Beverley to rescue Eddie is tainted by the fact that a human scapegoat makes Eddie’s escape possible. The Killing Ground, the final novel in the quintet, brings the middle-aged writer Hannah McKarkle to her home, Canona, West Virginia, so that she can at last understand the life and death of her brother Johnny McKarkle. (At the beginning of the book, set eighteen years after Johnny’s death, Hannah has returned to Canona for a lecture.) There is no mystery about the facts; in 1960, Hannah had been called home by Johnny and had learned immediately after his death that it was the result of a brawl in a jail cell where he had been thrown with other drunks. That Jake Catlett knocked him down Hannah has known ever since the event; that the death resulted from Johnny’s hitting his head against a bench in the fall makes it clear that there was no premeditation. The central section of the book details these events. In the first section, set in 1978, Hannah is seeking more complex answers to much deeper questions. As she talks to clubwomen such as Kitty Puss Baseheart, as she gossips about meaningless lives such as that of the womanizer Charlie Bland, as she sees dried-up Thelma Leftwich, a “good” woman who found no happiness in her hopeless love for Johnny, and as she visits the old family home with her aunt, Ann Althea Lacey Neill, the widow of the war-lover Captain Neill of The Scapegoat, Hannah tries to find a pattern in human history. Because Hannah McKarkle is Mary Settle’s alter ego (Hannah is referred to in the novel as the author of the four previous books of The Beulah Quintet), it is logical that in the two years after her 1978 visit to Canona she would visit all the places of quintet significance, including the churchyard where Jonathan Church was shot in 1649. Her conclusions come in the epilogue, set in 1980.

The Characters

At the end of The Killing Ground, Settle suggests that there are repetitions of character-types throughout history. In that human motivations are certainly limited in number, though unlimited in particular combinations, this point seems logical. One strain which she sees throughout history is that of rebellion against the status quo. In Prisons, Jonathan Church left his home rather than submit to his father, then died rather than submit to Cromwell and his henchmen. In The Killing Ground, Jake Catlett struck out at Johnny McKarkle because Johnny represented rule by wealth and social position. At the end of The Killing Ground, Settle includes among these restless spirits Hannah Bridewell of O Beulah Land, the Provincial captain Jonathan Lacey, troubled Johnny Catlett of Know Nothing, the Italian scapegoat Carlo Michele and intelligent Eddie Pagano from The Scapegoat, and idealistic Lily from the same book. At the end of The Killing Ground, Hannah McKarkle realizes that she is like those characters in her independent spirit and in her need for freedom. Throughout the novels, such characters are contrasted with other types—the unprincipled, such as Cromwell and Charlie Bland; the cruel, such as Lewis Catlett and Captain Daniel Chester Neill; the pampered and petty, such as Sally Lacey in O Beulah Land, Sally Lacey in Know Nothing, and the clubwomen in the final novel; and the weak, such as Beverley Lacey in The Scapegoat and Brandon Lacey in Know Nothing. Although none of her characters is exactly like another, Settle’s repetition of types suggests that human qualities, as well as human choices, are repeated again and again in history. Settle reveals the inner lives of her characters by skillful shifts in point of view. Even in Prisons and The Killing Ground, the two works which are primarily written in the first person and concentrate on the perceptions of a single character, there are sections that move to other characters. The Scapegoat begins with Mary Rose Lacey, speaking in the first person with childish candor. Just as the reader has begun to accept Mary Rose’s vision of reality as certainly more accurate than that of the adults around her, however, Settle switches to limited omniscience, moving from one character to another, and later once again has a first-person account, this time from Mary Rose’s sister Ann Althea Lacey, who says that Mary Rose never tells the truth but invents and believes her own reality. The complex handling of point of view is a characteristic of Settle’s fiction. It is a tribute to her craftsmanship that the reader is not confused as to whose mind is being exposed, whether in the first or in the third person, and the changes of perspective, like the repetition of character-types, produce a richness of texture like that of a Gobelin tapestry.

Critical Context

It is surprising that Mary Lee Settle is not better known. In 1978, when she received the National Book Award for Fiction for Blood Tie (1977), there were many critics who questioned the decision. Even since the completion of The Beulah Quintet, critical articles about her have been few. Yet her longtime admirer, George Garrett, himself an outstanding historical novelist, continues to point out Settle’s scope, the depth of her vision, the proficiency of her technique. In even one historical novel, to handle varied points of view and a multitude of characters so deftly and so clearly is a notable achievement. To juggle families, characters, themes, motifs, and historical details in five related novels without departures from a high level of craftsmanship and the consistent search for truth, clearly expressed, is a task at which few other contemporary writers could succeed. As a Southern writer, Settle is typically conscious of the burden of the past, of the anti-intellectualism and jubilant boorishness which are the inheritance from the frontier, of the stagnant smugness which accompanied the elevation in a new social hierarchy of those who had been inferior in an older hierarchy. Without family, wonders a lady in Know Nothing, what could the Yankee women at Egeria Springs find to talk about? Settle’s use of eastern Virginia-western Virginia setting is particularly useful in illustrating the social changes which accompanied the movement of established traditions into the resistant frontier. Yet with all of her regional and historical accuracy, Settle transcends mere local color and, like the best writers of the continuing Southern Renaissance, achieves universality in characterization and in theme.

Bibliography

Galligan, Edward L. “The Novels of Mary Lee Settle.” The Sewanee Review 104 (Summer, 1996): 413-412. Galligan details several of Settle’s novels, including The Beulah Quintet. The theme of mortality in Settle’s work is explored as well as her ability to examine the subconsciousness of her characters.

Garret, George P. Understanding Mary Lee Settle. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. A critical interpretation of Settle’s major works is included in Garret’s extensive survey of Settle’s fiction and influences. A fine examination of the writer that explores the major themes and settings that unify her writings.

Rosenberg, Brian. Mary Lee Settle’s Beulah Quintet: The Price of Freedom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. Rosenberg presents a thematic study of the novels and places The Beulah Quintet in the context of English and European historical fiction. Rosenberg includes an interview with Settle in the book’s appendix in which the author comments on her novel’s complex origins.

Stephens, Mariflo. “Mary Lee Settle: The Lioness in Winter.” The Virginia Quarterly Review 72 (Fall, 1996): 581-588. Stephens profiles Settle and discusses how her works draw readers into the story, making them privileged eavesdroppers. Stephens also discusses Settle’s reputation for passion and explosive behavior in the literary world.