Marjorie Daw by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

First published: 1873

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: Late summer, 1872

Locale: New York City and New Hampshire

Principal Characters:

• John Flemming, an impatient young man with a broken leg
• Edward Delaney, his correspondent
• Marjorie Daw, a charming young woman, who is actually Delaney's fictional creation
• Dr. Dillon, the elderly physician who prescribes Flemming's recovery regimen and enlists Delaney's help

The Story

The story unfolds through a series of letters exchanged between John Flemming and his friend Edward Delaney, a young attorney vacationing with his invalid father. The first letter, however, is from Dr. Dillon to Edward Delaney. It explains John Flemming's situation and the terms of his convalescence.

After slipping on a lemon peel and breaking his leg, Flemming has been ordered to remain at his New York City home for three to four weeks, confined to a couch. A robust, normally active young man of twenty-four, he finds his confinement at best tedious, at worst intolerable, and becomes extremely moody. When his sister Fanny comes home from the family's summer resort to care for him, he drives her away in tears. Flemming's servant Watkins then bears the brunt of his melancholy and sudden, unreasonable anger. The convalescent repeatedly pelts Watkins with volumes from the complete works of Honoré de Balzac. Hoping to calm his patient, Dr. Dillon encourages Delaney to write to him to buoy his spirits and still his rage.

The exchange of letters between Delaney and Flemming begins shortly thereafter, on August 9, 1872. Part of Flemming's frustration arises from the fact that he was to have spent the late summer months with his friend in New Hampshire and that his accident has ruined their plans. Delaney, noting the quiet, uneventful life he leads at the Pines, his rustic retreat, innocently speculates what he might do, were he a novelist like the great Russian Ivan Turgenev. Then, without making it entirely clear that he is doing so, he begins to spin a story about imaginary neighbors—the Daws, who live in an imaginary colonial mansion across the road from his own cottage.

Delaney starts by describing a young, graceful, and fashionably dressed woman of about eighteen. She has golden hair and dark eyes and lies in a hammock in the neighbor's piazza. The portrait that he creates fascinates Flemming, who hungers for more information about the young woman. Delaney innocently provides such information in his succeeding letters, drawing Flemming into his fictional web with realistic accounts of the young lady, Marjorie Daw, and her family. He has no inkling that his friend is accepting his account as entirely factual.

Delaney describes the girl's father, Richard W. Daw, as a banker, retired colonel, and widower, providing vivid details. He also identifies a brother who is a Harvard student and writes that another brother died at the Battle of Fair Oaks during the Civil War. The Daws, he explains, are a rich family of good lineage, who reside in Washington and Baltimore most of the year but summer in New Hampshire.

Hooked by Delaney's account, Flemming pleads for yet more information about Marjorie. Delaney obliges, writing about the idyllic relationship between Marjorie and her father and about a dreary party at the Daws's house that was attended by two dull men, a naval lieutenant named Bradley and an Episcopal rector, as well as two engaging women, the Kingsberry sisters from Philadelphia.

After writing just a few letters, Delaney has unwittingly made Flemming totally entranced by his depiction of Marjorie, a young lady of great beauty, charm, and grace. In response to Flemming's demands, Delaney piles detail on convincing detail, eventually adding a complication that leads to a humorous climax. Delaney writes that, in telling Marjorie and her father about Flemming and his unhappy accident, he has inadvertently piqued her interest in his friend.

Flemming is now totally captivated. After establishing that his friend has no amorous designs on Miss Daw himself, Flemming presses him to act as his intermediary with the young woman. When he asks for a photograph of Marjorie, Delaney declines to steal one from the Daws's mantlepiece but holds out the hope that he can get a print made from a recent negative. Meanwhile, he continues to paint his written picture of Marjorie, adding some sauce to her character. Although Marjorie is sweet and gracious, she is not without an occasional petulance that Delaney finds "disagreeable." He also indicates that Lieutenant Bradley has been courting Marjorie with her father's blessing but with little encouragement from her. She remains, Delaney reiterates, far more interested in Flemming, although she has never met his friend.

Matters come to a head when Flemming ends his convalescence and writes that he is making arrangements to come to the Pines to meet Marjorie. Finally realizing that his friend has been completely bamboozled, Delaney tries to talk him out of coming, but Flemming is not to be denied. He arrives at the Pines, only to discover that Delaney has skipped to Boston, leaving him a letter in which he confesses that "there isn't any colonial mansion on the other side of the road, there isn't any piazza, there isn't any hammock—there isn't any Marjorie Daw!"