Book Review: The Governor's Daughter

Title: The Governor’s Daughter

Author: Denton Whitson

Date: 1953

Publisher: Bobbs-Mierrill

ISBN: none

Length: 322 pages

Quote: “Not one inch of our blessed free soil must we abandon to French tyranny. This vast new country of ours can prosper only under the Magna Charta—under British laws.”

Before the American Revolution, American “colonials” had fought the French and Indian War, in which they learned the advantages of guerrilla-style fighting. This is the historical background of The Governor’s Daughter, a nice, family-friendly romance about Clytie, a colonial governor’s daughter, and Adam, a young officer in George II’s colonial army.

For a wartime romance it’s a remarkably wholesome story. Clytie, an adventurous young lady, is so resolutely nice that she can defy all her elders’ advice and ramble all through the Atlantic coastal colonies, with Adam and a hired man and nothing remotely resembling a chaperone, without any kind of reprisals. Even when Clytie and Adam are offered one bed for the night, they’re so virtuous they roll up in separate blankets and sleep back to back. Likewise Clytie is just too wholesome to be kidnapped, and Adam is just too wholesome to be killed, in situations in which people were kidnapped or killed in real life. And even when we’re told that soldiers are using foul language in scenes of battle, murder, and sudden death, we see only a couple of words misappropriated from the Bible.

Clytie and Adam know several people who became famous in real life. We get information about the early lives of Benjamin Franklin (Clytie, whose father he advises, is a fan of his) and George Washington (Adam is a fan of his). Not only does Whitson imagine Franklin and Washington in several fictional scenes; he also shows us William Franklin (a less heroic character than his father), and General Edward Braddock as he may well have been—at this time in history: an old man who refuses to learn anything new.

Clytie and Adam are young adults not teenagers, but their story is one to which teenagers can relate. It might interest some readers in the history of the American Colonies.

Whitson leaves me with some further questions about the dialogue. We don’t know how people actually talked in the eighteenth century, except that it probably wasn’t quite the same way they wrote. Variations of accent and dialect were wide. Even rich people didn’t necessarily learn to read; neither spelling nor grammar had been “standardized” by those who did. Whitson doesn’t try to reconstruct a real eighteenth century dialect, but goes beyond the twentieth century rule of letting everyone speak the author’s dialect and throwing in a few archaic words for flavor. His method is a compromise between these two. Some of his archaisms are well documented in historical sources, some are not. Whether fictional eighteenth century characters identify with their period by saying “’tis,” “that be,” “aye,” “ye,” or “lad/lass” need not interfere with a story. Whitson  picks up on occasional tidbits of linguistic history. Eighteenth century English speakers loved titles; “Mistress” was the usual title for any middle-class female, and the late eighteenth century was when the children’s and foreign servants’ forms, “Miss” and “Missis,” began to be used with separate meanings; Whitson lets Benjamin Franklin call attention to this new fad in conversation. I think that’s based on something Franklin wrote, and wish I had his complete collected works to check.

The usual terms apply: to buy it here, send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment; four books of this size would fit into one $5 package.