Grove Koger

A novel titled Madame Solario was published in England and the United States in 1956, and although it quickly became a bestseller in both countries and was subsequently translated into nine other languages, few knew its author’s name. The novel had appeared anonymously.

The following year, however, Life Magazine revealed that the author was one Gladys Parrish Huntington. Born December 13, 1887, she had traveled widely as a child and young woman with her parents, visiting London, Paris, Biarritz, and Rome, as well as … Lake Como, the Northern Italian setting of her novel. It seems that her wealthy Quaker family owned a villa on the shore of the lake and summered there for several years.

Set for the most part in the Hotel Bellevue in the resort of Cadenabbia, Madame Solario records the impact of its title character and her brother, Eugene Harden, on a small cast of fellow guests. She herself is languorously beautiful, and has the face (thinks one character, a little ominously) of a Medusa. The brother is handsome and ruthlessly calculating. They make a striking pair, but more than a whiff of scandal accompanies them, for (as we learn from gossip early on) the sister had been seduced by her stepfather when she was fifteen and her brother had shot and badly wounded him. Harden was exiled to “the other end of the world,” but now he’s reappeared—at the Hotel Bellevue—and he brings with him a sense of thwarted desire that gradually suffuses the entire novel.

Later, as Madame Solario nears its climax, a doctor advises the beautiful woman’s young admirer: “You may know that geologists speak of faults when they mean weaknesses in the crust of the earth that cause earthquakes and subsidences.… And I will tell you something out of my own experience. There are people like ‘faults,’ who are a weakness in the fabric of society; there is disturbance and disaster wherever they are.… Young man, go away from here! Get onto solid ground as soon as you can!”

Although Huntington (seen above in a photograph taken late in her life) knew the setting well from her childhood, her novel’s plot was entirely imaginary. She pointed out that she didn’t have a brother, nor did she have “any great friends who were devoted brother and sister.” And the novel’s title? It simply came to her, she explained, in a vision in Rome when she was 17.

Writing in The American Scholar in 1970, Mary Renault (herself an acclaimed historical novelist) described Madame Solario as “one of the finest novels” of the twentieth century. She went on to explain that its “ firmness, delicacy and restraint of the handling, the perceptiveness with which the quite large cast of characters is drawn, the way in which mounting tension is achieved without the least concession to melodrama, can stand comparison with Henry James and are achieved with more economy.”

The reference to James is apt in more ways than one. He mentions Cadenabbia in passing in his 1909 travel book Italian Hours, and devotes a kind of fusillade of words to Lake Como’s resorts. They have, he writes, “figured largely in novels of ‘immoral’ tendency—being commonly the spot to which inflamed young gentlemen invite the wives of other gentlemen to fly with them and ignore the restrictions of public opinion,” etc., etc. He goes on to devote well over one hundred words to pointing out that the resort’s appearance is operatic. But Huntington, as Renault points out, manages to be just as discerning in far fewer words.

I was a little surprised to learn that the hotel in question, the Bellevue, is also real, having been founded as the Grand Hotel Cadenabbia in 1802. The 1913 edition of Baedeker’s Northern Italy explains that the resort draws “many English and American visitors,” and lists the Bellevue, “adjoining the Villa Carlotta, with shady grounds on the lake” as offering 150 beds.

Next I turned to my treasured Tauchnitz copy of Richard Bagot’s Lakes of Northern Italy, originally published in 1907. It turns out that Bagot is impatient with those very same visitors: “Like all such places in Italy, those who do not leave England in order to meet their compatriots and lead an English life, with all its drawbacks and none of its advantages, in a foreign country, will find it infinitely more pleasant and attractive out of the spring and autumn seasons than during them.”

But then I happened on this passage, which I found more than a little suggestive, even though its subject is meteorological rather than geological: “In this upper portion of the … lake storms are apt to be sudden and violent, and the winds sweep down the mountain passes and valleys with great force. There are many signs, however, by which those who know where to look” will “receive ample warning of what may be expected.”

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