IntroductionWhen A Detached Pirate was published by Greening & Company, London, in 1900, divorce was still pretty unconventional in everyday society. It carried with it the whiff of showgirls, the indulgent rich, and a disregard for British propriety. Thus, the decision of author Susan Morrow Jones (who wrote under the pseudonym "Helen Milecete") to focus on a divorced woman's narrative in A Detached Pirate: The Romance of Gay Vandeleur was audacious, doubly so because she situated much of her story in her native city of Halifax, Nova Scotia. But Morrow Jones knew the context about which she was writing. Originally a British military town — still a city of old mercantile money, and a place redolent with history going back to the mid-eighteenth century — Halifax was no stranger to the flux and flow of ships passing in the night. When A Detached Pirate's Gay Vandeleur attends church on Sunday where "a pale young priest, with big dark eyes and red lips like a cupid, sang 'Vespers for the Dead'" — and then subsequently dines surreptitiously at a military dinner with her ex-husband — she captures the vexed intersection of puritanism and cosmopolitanism that characterized the city in which Morrow Jones had grown up. Susan Morrow was the daughter of Robert Morrow and Helen Stairs, both from established, prominent and affluent families in Nova Scotia. It is the ambition of young women in A Detached Pirate to marry into houses "with money" on Halifax's Northwest Arm, and this, indeed, is where Susan Morrow and her literarily-inclined sister, Helen, grew up. The advertisement announcing the sale of their childhood home, Bircham, in the Halifax Morning Chronicle on April 5, 1906, describes the house as "A VERY CHARMING RESIDENCE standing in its own grounds of about 12 acres on the shores of the beautiful North West Arm . . . fine for boating, bathing and sea-fishing." With mature trees, flower gardens, a stable and coach-house, Bircham had, in addition to the usual residential accoutrements, a billiard room, two drawing rooms, a nursery, a library, six bedrooms on the second floor and six bedrooms on the third floor. It and other houses in the neighbourhood undoubtedly inspired The Towers, the fictional mansion filled with "flowery" wallpapers and situated on the Northwest Arm, where Gay Vandeleur joins a weekend party and where, on a night that is "cold, but clear and still," she toboggans down a hill in a torch-lit course to the sea. Gay is disturbed by the cynicism of the wealthy at that weekend party, for it is obvious that marrying for money, not love, is the model to which Mrs. Goldsmith and other women aspire. And the house — with "no books, no cushions, no sofas, no coffee after dinner" — is a cold manifestation of life. Gay seeks more.Susan Morrow also sought more, as did her first cousins who grew up around her on the Northwest Arm at Fairfield and Bloomingdale (now the Waegwoltic Club). The Bloomingdale cousins, in particular, shared the literary and artistic interests of Susan and Helen. First cousin Alice Jones was to become one of Canada's leading international travel writers in the 1880s and 1890s and a novelist published in London, Boston and Toronto. Alice's sister, Frances (Jones) Bannerman, was to become an internationally recognized artist who exhibited at the Salon in Paris and the Royal Society in London (her painting, "In the Conservatory," is said to be of Helen). And their brother, Dr. Guy Carleton Jones, educated in Scotland, Nova Scotia, and London, was made Head of the Canadian Medical Service overseas in World War I. First cousins, Guy Carleton Jones and Susan Jones ("Susie"), married at St. Stephen's Church in Halifax on October 30, 1889.The early years of Susan Morrow Jones's marriage were spent in Halifax where her husband served variously as lecturer in the Halifax Medical College, Quarantine Medical Officer for the Port of Halifax, and Second in Command of the 10th Canadian Field Hospital in South Africa during the Boer War. In 1906, following the death of Jones's father, Alfred Gilpin Jones, Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia, Susan and her husband moved to Ottawa where he was appointed honorary surgeon to the Governor General and became Director-General, Canadian Medical Services. After first living in Cochrane Lodge in Rockcliffe Park, they then moved into Birkenfels, a romantic limestone Scottish-styled cottage customarily "leased to a succession of ranking Canadian military officers." Their social circle included the elite of Ottawa (the Rideau Club, the Ottawa Hunt Club). Already, in 1903, Susan had been described in a newspaper article as "bright, vivacious, and good-looking, an expert horsewoman, a lover of dogs and all outdoor sports, and a favourite in the most exclusive social circles." Now, in Ottawa, as in Halifax, she mingled with the fashionable world that was to inform novels such as A Detached Pirate and The Career of Mrs. Osborne.It is that fashionable world that captivates and yet threatens to destroy Gay Vandeleur in A Detached Pirate. In spite of her superficial breezy charm, she has come from a common- sense kind of background. But it was not impoverished. Her Aunt Lydia lives on an English estate called Bracebridge Hall and Gay, like her author, is a superb horsewoman, knows the intricacies of elegant dining, and has a fashion sense. But she rebels against the smothering world of British Edwardian propriety that Aunt Lydia represents — a world where "Aunt Lydia will never forgive me for not marrying Mr. Bernard, the diamond merchant, who dwelt in the big villa on the Downs" and where she, Gay, is "labelled 'Fast'." Her marriage at twenty to Colonel Gore — a tanned, blue-eyed, steely, correct officer with an intriguing scar over his eyebrow — is clearly an escape to a man she finds both devastatingly attractive and disturbingly masterful. The misrepresentations that lead to his divorcing her — throwing her into the public glare of the British gossip columns — drive Gay to take a new name (Vandeleur), invest her remaining money in a fashionable wardrobe, throw her wedding ring into the Atlantic and sail across the sea to her birth city, Halifax, to make a new life. Even on the S.S. Canadian she meets interesting men who will make her temporary social resurrection in Halifax more complex, but one of the lessons she learns in the new world is that she can never escape the old. In many ways, this is a coming-of-age novel — a Bildungsroman — where Gay learns not only the lessons of society but also discovers previously unknown strengths within her own personality. She had wanted to be "allowed to fight for myself and look inside the cupboards of Bluebeard." Her wish is granted.Morrow Jones draws the reader into Gay's story by creating an epistolary novel set around twenty-five letters written by Gay to her closest English friend and confidante, Vera Hughes. Starting in Britain before Gay leaves for Canada, these letters are subsequently written on the Atlantic, in Halifax, in New York and, finally, when Gay has returned to England. Initially their tone is almost artificially bright, capturing a sense of Gay's bravado and insecurity as she embarks on her great adventure to Halifax and is drawn into a circle of male admirers in her new milieu. The tension and the pace accelerate, however, as the author skilfully integrates Vera's epistolary reactions into Gay's responses in such a way that we, the readers, begin to sense Vera's dismay at Gay's recklessness. The reader never actually reads any of Vera's letters, but we nonetheless infer her concern over the Charley Woodward extravaganza, the possible marriage to Sir Anthony, the legality of the divorce and Gay's outcast status at the end of the novel. In a way, Gay sums up Morrow Jones's epistolary technique when she writes to Vera at the beginning of Letter Thirteen: "Well, Vera dear, to resume my thrilling narrative, do you feel as if you were in a front stall at the Adelphi?" Vera may well feel that way. So, too, does the reader.Though Gay may be too prone to drink life to the fullest, there is much that unfolds during her letters to endear her to the reader. She revels in the beauty of the Northern Lights from the deck of her liner ("Surely my mother loves me still"); sentimentally wears the Canadian canoe bangle that her deceased father gave her as a child; frankly admits how much she enjoys escaping to her rooms for a whiskey and soda, a cigarette and a good book; and unconsciously reveals to the reader how much she passionately loves the ever-correct Colonel Gore from whom she is divorced. Her selfless dedication to the unhappily married, dying Mrs. L'Esterre, demonstrates a capacity for female friendship that the garden party set would little suspect, and her ruminations about a woman's position in the marriage economy show her to be a shrewd assessor of changing patterns in Edwardian life. On one level, Morrow Jones does not seem to have written a "New Woman" novel, for although Gay acknowledges that women have the right to leave the Aunt Lydias of the world to find their own destiny, she herself initially pursues a path totally dependent on men. When social ostracism thrusts her out on her own, however, she intrepidly seizes an opportunity to support herself, however marginally. She had sympathized with the thirty-year-old downtrodden daughters in England who had left their "dull middle-class houses behind the laurustinus bushes" to build careers, and, although she was shocked by "the awful faces of the women — world-weary, life-weary women" in New York, she nonetheless perseveres: "I don't belong to the ranks of the vast army of women who have gone under. I won't belong to them." Yet, she is not really a "New Woman." Necessity drives her. Pride and a sense of dignity sustain her. She has little commitment to carving a new social niche for women. That being said, she does challenge certain female boundaries in her society. This is one of the first novels in Canada to integrate cross-dressing into its plot as a deus ex machina, for Gay's restlessness and sense of independence impel her to exchange women's dress for men's in both London and Halifax. Disguised as a man, she ventures forth alone at night, walks areas of the city otherwise forbidden her and seeks the freedom that women cannot enjoy: "How lovely it is to be a boy — nobody looks at a boy; a woman is always stared at, and I hate it." From the beginning of Susan Morrow Jones's literary career, critics have found it difficult to categorically separate her literary work from that of her sister, Helen Morrow Paske Duffus, partly because both used the pseudonym Helen Milecete. In fact, as critic Carole Gerson has pointed out, the novel The Career of Mrs. Osborne, eventually published in 1903 as being by "Carleton-Milecete," was first serialized in The Smart Set in 1901 under the pseudonyms "S. Carleton and Helen Milecete," thereby suggesting that the two literary sisters might have collaborated in writing it. Given that the novel rests on fast-paced repartee between two sisters in London, the collaboration is highly possible. The mystery of the Helen Milecete pseudonym is made even more complicated by Susan and Helen's cousin, Frances (Jones) Bannerman, having used "Miss Milecete, 52 Maddox Street, London" as an address when she was travelling abroad in 1898–99. The London directory for the period reveals that Madame Ellen Milecete, who carried on her business at that address in London (Maddox Street runs off Regent Street from Hanover Square), was a court dressmaker to the royal family by appointment to the Queen. It seems plausible, therefore, that as a chic dressmaker to the international set, she acted as a convenient postal drop-off point for some of her international clients when they were travelling. And certainly the Jones and Morrow sisters of Halifax represented the economic and social background that would subscribe to an establishment such as Madame Milecete's when they were abroad. Thus, the appropriation of her name as a pseudonym for novels by both Susan Morrow Jones and Helen Morrow Paske Duffus may suggest a delicious insider joke enjoyed by the literary sisters, indicating both their intimacy and their shared literary inclinations. It took a mere slip of the pen to move from the real Ellen Milecete to the pseudonymous Helen Milecete. Indeed, "Helen Milecete" may well have picked the surname "Vandeleur" for Gay in A Detached Pirate by browsing Boyle's Court Guide for 1903 where a "Mrs. Vandeleur" turns up as a resident of South Kensington.All this being said, there are indicators that point to Susan Morrow Jones as the primary user of the "Helen Milecete" pseudonym. The most convincing is her obituary, which appeared in the Halifax Morning Chronicle on July 21, 1926. At the time of her death, Morrow Jones and her husband had been living in London, England, since 1920. Her sister, Helen, had earlier taken up residence in the United Kingdom, having married Major Edward John Duffus of the Royal Artillery in 1906, and Helen's son by her first marriage, Major E.L. Paske, was stationed there. As well, other close members of the extended Halifax family, such as the novelist, Alice Jones, and the artist, Frances (Jones) Bannerman, had already moved permanently to the south of France, where Susan Morrow Jones and Guy Carleton Jones would also spend their winters after 1920. Although her contributions to literary magazines such as Lippincott's, The Smart Set, and Everybody's Magazine had diminished by World War I, and she had published only two novels after the War — The La Chance Mine Mystery (Boston: Little Brown, 1920; Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1920) and The Forest Runner (London: Melrose, 1925) — Susan's obituary noted that she had earned "considerable success in the literary world," including first prize in the New York Herald short story competition in 1903 for her story, "The Corduroy Road." What is most compelling, however, is that the obituary, which presumably would have been written by her husband and her sister in London, and her brother-in-law in Halifax, identifies her as "writing under the nom de plume 'Helen Milecete'" and lists her novels as A Detached Pirate; A Girl of the North; The Fascinating of Mr. Savage; The Career of Mrs. Osborne; The MicMac, or the Ribboned Way; Out of Drowning Valley; and The La Chance Mine Mystery. These novels were published variously under the pseudonyms "Helen Milecete," "Carleton-Milecete," "S. Carleton" and "S. Carleton Jones." A subsequent obituary in The Nova Scotia Medical Bulletin noted that "Mrs. Jones achieved considerable success as a writer of fiction and was the author of several books including A Detached Pirate, A Girl of the North, The Fascinating Mr. Savage [sic], The Career of Mrs. Osborne, The Micmac, and many short stories. She wrote under the name of 'Helen Milecete'." As with the newspaper obituary, there is every possibility that this memorial was submitted to the Medical Bulletin by Susan Morrow Jones's husband, Dr. Guy Carleton Jones, who would have had intimate knowledge of the details of her writing career. At some point, sending some of her stories to his nephew in South Africa, Dr. Guy Carleton Jones noted: ". . . Susan was, in a way, a mystic. Perhaps that isn't the word, but it is the best I can get hold of. Her short stories are to me, the best things she did"....
