landofnowhere | (Reply)

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You're welcome -- I'm glad to have you along for the ride!

Yeah, it reminds one of the whole claim that Shakespeare "never blotted out a line". Though given some of the deficiencies in the prose, I find it somewhat plausible that she didn't revise it much. Also it does seem like the sort of story where she was somewhat making up the plot as she went along -- there's a bit where Charles gets his fortune told as "music and medicine", and then the story never follows up with the medicine. I do think it's plausible that the story was started before Felix Mendelssohn's death (in 1847, when Sheppard was 21) and that Sheppard only made the choice to kill off Seraphael after that -- I'd have to take a closer look at the book to see when the death starts feeling foreshadowed, it might be fairly late in the story. It's also possible that the plotline with the female composer dying while conducting her own symphony was conceived before Fanny Mendelssohn's death (earlier in 1847), and then retconned to better fit with Fanny, but I find that argument less convincing.

Based on what the friend wrote to the Atlantic, it sounds like Sheppard was too busy to read aloud, but the full description is charming:

"The moment her hour of leisure came, she would hide herself with her best loved work in the quietest corner she could find; sometimes it was a little room in-doors, sometimes the summer-house, sometimes under a large mulberry-tree; and thus “ Charles Auchester” and “Counterparts” were written, the former without one correction,—sheet after sheet, flung from her hand in the ardor of composition, being picked up and read by the friend who was in all her literary secrets."