Suffragist Beatrice Harraden had written short stories and one novel before publishing Ships That Pass in the Night, but that work brought her fame as a writer. An example of sentimental fiction, it depicts the doomed love of two patients suffering from tuberculosis. The setting is a “consumptive” patient winter resort, the Kurhaus at Petershof, where 250 gather, hoping for a cure.

In heavy foreshadowing in the opening pages, a character identified perfunctorily as the Disagreeable Man tells the protagonist, Bernardine Holme, that she will not recover, as “I know your type well; you burn yourselves out quickly. And—my God—how I envy you!” Her uncle, in a typical sentimental fashion, next describes Bernardine as “thin and drawn” with eyes that “seemed to be burning themselves away.” Within six pages the appearance of two references to a burning fire, symbol of destruction, but also renewal and rebirth, signal the reader that Bernardine is not long for this world. However, both references also connote envy or wistfulness on the part of the observers, suggesting that Bernardine will not die without passion. When the narrator describes her childhood as one “which even the fairies have failed to touch with the warm glow of affection,” Bernardine’s part as a sentimental heroine has been made clear.

Once a woman of interest and ambition, “a diligent scholar” and “self-reliant,” a “modern product,” Bernardine has come to a standstill due to illness. However, only through this weakness will she experience love, which she encounters at the clinic. This fact proves important to feminist critics, who understand that even though a staunch supporter of women’s rights, Harraden had to employ a traditional aspect of sentimental fiction, the invalid female, in order to make her work acceptable to readers of the day.

Other conventional approaches used in shaping Bernardine include the diminutive nicknames bestowed on her, such as “Little Brick.” When the Disagreeable Man, Robert Allitsen, becomes her love, he refers to her as “You little thing,” and she even refers to herself as a “little playmate.” However, she also makes wise pronouncements, including “we realize that we stand practically alone, out of any one’s reach for help or comfort,” allowing clear delivery of Harraden’s subversive message regarding the isolation forced upon independent females who may be misunderstood as cold and without emotion.

She seems, however, to counter her own message as Bernardine returns to a life of books, realizing love had made her become “probably more human, and probably less self-confident. She had lived in a world of books, and she had burst through that bondage and come out into a wider and a freer land.” While Harraden seems to suggest that women must have love to achieve self-realization, and that education may prevent that love, the scene may instead be interpreted as one with the message that a woman is allowed to reach her full potential only when separated from vocation, a declaration against society’s defined confining roles for women.

When Bernardine learns of the death of Allitsen’s wife, she begins writing a book, and he suddenly reappears in her life, with the promise of future happiness for both himself and Bernardine. However, the novel supplies the expected tragic conclusion with Bernardine dying in an accident, without realizing a life of love. Knocked down in the street by a wagon, she is taken to a hospital, where a doctor pronounces, “she will not recover . . . poor little thing.”

Harraden loved America, and in a preface to the first authorized American edition of her novel explained that the title came from American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Tales of a Wayside Inn. The phrase “ships that pass in the night” would come to connote star-crossed lovers. In an edition that followed the original by seven years, Harraden added a preface describing the unexpected effects of the novel’s popularity in its bringing the “best gifts” of life: “generous appreciation, good-fellowship, friendship, and love, and a genial freemasonry with all sorts of conditions of men and women in many parts of the world.”

That the novel created opportunities for Harraden to spread her ideas regarding the condition of women may be its most important achievement. While little read or studied, it remains readily available in print form and is an excellent example of sentimental fiction that profits from a revisionist reading.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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