Thirteen million words. Over forty years’ work. Millions of readers. It’s been called the longest novel ever written. And you’ve never heard of it or its author.
That’s because Adele Garrison’s Revelations of a Wife has never been reissued, aside from its first volume, Revelations of a Wife: The Story of a Honeymoon, which was published in book form in 1915 and is now in the public domain (Project Gutenberg, Librivox). Revelations of a Wife was a newspaper serial, a form that’s barely recognized, let alone written about, today.
According to King News, the 1941 autobiography of King Features Syndicate founder Moses Koenigsberg, Revelations of a Wife was designed, not inspired. “Few undertakings with literary flavor ever set out along more methodical lines than marked this feature. First, the plane of reading interest was plotted. It touched at every angle the housewife in modest financial circumstances.” “A sea of psychology” was explored, he claimed, to characterize the situation and mindsight of the diarist. “Household events dominated her life. Their importance to her ranked in order of their nearness. Only second to her own her the domestic affairs of those close at hand. She would be held in rapt attention by the daily diary of the woman next door.” Above all, her middle class “must be jealously preserved.”
Only then did Koenigsberg start looking for a writer. It had to be a woman, of course, and preferably one who combined a lively imagination with the diligence and speed of an experienced reporter. After months of considering candidates, he found exactly who he was looking for: Nana Springer White.
Born Nana Belle Springer in Clinton Junction, Wisconsin in 1873, she had been home-schooled up to high school by her mother, who forbade her daughter reading fiction. “As a result,” she later wrote, “I read everything omnivorously, including seed catalogues.” After a stint as a schoolteacher, she went to work as a women’s feature writer for the Milwaukee Sentinel, then moved to Chicago. Then editor of the Chicago American, Koenigsberg took Springer on in the same role but on the understanding that he would let her take on straight reporting jobs normally assigned to men. To avoid upsetting family and friends back in Wisconsin, they agreed these stories would be credited to “Evelyn Campbell.”
Evelyn Campbell was a daring reporter. She went undercover to collect the facts on the arrangements that several Chicago factories had to avoid paying their female employees. The women were given checks and instructed they could only be cashed in a local saloon, where they would then be pressured into buying beer, getting drunk, and being swindled out of what was left of their pay. She attended murder trials and hangings and once had an actor arrested when he got rough with her during an interview with his actress girlfriend.
While working for Koenigsberg, though, she met and married Martin White, a fellow reporter who soon took a job with the Associated Press in New York. The couple moved to a house in the suburbs. Martin commuted to Manhattan and Nana began raising the first of their four children.
Never ready to set aside her work as a writer, she had been selling short stories to various syndicates for publication in newspapers around the country. At a time when per-capita readership in America was at its height, newspapers were starved for material and syndicates like King Features, which Koenigsberg founded in 1913, were thriving. Beyond the straight news that Associated Press, Reuters, and others had been providing for decades, these new services were offering a variety of “soft” features like cooking, homemaking, fashion, humor, comics, general interest stories, and fiction.
Koenigsberg’s idea was to tap into the huge market for fiction among women with a novel that would appeal to a demographic it would mirror: middle class homemakers, women with enough money to hire a little domestic help, not so rich as to afford servants. In early 1915, Koenigsberg wrote Nana Springer White with his proposal. She could work from home; it would be a steady income; and she could keep her privacy: a pseudonym had already been chosen. Adele Garrison was invented, he said, “to hit as close as possible to the median line in the American social fabric.”
The first installment of Revelations of a Wife appeared on July 19, 1915. “Today we were married.”
“We” are Dicky, a commercial artist, and Margaret — Madge — a former schoolteacher. Dicky was free spirited and still a bit of a philanderer, or at least a flirt, while Madge is — and continues to be for the next 40 years — described as “beautiful, sensitive and severe in her codes.” Madge is no Victorian wife, subservient, accommodating, deferential to her husband. She is neither ingenue nor spinster but a woman with education, life experiences, and a will of her own. Enough of a will, in fact, that she expresses some wonder at this new identity she has taken on:
I cannot believe that I, Margaret Spencer, 27 years old, I who laughed and sneered at marriage, justifying myself by the tragedies and unhappiness of scores of my friends, I who have made for myself a place in the world’s work with an assured comfortable income, have suddenly thrown all my theories to the winds and given myself in marriage in as impetuous, unreasoning fashion as any foolish schoolgirl.
From the very first, Revelations of a Wife was written to incorporate lessons from a century’s worth of magazine serials: compact size (the daily chapter under 1,000 words); steady narrative drive; each chapter ending on the cusp of a development only revealed in the next. Though she would write over 10,000 chapters in Revelations, White/Garrison managed to keep her primary cast down to 25 characters: Madge and Dicky, their children (and grandchildren), their neighbors, a few relatives and friends.
Koenigsberg had lucked into the perfect creator to turn his concept into reality. As Ishbel Ross wrote in her 1936 book, Ladies of the Press:
Miss Garrison’s ingenuity is boundless. She weaves a plot, unravels it and gets a fresh start now and again. She can turn out her copy in intervals between entertaining friends, seeing that her household is running smoothly, and carrying on her club work. She goes for days on end with little sleep, sits up half the night with guests, and when the last one has started for home, continues her revelations, due in the office next morning.
She once told a reporter that her formula involved juggling three balls: melodrama, romance, and domesticity. “I try hard not to throw one higher than the others for too long a time.” She also said that she was often infuriated with her narrator. “If I’d been Madge’s husband, I’d have killed her,” she remarked.
Revelations of a Wife quickly gained an enthusiastic following, some of whom would remain faithful to the very end. Its first 52 chapters — “The Story of a Honeymoon” — were packaged up and published the same year by the Universal Press. This would be the one and only physical book produced from the serial.
It was not without competition. In fact, nearly simultaneously with its appearance, the Newspaper Enterprise Association, a competing distribution service, began publishing Confessions of a Wife, written by Idah McGlone Gibson. NEA attempted to squelch Garrison’s serial, sending Koenigsberg a letter accusing King Features of plagiarism. He replied with a short list of admissions that concluded with a refusal to admit guilt:
It is true that each serial is in the form of a diary.
It is true that in each case the diary purports to have been written because of a sacred promise to a dying mother.
It is true that in each case the diarist is red-haired.
It is true that each diarist was a schoolteacher before her marriage.
It is true that in both cases the diarist’s first name is Margaret.
It is true that the first name of the husband of each diarist is Richard.
It is true that each husband has been an artist.
But beyond these analogies there is no substantial similarity between the stories. The two narratives are essentially different. There is no likeness either in action or development.
In addition, Koenigsberg brought to the attention of his competitors that the Chicago American had published a serial called Confessions of a Wife, written by Elizabeth Miller Yorke, while he’d been its editor.
Published four times a week at the start, demand was so great that White started writing Monday through Friday. Several papers were inundated with angry letters when they stopped or even interrupted the series. A steady slate of at least 75 newspapers around the country adopted Revelations of a Wife as a feature as predictable as the weather forecast.
And White carried on. Every couple of years, she would launch a new installment. “My Soldier Husband” had Dicky deployed to France to fight in World War One. Major developments — an affair? No, not really, just the suspicions of one; growing children; aging parents; economic gains and losses — were organized: “Heart of a Wife,” “My Heart and My Husband,” “Given in Marriage,” “Love’s Embers,” “Marriage Meddlers,” “Married Comrades,” “Fair Horizon,” “Love’s Pitfalls.” By the mid-1930s, it was said that over 5,000 chapters had appeared, amounting to over 4 million words. “And there has never been a dull or uninteresting chapter that did not leave the reader eager to know what was coming next,” claimed one of the infomercial articles that appeared just before the start of a new installment.
When Time magazine published a feature on the series — which it described as a “3,000,000-word novel, longest in the world” — in 1928, it said Revelations “appeals not to shopgirls who what a seduction in every chapter but to housewives and clubwomen who read more fiction than any other group of U.S. inhabitants.” The popularity of White’s serial was not reflected in her income, however. In 1941, Koenigsberg estimated that she’d earned roughly $250,000 over the course of 26 years with his service, or under $10,000 a year: not bad by the standards of the time, but hardly a fortune.
As the years passed, the pressure to maintain readers’ interest led White to travel down some fairly absurd narrative back alleys. As a 1948 profile in Editor and Publisher put it, White’s cast had by then “been threatened by a Nazi submarine off Long Island, rescued a queen in a mythical European kingdom, captured spies, escaped through secret passages, recovered sacred Chinese gems…” “Heart of a Wife” involves a conspiracy to obtain a mysterious box containing the inheritance left to a young woman by the ex-husband of one of Madge’s closest friends, a kidnapping, and a dramatic rescue of its victim. Often, White was no more than a step or two of her readers. When one editor asked White what was in the mysterious box, she replied, “Well, Gene, when I find out myself, I’ll tell you.” “And two years later,” she reported proudly, “I did.”
White’s dedication to the work was legendary. She continued writing and living in their large Connecticut farmhouse after Martin White died in 1948. In 1955, when a fire broke out in her home, she called the fire department, then took her typewriter to another room well away from the fire and continued to write. She was then 81 and had been writing her serial for 40 years. Nana Springer White died in her sister’s home in Sag Harbor, New York in December 1956, just a few months after the last chapter of the last installment of Revelations, “Love Triumphant,” appeared. By conservative estimate, the serial had run to 13 million words in total.
Is it fair to call Revelations of a Wife the longest novel? Not if by novel you mean a work of fiction conceived as a single entity and certainly not if you expect a novel to take the form of a physical book or even set of books, as with Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage or Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Given the length of time and the format in which Revelations was published, it’s fairer to consider it sui generis, as a serial.
Serials were, throughout the lifespan of Revelations of a Wife, one of — if not the — most popular form of fiction in America. Plenty of best-selling books were packaged and published in serial form, but there were others, like much of Revelations, that never transitioned to book form. Here, for example, are a dozen-plus serials listed in a 1936 issue of Editor and Publisher — and there are at least four times more listed in a two-column spread too big to show here.
The fact that newspaper serials are so little studied today is in part attributable to the lack of evidence that they exerted any upward influence on the craft of fiction. Unlike Victorian serials, many of which easily transitioned to book form and form part of the literary canon, these serials are perhaps no more relevant to today’s readers than an episode of a radio or television soap opera from the same period. Yet as a firm believer in “there must be a pony in there” principle, I can’t help but wonder if we’re not leaving an important element of our literary history unexamined.