Photo above: Behind Roberts is the Anchorage in Marietta, OH, where she lived 1911-18.

Dorothy James Roberts made her reputation with her Arthurian historical novels, in which she recreated legends of lovers, such as “The Enchanted Cup,” which dealt with Tristan and Isolde, and “Launcelot, My Brother,” the story of Launcelot and Guinevere. But it took her four earlier novels to find that footing.

Roberts was born in Burning Springs, WV in 1903. The family—her parents, one brother and three sisters, one a twin—moved in 1911 to Marietta, OH, where they lived for seven years at The Anchorage, a 22 room villa built in 1859 that was typical of the Italianate style popular at the time.

Roberts attended Barnard College and refused the restrictive dorms of those days. To cover the rules, she said that she would live with an older sister, when actually she lived alone and explored New York City.

After getting her B.A. in English in 1927, she did graduate studies in Old French at the University of Wisconsin.

Early in her career Roberts was a freelance writer for publications such as Liberty, and American Magazine, what she described as “bread and butter jobs” which also included some editing and teaching. 

Her first book, with Kay Smallzried, was More Than You Promise, a history of the Studebaker Automobile Corporation, from 1942.

Dorothy Roberts’ novel writing didn’t truly get off the ground till the following year. But then she had a burst of creative activity, producing a novel every two years from 1943-49. By this point she was able to support herself by writing, quite a coup in those days, especially for a woman. During this period of her writing she drew heavily from her late childhood in Marietta as well as her earlier West Virginia experiences.

Her debut book, A Man of Malice Landing, “is a fresh, clean and well-written novel,” observed Paul D. Tiller in the Lexington Herald in October 1943. “The plot is a familiar one. Yet this novel is original and has a pungent quality of its own. The narrative is unusually good. The book is the story of a man born and reared in a small town who, like so many other ‘small towners,’ feels that happiness and fortune await him in the big city.”

In 1945 Roberts brought out A Durable Fire. Drawing again from the town of Malice Landing, she wrote of the conflicts within a sensitive modern girl who could not fit into the ways of her small Ohio home town. “A Durable Fire is a serious piece of work. Consistently serious. Even seriously dull,” sniffed critic Margaret Bradshaw at the Dayton Herald in late 1945. “Glee Vanny, the heroine, has little to recommend her. At an early age she would surely have been relegated to the problem child department, except that the author would not have it so. A Durable Fire may be a sociological thesis, but it is not a good story.”

In The Mountain Journey, third out of the gates, “Roberts writes effectively of the oil industry in the West Virginia hill country [-ed. her father James was an oil producer] and of those people who are the dross of a once-booming economy,” says Arthur E. Jenkins in a 1947 Hartford Courant review. “Dorothy James Roberts conveys a close-knit sociological study of the common folk, their ignorance, strange courtesy, superstition and occasional bestiality. The Mountain Journey betrays a profound knowledge of this region and an acute understanding of human beings.”

“Marshwood is a quiet and unpretentious novel that will appeal to women readers,” said Martha Schlegel of Roberts’ fourth novel in the Philadelphia Enquirer in May 1949. “It interprets various feminine points of view sympathetically through objectively. It lacks dramatic intensity, but provides a smooth narrative with a wealth of graphic detail.”

Roberts finally found her defining niche with The Enchanted Cup (1953), her first novel written in the historical fiction genre. It was selected as a Book of the Month Selection. Her alma mater took notice and sought her out for an interview:

Barnard Alumnae magazine December 1953 interview:

THERE is a curious parallel in the careers of the two distinguished “Barnard novelists” whose latest novels were published recently within a couple of weeks of each other. Just ten years ago, Dorothy James Roberts ’27 and Elizabeth Hall Janeway ’35 were acclaimed for their respective first novels, “A Man of Malice Landing” and “The Walsh Girls.” 

Last month, Miss Roberts’ “The Enchanted Cup,” a rendering of the Tristan and Isolde legend in novel form, and Mrs. laneway’s novel of modern life, “Leaving Home,” again received wide critical attention, both writers being praised for their independent approach to literary and human problems. It is interesting to note that their distinction as stylists was established from the first when Miss Roberts was compared favorably to Laurence Sterne and Mrs. Janeway to Jane Austen. 

Although the two women graduated from Barnard some eight years apart, and do not know each other, they express admiration and fondness for the same Barnard professor, Miss Ethel Sturtevant, in whose short-story-writing course they received their initial encouragement. Miss Roberts, who also studied medieval literature with her, traces her interest in the Tristan legend to Miss Sturtevant’s inspired teaching. (“Do you remember her?” Miss Roberts asked. “When I knew her she had a wise, amused face, a listening face.”) 

Personally, too, Miss Roberts and Mrs. Janeway have something in common: both are that rare phenomenon among serious women writers — well-adjusted individuals, quite untouched by the aura of bohemianism. 

Yet as writers and personalities each is distinctive. Miss Roberts, the more extrovert of the two, you no sooner meet than you feel you know. Her overflowing enthusiasm, mingled with a very human sort of interest in others, makes you at once warm up. Five minutes in her presence is enough to convince you that writing takes up only a part of her life, for she looks like a woman who would fill her day with activity and she talks like one whose interests are as deep as they are wide. Since “The Enchanted Cup” (a Book-of-the-Month Club selection) was her first venture into historical fiction — and challenging material at that — there was much to say on the subject. 

Miss Roberts had been reading and working toward this novel for over twenty years. As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she had specialized in Old French, studying with Julian Harris, a disciple of the French medievalist, Bedier — who has written the only other modern prose rendition of the Tristan legend. More than either Bedier or Gottfried of Strassbourg, however, Thomas Malory proved her chief source for the story. But it was Malory with a “difference.” 

“In this age of Freud,” Miss Roberts explains, “the traditional elements of the story could only be swallowed if psychological symbol and projection were taken into account. It seemed to me sensible when I had solar myths and potions to deal with, to move down the centuries a bit and say right out loud that human wishes and frustrations were to be found in the minds and spirits of these characters. As for the form, I tried to keep an oral tradition in mind, and to offset the realistic details, the houses, the menus, the clothing. I kept the narrative as technically innocent as I knew how.” 

Although she has lived for many years in Mamaroneck, N.Y., Miss Roberts is a native of West Virginia and attended schools in Ohio before coming to Barnard. Early in life her parents provided her with a cultural atmosphere — her father wrote poetry, her mother composed. A precocious child, she was an avid reader of the classics (still is) — her favorite book being “Don Quixote.”

But neither her serene family life nor the academic world to which she became attached kept her remote from contemporary American experience. All her previous novels, “A Man of Malice Landing,” “Durable Fire,” “Mountain Journey,” and “Marshwood,” have a quality of lived reality which is anything but bookish. They are psychological studies which, taking in a particular social milieu, aim to create the quality of a legend — the American legend. 

Read alongside her other works, “The Enchanted Cup” seems different only in that the process has been reversed: here she has begun with a legend— a universal one — and has sought to uncover the psychological truths blurred by time and tradition. ….

‘These Are the Lessons We Have Learned,’ by Nona Balakian, Barnard Alumnae Magazine, December 1953, page 8

Nine years after Launcelot, My Brother, Dorothy Roberts’ final novel Kinsmen of the Grail circled back to the Arthurian well she’d drawn from so profitably earlier. Gawaine has been a knight for some 20-odd years; he’s still a powerful knight but he knows he’s slowing down and that he increasingly needs to rely on his experience rather than merely physical prowess. He’s just a bit irked when the young Perceval, who has been kept shielded from all knightly pursuits by his mother, goes off to Camelot, pulls an enchanted sword out of a stone, and becomes “super-knight” overnight. Book reviewer Bert Collier at the Miami Herald tersely noted that the recently published The Once and Future King covered much of the same turf as Roberts’ novel. “Somehow, Miss Roberts’ treatment seems less convincing.” 

Dorothy Roberts stopped publishing after that, leaving the New York publishing area and arena because she did not want to lower her standards at a time when publishers wanted her to write in a lesser way. 

Roberts retired to Palo Alto, CA, where she died in 1990.

sources: Barnard Alumnae Magazine interview

The Late Life Creativity of Dorothy James Roberts, by Ruth Harriet Jacobs

More articles on novelists from the region:

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Christy and Leonora: City Girl, Country Gal(Opens in a new browser tab)

Manly Wade Wellman: a Writer for the Ageless Hills(Opens in a new browser tab)

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