メアリ フェノロサ ノ ガッサク ギワク : トゥルース デクスター ノ ヒョウカ オ メグッテ

Abstract: Today, few people know the name of Mary McNeil FENOLLOSA (1865-1954) as a popular writer in early 20th-century America. Her first novel Truth Dexter (1901) achieved considerable sales; her third novel The Dragon Painter (1906) was a bestseller in its time. By 1907 Mary emerged as a budding novelist and enjoyed remarkably wide literary popularity. However, the heyday of Mary’s writing career did not last long. During the early and mid 1910s she continued to write and publish, but none of her novels were commercially successful. Mary retired from novel writing in the late 1910s. Since then, her works have mostly been forgotten except among a small number of readers and literary scholars. In American literary history, the name of Mary Fenollosa is recorded at best as a once popular, but more or less mediocre, novelist. Rather than as a novelist, Mary may now be remembered as the second wife of Ernest Francisco FENOLLOSA (1853-1908), who was a noted authority on Far Eastern art and also an Orient-minded cultural critic in America at the turn of the 20th century. While Mary herself acknowledged an intellectual debt to her talented husband, their marriage sometimes functioned to blacken her good literary name; there was an occasional rumor that Mary wrote her novels not on her own but in close collaboration with Ernest. The purpose of this article is to examine whether or not the authorship of Mary Fenollosa was a “collaborated” one, and if so, to what extent. My primary focus is on her first novel Truth Dexter. By closely analyzing Mary’s original text and other related material, I claim that such a rumor, if not completely groundless, should certainly be dismissed as ill-intentioned defamatory discourse