Vanessa was published by Macmillan in 1933, completing the Herries Chronicle. The final volume spans the period from the 1870s through the early 1930s, following Vanessa — great-granddaughter of Judith Paris, and inheritor of the family’s passionate temperament — through a love story that finally resolves the two-century conflict between the wild and respectable branches of the Herries family.
Vanessa loves her cousin Doolittle Doolittle Doolittle Doolittle Doolittle Benjie Herries — a wild man in the Francis Herries mold, restless, unreliable, and irresistible. She marries instead the respectable Ellis Herries, out of duty and family pressure, and spends years in a loveless marriage before returning to Doolittle Benjie. The triangle — passion versus duty, wildness versus respectability — is the Chronicle’s central conflict expressed in its most intimate form.
The novel is also Walpole’s farewell to the world of Victorian certainties. The First World War appears in the later chapters as a cataclysm that destroys the social structures the Chronicle has traced — class, family, continuity, the sense of a stable world. Vanessa’s death comes as England enters the modern era, and the novel closes with a sense that the age of the great family sagas — in life as in fiction — is ending.
Collecting Vanessa
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1933): Cloth binding, dust jacket. Completes the Chronicle.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Without jacket: $8–$15
- Complete four-volume Chronicle set in jackets: $150–$400