Youth, and the South, and the Romance-freighted Sicilian Night!
The Works of Eleanor M. Ingram
Eleanor M. Ingram published widely in the popular pulp literary magazines of the day. While many of these have been scanned and put online, and we have tried to hunt down and personally document stories from magazines and issues that are not available on the internet in toto in our quest to recover her complete oeuvre, these .pdfs are hard to find and sometimes of very poor quality. Here we are slowly transcribing them so they can be read online, downloaded as text files, or pasted into an epub-creator. All of Eleanor M. Ingram's works are in the public domain.
Here you will find the stories we have done so far. In general, we preserve the spelling and punctuation of the magazines, except in the case of obvious typos. We have also tried to proof-read rigorously. However, please send errors to the site maintainer: eleanor DOT m DOT archivist AT gmail DOT com.
Ruritanian Romance
This early, very dark short story seems to be set in the same unnamed-but-obviously-Russian-inspired Empire as The Game and the Candle, and the titular Emperor could be considered the father of Emperor Adrian (who would then appear to have named his son after his erstwhile favorite!).
The heir presumptive of "Pyrenia" finds himself the target of an anti-monarchical conspiracy––because he is too beloved! Unusually for Eleanor M.'s oeuvre, politics play a bigger role in this story than romance and romantic loyalty (or do they?).
Another little Ruritanian romance of cousinly love-loyalty, mistaken intentions, and a resolution that gives each cousin his proper bride without marring the perfection of their own devotion to each other.
A Ruritanian farce about three royal brothers, one of whom is willing to do just about anything to save his army officer (boy?)friend from disciplinary action by his older brother the king.
Historical Romance
Ingram's first published story, a little intrigue tale set during the Régence.
An early abduction-romance about a Norse viking and the Saxon lady who holds a castle he is about to raid.
A chilling little tale of a courtier of Louis XIV, and the harsh lesson given him about letting romance distract him from paying attention and attendance on his sovereign. Similar concerns to "I Am the Emperor".
The story of an idealistic French governor of a Sicilian city––who arrives just before the Sicilian Vespers of 1281. A conventionally happy romantic ending, but one of few stories in which Eleanor M. confronts something like colonialism head-on.
This story seems to be working out early ideas for an abduction-romance that would later become "Lucifer's Wife" and "The Unafraid". A bit darker than the later versions.
This novella of 44,000 words (as long as some of Ingram's novels) about the "Spanish Viking" pirate-lords of a (fictional) Mediterranean island displays many of Eleanor M.'s favorite story elements: romantic fealty and passionate male friendship, love and romance between cousins, a laughing-eyed hero who must patiently endure a disgrace whose injustice he cannot reveal to the stern gray-eyed lord he loves, orientalizing luxury. Somewhat unusually, there are two principal female characters, both sympathetic and developed, and who have their own romantic friendship in addition to serving as love interests.
A farcical vignette about three musketeers who encounter a mysterious and alluring young woman at a country inn during the ascendency of Mazarin. Very Dumasian.
This novella of 20,000 words is an abduction/forced-marriage romance set in a romanticised Norman England c. 1300. In many ways, it is an "alternate-universe" version of Ingram's novel The Unafraid, with similar characters, plot, and some word-for-word identical scenes. It features such beloved Eleanor M. tropes as: chaste forced marriage; stern gray-eyed lord/cheerfully loyal subordinate; a castle strewn with exotic eastern luxuries.
Automobile Stories
This seems to be Eleanor M. Ingram's first automobile story; it gives a vividly immediate sketch of the atmosphere and excitement and confusion of a contemporary automobile race, clearly drawn from first-hand experience.
The chauffeur who turns out to be a millionaire in disguise was a standard automobile story trope, but this chauffeur is just a good working-class young man; typical for Eleanor M., his relationship with his prospective father-in-law is just as, if not more, important than his romance of his employer's daughter.
One of Eleanor M.'s only stories entirely about working-class characters; Denis, a wry New York mechanician who considers himself in "exile" from the East Coast race circuit and its camraderie when he must stay in a midwestern city to support the widow of a man his car killed, has something in common with Jack Rupert of the Mercury novels (and in fact, the driver Denis used to race with is a recurring name in those novels as well).
An almost-ghost story about the drivers of a sinister black car that seems to have a malevolent power to harm everyone who comes into contact with it. One of Eleanor M.'s most evoative pictures of the camaraderie, thrilling risks, and tragic accidents of the motor-racing "camps" and tracks.
Contemporary Romantic Fiction
The daughter of an old New England family falls in love with––shocking!––the son of Italian immigrants. A stirring defense of a (still very limited and racially-bound) notion of the "melting pot".
A fascinating romantic vignette about a young woman who falls for a vaudville drag performer, believing him to be a woman.
As the title suggests, an unusual "filial romance" of a middle-aged self-made millionaire and a young man with an abusive birth-father who fall irrevocably for each other; a convenient daughter allows for the relationship to be normalized into father- and son-in-law, but the love-story (and it is a story of love thwarted by duty) is firmly between the two men.
A humorous holiday romance about a young woman from Nevada ostracised by the fashionable set at asummer resort because of her "preposterous" hair.
A short romantic novella set at a quarrying operation; the massive machinery provides thrills and danger, as well as the opportunity for a modern woman exercising authority in the person of Miss Howard, the quarry's owner; the Italian-American, Mafia-dominated workforce offers scope for the favorite Eleanor M. themes of honor, loyalty, vows of vengeance, secret identities, and bonds between men.
When hard-nosed, rigidly upright second-generation self-made industrialist Mark Egerton is shot by a man he has fired for lying, he is saved and nursed back to health by the charming de Lauria siblings, who live with their Spanish father in genteel poverty. Romance blooms, and sets Mark Egerton on a collision course between his own pride of principle and old General de Lauria's pride in his family's ancient nobility. This novella of about 20,000 words also shows Eleanor M. Ingram's continued interest in "up to the minute" high-risk sports, with a key episode occurring at an aeroplane stunt show.