Ships That Pass in the Night - Beatrice Harraden

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Ships That Pass in the Night

by
Beatrice Harraden

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Title:	Ships That Pass in the Night
Author:	Beatrice Harraden
Genre:	Novel
Written:	1893
Length:	263 pages
Availability:	Ships That Pass in the Night - US
	Ships That Pass in the Night - UK
	Ships That Pass in the Night - Canada
	Des ombres qui passent - France
	Wie Schiffe in der Nacht - Deutschland
	Barcos que se cruzan en la noche - España

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Our Assessment:

B : rather simple, but still works quite well

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The Nation	.	31/5/1894	.
The NY Times	.	18/2/1894	.

From the Reviews:

"Essentially modern in mise-en-scène, manner, and touch, belonging in its literary attitude to that advanced school of novels which largely owes its existence to women writers, and which might not inaptly be called the University Extension of Fiction, this little story is yet full of the tender grace of a day not wholly dead. It is clean, it is piquant, it is healthy" - The Nation

"It is a book that holds the attention, and one that is not easily put aside before it is finished, and yet the reader is inclined to wonder afterward where the strong interest lies. The story is woefully sad and almost needlessly so (.....) The book shows how in the course of one season Bernadine learns how to judge her fellow-beings not by what they do, but by what they suffer (.....) The author is "advanced," modern, and agnostic, but she is old-fashioned enough to believe in a future state, for which we ought to be thankful. Although her writing is not free from grammatical blunders (...) her style has a piquant charm which is not to be denied." - The New York Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

The much longer first part of the two-part Ships That Pass in the Night is almost entirely set at Petershof, a Swiss Kurhaus -- "a winter resort for consumptive patients" --, covering the six-month stay of Bernardine Holme, a woman in her mid-twenties from London.
Bernardine had: "suffered a cheerless childhood in which dolls and toys took no leading part", raised by her bookseller-uncle, Zerviah, and his (now deceased) wife. As an adult: "She was at least a worker, if nothing else; she had always been a diligent scholar, and now she took her place as an able teacher" But now she had fallen ill, and:

she was broken down in every way, but it was thought that a prolonged stay in Petershof might help her back to a reasonable amount of health, or, at least, prevent her from slipping into further decline. She had come alone, because she had no relations except that old uncle, and no money to pay any friend who might have been willing to come with her.

Bernardine does not readily grow too chummy with anyone, but several of the other guests at Petershof figure prominently here, most notably Robert Allitsen, who has been here almost seven years and has long been seen as a taciturn curmudgeon with the well-earned nickname/title of 'the Disagreeable Man', one that: "had been fairly earned, and he hugged it to himself with a triumphant secret satisfaction". His welcome -- out of character in its length, though certainly not sentiment -- opens the novel:

“Yes, indeed,” remarked one of the guests at the English table, “yes, indeed, we start life thinking that we shall build a great cathedral, a crowning glory to architecture, and we end by contriving a mud hut.”

His attitude barely changes, but he does take to Bernardine -- inviting her when he goes to celebrate his birthday, for example, an outing which reveals other sides to him. Still, he remains consistently gruff and philosophical:

“My dear young woman,” he said, “we are not living in a poetry book bound with gilt edges. We are living in a paper-backed volume of prose. Be sensible. Don’t ruffle yourself on account of other people. Don’t even trouble to criticize them; it is only a nuisance to yourself. All this simply points back to my first suggestion: fill up your time with some hobby, cheese-mites or the influenza bacillus, and then you will be quite content to let people be neglected, lonely, and to die. You will look upon it as an ordinary and natural process.”

       That's been his attitude, until Bernardine's arrival. He also makes clear that he only hangs on to life because his mother is still alive, and it would devastate her if he predeceased her. Once she is out of the picture, however .....
       Though they spend time together, Beatrice feels -- and he agrees -- that: "there never were two people less lover-like than you and I are". But, of course .....
       Bernardine has always had ambitions; one of them is to write. It takes a while, but eventually she will even makes a start of it. (Meanwhile, the Disagreeable Man also introduces her to his hobby, photography, -- though he complains (of course) that she is a poor student.)
       Eventually, Bernardine's time and money is up -- though the Disagreeable Man offers to lend her funds so that she can prolong her stay, the best he can do in trying to convey the feelings he has developed for her. She, too, of course, regrets leaving him -- but she returns to London, where the novel's second part, not much more than a coda, is set.
       She can't escape the experience:

All the time she thought of the Disagreeable Man. She missed him in her life. She had never loved before, and she loved him. The forlorn figure rose before her, and her eyes filled with tears. Sometimes the tears fell on the books, and spotted them.

       Bernardine recalls also how he had told her he would embrace his freedom once his mother passed -- and then Bernardine sees the notice in the newspaper that she has, and so then: " Every day she scanned the obituary, fearing to find the record of another death, fearing and yet wishing to know" .....
       Harraden has written a romance, and yet to her credit she doesn't opt for the easy ending; Ships That Pass in the Night comes with quite a twist, unexpected in this form, at the end, the lovers re-united yet fate having played its cruel hand .....
       Ships That Pass in the Night is rather simple in its telling, bobbing along at the surface most of the time -- to the extent even that one of the chapters is titled: 'The Story moves on at last' --, but Harraden does manage a few very successful scenes and exchanges. And, from the opening paragraph, there are some very nicely expressed bits -- not least around uncle Zerviah, the kind of bookseller who: "did not like to sell his books: he parted with them painfully, as some people part with their illusions"
       There's also the way he's introduced, for example:

In an old second-hand bookshop in London, an old man sat reading Gibbon’s History of Rome. He did not put down his book when the postman brought him a letter. He just glanced indifferently at the letter, and impatiently at the postman. Zerviah Holme did not like to be interrupted when he was reading Gibhon; and as he was always reading Gibbon, an interruption was always regarded by him as an insult.

       (Much later we're also told that when Bernardine was away people expected him to be lonely without her company, but: "They asked him once, and he said: 'I always have Gibbon.'")
       Though, on the whole, rather insubstantial, there's enough here of and to Bernardine and the Disagreeable Man and their relationship to sweep in the reader (though both characters could certainly be more fully realized). Harraden is also quite good on the general atmosphere at Petershof -- sketchily presented as that too is --, with characters such as the dying Mr. Reffold and his inattentive wife, or a suicide-incident. While the secondary characters are mostly left too secondary in the action, there are some clever and effective descriptions in the mentions of them -- as with Zerviah Holme, so also with the tragic local girl who lost her lover: "the eve before their wedding morning" to an avalanche (as one does) or "the little hunchback postman", Wärli, who: "could speak broken English in a most fascinating way, agreeable to every one, but intelligible only to himself".
       This is the book that, for all its failing, is just good enough, a quick and surprisingly pleasing read with some well-turned expression, despite the Disagreeable Man's negativity and the novel's tragic resolution; one can see why it was immensely popular in its time.

       (By the way: the title is taken from the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem:

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

In her 'Preface to the Continental Edition' Harraden admits that: "At the time the book was published, I myself did not know where to find the quotation", having heard it years earlier but having forgotten the source; it seems that it is this novel -- and the great success it enjoyed -- that propelled the phrase to its later and current ubiquity.)

- M.A.Orthofer, 16 August 2026

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Links:

Ships That Pass in the Night:

Edition A. B. Fischer publicity page
Maclein y Parker publicity page

Reviews:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Books Written Before 1900

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About the Author:

English author Beatrice Harraden lived 1864 to 1936.

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