Biography and Fiction Merge in ‘Dawson’s Fall’

Roxana Robinson is an author of both fiction and biography, and in her new novel, “Dawson’s Fall,” she weaves both efforts together on the page. Previously, Robinson meticulously detailed the pioneering and distinctly Southwestern emergence of the famed modernist painter of flowers and animal skulls in “Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life.” In her tightly-wound novel “Sparta,” Robinson inhabited the unsteady mind of a young Classics major turned American Marine who returns home to suburban New York following a tour in Iraq only to fight a new private war, battling his own sense of trauma and isolation. 

In “Dawson’s Fall,” a novel of both war and internal expression, Robinson dives into a particularly sensitive time in America’s past, and her own lineage. In the introduction, the part time Cornwall resident chronicles her family’s multi-generational dedication to their principles, including citing her great-great-great aunt Harriet Beecher Stowe as exemplar of this quality. Stowe was a 19th century abolitionist born in Litchfield County who is still best known for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly,” a successfully persuasive 1852 novel that helped sway Northern opinion with its depiction of the cruel treatment of enslaved men and women. A worldwide bestseller in Stowe’s lifetime, neck-and-neck with The Bible, it later garnered more contemporary literary criticism for its depiction of its pitifully saintly, subservient black characters, including in the opening essay of James Baldwin’s 1955 collection, “Notes on A Native Son,” in which Baldwin likened the novel to white missionaries in Africa. 

“Dawson’s Fall,” however, is about Robinson’s Southern side of her family, specifically her great-grandfather, Francis Warrington Dawson.  An upper-class Englishman, Dawson held an adoration for the American South, and in 1862 he sailed across the Atlantic to fight for the Confederate cause. After the war, he went on to become the editor in chief of the News and Courier newspaper in Charleston, S.C., and married Robinson’s great-grandmother, Sarah Fowler Morgan, a diarist from an affluent, slave-owning family in European-cultured Louisiana. 

Using Morgan’s diaries, starting at 19-years-old as she grieves the untimely deaths of multiple brothers, her letters to Dawson, and Dawson’s newspaper columns, which often speak out against the violent encounters between hostile white South Carolina Confederates and free black citizens, Robinson presents both the actual words of her great-grandparents and her own prose to depict the instability of the Jim Crow South. It is a bleak setting awash in hate-driven murder,  yet having access to the astonishingly detailed, first-hand insights of two ancestors, even with their particularly privileged points of view, would be hard for any storyteller like Robinson to resist sharing.

Oblong Books’ White Hart Speakers Series will present Roxana Robinson at The White Hart inn, 15 Undermountain Road, Salisbury, CT on June 5 at 6 p.m. For reservations go to www.oblongbooks.com