Author: Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse

Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse entered print through journalism before extending her work into novels, plays, and accounts of criminal trials. Cornwall, where she grew up in an artistic family, remained an important imaginative setting. During the First World War she reported from the Western Front, an unusual assignment for a woman journalist of her generation. She later collaborated on drama with her husband, Harold Marsh Harwood, while continuing to examine testimony and motive in nonfiction. The White Riband draws on her Cornish interests through a young woman's effort to escape poverty and restrictive expectations. Issued during the early 1920s, it belongs to the period in which Jesse established her mature reputation as a novelist. Her varied practice helps explain the story's alertness to setting, social pressure, and competing versions of truth. The novel introduces a writer who could connect close observation of circumstance with sympathy for an individual determined to imagine a wider life.