Get Your Man and Hold Him by Anne Hirst aka. Henry Becker Hirst, I think (1937)
Disclaimer: I have not read this book, just did a little breeze. AND it was hard to find anything on the author, Miss Anne Hirst. Especially since Michael Hirst & Anne Gracie wrote the popular The Tudors book series.
Imagine the aha moment when I finally decided to search for the title in our library catalog and came across… “Anne Hirst [pseudonym]”
I’m mostly confident that Miss Anne Hirst is actually Henry Becker Hirst, truthfully because of this one line in Heather Anne Hannah’s PhD thesis titled Male Use of a Female Pseudonym in Nineteenth-Century British and American Literature:
“Well-known Philadelphia poet and lawyer Henry Hirst contributed some of his poignant, romantic poems to The Ladies’ Companion (1834-1844), under the pseudonym Mrs Anna Maria Hirst (or Anna M. Hirst). Published in New York, The Ladies’ Companion was one of the leading women’s magazines in the United States.”
Even further down the rabbit hole, I find Henry Becker Hirst popping up on The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore’s site. In my brief readings I’ve gathered that Hirst was a lawyer, poet, and absinthe drinking companion of Poe and owned an exotic bird store. Further, Hirst, with Poe’s assistance, was the author of a popular biographical article (about Poe) published in the Philadelphia newspaper Saturday Museum on February 25, 1843. I’m seeing that today it is considered to be filled with misinformation (whether that be Hirst or Poe’s doing) and seen as a curiosity. Hirst wrote a parody of Poe’s “The Haunted Palace” called “The Ruined Tavern,” which apparently enraged Poe. Even more, it looks like there’s some major drama having to do with Hirst (selling, misplacing, letting someone borrow) some sort of Poe manuscript.
Unfortunately Hirst came to a sad end, becoming “an object of pity, roaming the streets wearing strange outfits and imagining himself to be in turn various presidents, emperors, kings, and queens.” And “Purring like a cat and swaying his body to and fro to the rhythm he was trying, he would jot down words here and there with intervals left to be filled in.” Finally, he was committed to the insane department of the Blockley Almshouse where he died at the age of sixty.
Not gonna lie, my sympathies are few to this man who wrote as a woman giving courting advice to other women like,
“Never, at this stage of the game (and if you’re wise, not for a long time after) go into a monologue of what you think, believe, eat, drink, etc. And don’t drag into the conversation events and people which are of necessity foreign to him; that can only throw a fog over this precious moment and blur his impression of you.”
And *eyeroll* the dedication: “To my husband whose unfailing sympathy and abiding wisdom make it possible for me to do my job.”
Hirst, you’re the worst! (Sorry you’re mental).
Hirst bio’s here: https://www.eapoe.org/people/hirsthb.htm
And here: http://lawlit.net/lp-2001/hirst.html
Hirst and Poe’s accusation of plagiarism: https://www.eapoe.org/works/stedwood/sw0813.htm
Poe and Hirst, drinking buddies: https://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poealchl.htm
Dr. Hannah’s thesis here: https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/44781/1/Hannah2018.pdf)
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