Graustark: The Story of a Love Behind a Throne was written by George Barr McCutcheon. McCutcheon (1866-1928) was an author and playwright whose only major success was the Graustark novels; he wrote five sequels to Graustark, from 1904-1926.

Graustark is about Grenfall Lorry, an American who is traveling on a train across the United States when he meets and is attracted to Yetive, a beautiful foreigner. He helps her catch a train, they chat, and his infatuation with her deepens. Yetive leaves for her home country, Graustark, and after some difficulty Grenfall discovers Graustark’s location—it is a tiny country which he had never heard of before meeting Yetive—and follows her there. Plot complications ensue. Grenfall discovers that Yetive is actually the ruler of Graustark. Grenfall is imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. Yetive is threatened with having to marry Prince Lorenz, the distasteful ruler of Axphain, Graustark’s neighbor. Graustark owes a large war reparations debt to Axphain, but if Yetive marries Lorenz Axphain will forgive the debt. If Yetive does not agree to the marriage Axphain will demand repayment of the debt and Graustark will be forced to cede most of its land to Axphain. But Grenfall manages to make everything better, and by the novel’s end he has married Yetive and been made the Prince Consort of Graustark.

Graustark was the most successful of the Prisoner of Zenda imitations and spawned a number of imitations of its own. Like most of the Zenda imitations, Graustark followed the Zenda template for Lost World novels (see: The Lost Race Story): an American finds love and adventure in an imaginary European country and ends up marrying that country’s female ruler and becoming the ruler of that country. But Graustark was so popular as a novel and play that it superseded all other Zenda imitators and became almost the equal of Zenda, with the term “Graustarkian” becoming synonymous with “Ruritanian.” One major reason for Graustark’s success was its wider audience appeal: Graustark is a genteel love story more than an adventure novel, while Zenda is an adventure novel with a romantic subplot. McCutcheon provides an uncomplicated, happy ending for his characters, while the ending of Zenda is bittersweet. McCutcheon writes in the light, brisk tone of turn-of-the-century commercial magazine prose, and if he produces a work even more superficial than Prisoner of Zenda and with less of a sense of seriousness, the modern reader will not object.

Even with the love plot, however, Graustark has enough adventure elements to fit into the “New Romance” subgenre (see: From the Memoirs of a Minister of France) and to serve its ideological ends. The New Romances were popular with men more than women, in part because of their masculinist worldviews and male main characters, but also because the New Romances largely appealed to the masculinist hopes of the younger generation of readers and the newly-aggressive American political and foreign policy outlook. As one writer and critic put it in 1920, “The return to the romance is simply a young, strong, virile generation pushing aside the flabby one...if the map of the world and the atmosphere of civilization are changing rapidly, the corresponding change in art should not be surprising.”¹ The popular fiction published in the wake of the Spanish-American War portrayed it as

a chivalric rescue mission that in turn rejuvenates the liberator. The historical romance opens with its own lament for the closed frontier, as the hero mopes, discontented with the dwarfed opportunities of his contemporary society. He then seeks adventure on a primitive frontier abroad, where he falls in love with a beautiful aristocratic woman, often the ruler of a kingdom and sometimes a genteel American. The hero, usually a disinherited or "natural" aristocrat, both saves the kingdom from falling to its barbaric enemies and thereby modernizes it and liberates the heroine from outdated class constraints by marrying her. The heroine of the novel, an athletically daring New Woman (often a Gibson girl in the illustrations), actively abets her own liberation by embracing the hero in marriage. At the end, the hero returns home with his bride, after relinquishing political control of the realm he has freed.²

This formula applied to bestselling novels like To Have and To Hold and Graustark; “the modem Western, initiated in Owen Wister's The Virginian…finds its immediate genealogy in this genre, which reclaims the American West through the course of overseas empire.”³

Graustark remains an entertaining read, if distinctly less of everything in most respects than The Prisoner of Zenda.

Print: George Barr McCutcheon, Graustark: The Story of a Love Behind a Throne. Seattle: Amazon Createspace, 2016.

Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s,” American Literary History 2, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 659-690.

¹ Maurice Thompson, “Critics,” 1920, qtd. in Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s,” American Literary History 2, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 665-666.

² Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire,” 666.

³ Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire,” 667,