Trans Wiki Bio: Pearl Grey

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Trans Wiki Bio: Pearl Grey
A Short Alternative Biography
By Maryanne Peters

Pearl Zane Grey (January 31, 1872 – October 23, 1939) was an American author and adventurer best known for her popular adventure novels and stories written for young women. Her novel “American Frontier – Women of the Purple Sage” is her best-selling book.

In addition to the commercial success of her printed works, her books have had second lives and continuing influence when adapted as films and television productions.

Early life

Pearl Zane Grey was born January 31, 1872, in Zaneville Ohio the fourth of five children, and it appears that her sex was indeterminate. She was given the name Pearl and clothed in dresses as was common for both sexes at the time. Her father was Lewis M. Grey, a dentist. Her mother Allie was born Alice Josephine Zane, whose ancestor Robert Zane gave the town of her birth its name.

As a child, Pearl was frequently bullied by an older brother and subjected to severe beatings from her father, and so took refuge in the care and attention of her mother and grandmother. Pearl chose to attend school as a girl. Her female relatives could then insist on her being treated appropriately.

Nevertheless, Pearl grew up an avid reader of adventure stories and dime novels and acquired a taste for an unconventional life. Despite warnings by her father that she must break free of skirts, Pearl to all steps necessary to ensure that her future was to be female.

Pearl wrote her first story, “Jane of the Cave”, when she was fifteen.

Due to shame from a severe financial setback in 1889 caused by a poor investment, Lewis Grey moved his family from Zanesville and started again in Columbus Ohio. While her father struggled to re-establish his dental practice, Pearl attended as his nurse and performed basic extractions until the state board intervened. But Pearl had acquired skills that would be useful later.

In those days she could not go on to study dentistry but she did attend Pennsylvania University and study English literature. She was an indifferent scholar, barely achieving a minimum average. Outside class, she spent his time on creative writing, especially poetry. Her shy nature and teetotaling set her apart from other students, and she socialized little. Her intention was to become a writer.

During a summer break Pearl became involved in a sexual encounter with a young man which resulted in her father having to pay a settlement of $133.40 to the man’s family to avoid charges of indecency being laid. All details of this matter were concealed but it made it difficult for Pearl to return to Penn in the fall as planned.

Instead Pearl obtained work as a dental assistant in New York City and she began to write in the evening to offset the tedium of dental practice. She struggled financially and emotionally. She was a natural writer but her early efforts were stiff and grammatically weak.

She relished life in the big city but still took the opportunity to enjoy the outdoors and on one such outing she met her future husband Jolyon Roth. “Jolly” as he was known seemed ready to accept Pearl regardless or her physical and personal quirks, although it was a long and intense courtship marked by frequent quarrels. Pearl and Jolly married five years later in 1905.

But Pearl has always made it clear that she was not to be tied to home life. She told him: “But I love to be free. I cannot change my spots. The ordinary woman is satisfied with a husband and a family but I am a million miles from being that kind of woman and no amount of trying will ever do any good ... I shall never lose my spirit:.

Over the next two decades Pearl travelled the nation and the world, and wrote, returning to Jolly every now and again for a moment of peace and the intimacy that the peripatetic life denied her. Jolly offered he solid emotional support as disclosed in their correspondence, but also financial support until the publication of her first significant success “The last Lady of the Plains” in 1908. It would be another four years before “American Frontier – Women of the Purple Sage” would cement her position.

Writing Career

“East of the Pecos” published in 1937 was perhaps an effort towards autobiography given her unusual circumstances. It tells the story of a cowboy and an adventurer at heart (like Pearl herself) who feels compels to head east for a new life living as a woman. This touching tale perhaps reveals that Pearl had an inner desire to settle that she never achieved in life.

His earlier story (1936) “The Trail Drivers” explores similar transgender themes when the woman taking over the chuckwagon for a team of cowboys turns out be not the sister of their old comrade, but the man himself choosing to live life as a frontier lady.

In large part her stories of the old west were influenced by her open sexual relationship with Brandon Montenegro, a part native American. The two met while hiking Eaton Canyon. Of him she wrote,
“I saw his flowing raven mane against the rocks of the canyon. I have seen the red skin of the Navajo and the olive of the Spaniards, but he was an apparition. He seemed to be the embodiment of the West I portray in my books, open and wild.”

She was not faithful to Jolly and as she relied on him less for material support she depended on him to proof her work and submit it to publishers while she travelled in search of inspiration and stimulation. Travel also allowed her to write with confidence about the American West, its characters, and its landscape. Treacherous river crossings, unpredictable beasts, bone-chilling cold, searing heat, parching thirst, bad water, irascible tempers, and heroic cooperation all became real to her.

As Pearl Grey had become a household name, other publishers caught on to the commercial potential of the Western novel. Many writers took on the genre with varying degrees of success, but Pearl remained the only woman, and her stories centered around the female characters led her to become very popular with young women in particular.

Perhaps because she wrote from this perspective her stories were not adapted to the screen as readily as the work of male writers of Westerns.

During the 1930s, Pearl continued to write, but the Great Depression hurt the publishing industry and her sales fell off. But she continued to earn royalty income, so she did better than many financially.

Reception by Critics

The more books Pearl sold, the more the established critics attacked her. Some claimed her depictions of the West were too fanciful, and not faithful to the moral realities of the frontier. They thought her characters unrealistic and much larger-than-life. Pearl took many of these criticisms to heart, betraying her feminine sensitivity.

Her novel “The Vanishing American” first serialized in The Ladies Home Journal n 1922, prompted a heated debate. Pearl portrayed the struggle of the Navajo to preserve their identity and culture against corrupting influences of the white government and missionaries which enraged religious groups.

Death

Pearl Zane Grey died of heart failure on October 23, 1939, aged 67.

Old West_0.JPG
A Young Pearl Grey

Biographer’s Note:
Erin pointed out to me that Zane Grey’s given name was Pearl (apparently pearl grey is a color!) and for some reason I just started to imagine that his parents had given their child the option. Certainly he was born at a time when parents routinely has sons wearing dresses and long hair until they were old enough for school. I simply lifted his bio from Wikipedia and made the necessary adjustments.

But this gives rise to two questions:

1. What other characters from history can be given the Trans Wiki Bio treatment; and
2. Should I write “The Trail Drivers” and “East of the Pecos”? Erin has suggested that there be a follow up collection of westerns following publication of "All Her Misfortune" on Amazon

© Maryanne Peters 2021

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Comments

When I was a child…….

D. Eden's picture

Of some eight or nine years of age, my father’s mother gave me a collection of Zane Grey novels. I think I read each one some eight or nine times over the years of my youth, and ended up giving them to one of my sons at around the same age. He inherited my love of reading, but preferred to borrow from the collection of science fiction novels I had gathered by that time.

I enjoyed this little fantasy, and would love to read the proposed stories should you ever get around to fleshing them out in real life.

D. Eden

Dum Vivimus, Vivamus

TG author

erin's picture

Zane Grey really did write two TG novels, and me mentioning this to Maryanne was part of the catalyst of herwriting this pastiche. When I mentioned that Grey's real first name was Pearl, she was hooked. :)

I read "West of the Pecos" and "The Trail Driver" when I was about 12 (along with about 20 other Zane Grey novels), from my Dad's constantly changing collection of paperbacks. We lived on the edge of the desert at the time, with actual cowboys operating ranches on either side of us. The plot gimmick is that girls are disguised as men. I identified immediately. :)

I also vote that Maryanne write "East of the Pecos" and "The Chuck Wagon Gal" as soon as possible.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Pearl Grey

littlerocksilver's picture

Pearl built a huge home in Altadena, California not many blocks from where I grew up. Needless to say, our neighborhood was a bit down the scale. Walked by it many times coming home from school.

Portia

L. Frank Baum?

L. Frank Baum?

Your question got me wondering how the original Oz books would have been different if a woman wrote them — of course, a woman, Ruth Plumly Thompson, did write the majority of the Oz series after Baum’s death and added some characters, but the main ones were the same — but I really couldn’t come up with anything significant: the sympathetic human(oid) characters there — Dorothy, Glinda, Ozma, eventually Betsy Bobbin and Trot — are female.

The male co-stars — the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Wizard, the Cowardly Lion, Tik Tok, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Sawhorse — are all quirky; while girls may identify with Dorothy, I can’t see any boys wishing they were any of the males. (And I think only a few of us wished we were Tip, when he turned out to be Ozma under a transformation spell.) Since I included Trot, Cap'n Bill is a positive character, but he’s too old to be a role model; so, I think, is the Shaggy Man.

Seems counter-intuitive, but would Dorothy have been a boy if a woman had written The Wizard of Oz? J.K. Rowling, after all, built her series around Harry Potter, not Hermione. Or would the Alice in Wonderland story model have forced the issue?

Lots more to Baum’s bio, of course, than the Oz series. I went into more detail here, but got bogged down and deleted it.

Might be something to look at, anyway.

Then there’s Winsor McCay. Haven’t really looked him up — just thought about it right now — but a girl in Little Nemo’s Slumberland and a better-behaved Gertie the Dinosaur might be intriguing.

Eric

Literary masters to literary mistresses

Zane Grey was such an interesting character in his own right - an adventurer and a philanderer and deeply troubled.
The way I wrote this bio was that he/she was not just a woman but a transwoman.
As Erin pointed out Zane did write 2 stories of women passing as men, and in my fantasy I turned those about. Erin is insisting that I write Pearls variation of those stories - men passing as women. I think I might.
But as for other literary figures, or figures from history who might have had a very different bio had they crossed over .... who has ideas?
Maryanne

"Well... How do you like it now, Gentlemen?"

laika's picture

During the last months of his life Ernest Hemingway would wander around saying this to himself. I never liked the guy but that refrain really haunts me, hinting at some spectral chorus of judgmental father figures or whatever Hell of self-loathing he'd drank himself into. And even if he did it to himself he didn't deserve that kind of pain...

His whole thing was this cartoonish ideal of manhood that just seems groteque to me; and his ideas about some mystical bond between a hunter and his prey were such utter tripe, and I guarantee weren't shared by those animals he murdered to prove he had a big dick. Maybe America's literary poster boy for two-fisted hard drinking toxic masculinity wouldn't have ate his shotgun if he'd been born a she, or if he realized all that blustering machismo was a desperate denial of her true girly giggling feminine self and became one!
~hugs, Veronica

.
The closest approximation to what it's like in my brain:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u08E7c-FRbU&t=4s

Hemingway

He would be a perfect candidate Laika!
I just need think of what Emily Hemingway's seminal work expressing her true TG nature might be?!
Maryanne

Liked this a lot

But to continue --
L. Frank Baum: the character of Tip being Ozma, I recall reading that when I was about 19 and being quite taken with the idea of a boy really being a girl. That little incident may have been the spark for finding the real me.

>>> Kay