On these travels Fletcher served as amanuensis to Appleton
: his book Nile Journal, 1876, appeared as dictated to her, with illustrations by Eugene Benson
; his Syrian Sunshine followed the next year.
As a young woman JCF was clearly a hit with American literary men: Charles Warren Stoddard
called her a dear friend and encouraged her writing for publication.
Stoddard, Charles Warren. “Memories of San Francisco in the Sixties”. In Old Bohemia, Pacific Monthly Publishing Company, Dec. 1907, pp. 639-50.
646
Thomas Gold Appleton
welcomed her as a near-collaborator.
Literary responses
Julia Constance Fletcher
Henry James
, reviewing this novel, called the rootless expatriate Amenican the most beautiful and fascinating type in modern fiction.
“The No Name Series”. Studies in the American Renaissance, No. 15, 1 Jan. 1991, pp. 375-02, https://www.jstor.org/stable/30227614.
385
Another reviewer praised it for magical descriptions, insight into moods and emotions, and a...
Travel
Julia Constance Fletcher
JCF, her mother
, and stepfather
, embarked on a Nile trip in the dahabiya Rachel with Thomas Gold Appleton
, a sixty-two-year-old American and addicted traveller whom Eugene Benson had met in Venice.