Mclary, Jane McIlvaine

About the author

Jane McIlvaine McClary was born in Pittsburgh, and moved when she was seven to Middleburg, Virginia. There she went to a one-room school. To get there, she rode her pony, but as the pony usually galloped off home during the day, she had to walk home. Jane worked as an exercise jockey for a racing stable, and became well known in Virginia for her hunting prowess. Hunting provided the background for several of her books, particularly her adult novel, A Portion for Foxes. This portrait of life in an American hunt club is described variously as very funny, very controversial, and by Jane’s editor, Michael Korda as “a kind of Gone With the Wind” of fox hunting.” I have to say, after reading it, I agree with none of these opinions. I found the characters spectacularly unpleasant, and found nothing in the book to make me want to finish it.

McClary also wrote several horse books for children. Those best known in the UK are the Cammie books (although only the first two made it into print here). Unlike British pony authors, Jane McIlvaine introduced romance into her books.

Michael Korda, in his book Four Legs and Flies, about his adult infatuation with the Horse, wrote about visiting Jane. The visit is described here by Penelope Green, who reviewed the book for the New York Times.

… deep in the 1960s, Korda makes a pilgrimage to Middleburg, Va, ”perhaps the horsiest place in America.” He’s there to deliver a sidesaddle to one of his authors, a horsewoman named Jane McIlvaine McClary, whose novel A Portion for Foxes became a sensation as ”a kind of Gone With the Wind of fox hunting,” as he describes it. Laboring under the misunderstanding that Korda is some sort of Pancho Villa in the saddle, his hostess leads him on a whiskey-fueled steeplechase through the rain, as well as into the Middleburg hunt itself, an haut-WASP ritual with more proscriptions and rites than a cardinal’s mitering. It is at this final event that Korda disgraces himself, not only by charging past the master of the hunt on a horse he is unable to control but also by pretending not to see the fox — the ultimate transgression.

Jane worked on the Times Herald and Fortune magazine as a writer. She married Robinson McIlvaine, and they moved to Downingtown, where they bought the Archive newspaper. She and her husband did pretty much everything on the paper, and she chronicled their time there in It Happens Every Thursday, which was later turned into a film, starring Loretta Young as Jane.

Finding the books
Cammie’s Challenge and A Portion for Foxes books are easy to find in the UK. With the exception of Cammie’s Choice and Cammie’s Cousin, all of the other books are easy to find either here or in America.

Links and sources
Dustjacket of Cintra’s Challenge
New York Times: Michael Korda on Jane McIlvaine McClary
It Happens Every Thursday on IMDB
Terri A. Wear: Horse Stories, an Annotated Bibilography, Scarecrow Press, 1987
Many thanks to Susan Bourgeau for providing virtually all the photographs in this section.