Richard Dehan
Life and career
Richard Dehan was a pen name used by Clotilde Graves, who lived from 1863 to 1932. Born in County Cork, she studied art in London, acted with a touring company and wrote plays and journalism before achieving substantial success as a novelist. She began using the Dehan name with The Dop Doctor in 1910. That Which Hath Wings belongs to the later fiction of a writer whose experience crossed several kinds of public storytelling.
A pen name and a public storytelling career
The name Richard Dehan should not obscure the career of Clotilde Graves behind it. Theatre, journalism and fiction involved different kinds of audience, and the novel here uses a broad range of social scenes and dramatic contrasts. That Which Hath Wings belongs to a wartime perspective on the recent past. Its presentation of national character, military life and looming conflict is part of that perspective, not a neutral account that a reader must adopt in order to follow the story.
That Which Hath Wings
The supplied edition is dated 1918, while its opening places a marriage in January 1914. Social entertainment, clubs and family arrangements establish a world that the approach of war will transform. Aviation and communication become part of the larger narrative, whose chapter sequence moves towards military service and wartime consequences. The subtitle, A Novel of the Day, emphasizes contemporary engagement. Readers can notice how knowledge of the coming conflict gives apparently ordinary early scenes a retrospective pressure.
Keep the two dates in view
Read the opening social scenes with attention to what the characters know and what a wartime narrator or audience can already anticipate. How does that difference influence descriptions of confidence, frivolity or duty? Compare personal loyalties with the broader national claims made around them. The novel's large cast and emphatic rhetoric become easier to follow when these levels remain distinct, allowing engagement with its emotional force without turning its historical judgments into unquestioned facts.