BIBLIOGRAPHY
Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Mayflower, 1843; Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852; Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, 1854; Dred (Nina Gordon), 1856; The Minister's Wooing, 1859; The Pearl of Orr's Island, 1862; Agnes of Sorrento, 1862; House and Home Papers, 1864; Little Foxes, 1865; Religious Poems, 1867; Queer Little People, 1867; The Chimney Corner, 1868; Oldtown Folks, 1869; Pink and White Tyranny, 1871; Oldtown Fireside Stories, 1871; My Wife and I, 1871; We and Our Neighbors, 1875; Poganuc People, 1878; A Dog's Mission, 1881; The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Edward Stowe, 1889.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. Tiny, 1866; The Gates Ajar, 1868; Men, Women, and Ghosts, 1869; Hedged In, 1870; The Silent Partner, 1870; Poetic Studies, 1875; The Story of Avis, 1877; An Old Maid's Paradise, 1879; Doctor Zay, 1882; Beyond the Gates, 1883; Songs of the Silent World, 1884; The Madonna of the Tubs, 1886; The Gates Between, 1887; Jack the Fisherman, 1887; The Struggle for Immortality, 1889; The Master of the Magicians [with H. D. Ward], 1890; Come Forth [with H. D. Ward], 1890; Fourteen to One, 1891; Donald Marcy, 1893; A Singular Life, 1894; The Supply at St. Agatha's, 1896; Chapters from a Life, 1896; The Story of Jesus Christ, 1897; Within the Gates, 1901; Successors to Mary the First, 1901; Avery, 1902; Trixy, 1904; The Man in the Case, 1906; Walled In, 1907.
Harriet Prescott Spofford. Sir Rohan's Ghost, 1859; The Amber Gods and Other Stories, 1863; Azarian, 1864; New England Legends, 1871; The Thief in the Night, 1872; Art Decoration Applied to Furniture, 1881; The Marquis of Carabas, 1882; Poems, 1882; Ballads About Authors, 1888; In Titian's Garden and Other Poems, 1897; The Children of the Valley, 1901; The Great Procession, 1902; Four Days of God, 1905; Old Washington, 1906; Old Madame and Other Tragedies, 1910.
Rose Terry Cooke. Poems by Rose Terry, 1860; Happy Dodd, 1875; Somebody's Neighbors, 1881; The Deacon's Week, 1885; Root-Bound and Other Sketches, 1885; No. A Story for Boys, 1886; The Sphynx's Children and Other People's, 1886; Poems by Rose Terry Cooke (complete), 1888; Steadfast: a Novel, 1889; Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills, 1891.
Sarah Orne Jewett. Deephaven, 1877; Old Friends and New, 1879; Country By-Ways, 1881; The Mate of the Daylight, 1883; A Country Doctor, 1884; A Marsh Island, 1885; A White Heron, 1886; The Story of the Normans, 1887; The King of Folly Island, 1888; Betty Leicester, 1889; Strangers and Wayfarers, 1890; A Native of Winby, 1893; Betty Leicester's Christmas, 1894; The Life of Nancy, 1895; The Country of the Pointed Firs, 1896; The Queen's Twin, 1899; The Tory Lover, 1901; Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, Edited by Annie Fields.
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. A Humble Romance, 1887; A New England Nun, 1891; Young Lucretia, 1892; Jane Field, 1892; Giles Corey, Yeoman: a Play, 1893; Pembroke, 1894; Madelon, 1896; Jerome, a Poor Young Man, 1897; Silence, 1898; Evelina's Garden, 1899; The Love of Parson Lord, 1900; The Heart's Highway, 1900; The Portion of Labor, 1901; Understudies, 1901; Six Trees, 1903; The Wind in the Rose Bush, 1903; The Givers, 1904; Doc Gordon, 1906; By the Light of the Soul, 1907; Shoulders of Atlas, 1908; The Winning Lady, 1909; The Green Door, 1910; Butterfly House, 1912; Yates Pride, 1912.
Alice Brown. Fools of Nature, 1887; Meadow Grass, 1895; Mercy Otis Warren, 1896; By Oak and Thorn, 1896; The Day of His Youth, 1896; The Road to Castaly, 1896; Robert Louis Stevenson—a Study (with Louise Imogen Guiney), 1897; Tiverton Tales, 1899; King's End, 1901; Margaret Warrener, 1901; The Mannerings, High Noon, Paradise, The Country Road, The Court of Love, 1906; Rose MacLeod, 1908; The Story of Thyrza, 1909; County Neighbors, John Winterbourne's Family, 1910; The One-Footed Fairy, 1911; The Secret of the Clan, 1912; Vanishing Points, Robin Hood's Barn, 1913; Children of Earth, [$10,000 prize drama], 1915.
[CHAPTER XII]
THE NEW ROMANCE
The novelists who began their work in the seventies found themselves in a dilemma. On one side was the new school which was becoming more and more insistent that literature in America must be a thing American, colored by American soil, and vivid and vital with the new spirit of Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hardy, Maupassant, Howells, that was thrilling everywhere like the voice of a coming era. But on the other hand there was the firmly set tradition that the new world was barren of literary material, that it lay spick and span with no romantic backgrounds save perhaps the Dutch Hudson and old Puritan Salem and colonial Boston. As late as 1872 the North American Review declared that the true writer of fiction "must idealize. The idealizing novelists will be the real novelists. All truth does not lie in facts."[114] And it further declared that he must look away from his own land, where there is no shadow and no antiquity, into the uncharted fields of the imagination. "One would say that the natural tendency of the American novelist would be toward romance; that the very uniformity of our social life would offer nothing tempting to the writer, unless indeed to the satirist."[114]
It was the voice of the school that had ruled the mid century, a school that was still alive and was still a dominating force of which young writers were tremendously conscious. The reading public was not prepared for the new realism: it had been nurtured on The Token and The Talisman. The new must come not as a revolution, swift and sudden; but as an evolution, slow and imperceptible. During the seventies even Howells and James were romancers; romancers, however, in process of change.
For the seventies in the history of American fiction was a period of compromise and transition. The new school would be romantic and yet at the same time it would be realistic. The way opened unexpectedly. The widening of the American horizon, the sudden vogue of the Pike literature, the new exploiting of the continent in all its wild nooks and isolated neighborhoods—strange areas as unknown to the East as the California mines and the canebrakes of the great river—and above all the emergence of the South, brought with it another discovery: Hawthorne and the mid-century school had declared romance with American background impossible simply because in their provincial narrowness they had supposed that America was bounded on the south and west by the Atlantic and the Hudson. America was discovered to be full of romantic material. It had a past not connected at all with the Knickerbockers or even the Pilgrims. Behind whole vast areas of it lay the shadow of old forgotten régimes, "picturesque and gloomy wrongs," with ruins and mystery and vague tradition.
One of the earliest results, then, of the new realism, strangely enough, was a new romanticism, new American provinces added to the bounds of Arcady. The first gold of it, appropriately enough, came from California, where Harte and Mrs. Jackson caught glimpses of an old Spanish civilization alive only in the picturesque ruins of its Missions. Quickly it was found again, rich and abundant, in New Orleans, where Spain and then France had held dominion in a vague past; then in the plantations of the old South where Page and others caught the last glories of that fading cavalier civilization which had been prolonged through a century of twilight by the archaic institution of slavery; and then even in the spick-and-span new central West with its traditions of a chivalrous old French régime.
America, indeed, was full of romantic area, full of a truly romantic atmosphere, for it had been for centuries the battle-field of races, the North—England, New England, Anglo-Saxons—against the South—Spain, France, the slave-holding Cavaliers. And romance in all lands is the record of the old crushed out by the new, the dim tradition of a struggle between North and South: the South with its tropic imagination, its passion, its beauty, its imperious pride, its barbaric background; the North with its logic, its discipline, its perseverance, its passionless force. Romance has ever held as its theme the passing of an old Southern régime before the barbarians of the North. And romance in America has centered always in the South. Realism might flourish in Boston and the colder classical atmospheres, but not along the gulf and the tropic rivers. The reading public, however, and the great publishing houses were in the North. The result was compromise: the new romanticism, Southern in its atmosphere and spirit, Northern in its truth to life and conditions.