The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

Books by Alice Duer Miller

The Modern Obstacle, 1903.
Calderon’s Prisoner, 1904.
Less Than Kin, 1909.
Blue Arch, 1910.
Are Women People? 1915.
Come Out of the Kitchen, 1916.
Ladies Must Live, 1917.
The Happiest Time of Their Lives, 1918.
Wings in the Night, 1918. Poems.
The Charm School, 1919. Harper & Brothers.
The Beauty and the Bolshevist, 1920. Harper & Brothers.
Manslaughter, 1921. Dodd, Mead & Company.

With certain exceptions noted, books are published by the Century Company, New York.

CHAPTER XXIX
ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT

ELEANOR HALLOWELL ABBOTT (Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Coburn: Mrs. Fordyce Coburn) is the most fanciful writer in America to-day. Fanciful, inventive—not imaginative in the large and proper sense of the word imagination. Her method in writing is utterly different from that of any other popular author. She is in this respect as unique as Harold Bell Wright—to whom she bears no resemblance whatever. Wright starts a novel—we hope the reader will pardon this digression—by making an elaborate outline, synopsis, scenario, not of the story but of certain moral and ethical ideas, concepts and principles which he wishes to impress upon his readers. Sometimes up to the very last typewritten draft of one of his books the characters are known only by words denoting the things they stand for. Then, at the eleventh hour, Wright strikes out “Greed” and inserts “Obadiah Jackson” and “Manliness” and inserts “David Fanning”—and the copy goes to the printer.

Mrs. Coburn, or Miss Abbott as we may permit ourselves to call her because of her pen name’s connotations—Miss Abbott finds a title and then constructs her story. “Her stories are made to revolve around the title, rather than an outgrowth of any plot,” says a writer in the Boston Globe, upon whose article we rely mainly for the facts of this chapter. It is an article with rather too much fluff but it presents the really interesting facts about the author of Molly Make-Believe and presents them with point. The writer of it says: “Once a satisfactory title occurs to Miss Abbott, she follows it in exactly the same manner as the detective who is pursuing a clue.”

This is perfectly intelligible. Molly Make-Believe as a title teems with ideas; so does The Sick-a-Bed Lady; so does The White-Linen Nurse.

“My characters are always wholly imaginary. I have never yet put a real person in a story. I doubt if I ever shall, for once I begin to weave a tale, imagination has too vivid a hold on me.”

Upon this the Boston Globe writer remarks, with a great deal of truthfulness:

“She may choose a commonplace subject—a girl, a woman, a road, a husband.... Mrs. Coburn immediately succeeds in placing hers in the uncommon category. It is the qualifying adjective that plays a prominent part in making her subjects peculiarly original. She specifies that her heroine is a sick-a-bed lady, her girl is very tired, her thoroughfare is a runaway road, and even the husband in her sanitarium story is a Sunday spouse.

“It is not her nomenclature alone that is unique and attractive. Added to marked creative ability, she has a quality of verbal fitness, and her phrases are charged with amazing intensity and force, so that there is an exhilaration in her pages. Indeed, as one of her friends said, after reading The Kink in the Air, one about decides that it is the ‘kink’ in this author’s style that is its chiefest charm.”

Many scoff; Franklin P. Adams used to divert himself with Eleanor Hallowell Abbottisms; scratching the surface of the ground like an industrious hen you may uncover many choice morsels of wriggling English. But if you think these are all the Eleanor Hallowell Abbott books contain you are as deluded as the hen that thinks she has uncovered earth’s deepest secrets. Below, far below, but not buried at such a depth as to be uncoverable by ordinary minds, are veins of pure humor, tenderness; the rich gold of sympathy and friendly fancifulness. They are paying streaks. Pick up a reprinted copy of Molly Make-Believe and look at the page in the front which records over twenty editions in five years!

We follow the lead of the Boston Globe article:

Miss Abbott works slowly and carefully. Her chief concern while writing is with her own feeling about the tale she is at work upon. Unless she comes to like it pretty well she does not send it to a publisher. It must interest her first as some sort of warranty that it will interest others. “Painter, musician, writer—whether anybody else likes your work or not,” she says, “doesn’t specially matter if you can only bring that work to the point where you like it yourself.”

She writes entirely upon the typewriter. Even the first draft is composed on a machine. Frequently she spends the entire day at her machine. In writing The Sick-a-Bed Lady she devoted twelve hours each day for nine days to the task and this, with one exception, is the quickest story-making she has ever accomplished. It is, by any standard, a tremendous bit of work. Three, four, rarely six hours a day is the ordinary day’s work of a busy writer. Twelve hours on a stretch can be and is managed once in a great while when circumstances make the work imperative; but it is not managed for more than a day or two and is usually followed by a complete rest, sometimes in bed and with medical attendance! Twelve hours a day for nine days—it will make the hardiest shudder. Many of the best American writers are entirely satisfied if they do 500 or 1,000 words a day—and not every day at that. But as a rule Miss Abbott takes from a month to a year to write in such time as she can dedicate to it a short story, or a long short story, or a short novel. In eight years she wrote some twenty stories. For two years in succession she won a $1,000 prize in Collier’s Weekly short story contests with The Very Tired Girl and The Sick-a-Bed Lady.

Before her marriage to Dr. Fordyce Coburn Miss Abbott was secretary and English assistant in the State Normal School at Lowell, Massachusetts. This job kept her at her desk all day and it was in hours when she might have been expected to be asleep or resting or playing that she hunted titles and let her fancy do what it would with them. She used a pen name at first. Her first serious attempts at writing were in verse. Two long poems published in Harper’s Magazine attracted much attention.

How curiously things go in this world! Miss Abbott had furnished the text and scheme for an advertising circular sent out by a Boston firm. The circular was so strikingly good that business houses began to come to its originator with offers of advertising contracts. Miss Abbott was for some time in a state of indecision as to whether she should develop her gift for writing advertisements or try to succeed with stories. Finally she sent two tales to two magazines with the mental resolution:

“If these are rejected, I believe I’ll take up commercial writing.”

But both stories were accepted. Miss Abbott says that she owes her success as a fictioneer, therefore, to Lippincott’s Magazine and the Smart Set quite as much as to anything else.

As readers will have suspected, Miss Abbott is a member of the family which has attained distinction in letters and theology both. She is a daughter of the Rev. Edward Abbott, sometime editor of the Literary World of Boston; a niece of Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of the Outlook and Henry Ward Beecher’s successor at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn; and a granddaughter of the Jacob Abbott who wrote the Rollo books for boys.

Miss Abbott’s father was born in Farmington, Maine, and was graduated from New York University in 1860, seven years after his brother, Lyman Abbott, matriculated at the same institution. Edward Abbott studied theology at the Andover Theological Seminary and served as pastor of the Pilgrim Congregational Church at Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1869 to 1878 he was editor of the Congregationalist; afterward he became editor of the Literary World. He was ordained a minister of the Episcopal church in 1879 and served as rector of St. James’s Church, Cambridge, until 1896. Like his father, Jacob Abbott, Edward Abbott wrote some juvenile books as well as several histories and biographies.

Eleanor Hallowell Abbott was born in Cambridge in 1872. Largely educated by private tutors, she was for a short time a student in the public schools and afterward a special student at Radcliffe. She was a child exceedingly fond of outdoor life. Although she remembers kind and patient teachers she can recall no day when the walls of a schoolroom did not fret and torment her with the sense of physical confinement.

“The one or two things I understood at all I learned so quickly that it drove me almost crazy waiting for the fifty or more classmates to catch up—and the great many things I didn’t understand I was too frightened to learn in such a crowd. I can’t look upon little, playful, day-dreaming, high-strung children shut up in an ironbound schoolroom without experiencing a very large lump in my throat.”

At the Harvard grammar school in Cambridge her teachers first discovered the Abbott talent in her surprising fondness for English composition, a subject not customarily dear to the hearts of schoolchildren, and in her rapturous delight in reading aloud Washington Irving’s Sketch Book.

“Certainly,” says Miss Abbott, “I never showed any other special signs of intelligence, being always, I remember, at the extreme foot of my class in every subject except English. Surely nothing but my father’s unfailing sympathy and understanding sustained either me or my teachers, through the dreadful period of fractions and other mathematical horrors. And it was here at this school that I formed the first intellectual friendship of my life with a little, fair-haired, blue-eyed, earnest-minded boy who is now Professor Thomas Whittemore, of Tufts College. While the other children giggled over ink-dipped pigtails, wrote facetious notes about their teachers, and traded postage stamps, we two were whispering about authors and exchanging autographs and timidly confiding literary ambitions to each other. Funny little people we must have been—astonishingly solemn, inordinately dignified and most deliciously important With all the grave, childish self-consciousness of having already fixed our minds on higher things.

“I recall one day when we were swapping a Longfellow check-stub for a Whittier post-card, or something of that sort. We got caught at it and were kept ignominiously after school, to the infinite delight of our more frivolous-minded companions.”

Miss Abbott’s husband, Dr. Fordyce Coburn, is the “silent partner” in her work to whom Molly Make-Believe is dedicated. He aids and abets her in her stories, in taking a course in playwriting at Harvard under Professor George Baker, in anything she wants to do. Dr. Coburn is medical adviser of the Lowell high school and an all-round athlete and sportsman whenever a city practice will release him sufficiently. He and Mrs. Coburn spend their spare time salmon fishing in Maine, playing tennis at Lowell, coon and wild turkey hunting on the edge of the Florida everglades—doing anything, in fact, that two persons, husband and wife, great comrades and possessing similar tastes, can always find to do happily together.