The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

Books by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Corneille and Racine in England, 1904.
English Rhetoric and Composition (with Professor
G. R. Carpenter), 1906.
What Shall We Do Now? 1906.
Gunhild, 1907.
The Squirrel-Cage, 1912.
A Montessori Mother, 1913.
Mothers and Children, 1914.
The Bent Twig, 1915.
Hillsboro People, 1916.
The Real Motive, 1917.
Understood Betsy, 1917.
Home Fires in France, 1918.
The Day of Glory, 1919.
The Brimming Cup, 1921.
Rough-Hewn, 1922.

First thirteen published by Henry Holt & Company, New York; others by Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York.

CHAPTER XXVI
AMELIA E. BARR

ON March 17, 1918, the author of this book had the pleasure, as editor of Books and the Book World of The Sun, New York, of printing what is certainly the best account extant of Amelia E. Barr within a reasonable length. Although the article was unsigned it was the work of Mr. A. Elwood Corning, who had been a neighbor of Mrs. Barr at Richmond Hill, Long Island, New York. It was based upon a personal visit and interview. This chapter is really nothing more than a reprint of Mr. Corning’s article with a few changes, particularly those necessitated by Mrs. Barr’s death on March 10, 1919, at her Richmond Hill home. To Mr. Corning, then, the credit of this chapter.

Amelia E. Barr struck the popular taste more than thirty years ago with her Bow of Orange Ribbon. She was one of the most prolific of present-day writers of fiction. Her last completed novel, The Paper Cap, published in the fall of 1918, brought the number of her books up to over seventy, and this does not include hundreds of short stories, a poem a week for fourteen years, written for Bonner’s Ledger, or the numerous newspaper articles, essays and verses of the first fourteen years of her literary life.

On March 29, 1918, Mrs. Barr entered her eighty-eighth year. In the preceding twelve months she had published three books, and shortly before her eighty-seventh birthday (or the birthday which made her eighty-seven years old!) she completed a fourth in manuscript! This was The Paper Cap, the scenes of which are laid in Yorkshire, England, where the novelist spent a part of her childhood. Mrs. Barr thought it one of the best stories she had written. The paper cap of the title is that of the workingman and the story centers around his fight for the suffrage. It was really a contest between the hand loom and the power loom.

It was about 4 in the afternoon when Mr. Corning reached Mrs. Barr’s study on the visit which preceded the preparation of his article. Mrs. Barr had been writing since 7 that morning, with only a brief intermission for luncheon, and was not feeling, she declared, so well as usual. “This is one of mamma’s blue Mondays,” said her daughter. But after she had begun to discuss current events, some incidents of her early life in Texas and above all the war Mrs. Barr became animated. She was an interesting and enthusiastic talker with positive views, a power of unusually apt expression and a mind keenly alert. Convinced of a fact, she uttered it with passionate force.

On this particular afternoon the manuscript of The Paper Cap was lying on her writing table. “It will be done to-morrow,” she said with the spirit of one who looks upon the completion of a work which has required much thought and painstaking labor. She pushed the manuscript toward Mr. Corning; it was as free of corrections and interpolations as if it had been freshly copied from a former draft. Mrs. Barr seldom changed what she first wrote and always used sheets of yellow paper, finding this tint more restful to her eyes than white.

When weary of building stories she handed the manuscript over to a stenographer to be typewritten. Mrs. Barr wrote with a lead pencil. Going to a drawer she brought out a box full of old pencil stubs, some of which dated back to the days when she was writing The Bow of Orange Ribbon. A few years ago six or seven of these stubs were given to as many friends, who had them tipped with gold and made into shawl pins.

In personal appearance and dress Mrs. Barr was typically English. She had a large face and marvelous physique, was rapid of movement and lithe of step. A flowing gown of some delicate shade was usually worn loosely over a lace petticoat, and a beribboned cap of lace and rosebuds or sometimes cowslips rested becomingly on her silvery hair.

But the most striking characteristic of this remarkable woman was the retention of so much youthful vigor and optimism, which she attributed to her English ancestry. Born at Ulverton, Lancashire, England, March 29, 1831, Amelia Barr was descended from a long line of Saxon forebears, of whom the men for generations had been either seamen or preachers of the Gospel. Her father, the Rev. Dr. William Henry Huddleston, was a scholar and a preacher of eloquence. The child’s early education was largely under his supervision. As he was a regular contributor to English reviews, the little daughter was brought up in a literary environment.

Before she was six she is said to have known intimately the tales of the Arabian Nights, and nothing pleased her more in those days than to be the recipient of a new book, a pleasure seldom afforded her. She would often accompany her father on his preaching itineraries through the fishing villages and thus became a lover of the sea, from which she doubtless formed impressions which have disclosed themselves in her fiction.

At eighteen she was sent to a Free Kirk seminary in Glasgow, where she remained until her marriage to Robert Barr in July, 1850. For three years the young couple lived in Scotland. Here Mrs. Barr made the acquaintance of Henry Ward Beecher, who years later was able to help her begin her career as a writer.

Failure in business compelled the Barrs to come to America. They first came to New York, where the future novelist saw for the first time to her great delight ready-made dresses and oranges, a fruit not easily procurable in the north of England or Scotland.

The Barrs with their two little daughters soon went West, locating in Chicago. After a time misfortune drove them South. They went first to Austin, later to Galveston, Texas. The history of these eventful and sorrowful years is told in Mrs. Barr’s autobiography, The Red Leaves of a Human Heart.

In Austin success was sandwiched in with failure, disappointments and heartaches. In those early days on the frontier there was a great scarcity of many things which went to make up home life. When Mrs. Barr came to America she had been told that she was going into a desolate and savage country in which there were none of the comforts of life and where none could be obtained. So she brought with her a great assortment of useful articles, such as needles, tape, sewing cotton (linens, silks, etc.). Finding that they had more than they wanted of such things, the Barrs traded some of them for tea and other staple articles of food.

Despite vicissitudes Mrs. Barr never neglected her reading or the daily instruction of her children. The noon hour was reserved for study and at that time no one was permitted to disturb her. She could be seen daily sitting with a young baby on her lap by the open door of her log house partaking of the noonday meal and reading at the same time. In all, Mrs. Barr had fifteen children. Three daughters are now living, one the wife of Kirk Munro, the popular writer for boys.

In spite of her large family Mrs. Barr found time to accomplish things outside household duties. During the Civil War, for example, articles of amusement were few. One was put to great inconvenience in securing games. So Mrs. Barr, an enthusiastic whist player, painted a pack of cards, which were to those who remember them a most real counterpart of an original set.

At the close of the war the Barrs moved to Galveston, and there, in 1867, Mrs. Barr experienced the overwhelming sorrow of her life. Yellow fever entered her home. The whole family was stricken, and before Mrs. Barr herself had fully recovered she suffered the loss of her husband and three little sons.

After endeavoring to support herself and three daughters in the South she came with them to New York in the fall of 1869.

One day she was asked if she could write stories and replied that she had often written them for the amusement of her children but had destroyed them after they had served their purpose. She promised to try again and received $30 for the effort.

“What, $30 for that article?” she exclaimed. “Why, I can write three or four of them a week.”

She eventually found work on the Christian Union, of which Beecher was editor, and this opened a career which brought her both a reputation and honor. At first she rented a few rooms at 27 Amity Street, Brooklyn, a house once occupied by Edgar Allan Poe, although at the time she was unconscious of the fact. When she moved into these quarters she found that after paying the rent she had only $5 in her purse.

“Well, girls,” she told her daughters, “we will have a good beefsteak dinner and let to-morrow take care of itself.” Even then she felt, as she afterward said, that “God and Amelia Barr were a multitude.”

For fourteen years Mrs. Barr toiled, meeting with successes and rebuffs. It was a hard struggle. After working all day in the Astor Library she would often at night take her daughters to the theater, leaving sometimes in her purse only enough money for carfare in the morning.

Returning from one of these outings she discovered that her house had been broken into. Rushing at once to the family Bible, she found $40 between the pages where she had placed it for safety. Not having in those days enough money to bank, she would often put bills behind pictures, and they were never disturbed.

In 1884 Jan Vedder’s Wife was published. The success of this book almost immediately placed Mrs. Barr in the front rank of popular American novelists. From that time her record was phenomenal. Over fifty-three when her first book appeared, Mrs. Barr produced an average of over two novels a year and at the close of her life she had not one unsold manuscript. She had written only one article, she said, which she was never able to dispose of. And so little did she care for her books after they had been written that she had not a complete set of them in her library, which numbered several thousand volumes.

She not infrequently took up one of her old novels and after reading it said that it seemed like a new story. “All my characters,” she once remarked, “are real to me. They begin to live and have a personality of their own. I have started to write a villain and afterward fallen in love with him and made him my hero.”

Mrs. Barr’s books were invariably sold outright. Years ago she made a thorough study of the early history of Manhattan Island, which ultimately formed a foundation on which she built eight historical novels which stand out as among the best of her work. Chronologically considered they should be read as follows:

The House on Cherry Street.
The Strawberry Handkerchief.
The Bow of Orange Ribbon.
A Maid of Old New York.
A Song of a Single Note.
The Maid of Maiden Lane.
Trinity Bells.
The Belle of Bowling Green.

So much Mr. Corning. The author of this book can add nothing to so extraordinary a story. As fiction, Mrs. Barr’s own life and performance would be called incredible. Her stories are first-rate stories; all of them offer clean, imaginative and very real entertainment; many of them offer a true and valuable picture of vanished or vanishing times, manners and people. Her achievement was much bigger and more solid and worth while than many, many efforts at literary “art.”