The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

Books by Marjorie Benton Cooke

Modern Monologues, 1903.
Dramatic Episodes, 1905.
Plays for Children, 1905.
More Modern Monologues, 1907.
The Girl Who Lived in the Woods, 1910.
Dr. David, 1911.
Bambi, 1914.
The Dual Alliance, 1915.
Cinderella Jane, 1917.
The Threshold, 1918.
The Clutch of Circumstance, 1918.
The Cricket, 1919.
Married? 1921.

The Girl Who Lived in the Woods and Dr. David are published by A. C. McClurg & Company, Chicago; Miss Cooke’s later novels are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; but The Clutch of Circumstance is published by George H. Doran Company, New York.

CHAPTER XX
GRACE S. RICHMOND

WHY do some of Grace S. Richmond’s books sell faster than the books of any other American woman writer? Because they do! And their popularity has no relation whatever to their size. Some of the littlest—On Christmas Day in the Morning, On Christmas Day in the Evening, and The Enlisting Wife, for instances—sell most rapidly. Not the size; perhaps it has something to do with the substance!

No perhaps about it! Mrs. Richmond has, more perfectly than most of her contemporaries, the gift for disclosing the simplest and deepest feelings of men and women everywhere in just those words which are at the back of our heads and hardly ever on our lips. They are the words we ache to utter but never quite bring ourselves to say. She says them for us. She makes articulate and perfect the full feeling that is in us. She is our emotional self—that part of self which is a common possession—touched with pentecostal fire. When we read her we have the delight of self-expression blended with a feeling of gratefulness to her for affording it to us.

These are strong words. Gush, some will call them. Well, among the people of repressed instincts there is one instinct seldom repressed—the instinct to sneer at those who let themselves go. This is an inconsistency which will trouble them (we point it out that they may give themselves over to their favorite delight of self-torture) but which bothers the rest of us not at all. We know—the rest of us—full well that the emotionalism of which Mrs. Richmond is the most successful exponent is a cleansing and refreshing exercise. We read her and come away a little surer of ourselves and of the world about us. For the essence of that world is the people in it and there is something in most people that does not change.

Mrs. Richmond has written many books. The only exact fact to be stated is that in 1914—and several of her most successful books have appeared since—she had sold 400,000 copies. The total must be well on to the million mark by now. Then there are the cheaper editions of her earlier stories; there are the readers of her work in the Ladies’ Home Journal and other publications; there are the libraries where copies of her are always “out” and there are new circles of readers, each book being much like a stone breaking the surface of a pond and making its own widening ripples;—no matter. Millions read Mrs. Richmond. That is enough to know. It is the achievement of a quiet, country-dwelling woman whose publishers have a time to get her to be photographed!

She lives in Fredonia, New York, and the sketch of her life is a bare outline. She was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the daughter of the Rev. Charles Edwards Smith, D.D., and Catherine A. (Kimball) Smith. Her father was a Baptist clergyman, the author of The Baptism of Fire and The World Lighted. Grace was an only child. While she was still a young girl the family moved to Syracuse, New York. There the daughter was educated in the Syracuse High School and under private tutors, following college courses of study under their direction. She gave some indications of the writer’s gift before her marriage, in 1887, to Dr. Nelson Guernsey Richmond of Fredonia. But the wife of a young physician with a growing practice has not a great deal of leisure. It was not until 1891 that Mrs. Richmond, whose first work was short stories for magazines, attracted special attention by a story which appeared in the Thanksgiving number of the Ladies’ Home Journal.

It had come in as hundreds of other things come in, had been read by the principal reader and had by him been handed directly to the editor, who accepted it without delay. The story was called The Flowing Shoe-String and described the reformation, through love, of a charmingly untidy little literary genius. Mrs. Richmond remembers it very well! She found herself in rather notable company—Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, Frances E. Willard, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the Rev. T. De Witt Talmage and Russell Sage were other contributors to that Thanksgiving number.

Very, very modest, and very, very busy, Mrs. Richmond did not deluge the editor with other work. In fact, seven whole years passed before she made her second appearance in the Ladies’ Home Journal, in 1898, with A Silk-Lined Girl. It was the Thanksgiving number again. The company had changed but was still notable; Henry M. Stanley, Caroline Atwater Mason and Mary E. Wilkins, now Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, were on the table of contents.

This second bow was the real introduction to her audience. Since 1898 Mrs. Richmond has been among the magazine’s most steady and popular contributors. For twelve years, from 1902 to 1913, not a year went by when she was not represented in its pages. Her most successful work has had its first appearance there. May and June of 1902 brought to the Journal’s readers the first of a series of tales about Juliet which became, in 1905, a book, The Indifference of Juliet. Juliet’s indifference was toward a young author in relation to the subject of marriage. Naturally interest in her did not stop with The Indifference of Juliet and so, in 1907, her further experiences as communicated to the Journal’s readers were published between covers under the title With Juliet in England.

Mrs. Richmond is a doctor’s wife. In 1910 she created the character for whom she is most widely known and thanked—Redfield Pepper Burns, the generous, red-haired young doctor of uncertain temper and humane impulses of whom we haven’t heard the last yet. Red Pepper Burns was followed by Mrs. Red Pepper and Red Pepper’s Patients. But hold on—not so fast. In 1906, between the two Juliet books, Mrs. Richmond had given us the story of The Second Violin. In 1908 came Around the Corner in Gay Street, in 1909 A Court of Inquiry; there were also the two Christmas booklets—On Christmas Day in the Morning (1908) and On Christmas Day in the Evening (1910). Between Red Pepper Burns and Mrs. Red Pepper appeared Strawberry Acres and a year after Mrs. Red Pepper was published The Twenty-fourth of June.

But this is becoming a mere catalogue, and the place for a list of Mrs. Richmond’s books is at the end of this chapter. What we want to do here is to consider her writing, or a few fragments of it as representative as may be, and try to see what she does and how she does it.

Let it be said at the outset that she makes slips which would be inexcusable if we did not all make the same slips. In the second chapter of Red Pepper’s Patients Dr. Burns has sheltered a Hungarian violinist who is now playing for the physician and his wife: “Warmed and fed, his Latin nature leaping up from its deep depression to the exaltation of the hour, the appeal he made to them was intensely pathetic.” The Hungarians are not a Latin race, but we know what she means, so why be bothered? “His attitude, as he stood before his hosts, had the unconscious grace of the foreigner.” Of any foreigner—they are all graceful! Hang it! We always think of them as unconsciously graceful. Why quibble?

Mrs. Richmond can be humorous in the most natural way. From The Twenty-fourth of June:

“‘Rufus,’ said his wife solemnly, following him into the white-tiled bathroom, ‘I want you should look at those bath-towels. I never in my life set eyes on anything like them. They must have cost—I don’t know what they cost—I didn’t know there were such bath-towels made!’

“‘I don’t want to wrap myself in a blanket,’ asserted her husband. ‘I want to know I’ve got a towel in my hand, that I can whisk round me and slap myself with. Look here, let’s get to bed....

“‘Ruth,’ said he, with sudden solemnity, ‘I forgot to undress in my dressing-room. Had I better put my clothes on and go take ’em off again in there?’”

It is funny because it is so exactly what we do say in such situations. It is naturalism of a very high order and the more humorous for being entirely unforced.

In the creation of character Mrs. Richmond is at her best simply because she differentiates her people ever so slightly from what, lacking a better word, we generally call types. Her main triumph is evenly shared in this field and that other, of which we spoke at the outset. Red Pepper Burns was a very great success as novels go and Redfield Pepper Burns is a very distinct success as the persons of fiction go; but the Christmas stories that Mrs. Richmond has written and such intimate little heart messages as The Enlisting Wife and The Whistling Mother are just as successful. Take the opening of The Enlisting Wife:

“Judith Taine, who was married to Lieutenant Kirke Wendell, Junior, just before he sailed for France, is keeping in a small blue book a little record which he may see when he returns. It begins with the last paragraph of a letter from her young husband.

“‘If you hadn’t enlisted with me, my Judith, I shouldn’t be half the man I’m beginning to hope I am, over here in France. If manhood means standing up straight and strong, facing the future without the old boyish love of ease and snug corners—then—well—time will prove me, anyhow. Darling, can you guess how you are with me, every waking moment—and some of the sleeping ones too, when I’m lucky? My wife—even though I could be with her only those few hours after Father married us—how absolutely she is that! My enlisting wife, my fighting comrade!—O Judith!’

“I don’t cry often—not I, Judith Taine Wendell. I can’t afford to cry, there’s too much to be done. But that last paragraph did bring the tears—happy ones—and I kissed the dear words again and again before I tucked the letter away in the warm place where each one lives, day and night, till the next one comes. O Kirke! Even you don’t know yet how ‘absolutely’ I am your wife!”

Such writing is insusceptible of analysis; it admits only of characterization. We all know how hostile some of the characterization is likely to be, but the fact remains that Mrs. Richmond has contrived perfectly to set down not the things the Judith Wendells and Kirke Wendells actually say and write but the unspoken thought that gives body and coloring to their actual words. It is what we wish we could say and write that Mrs. Richmond gives us. She transliterates the true feeling. Remember, it is not our feeling but the depth of it that we are habitually ashamed to show. It is only necessary to make that reflection to understand Mrs. Richmond’s success. She is as popular with our emotional selves as would be a person who should write letters for the unfortunate inhabitants of an illiterate community. Most of us are emotional illiterates and are likely to remain so. We need Mrs. Richmond and more like her.