The emotional effect of this story represents in a high degree one of the author’s best achievements. Her stories are notable for their human appeal. One man went so far as to state to the present critic that he would willingly have bartered his soul to enable that old lady to go back to Russia. Study all the ways by which she reaches your sympathy.
General Methods. “Almost invariably my plots emerge from characters, rather than characters from plots. I doubt if this latter is ever as sound in method except in the detective or picaresque story.
“I have never based a short story upon a concrete incident, written a character directly from ‘life,’ or, except rarely, incorporated a speech actually heard into dialogue.
“A situation may suggest the beginnings of a story, or a chance word be the seed of an idea, but most often I find myself puttering around the hypothetical psychology of folks....
“... Unity of Effect, no matter how the unities must be smashed to attain it, I consider the corner stone of short-story writing. Without it, architectural beauty and continuity of development are impossible....”
—Fannie Hurst.
MR. EBERDEEN’S HOUSE
Starting Point and First Processes. “Mr. Eberdeen’s House” was to have been originally only the effect of an old New England House upon a New Englander who had become rather enfranchised from his austere beginnings, and returned to find them only more crabbed, more grim, than ever, and himself strangely, inexplicably connected with them. The explanation of how he was connected with this distasteful setting, and of why it was distasteful to him evolved the author’s theme. The hero’s great-grandmother had fled from the same grimness and straight-lacedness and puritanism by running away with a Frenchman, just before the birth of her child, of whom Mr. Eberdeen was, contrary to his bleak, orthodox suspicions, the father. The author’s plan was to have Mr. Eberdeen, representing all that was distasteful to the hero (Hastings) in the New England character, the hero’s ancestor without his knowing it—the great-grandmother after she had fled, having presumably taken the name, for herself and child, of Tremaine.