The moment I saw her I was struck by her brilliance and intelligence, and I did not require to learn that she had carried everything before her at Miss Douglas’s famous school in Queen’s Gate, to know that she was much the ablest of the ladies who answered my advertisement when Miss Phipps had to leave us.
At various times she travelled all over Italy and Sicily with us, and visited Tunis and Carthage. She was with us for several years, and a great worker. On her fell the almost incredible labour of typing out and keeping sorted the immense mass of materials accumulated chiefly from Italian sources, for the Encyclopædia called Things Sicilian, which forms the bulk of my Sicily, the New Winter Resort.
She had studied a great deal before she came to us, and besides a good knowledge of French and German and music (she played the violin charmingly), had a strange accomplishment—she spoke Romany, the Gipsy language, so fluently that when she made up a little, even gipsies took her for a gipsy. She had learnt it in the New Forest, which was near her home. She began before she had been very long with us the gipsy novel, which now, after many years, she has taken up again. It was a story with a strong love interest in it, but it gave no promise of the admirable gift of writing which she has shown in her published works like The Veil and The Mountain of God. In the large amount of reviewing which she did for me—against time, it was true—she had a habit of introducing stock phrases and introductory periphrases, such as “the worst of the whole matter was that,” “that redoubtable,” “the venerable form of.” Her criticisms of books were in judgment very good, but in expression they were verbose and lacking in distinction. She was always studying in the fine library which I had collected as a reviewer. Besides gipsy-lore and music she was especially interested in everything connected with occultism and amulets, and the Black Art generally, and everything connected with the Orient. It was in the three excellent chapters which she wrote for my Carthage and Tunis, where they are signed with her own initials, E. M. S., instead of the E. S. S. she uses now, that Miss Stevens first showed what she could do when she tried. The chapters are Chapter VI, Volume I, “The Lavigerie Museum at Cairo”; Chapter XVIII, Volume II, “Superstition in Tunis”; Chapter XX, Volume II, “A Tunisian Harem, and the Tombs of the Beys.”
It was when she was visiting Tunis with us that she first heard the “East a-callin’.” She found it absolutely irresistible. In the short time that we were there she began to learn Arabic, and acquired quite a good knowledge of Arab amulets, and the Egyptian amulets in the museum at Carthage. She afterwards paid another visit to Tunis before she wrote her memorable book, The Veil, one of the most successful novels of its year.
In search of a fresh Oriental subject, she next went to Haifa, the Syrian seaport, where she was lucky enough to live in the little colony which surrounded the present head of the Bahai movement, and to see a great deal of the inner working of that movement, which is said to count half the Shia Mohammedans (chiefly Persians) among its secret adherents. So high an opinion did Abbas Effendi form of her abilities, that he invited her to stay in his house and gave her a special course of instruction, which lasted over many months, in the philosophy of the sect.
Her stay at Haifa also supplied her with the materials for her second novel, The Mountain of God. Since then she has published several able and successful books, just as The Earthen Drum, The Long Engagement, The Lure and Sarah Eden, for the material of which she paid two visits to Jerusalem.
My next secretary, who was with me for seven years, has also had three books published by leading firms.
It is not by any means an uncommon thing for authors’ secretaries to become authors. One of the most conspicuous examples is Mary E. Wilkins, now Mrs. Freeman-Wilkins, who was for a long time secretary to Oliver Wendell Holmes. I well remember the day when he stopped me in the street in Boston (U.S.A.), to say, “I have a hated rival. My secretary, Mary Wilkins, has just published a novel—a much better one than I ever wrote.”