GERTRUDE ATHERTON was born in San Francisco and received her early education in California and Kentucky, but her best training was in her grandfather’s library, a collection, it is said, of English masterpieces only, containing no American fiction whatever. Yet Mrs. Atherton is as thorough an American as a niece, in the third generation, of Benjamin Franklin should be.
It seems to have been the English critics who first recognised her originality, power, intensity, vividness, and vitality, but from her first book, “What Dreams May Come,” published in 1888, her writings have revealed the unusual combination of brains and feeling. This gives her work both keen, clever strength and brilliancy of colour, developed through years of hard work, many of which were spent abroad, and reaching their best manifestation in her latest fiction, the one quality in “The Conqueror” and the other in “The Splendid Idle Forties.” Both of these books go to prove the foresight of Mr. Harold Frederic, who, shortly before his death, declared her to be “the only woman in contemporary literature who knew how to write a novel,” and that her future work would be her best. Another eminent English critic, Dr. Robertson Nicholl, spoke for some of the best students of modern literature in saying:—
“Gertrude Atherton is the ablest woman writer of fiction now living.”
In her most notable novel, “The Conqueror,” Gertrude Atherton has chosen in “the true and romantic story of Alexander Hamilton” a subject which would have attracted few woman writers, and has handled those parts of it with which many men have busied their brains in such a way that The New York Times Saturday Review remarked that it
“Holds more romance than nine-tenths of the imaginative fiction of the day and more veracity than ninety-nine hundredths of the history. She is master of her material.”
“Certainly this country has produced no writer who approaches Mrs. Atherton,” says one critic, while another adds that to have so “re-created a great man as Mrs. Atherton has done in this novel is to have written one’s own title to greatness.” All alike regard it as “a thing apart” (The Critic); “a remarkable production, full of force, vigour, brains, and insight” (Boston Herald); “an entrancing book . . . brilliantly written” (Glasgow Herald). “It is hardly too much to say that she has invented a new kind of historical novel” is the comment of the Athenæum (London), with the addition that “the experiment is a remarkable success.”
Equally strong in fascination and vigour is “The Splendid Idle Forties,” but as far removed from “The Conqueror” as were the Eastern and Western seaboards of this country in the times of which the stories treat, “the long, drowsy, shimmering days before the Gringo came,” to the California of which she writes. “Pointed, spirited, and Spanish” are these “rich and impressive” stories; “such as could hardly have been told in any other country since the Bagdad of the ‘Thousand and One Nights.’ The book is full of weird fascination, and will add to Mrs. Atherton’s deservedly high reputation,” says The Athenæum.
“In this book even more than in her others is shown that imaginative brilliancy so striking as to set one wondering what is the secret of the effect. . . . For the rest, her charm lies in temperament, magnetic, restless, assertive, vivid.”—Washington Times.
In close relation to “The Conqueror” stands Mrs. Atherton’s still more recent selection of “A Few of Hamilton’s Letters,” chosen from the great bulk of his state papers and other letters in such a way as to bring to the average reader the means of estimating the personality of this remarkable man from his own words. Incidentally it is the surest refutation of some of the hasty criticisms upon the picture of him in “The Conqueror,” where, as Mr. Le Gallienne justly observes, “it was reserved for Mrs. Atherton to make him really alive to the present generation.”