There was nothing surprising or wholly unpremeditated therefore in the writing of Mrs. Wiggs. Alice Hegan and her mother kept a “give-away bag” which went regularly to a “poor but merry and philosophic woman” living in a neglected quarter of Louisville, out near the railroad tracks, in the southern part of the city. This woman was the original of Mrs. Wiggs. “The story was not a ‘just-so story,’” says Margaret Steele Anderson in her over-effusive appreciation of Alice Hegan Rice, “nor was it a photograph, exact from head to toe, but, in truth, a development of the original. The merry woman served as a nucleus; the rest was all Alice Hegan.” To quote further:
“The manuscript was read one rainy Saturday morning to a little group of ardent young women which called itself, with a courage half gay and half ironical, the Authors’ Club of Louisville. At that time it boasted no ‘real author,’ but the following was the roster of the club: Evelyn Snead Barnett, Alice Hegan Rice, Ellen Churchill Semple, George Madden Martin, Annie Fellows Johnston, Frances Caldwell Macaulay, Abbie Meguire Roach, Eva A. Madden, Mary Finley Leonard, Venita Seibert White, Margaret van der Cook and Margaret Anderson. This club meant nothing at the time, but it means, now, such stories as Mrs. Wiggs and Mr. Opp, Emmy Lou, The Lady of the Decoration and the Little Colonel books. It means also such work as Mrs. Roach’s studies of married life—which rendered a year of Harper’s very memorable—and such achievement in anthropo-geography as has made Ellen Semple a name on two continents and a lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge. To this little club was read this little story—and the club, as a body, became the very figure of laughter, literally holding both its sides.
“The story was published by the Century Company in October, 1901, and that next summer, as somebody put it, every tourist had it, ‘sticking up out of his pocket.’”
There are thousands of stories to illustrate the world conquest of Mrs. Wiggs. West Virginia coal miners whose little homes contain no Bible have the book. In a village of Korea there is, or used to be, an old woman, bent continually over her garden, known to the English officers as “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.” In Sidmouth, on the coast of South Devon, England, was another such person. Mr. and Mrs. Rice have had Mrs. Wiggses pointed out to them everywhere—and they have been everywhere—Sicily, China, India, Japan (the poet is a specialist in Orientalism). “In India one Christmas day, after a morning on the Ganges, after hours of Vedic hymns chanted by Brahmin priests and after a terrible vision of the bodies on the burning ghats,” says Margaret Anderson, “Mrs. Rice was suddenly jerked back into modern life by a billboard near Benares. Mrs. Wiggs would be played there that night by an English company!”
Mrs. Rice is a good deal interested in philanthropic work at home. The Rices’ house stands in St. James Court, a place of trees, bushes, wide sweeps of lawn and a playing fountain. The author of Mrs. Wiggs devotes time and personal effort to the Cabbage Patch Settlement and to a woman’s club which is a feature of it. For many years Mrs. Rice was chiefly active in work among boys. At sixteen she founded a club for youngsters which held weekly meetings at her own home.
When writing she works generally in a snug room or den on the second floor of her home, working through the quiet mornings. She contrives somehow to deal with a heavy correspondence and replies with delightful letters to the letters of all kinds—curious, friendly, grateful—that she is constantly receiving.
“Though Mrs. Wiggs has made its author famous,” says Margaret Anderson, “Mr. Opp is Mrs. Rice’s finest piece of work. In the hero of this story, which is a story of Dickensian humor and robustness, we mark a real and very big development—a development, moreover, which is not a thing of violence but proceeds along the lines of the man’s peculiar nature.
“Mrs. Wiggs is fixed, the same at the end of the book as at the opening; but Mr. Opp grows, and the interest of the reader increases with his growth. The story has not been read as Mrs. Wiggs was read, but for imagination, for spirituality, and even for humor, it remains the better book.
“It is, indeed, her most distinct success, for Lovey Mary followed Mrs. Wiggs in general character, while Sandy, though wholesome, engaging, and charged to the full with Mrs. Rice’s humor, is not of an equal inspiration. Her story of Billy-Goat Hill shows some excellent and delicate work, the figures of ‘Miss Lady’ and the Doctor recalling those of Annie and her husband in David Copperfield, while Connie and Noah Wicker are done with delightful vim and gayety.
“In The Honorable Percival Mrs. Rice has aimed deliberately at the light, the frothy, the effect of touch-and-go, yet here we note especially an increase in her art. The thing is light and sure; it is froth but froth well-made and inviting; it does touch and go, but it touches with a spark and goes vividly.