We follow the lead of the Boston Globe article:
Miss Abbott works slowly and carefully. Her chief concern while writing is with her own feeling about the tale she is at work upon. Unless she comes to like it pretty well she does not send it to a publisher. It must interest her first as some sort of warranty that it will interest others. “Painter, musician, writer—whether anybody else likes your work or not,” she says, “doesn’t specially matter if you can only bring that work to the point where you like it yourself.”
She writes entirely upon the typewriter. Even the first draft is composed on a machine. Frequently she spends the entire day at her machine. In writing The Sick-a-Bed Lady she devoted twelve hours each day for nine days to the task and this, with one exception, is the quickest story-making she has ever accomplished. It is, by any standard, a tremendous bit of work. Three, four, rarely six hours a day is the ordinary day’s work of a busy writer. Twelve hours on a stretch can be and is managed once in a great while when circumstances make the work imperative; but it is not managed for more than a day or two and is usually followed by a complete rest, sometimes in bed and with medical attendance! Twelve hours a day for nine days—it will make the hardiest shudder. Many of the best American writers are entirely satisfied if they do 500 or 1,000 words a day—and not every day at that. But as a rule Miss Abbott takes from a month to a year to write in such time as she can dedicate to it a short story, or a long short story, or a short novel. In eight years she wrote some twenty stories. For two years in succession she won a $1,000 prize in Collier’s Weekly short story contests with The Very Tired Girl and The Sick-a-Bed Lady.
Before her marriage to Dr. Fordyce Coburn Miss Abbott was secretary and English assistant in the State Normal School at Lowell, Massachusetts. This job kept her at her desk all day and it was in hours when she might have been expected to be asleep or resting or playing that she hunted titles and let her fancy do what it would with them. She used a pen name at first. Her first serious attempts at writing were in verse. Two long poems published in Harper’s Magazine attracted much attention.
How curiously things go in this world! Miss Abbott had furnished the text and scheme for an advertising circular sent out by a Boston firm. The circular was so strikingly good that business houses began to come to its originator with offers of advertising contracts. Miss Abbott was for some time in a state of indecision as to whether she should develop her gift for writing advertisements or try to succeed with stories. Finally she sent two tales to two magazines with the mental resolution:
“If these are rejected, I believe I’ll take up commercial writing.”
But both stories were accepted. Miss Abbott says that she owes her success as a fictioneer, therefore, to Lippincott’s Magazine and the Smart Set quite as much as to anything else.
As readers will have suspected, Miss Abbott is a member of the family which has attained distinction in letters and theology both. She is a daughter of the Rev. Edward Abbott, sometime editor of the Literary World of Boston; a niece of Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of the Outlook and Henry Ward Beecher’s successor at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn; and a granddaughter of the Jacob Abbott who wrote the Rollo books for boys.
Miss Abbott’s father was born in Farmington, Maine, and was graduated from New York University in 1860, seven years after his brother, Lyman Abbott, matriculated at the same institution. Edward Abbott studied theology at the Andover Theological Seminary and served as pastor of the Pilgrim Congregational Church at Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1869 to 1878 he was editor of the Congregationalist; afterward he became editor of the Literary World. He was ordained a minister of the Episcopal church in 1879 and served as rector of St. James’s Church, Cambridge, until 1896. Like his father, Jacob Abbott, Edward Abbott wrote some juvenile books as well as several histories and biographies.
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott was born in Cambridge in 1872. Largely educated by private tutors, she was for a short time a student in the public schools and afterward a special student at Radcliffe. She was a child exceedingly fond of outdoor life. Although she remembers kind and patient teachers she can recall no day when the walls of a schoolroom did not fret and torment her with the sense of physical confinement.