The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

The worth of Mrs. Comstock was never known until Joyce of the North Woods went into reprint.

The book, at over a dollar, had had a “good, average sale”—is 10,000 copies a good average sale? Reader, it is. Think not that all novels are best sellers. That’s no more the case than that all the sellers are the best novels.

Joyce went into reprint and in three months sold 60,000 copies and then it sold and sold and sold; and so, when they came to be reprinted, did Janet of the Dunes and A Son of the Hills. In a little more than three years these three novels in reprint went to 250,000 copies. Since then The Place Beyond the Winds and later books have been put out by the reprinters. Is there any question of Mrs. Comstock’s importance? We think not.

But what’s the explanation? What, in the vernacular, is the answer? The answer is just this: Mrs. Comstock is an earnest, sincere, enthusiastic writer; she is an educated woman, a suffragist, with experience in public speaking and a familiarity with public affairs; she is a homemaker who has always made the keeping of a pleasant home in Flatbush, Brooklyn, her chief business and who wrote at first just for fun and as she had the chance; she has convictions and no more hesitates to act upon them than to express them; she is personally modest—you have to dig things out of her about herself. But—is this the answer? Is there something else?

Yes, there is this else. Mrs. Comstock has worked with intensive culture and a visible reward the peculiarly modern literary field known (it really isn’t so known but it will be) as idealism.

What’s that? There are realists and romanticists although no two of us agree as to what makes a literary realist, what a romanticist. Yet we all recognize the distinction. It is a sure if shadowy boundary. But a literary idealist?

The literary idealist is the product of everybody’s dissatisfaction with what the other two give us. Vexed with the clash of the allopath and the homeopath, some send for the osteopath. The figure of speech we employ is no offhand metaphor. Literary idealists like Mrs. Comstock are a kind of literary osteopaths. They go at us vigorously. They decline to dose us with the nauseous compounds of realism and they shudder at the thought of our taking sugar pellets of romance. What they want us to do is to let them rub, thump, pound and flex us—mentally and emotionally, of course. They say: “Now, see here! Your intellect and your emotions may not be very wonderful but they are your own. Exercise them! Rely on them! Keep well and happy by using them to the fullest extent! They are what the Lord gave you. Don’t try to refine them till they become flabby. Don’t use them brutally till they go to pieces. Recognize your limitations and you’ll be all right!”

That’s Mrs. Comstock’s secret, whether she would put it that way herself or not. She is not a “great” novelist in the usual acceptation of the word; she is, in respect of literary distinction, not even a good novelist. Aesthetically considered she is nowhere. Practically considered she is in a hundred thousand homes, entertaining people, instructing people, osteopathizing, making them use the brains and feelings they have, preventing them from aping something they have not and cannot acquire, killing snobbery at the roots, arresting the blight of disillusionment and convincing young and old that certain simple, fundamental instincts and certain simple, fundamental principles of character are what count—with them. She is right, they do.

Conviction about the truth of life, conviction as to the best use of the novel, namely, “to present the great truths of life in an attractive manner, where they will reach the greatest number of people”—this sums up Harriet T. Comstock. How did she come to write The Place Beyond the Winds which presents the question of eugenics and the ethics of silence on certain matters affecting marriage? Mrs. Comstock’s face saddens and she tells you:

“I had a most unpleasant experience once. I happened to learn that the very attractive son of a dear friend of mine was totally unfit to marry the girl to whom he was engaged. I approached the young man, but found him obdurate; so, after a long mental and spiritual struggle, I revealed the facts to the girl’s mother.