Thomas Hardy is her favorite author. “Whenever I feel that I am stranded I read Hardy and regain my poise. He discusses so clearly and nobly the problems with which we are struggling to-day. And I also like Barrie; principally, I think, because he knows women so thoroughly, and I always know he knows. Stevenson once said of George Eliot that when she wrote of men they always put their hands up to feel if their hair is coming down; but Barrie writes of women without their appearing with a cigar in their hands.”
Of her method of work Mrs. Comstock says:
“The first thing I see is the place and the people—the background and the actors. Then their story begins to unfold in my mind. When the time comes that that story must be written before I can have any peace of mind, I sit down to it—not before. Other writers, I understand, usually see the story or the people first, and the background later. With me, the background, the environment of my characters, is all-important. Why, I even keep a set of pictures of the country I am writing of on my desk beside me.”
Mrs. Comstock always goes to the scene of her stories. Her backgrounds are always of actual places and her people are frequently real people. Thus in Joyce of the North Woods her St. Ange is a place in northern New York and all the lesser characters are taken from life. In The Vindication, Dr. Hill is straight out of actuality. On a suffrage tour Mrs. Comstock met this young physician whose work had been so largely among the Adirondack poor. He, too, had adopted a backward and neglected child, just as Dr. Hill takes hold of the boy Chester in Mrs. Comstock’s novel. A Son of the Hills was the fruit of a visit in the Virginia mountains. Not the immediate fruit; some time had to elapse before Mrs. Comstock could “see” the story in the mountaineers. In Mam’selle Jo, Mrs. Comstock has gone up North again, to the St. Lawrence country, and she tells the moving story of a woman of 40 who has at last struggled clear of debt and is at last able to gratify the instinct of mother-love which is in her.
Popular she is, but she does not think of popularity. In truth a writer cannot. For, as Mrs. Comstock says, the writer who thinks of the possible popularity of her work when she should be thinking of her story will impair her work. And her work is the thing with Mrs. Comstock. Reject it if you like, accept it if you will; she will go unshakeably on. She has something to do and is about doing it.
Books by Harriet T. Comstock
Janet of the Dunes, 1908.
Joyce of the North Woods, 1911.
A Son of the Hills, 1913.
The Place Beyond the Winds, 1914.
The Vindication, 1917.
Mam’selle Jo: A Novel of the St. Lawrence Country, 1918.
Unbroken Lines, 1919.
The Shield of Silence, 1921.
At the Crossroads, 1922.
(Also many books for boys and girls.)
Mrs. Comstock’s earlier books are to be had in reprint. Janet of the Dunes was published by Little, Brown & Company, Boston; the others are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.
CHAPTER XXXI
HONORÉ WILLSIE
NOTHING is so satisfactory to write about as a novelist with ideas; but in writing about Mrs. Honoré Willsie we shall not discuss her ideas. It will be enough to try faithfully to set them before her thousands of readers and the thousands who ought to be her readers, to try to picture Mrs. Willsie herself. That is all that can be done in a chapter of reasonable length. To discuss intelligently Mrs. Willsie’s ideas would require a book and an amount of exact knowledge on certain subjects—immigration and Americanization, for example—that is no part of our reporter’s equipment. A straightaway bit of exposition must do instead.