Kathleen was the oldest girl. At nineteen she was to “come out” in San Francisco. A house had been taken in the city for the winter. Gowns had been ordered and “the cotillions joined” when Mrs. Thompson was stricken with pneumonia and died. Her husband died, broken-hearted, in less than a month afterward. Misfortunes culminating just after the father’s death left the six children “destitute, with the exception of the family home in Mill Valley, too large and too far from the city to be a negotiable asset.”

The children had never known what it was to want money. They behaved bravely. The oldest boy already had a small job. Kathleen got work at once with a hardware house at $30 a month. Her 15-year-old sister took three pupils “whose fees barely paid for her commutation ticket and carfares. The total of the little family’s income was about $80 a month. Their one terror—never realized—was of debt.”

Kathleen and her sister came home from the day’s work to get the dinner, make beds, wash dishes and scrub the kitchen floor at midnight. Kathleen, who had been a favorite story-teller all her life, began to wonder if she could not make money by writing. Her tales as a child had generally been illustrated with little pen drawings of girls with pigtails, girls in checkered aprons, girls in fancy dress, “and occasionally with more tragic pictures, such as widows and bereaved mothers mourning beside their departed.... There is a scrapbook in the family in which are pasted more than 1,000 of these sketches.” Now she was not thinking of illustrating stories, her own or others’, but of making needed money. In the fall of 1903 she had attempted to take a year’s course in the English department of the University of California and had had to give it up because the family needed her. In 1904, at the age of twenty-three, she made her first successful effort. The San Francisco Argonaut paid her $15.50 for a story called The Colonel and the Lady. Mrs. Norris was then librarian in the Mechanics’ Library and had more time to try writing. Such success as she had was not very encouraging. She left the library to go into settlement work, and for several months strove “to reanimate an already defunct settlement house.” She got her feet on the right path at last by becoming society editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. A few months later she became a reporter for the San Francisco Call, where she worked for two years.

“Mrs. Norris doesn’t know whether the newspaper experience helped or hindered her in her literary work.” There need be no uncertainty, we should think, when, as we are told in the next breath, “during these years she saw many phases of life that must have enlarged her vision and made her more catholic in her views.” She learned to write with speed. “During the visit of the Atlantic fleet to Pacific waters, in 1908, there was one day in which 8,000 words were Mrs. Norris’s contribution to the paper.” This may explain why she is one of the most prolific of American novelists. Long before Josselyn’s Wife could be brought out in the fall of 1918, Sisters had begun to be published serially.

In April, 1909, Kathleen Thompson was married to Charles Gilman Norris, younger brother of Frank Norris, the author of McTeague and The Pit. Charles Norris, now Capt. Charles Norris, U. S. A., is himself a novelist, the author of The Amateur and Salt: The Education of Griffith Adams. Captain and Mrs. Norris, whose home is at Port Washington, Long Island, New York, have a son named after his distinguished uncle, Frank Norris.

Marriage, a home in New York City, and the first leisure since her father’s death; a literary atmosphere (her husband was in magazine editorial work), and the happiness of being in the city she had for years longed to know-these are the circumstances which reawakened Mrs. Norris’s ambition to write. She essayed again without encouragement from editors except the editor at the breakfast table. Her newspaper training now seemed to handicap her, “her fiction lacked the simplicity and the appeal that have since endeared it to so many readers.” For months she got nothing but rejections. Finally this note popped out of the mail:

“Dear Mrs. Norris:

“The readers report that, delightful as this story is, it is ‘not quite in our tone.’ The feeling of the Atlantic is, that when a tale is as intimately true to life as this is of yours, the tone is surely a tone for the Atlantic to adopt.

“It gives us much pleasure to accept so admirable a story.

“Very truly yours,
“The Editor.”