The distinction is not so much “literary” as national. Corra Harris’s work could be nothing but American. It is racy of the soil, and crusted with unusual and deep personal experience of life. The experience was externally of a rare sort but spiritually of a wide and common and very profound sort. It was an intensive cultivation of the soul that she shared with us and we who had had a taste of that experience were able to understand and rejoice in it. For the depths of life are spiritual depths. They are not gained by travel be it ever so wide, nor by exciting worldly adventures. They are plumbed at home, by the fireside, at the supper table, in bed on sleepless nights, in the snatched intervals of exhausting and ordinary toil, in the room where a father lies dying, in the room where two young people are confessing love, in the room where a child is being born.
Corra Harris was born on a typical Southern cotton plantation owned by her father, Tinsley Tucker White, at Farm Hill, Elbert county, Georgia. Her mother had been Mary Elizabeth Matthews. The girl spent her early years on the plantation and was educated at home. Occasionally she made trips to town behind two white mules. When she was 14 she was sent to a local seminary. A few years there joined to the desultory teaching at home gave her what was considered in the South of the late ’70s and early ’80s (she was born March 17, 1869) a very respectable education—for a girl.
At 17 she was married to Lundy Howard Harris, a young minister. It was his first few years on a Methodist circuit which gave Mrs. Harris the material from which she was able later to construct A Circuit Rider’s Wife. After two or three years of preaching Mr. Harris became professor of Greek in Emory College, Oxford, Georgia. Then for the first time his wife began to write, using the pen name of Sidney Erskine. She met with no success until she was 25. Then Clark Howell, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, published in the Sunny South (owned by the Constitution) a story of hers called Darwinkle’s Dream. It was a gruesome story and Mr. Howell made Mrs. Harris rewrite some of it to “give the poor fellow [the hero] a better chance.” Gruesome, yes; nevertheless Mrs. Harris’s friend, Joel Chandler Harris, creator of Uncle Remus, laughed over what he called the humor of it!
In 1899 Mrs. Harris had a series of articles on the South’s problems accepted by the Independent magazine. Steady progress, thereafter; she became a contributor to the Saturday Evening Post and with the publication of A Circuit Rider’s Wife reached her deserved place. Her husband died on September 18, 1910. They had been married since 1887.
Mrs. Harris’s home is in the “valley” we have heard her describe, not so far from Atlanta and near Pine Log, in Bartow county, Georgia. It is a long, low log cabin with a forest of cathedral palms in front of it. From the west you look down slopes to the crops Mrs. Harris grows, for she is a farmer. The living room around which the house is built was an Indian cabin over a hundred years old. The dining room is in back of the living room and is decorated in yellow browns. Isma Dooley, writing an article which appeared in a number of Southern newspapers, completes the picture:
“The marigolds on the table are a harmonious touch and, as I write, the whole cabin is gold-lighted by the afterglow of the wonderful sunset. Mrs. Harris’s own room and sleeping porch are on the first floor. The guest rooms are up a granite rustic stairway—cozy apartments done all in blue. A rustic passageway leads to the kitchen and servants’ quarters, all of log construction. Mrs. Harris’s little study is another adjunct of the cabin and is in the shade of stately pine trees. There are no neighbors within a mile, but Mrs. Harris has a large acquaintance in the county and is devoted to the people and their interests. She told me many things about them as we took a long drive this afternoon behind her stout mule team Blythe and Cobb and driven by Hicks, a colored retainer. [The mules are apparently named in honor of fellow contributors to the Saturday Evening Post.]
“‘Good evening, Mrs. Pliney,’ said Mrs. Harris, as she greeted an old woman sitting out in front of a typical little country house.
“The woman smiled and responded. ‘When I passed here the other day,’ said Mrs. Harris, ‘and commented on the cosmos blossoms in her yard, she remarked, “Neighbor, you should see them when the Wind blows the blossoms; they look like butterflies.”
“‘The next morning I heard she had shot that day at one of her neighbors! It shows that a poetic soul and desperation often go together.’
“Here Hicks interrupted in apologetic tones: ‘But, Miss Corra, the man she shot at was all the time a-teasin’ her dog.’”