The Women Who Make Our Novels

by Grant M. Overton

It began right after the appearance of The Land of Little Rain with her next work, the novel Isidro, a romance dealing with the California of the padres, and it reached its high and sustained level with A Woman of Genius.

She did not remain on the edge of the desert. To do so would have been fatal. She moved about and with benefit to herself and her work. Now she lives in a house facing on Gramercy Park, New York, where she has a studio. She has exchanged the Mojave desert for the desert of Manhattan, but she is sheltered in an oasis touched with the lingering loveliness of the New York H. C. Bunner knew. Ask her about the advantages of her new environment and she will tell you a story:

“A young Californian who came East to try his fortune gravitated naturally to Washington Square where Genius is supposed to germinate. He was personally conducted to the Liberal Club where a young woman in bobbed hair and a futurist dress asked him if he didn’t think the Liberal Club the most remarkable thing in America.

“‘Well,’ said the Westerner, ‘there’s the Grand Canyon, you know.’

“There you have it,” concludes Mrs. Austin. “If you haven’t seen the Grand Canyon you had better keep away from the Liberal Club; but once you have caught the lift and bigness of America outside New York, then New York is the most inspiring place in the world in which to work.”

Ask her about her fine novel The Ford, a story of present day California which takes its title from a river shallow where the boy Kenneth Brent rescues a lamb from drowning:

“The book records incidents in my own life in the struggle for the waters of Owens River which the city of Los Angeles stole from us,” Mrs. Austin explains. “That was a very wicked episode, and I did not begin to do justice to the chicanery of Los Angeles. I am saving some of these things for the sequel to The Ford! It was I who discovered and made public the attempt of the city to secure the surplus rights of the river in just such fashion as I have described Anne and Kenneth Brent doing in the book.”

We have had Mary Austin’s portrait of herself in 1902; let us have a portrait of her by a visitor who met her about that time. Elia W. Peattie, writing in the Boston Transcript, supplies just those externals that we need to round out our picture:

“I met another desert woman, too [she had been describing a visit to Ida Meacham Strobridge]—Mary Austin, who has within the last eighteen months appeared twice in the Atlantic in sketches which could have been written only by one who knows the solitude and understands it. A Shepherd of the Sierras and The Little Coyote were the titles of these stories. She has also written much verse and of a peculiar order. It is for children, and has a wild and curious quality. This has appeared chiefly in the Youth’s Companion and St. Nicholas.

“Mary Austin lives down in Independence, where her husband is Government land agent. She is fairly on the edge of Death Valley, and her companions are principally Paiute Indians.... Mrs. Austin has an Indian-like solemnity about her. She has a pervading shyness and likes the philosophy of the Indians and their poetry. Instinctively she is artistic in all she does, and her writing has undeniable style as well as remarkable individuality. Her paper on The Indian Arts read at one of the art sessions of the biennial meeting of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs was the most purely literary paper of the entire convention. It was written too well, if anything. It was so smooth that it failed to arrest the attention of the more casual listeners....