The Girl Who Lived in the Woods and Dr. David are published by A. C. McClurg & Company, Chicago; Miss Cooke’s later novels are published by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York; but The Clutch of Circumstance is published by George H. Doran Company, New York.
CHAPTER XX
GRACE S. RICHMOND
WHY do some of Grace S. Richmond’s books sell faster than the books of any other American woman writer? Because they do! And their popularity has no relation whatever to their size. Some of the littlest—On Christmas Day in the Morning, On Christmas Day in the Evening, and The Enlisting Wife, for instances—sell most rapidly. Not the size; perhaps it has something to do with the substance!
No perhaps about it! Mrs. Richmond has, more perfectly than most of her contemporaries, the gift for disclosing the simplest and deepest feelings of men and women everywhere in just those words which are at the back of our heads and hardly ever on our lips. They are the words we ache to utter but never quite bring ourselves to say. She says them for us. She makes articulate and perfect the full feeling that is in us. She is our emotional self—that part of self which is a common possession—touched with pentecostal fire. When we read her we have the delight of self-expression blended with a feeling of gratefulness to her for affording it to us.
These are strong words. Gush, some will call them. Well, among the people of repressed instincts there is one instinct seldom repressed—the instinct to sneer at those who let themselves go. This is an inconsistency which will trouble them (we point it out that they may give themselves over to their favorite delight of self-torture) but which bothers the rest of us not at all. We know—the rest of us—full well that the emotionalism of which Mrs. Richmond is the most successful exponent is a cleansing and refreshing exercise. We read her and come away a little surer of ourselves and of the world about us. For the essence of that world is the people in it and there is something in most people that does not change.
Mrs. Richmond has written many books. The only exact fact to be stated is that in 1914—and several of her most successful books have appeared since—she had sold 400,000 copies. The total must be well on to the million mark by now. Then there are the cheaper editions of her earlier stories; there are the readers of her work in the Ladies’ Home Journal and other publications; there are the libraries where copies of her are always “out” and there are new circles of readers, each book being much like a stone breaking the surface of a pond and making its own widening ripples;—no matter. Millions read Mrs. Richmond. That is enough to know. It is the achievement of a quiet, country-dwelling woman whose publishers have a time to get her to be photographed!
She lives in Fredonia, New York, and the sketch of her life is a bare outline. She was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the daughter of the Rev. Charles Edwards Smith, D.D., and Catherine A. (Kimball) Smith. Her father was a Baptist clergyman, the author of The Baptism of Fire and The World Lighted. Grace was an only child. While she was still a young girl the family moved to Syracuse, New York. There the daughter was educated in the Syracuse High School and under private tutors, following college courses of study under their direction. She gave some indications of the writer’s gift before her marriage, in 1887, to Dr. Nelson Guernsey Richmond of Fredonia. But the wife of a young physician with a growing practice has not a great deal of leisure. It was not until 1891 that Mrs. Richmond, whose first work was short stories for magazines, attracted special attention by a story which appeared in the Thanksgiving number of the Ladies’ Home Journal.
It had come in as hundreds of other things come in, had been read by the principal reader and had by him been handed directly to the editor, who accepted it without delay. The story was called The Flowing Shoe-String and described the reformation, through love, of a charmingly untidy little literary genius. Mrs. Richmond remembers it very well! She found herself in rather notable company—Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, Frances E. Willard, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the Rev. T. De Witt Talmage and Russell Sage were other contributors to that Thanksgiving number.
Very, very modest, and very, very busy, Mrs. Richmond did not deluge the editor with other work. In fact, seven whole years passed before she made her second appearance in the Ladies’ Home Journal, in 1898, with A Silk-Lined Girl. It was the Thanksgiving number again. The company had changed but was still notable; Henry M. Stanley, Caroline Atwater Mason and Mary E. Wilkins, now Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, were on the table of contents.
This second bow was the real introduction to her audience. Since 1898 Mrs. Richmond has been among the magazine’s most steady and popular contributors. For twelve years, from 1902 to 1913, not a year went by when she was not represented in its pages. Her most successful work has had its first appearance there. May and June of 1902 brought to the Journal’s readers the first of a series of tales about Juliet which became, in 1905, a book, The Indifference of Juliet. Juliet’s indifference was toward a young author in relation to the subject of marriage. Naturally interest in her did not stop with The Indifference of Juliet and so, in 1907, her further experiences as communicated to the Journal’s readers were published between covers under the title With Juliet in England.