“When I was a very young girl I read something Miss Mulock said apropos of writing which made a deep impression. It was this: ‘An author should go to his desk as regularly as a carpenter to his bench, and with as little thought of inspiration.’ I point to my twenty novels as a proof that I have heeded that direction; for if any one doubts the manual labor of book writing let him pick up any story and copy a chapter from it in long hand. I have averaged one novel a year, yet my maximum period of daily work is three morning hours.
“If a young person aspiring to print should ask me whether there is a definite way to begin, I should tell him to start by catching a big brother. Preferably his own, for any one else’s might be a hindrance. Mine is Frederick W. Root, ex-president of the Literary Club, Cliff Dweller, Little Roomer, and in many other respects an orthodox Chicagoan. He has been my mascot ever since the day when he started on the labor—and hard labor it was—of drawing a young sister away from the music which was her chief interest and starting her at story writing. You know I am one of the Roots. My father, George F. Root, was known chiefly by his war songs, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp and The Battle Cry of Freedom and so on, but every home in the land knows his simple, melodious songs, and I should like to feel that the vitality in my unpretentious stories is akin to the spontaneous harmony that flowed for fifty happy years from his clear mind.
“I suppose the reason I did not wish to write was that music satisfied me. My brother persisted against my indifference for a year. At last we were both exasperated. He shut me into a room with him one day, and opening a very business-like looking knife, declared with a fearful scowl that I should not leave that room alive unless I promised to try faithfully to write a story. I laughed a little and wept a little, and at last promised to show him that I couldn’t do it.
“Some one asked him once in my presence why he was so certain that I could write. He replied: ‘Oh, she has a picturesque way of telling things and isn’t too much hampered by the truth.’ I forgive him even such aspersions. He is an example of what ‘a heart at leisure from itself’ can do for another. I owe him everything; above all the blessed assurance which sometimes reaches me that my stories help others.
“It is wonderful that I met no obstacles in starting. With no conscious preparation I was like a ship ready to be launched. Fred pushed me off into deep water.
“I enjoy my work, but not quite in the carefree way I used to enjoy it. With each new book now I am conscious of some anxiety not to disappoint my large parish; not to go backward. Both in books and plays I believe the destructive is doomed. In this world there exists only one rose without a thorn. There are many larger, more alluring, more fragrant, but there is only one thornless rose; it is work that you love.”
Mrs. Burnham rather minimizes the difficulties of getting started. Her first stories were unfavorably passed upon but the verdicts did not deter her. A poem sent to Wide Awake was her first accepted work. No Gentlemen was her first novel. It should be stated that her mother also was musically gifted. Though born in Newton, Massachusetts, the girl lived for some years in North Reading, Massachusetts. She was nine when the family went to Chicago to live. She was married young and it was after her marriage that her brother induced her to write. She is a member of the Little Room Club of Chicago and lives there at The Elms Hotel. Her first play, or rather the first play made from one of her books, was The Right Princess, and when, after the usual hitches, it was staged smoothly at the Alcazar Theater in San Francisco late in 1912, Mrs. Burnham confessed to the dramatist’s deepest thrill. “I will not act the doting parent except to say that after so many years of seeing one’s characters in black and white on the printed page you can’t imagine how fascinating it is to watch them move about in the flesh, your own creations, speaking your own lines; and then my first—my very first—villain lives in that little play.”
To get to Bailey Island, Mrs. Burnham’s summer home in Maine, you go first to Portland, where the author is as “widely and favorably known” as if she had lived there all her life. It is, in fact, almost a quarter of a century since she began spending her summers in Maine. She has failed to show up but rarely since 1894, although she did spend two summers abroad and one visiting Yellowstone Park. “I only spared a summer to go to Yellowstone because it was open only in summer,” she explained afterward. Her Bailey Island house, a roomy shingled structure, stands on a steep, shelving headland, not rocky but covered with grass and with a pebbled beach at its foot. It is called The Mooring. Beside it stands her brother’s house, of the same character but a little larger. The view is over the Atlantic and Casco Bay and you may see the White Mountains clearly. The story of how Mrs. Burnham came to live there is related, with changes of names, in her novel Dr. Latimer. The old tide mill, which figures so importantly in The Opened Shutters, was a real mill which, two years after the novel’s appearance in 1906, sank into the sea. Do you remember this passage in the last chapter of The Opened Shutters?
“She paused, her lips apart, her eyes wide, for all at once she caught sight of the Tide Mill. Every one of its shutters had turned back. The sunlight was flooding in. She grew pale, sank down upon a rock near by, and gazed.” And then a few pages later John Dunham’s words to Sylvia Lacey:
“‘You said Love would open the shutters, and it has.’” The incident is charged with a special significance in the story. It appears that when the real mill disappeared a coincidence was noted, the sort of thing that many persons prefer to think no coincidence at all. We quote from the Portland Evening Express of July 31, 1909: