“It seems that one day last summer Captain Morrill of the Harpswell Steamboat Company, who is not too fond of story reading, picked up The Opened Shutters to read. His wife in telling about it to Mrs. Burnham said that he read the story far into the night, not being willing to put it down till he had read the last word. The next day when he was sailing down the bay, his attention was suddenly directed to the old Tide Mill. He looked at it long and steadily. Could it be? Were his eyes deceiving him? Had he read so late and thought so deeply on the story that things did not look quite natural to him? He looked at the old mill again. Yes, it was sinking into the sea—and the shutters were wide open! The sun, too, was shining through. For years these old shutters had not let in a rift of light; but now they were aflood with it.”
Those who do not hug the supernatural are at liberty to suppose that the strain of settling and sinking unbarred and flung open the shutters. Of Captain Morrill it may be noted that his presence of mind and bravery several years earlier had saved the lives of Mrs. Burnham and other passengers in a collision between the steamboat Sebascodegan and a revenue cutter. But for him The Opened Shutters would never have been written.
The beginning of this capital story was not with the Tide Mill, however, but with the name Thinkright Johnson. Like certain persons whose appearance before Mrs. Burnham’s mind’s eye has compelled her to write about them, this New Englandish appellation gave birth to a book. Thinkright Johnson—Thinkright Johnson; the name haunted Mrs. Burnham for days and weeks, “till I knew that the only way I could have any peace was to write something about him.”
It was the same way with Jewel. She kept coming before her author. “She is the exact type of one of my little nieces, in character, looks, and even to the things that she says. In some way I felt compelled to write about her.”
On the other hand the story of The Right Princess came to Mrs. Burnham one evening when she was all dressed for the theater. “As I stood in my room, all ready to go, it began to come to me. I drew off one of my gloves and sat down to my desk just to jot down a few of the ideas; but the whole thing grew so rapidly in my mind that I did not realize anything in the world about me again, till I found myself removing one of my shoes many hours later.
“The book was practically conceived and written in a single night. But, ordinarily, I just live with my characters after they have come to me. Of course it is usually the leading character of a story that occurs to me first, and then I let him or her gather about them the characters which they would naturally know or come in contact with. Then I just let them say the things which they would naturally say to each other. Of course I accept and reject what my characters shall say in print, coördinating and assorting it into the plot; but they develop the plot.
“My hours are from 9 to 12 in the morning. Whatever I write comes to me perfectly easily and naturally, and I rarely ever make any change in my first copy. My mother used to say that I wrote just as other people hemmed handkerchiefs. Writing has never meant any struggle whatever to me.
“Stories are to entertain, and they cannot do this if they are unhappy, and then, all my early stories I used to read to my father, and he particularly disliked anything that was unhappy in them and urged me to take it out.”
Among Mrs. Burnham’s close friends are the brothers George Barr McCutcheon, the novelist, and John McCutcheon, the cartoonist; and George Ade. Charles Klein, the playwright, was a personal friend also.
It is improper to use the word trilogy in speaking of Mrs. Burnham’s Christian Science novels, since a trilogy, rightly speaking, is a group of three novels in which one or more characters persist, or which have a common setting. If we can speak of a trilogy based on an idea or set of ideas then Mrs. Burnham’s Christian Science trilogy consists of The Right Princess (1902), Jewel (1903) and The Leaven of Love (1908). The Opened Shutters (1906) is free from the special terminology of the Scientists, though saturated with their principles and beliefs in the character of Thinkright Johnson and later of Sylvia Lacey.