Title of (first) book: First Secretary.
Year first published: 1907.
Publisher: W. B. Dodge & Co. (extinct).
This amusing cross-examination needs to be supplemented at several points and the reader will be somewhat more enlightened by what follows.
Demetra Vaka is a Greek whose ancestors lived in Constantinople for more than 700 years. Many of them were Turkish government officials. Mrs. Brown’s early life brought her constantly and intimately in touch, therefore, with the Turks. She played with Turkish children and was able to view the Turkish people without any religious prejudice whatever. But she was born, she says, with an American soul. Certain conditions revolted her, and not least among them the system of prearranged marriages. It was to escape such a marriage that she ran away from home, coming to the United States with the family of a relative. Once here, however, she was soon left to shift for herself.
Alone, penniless, and not yet eighteen, she found it neither an easy nor romantic affair to get work. When finally she got on the staff of Atlantis she found she liked newspaper work. But it came home to her that going on this way she would never learn English, and at that time she wanted English because she hoped to study medicine. So she became a private school teacher of French, and within two years she had charge of the French department of the school.
In 1901, six years after her arrival in America, she returned to Turkey. Carefully guarded in her pocket was a ticket back to America. She had no intention of staying in Constantinople. Once in that city invitations from girlhood friends began to reach her. These were now married women, and so, equipped with a new and American point of view, she entered Turkish harems as a welcome visitor from whom there need be no secrets. Eight years later ten studies of Turkish women, embodying what she saw and heard in 1901-2, were published as a book, Haremlik, which means “the place of the harem.” But to stick to the order of events:
Demetra Vaka returned to America and the teaching of French but not for long. In 1904 she was married to Kenneth Brown, novelist, and had at last the continuous encouragement and professional assistance necessary if she was to become a writer in English. She had been frequently urged to prepare for publication her picturesque experiences. One day after her marriage she sent to a magazine editor an account of an experience while on a visit to Russia. It was accepted. That settled it. She would write.
Haremlik was her second book. It made a wide and deep impression. There have been French, Swedish, German, Italian, Danish and Dutch translations. It is not fiction, and neither, essentially, is Mrs. Brown’s later book, A Child of the Orient, which is the tale of the author’s own childhood and early life in Constantinople, of a Greek girl with Turkish friends and playmates. The flavor of the Arabian Nights fills the pages of Haremlik and A Child of the Orient. The final chapters of the second book give Demetra Vaka’s first impressions of America, the effect upon a girl in her teens of a land almost as different from Paris as Paris had been from Constantinople and Athens.