Books by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Corneille and Racine in England, 1904.
English Rhetoric and Composition (with Professor
G. R. Carpenter), 1906.
What Shall We Do Now? 1906.
Gunhild, 1907.
The Squirrel-Cage, 1912.
A Montessori Mother, 1913.
Mothers and Children, 1914.
The Bent Twig, 1915.
Hillsboro People, 1916.
The Real Motive, 1917.
Understood Betsy, 1917.
Home Fires in France, 1918.
The Day of Glory, 1919.
The Brimming Cup, 1921.
Rough-Hewn, 1922.
First thirteen published by Henry Holt & Company, New York; others by Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York.
CHAPTER XXVI
AMELIA E. BARR
ON March 17, 1918, the author of this book had the pleasure, as editor of Books and the Book World of The Sun, New York, of printing what is certainly the best account extant of Amelia E. Barr within a reasonable length. Although the article was unsigned it was the work of Mr. A. Elwood Corning, who had been a neighbor of Mrs. Barr at Richmond Hill, Long Island, New York. It was based upon a personal visit and interview. This chapter is really nothing more than a reprint of Mr. Corning’s article with a few changes, particularly those necessitated by Mrs. Barr’s death on March 10, 1919, at her Richmond Hill home. To Mr. Corning, then, the credit of this chapter.
Amelia E. Barr struck the popular taste more than thirty years ago with her Bow of Orange Ribbon. She was one of the most prolific of present-day writers of fiction. Her last completed novel, The Paper Cap, published in the fall of 1918, brought the number of her books up to over seventy, and this does not include hundreds of short stories, a poem a week for fourteen years, written for Bonner’s Ledger, or the numerous newspaper articles, essays and verses of the first fourteen years of her literary life.
On March 29, 1918, Mrs. Barr entered her eighty-eighth year. In the preceding twelve months she had published three books, and shortly before her eighty-seventh birthday (or the birthday which made her eighty-seven years old!) she completed a fourth in manuscript! This was The Paper Cap, the scenes of which are laid in Yorkshire, England, where the novelist spent a part of her childhood. Mrs. Barr thought it one of the best stories she had written. The paper cap of the title is that of the workingman and the story centers around his fight for the suffrage. It was really a contest between the hand loom and the power loom.
It was about 4 in the afternoon when Mr. Corning reached Mrs. Barr’s study on the visit which preceded the preparation of his article. Mrs. Barr had been writing since 7 that morning, with only a brief intermission for luncheon, and was not feeling, she declared, so well as usual. “This is one of mamma’s blue Mondays,” said her daughter. But after she had begun to discuss current events, some incidents of her early life in Texas and above all the war Mrs. Barr became animated. She was an interesting and enthusiastic talker with positive views, a power of unusually apt expression and a mind keenly alert. Convinced of a fact, she uttered it with passionate force.
On this particular afternoon the manuscript of The Paper Cap was lying on her writing table. “It will be done to-morrow,” she said with the spirit of one who looks upon the completion of a work which has required much thought and painstaking labor. She pushed the manuscript toward Mr. Corning; it was as free of corrections and interpolations as if it had been freshly copied from a former draft. Mrs. Barr seldom changed what she first wrote and always used sheets of yellow paper, finding this tint more restful to her eyes than white.
When weary of building stories she handed the manuscript over to a stenographer to be typewritten. Mrs. Barr wrote with a lead pencil. Going to a drawer she brought out a box full of old pencil stubs, some of which dated back to the days when she was writing The Bow of Orange Ribbon. A few years ago six or seven of these stubs were given to as many friends, who had them tipped with gold and made into shawl pins.