After endeavoring to support herself and three daughters in the South she came with them to New York in the fall of 1869.
One day she was asked if she could write stories and replied that she had often written them for the amusement of her children but had destroyed them after they had served their purpose. She promised to try again and received $30 for the effort.
“What, $30 for that article?” she exclaimed. “Why, I can write three or four of them a week.”
She eventually found work on the Christian Union, of which Beecher was editor, and this opened a career which brought her both a reputation and honor. At first she rented a few rooms at 27 Amity Street, Brooklyn, a house once occupied by Edgar Allan Poe, although at the time she was unconscious of the fact. When she moved into these quarters she found that after paying the rent she had only $5 in her purse.
“Well, girls,” she told her daughters, “we will have a good beefsteak dinner and let to-morrow take care of itself.” Even then she felt, as she afterward said, that “God and Amelia Barr were a multitude.”
For fourteen years Mrs. Barr toiled, meeting with successes and rebuffs. It was a hard struggle. After working all day in the Astor Library she would often at night take her daughters to the theater, leaving sometimes in her purse only enough money for carfare in the morning.
Returning from one of these outings she discovered that her house had been broken into. Rushing at once to the family Bible, she found $40 between the pages where she had placed it for safety. Not having in those days enough money to bank, she would often put bills behind pictures, and they were never disturbed.
In 1884 Jan Vedder’s Wife was published. The success of this book almost immediately placed Mrs. Barr in the front rank of popular American novelists. From that time her record was phenomenal. Over fifty-three when her first book appeared, Mrs. Barr produced an average of over two novels a year and at the close of her life she had not one unsold manuscript. She had written only one article, she said, which she was never able to dispose of. And so little did she care for her books after they had been written that she had not a complete set of them in her library, which numbered several thousand volumes.
She not infrequently took up one of her old novels and after reading it said that it seemed like a new story. “All my characters,” she once remarked, “are real to me. They begin to live and have a personality of their own. I have started to write a villain and afterward fallen in love with him and made him my hero.”
Mrs. Barr’s books were invariably sold outright. Years ago she made a thorough study of the early history of Manhattan Island, which ultimately formed a foundation on which she built eight historical novels which stand out as among the best of her work. Chronologically considered they should be read as follows: