When Winter Comes to Main Street

by Grant M. Overton

To say so much is to bear the strongest testimony to that superb vitality, which, characteristic of Mrs. Rinehart as a person, is yet more characteristic of her fiction. There is, I suppose, this additional interest in regard to The Breaking Point, that Mrs. Rinehart is the wife of a physician and was herself, before her marriage, a trained nurse. The facts of her life are interesting, though not nearly so interesting as the way in which she tells them.

She was the daughter of Thomas Beveridge Roberts and Cornelia (Gilleland) Roberts of Pittsburgh. From the city’s public and high schools she went into a training school for nurses, acquiring that familiarity with hospital scenes which served her so well when she came to write The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry, the stories collected under the title of Tish and the novel K. She became, at nineteen, the wife of Stanley Marshall Rinehart, a Pittsburgh physician.

“Life was very good to me at the beginning,” said Mrs. Rinehart in the American Magazine article I have referred to. “It gave me a strong body and it gave me my sons before it gave me my work. I do not know what would have happened had the work come first, but I should have had the children. I know that. I had always wanted them. Even my hospital experience, which rent the veil of life for me, and showed it often terrible, could not change that fundamental thing we call the maternal instinct.... I would forfeit every part of success that has come to me rather than lose any part, even the smallest, of my family life. It is on the foundation of my home that I have builded.

“Yet, for a time, it seemed that my sons were to be all I was to have out of life. From twenty to thirty I was an invalid.... This last summer (1917), after forty days in the saddle through unknown mountains in Montana and Washington, I was as unwearied as they were. But I paid ten years for them.”

Mrs. Rinehart had always wanted to write. She began in 1905—she was twenty-nine that year—and worked at a tiny mahogany desk or upon a card table “so low and so movable. It can sit by the fire or in a sunny window.” She “learned to use a typewriter with my two forefingers with a baby on my knee!” She wrote when the children were out for a walk, asleep, playing. “It was frightfully hard.... I found that when I wanted to write I could not and then, when leisure came and I went to my desk, I had nothing to say.”

I quote from a chapter on Mrs. Rinehart in my book The Women Who Make Our Novels:

“Her first work was mainly short stories and poems. Her very first work was verse for children. Her first check was for $25, the reward of a short article telling how she had systematised the work of a household with two maids and a negro ‘buttons.’ She sold one or two of the poems for children and with a sense of guilt at the desertion of her family made a trip to New York. She made the weary rounds in one day, ‘a heartbreaking day, going from publisher to publisher.’ In two places she saw responsible persons and everywhere her verses were turned down. ‘But one man was very kind to me, and to that publishing house I later sent The Circular Staircase, my first novel. They published it and some eight other books of mine.’

“In her first year of sustained effort at writing, Mrs. Rinehart made about $l,200. She was surrounded by ‘sane people who cried me down,’ but who were merry without being contemptuous. Her husband has been her everlasting help. He ‘has stood squarely behind me, always. His belief in me, his steadiness and his sanity and his humour have kept me going, when, as has happened now and then, my little world of letters has shaken under my feet.’ To the three boys their mother’s work has been a matter of course ever since they can remember. ‘I did not burst on them gloriously. I am glad to say that they think I am a much better mother than I am a writer, and that the family attitude in general has been attentive but not supine. They regard it exactly as a banker’s family regards his bank.’”

Most of the work of the twelve years from 1905 to 1917 was done in Mrs. Rinehart’s home. But when she had a long piece of work to do she often felt “the necessity of getting away from everything for a little while.” So, beginning about 1915, she rented a room in an office building in Pittsburgh once each year while she was writing a novel. It was sparsely furnished and, significantly, it contained no telephone. In 1917 she became a commuter from her home in Sewickley, a Pittsburgh suburb. Her earnings had risen to $50,000 a year and more.

“My business with its various ramifications had been growing; an enormous correspondence, involving business details, foreign rights, copyrights, moving picture rights, translation rights, second serial rights, and dramatisations, had made from the small beginning of that book of poems a large and complicated business.