So I set my pen in rest, and went in for the prize; less, I avow, for the fifty dollars than for the reward for seeing my ambitious bantling in print. So faint and few were my expectations of this consummation, that I went off to Boston for the summer, without intimating to any one the audacious cast I had made. I had been with my cousins six weeks when my mother sent me a copy of the Southern Era, containing what she said in a letter by the same mail, “promised to be the best serial it had published.” I opened the letter first, and tore the wrapper from the paper carelessly.
How it leaped at me from the outermost page!
OUR PRIZE STORY!
KATE HARPER
By Marion Harland
All set up in what we christened in the last quarter-century, “scare-heads.”
As I learned later from home-letters, the editor, after advertising vainly for the author’s address, had published without waiting for it. I wrote home that night to my father, pouring out the whole revelation, and stipulating that the secret should be kept among ourselves.
“Marion Harland” was, again, a hint of my name, so covert that it was not guessed at by readers in general. The editor, an acquaintance of my father, was informed of my right to draw the money. I continued to send tales and poems to him for two years, and preserved my incognito.
In the late spring of 1853, “Mea,” Herbert, and I were sitting in the parlor on a wild night when it rained as rain falls nowhere else as in the seven-hilled city. My companions had their magazines. Mea’s, as I well recollect, was Harper’s New Monthly; my brother had the Southern Literary Messenger. Ned Rhodes had taken Harper’s for me from the very first issue. My father subscribed conscientiously for the Messenger to encourage Southern literature. All right-minded Virginians acknowledged the duty of extending such encouragement to the extent of the subscription price of “native productions.”
I had dragged out the rough copy of my book from the bottom of my desk that day, and was now looking it over at a table on one side of the fireplace. Chancing upon the page describing Celestia Pratt’s entrance upon school-life, I laughed aloud.
“What is it?” queried my sister, looking up in surprise.