MARTHA FINLEY.
THE GIRLS’ FRIEND.
ARTHA FINLEY, author of the “Elsie Books,” etc., amounting in all to about one hundred volumes, was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, April 26, 1828, in the house of her grandfather, Major Samuel Finley, of the Virginia Cavalry, in the War of the Revolution, and a personal friend of Washington, who, while President, appointed him “Collector of Public Monies” for the Northwestern Territory of which Ohio was then a part. In the war of 1812–14 Major Finley marched to Detroit to the assistance of General Hull, at the head of a regiment of Ohio volunteers in which his eldest son, James Brown Finley, then a lad of eighteen, was a lieutenant. On Hull’s disgraceful surrender those troops were paroled and returned to their homes in Ohio. James Finley afterwards became a physician and married his mother’s niece, Maria Theresa Brown. Martha was their sixth child. In the spring of 1836 Dr. Finley left Ohio for South Bend, Indiana, where he resided until his death in 1851.
Something more than a year later Martha joined a widowed sister in New York city and resided there with her for about eighteen months. It was then and there she began her literary career by writing a newspaper story and a little Sunday-school book. But she was broken down in health and half blind from astigmatism; so bad a case that the oculist who years afterward measured her eyes for glasses, told her she would have been excusable had she said she could not do anything at all. But she loved books and would manage to read and write in spite of the difficulty of so doing; and a great difficulty it was, for in the midst of a long sentence the letters would seem to be thrown into confusion, and it was necessary to look away from the book or close her eyes for an instant before they would resume their proper positions.
But orphaned and dependent upon her own exertions, she struggled on, teaching and writing, living sometimes in Philadelphia with a stepmother who was kind enough to give her a home, sometimes in Phœnixville, Pa., where she taught a little select school. It was there she began the Elsie Series which have proved her most successful venture in literature. The twenty-second volume, published in 1897, is entitled Elsie at Home. The author has again and again proposed to end the series, thinking it long enough, but public and publishers have insisted upon another and yet another volume. The books have sold so well that they have made her a lovely home in Elkton, Maryland, whither she removed in 1876 and still resides, and to yield her a comfortable income.
But her works are not all juveniles. “Wanted a Pedigree,” and most of the other works in the Finley Series are for adults, and though not so very popular as the Elsie Books, still have steady sales though nearly all have been on the market for more than twenty years.