"My parents died when I was eighteen years old. I went to the city and tried my hand at different sorts of work. For one thing, I tried to get up children's parties, but in eighteen months I managed only one. Then I did settlement work, was a librarian, a companion, and society reporter on a newspaper. Then I got married—and wrote stories."
Mrs. Norris was at one time opposed to woman suffrage. Now, however, she is a suffragist, but she refuses to say that she has been "converted" to suffragism.
"I can't say that I have been converted to suffragism," she said, "any more than I can say that I have been converted to warm baths and tooth-brushes. And it does not seem to me that any women should need to defend her right to vote any more than she should need to defend her right to love her children. There is a theme for a novel—a big suffrage novel will be written one of these days."
It may be that the author of Mother will be the author of this "big suffrage novel." But at present she disclaims any such intention. But she admits that there is a purpose in all her portrayals of normal, wholesome American home life.
"I don't think that I believe in 'art for art's sake,' as it is generally interpreted," she said. "Of course, I don't believe in what is called the commercial point of view—I have never written anything just to have it printed. But I do not believe that there is any one standard of art. I think that any book which the people ought to read must have back of it something besides the mere desire of the writer to create something. I never could write without a moral intention."