Mary Johnston has covered a large historical field. Beginning in the early days of Virginia, she took the settling of Jamestown in Prisoners of Hope and To Have and To Hold; both these are of absorbing interest, and have remarkable pictures of the Indians of the time. Then comes Lewis Rand and the settling of the Northwest, and then The Long Roll, about our Civil War. All her work is done in a careful painstaking way, and is distinctly dramatic. Read from To Have and To Hold.
Add to these the books of Mary Catherwood, about Canada, and those of Beulah Marie Dix, who has used the wars of Cromwell largely as her theme; both writers are among our best.
II—STORIES OF ROMANCE AND MYSTERY
Bertha Runkle's The Helmet of Navarre may perhaps stand at the very head of our romantic novels, for its wonderfully vivid representation of life and adventure in Paris under her famous hero. It is all the more remarkable because it was the author's first book, and written when she was only a girl. Read the closing chapter.
Amélie Rives, now the Princess Troubetzkoy, has several romantic novels, notably The Quick or the Dead and A Brother to Dragons, both written in an intense, dramatic way; her Virginia of Virginia, while different, is no less fascinating. Her books have the setting of the South. Read from the last.
Molly Elliot Seawell has written a great number of books, all carefully done and of great variety of subjects. Her Sprightly Romance of Marsac, which took a three-thousand-dollar prize and is as gay as its title indicates, has for its foils the more serious The House of Egremont and Midshipman Paulding. Read from the first.
Anna Katherine Green has many books about the detection of crime, with complicated plots. Her The Leavenworth Case is her best book; others are The Mill Mystery, Behind Closed Doors, and The Filigree Ball. Read from The Leavenworth Case.
III—STORIES OF LIFE PROBLEMS
The greatest problem novel ever written by a woman was Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Clubs should give at least one meeting to this book, studying the times, the character of the author and her training, as the causes which led to its writing; notice also the effect of the book upon the nation. It has passed into many other languages than ours, and has a world-wide fame.
Mrs. Stowe also wrote another book with a great theme, The Minister's Wooing, of early Colonial days and the power of Calvinism in the lives of the people. Read from both these books.