Another transition figure, typical of a group of writers and at the same time illustrative of the change that came over the tone of American literature after the war period, is Harriet Prescott Spofford. A country girl, born in a Maine village, educated in the academy of a country town in New Hampshire, compelled early to be the chief support of an invalided father and mother, she turned from the usual employments open to the women of her time--work in the cotton mills and school teaching--to the precarious field of literature. That could mean only story-writing for the family weeklies of the day, for a bourgeois public that demanded sentimental love stories and romance. Success made her ambitious. She applied herself to the study of fiction--American, English, French. How wide was her reading one may learn from her essays later published in the _Atlantic_, "The Author of 'Charles Auchester'" and "Charles Reade." The new realism which was beginning to be felt as a force in fiction, she flouted with indignation:--"he never with Chinese accuracy, gives us gossiping drivel that reduces life to the dregs of the commonplace." Rather would she emulate the popular novelist Elizabeth Sheppard: "At his, Disraeli's, torch she lit her fires, over his stories she dreamed, his 'Contarini Fleming' she declared to be the touchstone of all romantic truth."[106] The essay reveals the author like a flash-light. She too dreamed over Disraeli and the early Bulwer-Lytton, over Charlotte Brontë and Poe, over George Sand and French romance until at last when she submitted her first story to the _Atlantic_, "In a Cellar," Lowell for a time feared that it was a translation. Other American women have had imaginations as lawless and as gorgeously rich as Harriet Prescott Spofford's; Augusta J. Evans Wilson, for instance, whose _St. Elmo_ (1866) sold enormously even to the end of the new period, but no other American woman of the century was able to combine with her imaginings and her riotous colorings a real distinction of style. When in the fifth volume of the _Atlantic_ appeared "The Amber Gods," judicious readers everywhere cried out in astonishment. Robert Browning and others in England praised it extravagantly. A new star had arisen, a novelist with a style that was French in its brilliancy and condensation, and oriental in its richness and color. _The Amber Gods_ fails of being a masterpiece by a margin so small that it exasperates, and it fails at precisely the point where most of the mid-century fiction failed. In atmosphere and style it is brilliant, so brilliant indeed that it has been appraised more highly than it deserves. Moreover, the _motif_, as one gathers it from the earlier pages, is worthy of a Hawthorne. The amber beads have upon them an ancestral curse, and the heroine with her supernatural beauty, a satanic thing without a soul, is a part of the mystery and the curse. Love seems at length to promise Undine-like a soul to this soulless creature: