The field that she abandoned was taken later by Mary Hartwell Catherwood, a native of Ohio, the first woman novelist of the period to be born west of the Alleghenies. She was, moreover, the first woman of any prominence in American literary ranks to acquire a college education, graduating not in the East, as one might suppose, but from a new college in the new West. The fact is significant. After a brief period of teaching in Illinois, she became a newspaper writer and a general literary worker, and she published her first book, _A Woman in Armor_, as early as 1875. Juveniles, marketable stories, sketches, critiques, flowed from her pen for nearly twenty years, and yet in 1888 she had settled upon no fixed style or field of work and she was completely unknown to the reading public. She seems to have been trying the literary currents of the time. Her first experiment, not to mention her juveniles, was her _Craque-O'-Doom_, 1881, an E. P. Roe-like novel of the _He Fell in Love with His Wife_ type, but it made no impression. "Don't you know," she makes one of her characters say in words that are an explanation, "that the key of the times is not sentiment but practical common sense? Just after the war when the country was wrought to a high pitch of nerves, current literature overflowed with self-sacrifice. According to that showing--and current literature ought to be a good reflection of the times--everybody was running around trying to outdo his neighbor in the broken heart and self-renunciation business." Next she assayed to enter the "practical sense" school, and her "Serena," _Atlantic_, 1882, with its unsparingly realistic picture of a death and funeral in an Ohio farmhouse, shows that she might have made herself the Miss Jewett or the Miss Wilkins of her native region. But minute studies of contemporary life failed to satisfy the demands within her. She awoke at last to her true vocation over a volume of Parkman, let us suppose over the sixth and the sixteenth chapters of _The Old Régime in Canada_. From the glowing pages of this master of narrative she caught a full breath of romance and for the first time she realized her powers.