The Women Who Make Our NovelsOverton, Grant M. (Grant Martin)
General
The Women Who Make Our Novels
Overton, Grant M. (Grant Martin)
Novelists, American -- Biography; Women novelists, American -- Biography
Nevertheless he was right. “I am at home as soon as the small boy is, or
sooner,” Mrs. Rinehart proclaims. “And I am better for the change. It
takes me out of the house. The short ride in the train or the motor to
the city detaches me automatically from the grocery list and a frozen
pipe in the garage.
“In the city I have two bright and attractive rooms. My desk is ready;
my secretary is waiting. Sometimes I work all day; sometimes I look over
my mail and go out to luncheon and do not come back.
“Then automatically the train or car going home detaches me from
publishers and autograph hunters and pen and ink and paper. I am ready
to play.”
She lives in Sewickley, a suburb of Pittsburgh. The home is known as
Glen Osborne. She is not an early riser. “I like to let the day break on
me gradually.” After breakfast there are household arrangements. She is
no slave to her typewriter. “I may say that I work every week-day
morning and perhaps three afternoons.” She goes riding, plays golf,
visits the dressmaker the other three. She is a member of the Equal
Franchise Association and of the Juvenile Court Association. There are
long vacations, but what she sees and experiences a-traveling is usually
rendered to her readers. “Thus in the summer we spend weeks in the
saddle in the mountains of the Far West, or fishing in Canada.... These
outdoor summers were planned at first because there were four men and
one woman in our party. Now, however, I love the open as men do.” She
writes about it better than many men do.
Mrs. Rinehart, in any account of herself, is certain to record the fact
that she has never done newspaper work, although in recent years she has
done “political and editorial writing.” She was never a newspaper
reporter. The “moral equivalent,” as William James would have styled it,
was, in her case, undoubtedly her hospital experience. Like any young
nurse, she saw “life in the raw,” to borrow the unoriginal but
completely expressive phrase used in her novel _K._ And then she had the
great fortune to marry happily and to become a mother. This is the
secret of her success, and all of it. Young and impressionable, she saw
what life is at its most agonizing, most horrible, most heroic moments.
Still young, but with her thoroughly normal and wholesome nature losing
its plasticity and taking on a definite mold, she found what life can be
in its permanent and most deeply satisfying beauty. Sympathy, genuine
affection and sanative humor were hers in fair measure; when they failed
her momentarily her husband replenished the healing store.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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