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
Her first novel, _The Circular Staircase_, was a mystery tale; so was
her second, _The Man in Lower Ten_. They appeared in 1908 and 1909
respectively. Her first play had been produced in New York in 1907. This
was _Double Life_, staged at the Bijou Theater. In conjunction with her
husband, she wrote _The Avenger_ (1908) and much later she collaborated
with Avery Hopwood in the highly successful farce _Seven Days_. This was
first played at the Astor Theater, New York. In 1913, at the Harris
Theater, New York, her farce _Cheer Up_ was put on. “Two plays were
successful,” in Mrs. Rinehart’s opinion.
She has written short stories for all the most popular American
magazines--the _Saturday Evening Post_ perhaps particularly;
_McClure’s_, _Everybody’s_, _Collier’s_, the _American_ and the
_Metropolitan_ are others she enumerates offhand. And her short stories
are among the most excellent produced by a living American writer. Some
of them, unified by possession of the same principal character or
characters, have been published in book form, as _Tish_ and _Bab, a
Sub-Deb_. The stories in _Tish_ relate various escapades of an unmarried
woman of advanced years, the heroine of Mrs. Rinehart’s earlier novel,
_The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_. Letitia Carberry, “Tish,”
is a person without a literary parallel. Well-to-do, excitement-loving,
curious, with a passion for guiding the lives of two other maidens like
herself, Lizzie and Aggie; with a nephew, Charlie Sands, who throws up
hopeless hands before her unpredictable performances, Miss Carberry is
unique and funny beyond easy characterization. She pokes at the
carburetor with a hairpin, rides horseback in a divided skirt, puts
great faith in blackberry cordial, shoulders a shotgun and mends the
canoe with chewing gum. These things in the tales composing _Tish_; in
_The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_ we have a story in which
the mystery of extraordinary and scandalous occurrences in a hospital
where Tish is a patient is finally solved by her efforts. Nothing
affords a better exhibition of Mrs. Rinehart’s skill as a story-teller
than this novel. Things that with less skillful handling would be both
ghoulish and shocking, are so related that they strike the reader merely
as bizarre or outrageously laughable, or as heightening the unguessable
puzzle of what is to come. The technical triumph is very great, as great
as that achieved in the last half of George M. Cohan’s play, _Seven Keys
to Baldpate_, where a corpse is lugged about without offending the
observer. _The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry_ is a remarkable
evidence of the lengths to which farce can be carried and remain
inoffensive--and become the source of helpless mirth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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