The Women Who Make Our NovelsOverton, Grant M. (Grant Martin)
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The Women Who Make Our Novels
Overton, Grant M. (Grant Martin)
Novelists, American -- Biography; Women novelists, American -- Biography
Do you remember the Penelope books? Do you _remember_! Somehow,
_Penelope’s Progress_, wherein we accompany Salemina, Francesca and
Penelope through Scotland, has always seemed a bit the best. Page 2,
please:
“On arriving in New York, Francesca discovered that the young lawyer
whom for six months she had been advising to marry somebody ‘more worthy
than herself’ was at last about to do it. This was somewhat in the
nature of a shock, for Francesca has been in the habit, ever since she
was seventeen, of giving her lovers similar advice, and up to this time
no one of them has ever taken it. She therefore has had the not
unnatural hope, I think, of organizing at one time or another all those
disappointed and faithful swains into a celibate brotherhood; and
perhaps of driving by the interesting monastery with her husband and
calling his attention modestly to the fact that these poor monks were
filling their barren lives with deeds of piety, trying to remember their
Creator with such assiduity that they might, in time, forget Her.”
Frank Stockton could be as funny as that. Mark Twain might have written
the close of the first chapter, where Francesca and Penelope, heads bent
over a genealogical table of the English kings, try to decide whether
“b. 1665” means born or beheaded. Irvin Cobb, shaking our sides with his
discussion of English pronunciation of proper names, and gravely
referring to a Norwegian fjord (“pronounced by the English, Ferguson”)
was anticipated by nearly twenty years when Mrs. Wiggin wrote:
“On the ground floor are the Misses Hepburn-Sciennes (pronounced
Hebburn-Sheens); on the floor above us are Miss Colquhoun (Cohoon) and
her cousin Miss Cockburn-Sinclair (Coburn-Sinkler). As soon as the
Hepburn-Sciennes depart, Mrs. M’Collop expects Mrs. Menzies of
Kilconquhar, of whom we shall speak as Mrs. Mingess of Kinyukkar.”
_Marm Lisa_ is graced with the presence of S. Cora Grubb, as well as the
youthful Atlantic and Pacific Simonson. Have we not yet with us such
places as Mrs. Grubb’s Unity Hall, the Meeting-Place of the Order of
Present Perfection? We have. On the wall was “an ingenious pictorial
representation of the fifty largest cities of the world, with the
successful establishment of various regenerating ideas indicated by
colored disks of paper neatly pasted on the surface.” Blue was for
Temperance, green for the Single Tax, orange, Cremation; red, Abolition
of War; purple, Vegetarianism; yellow, Hypnotism; black, Dress Reform;
blush rose, Social Purity; silver, Theosophy; magenta, Religious
Liberty; and, somewhat inappropriately, crushed strawberry denoted that
in this spot the Emancipation of Women had made a forward stride. It was
left for a small gold star to signify the progress of the Eldorado face
powder, S. Cora Grubb, sole agent.
The cat ’Zekiel in _The Old Peabody Pew_:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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