GRACE S. RICHMOND
Why do some of Grace S. Richmond’s books sell faster than the books of
any other American woman writer? Because they do! And their popularity
has no relation whatever to their size. Some of the littlest--_On
Christmas Day in the Morning_, _On Christmas Day in the Evening_, and
_The Enlisting Wife_, for instances--sell most rapidly. Not the size;
perhaps it has something to do with the substance!
No perhaps about it! Mrs. Richmond has, more perfectly than most of her
contemporaries, the gift for disclosing the simplest and deepest
feelings of men and women everywhere in just those words which are at
the back of our heads and hardly ever on our lips. They are the words we
ache to utter but never quite bring ourselves to say. She says them for
us. She makes articulate and perfect the full feeling that is in us. She
is our emotional self--that part of self which is a common
possession--touched with pentecostal fire. When we read her we have the
delight of self-expression blended with a feeling of gratefulness to her
for affording it to us.
These are strong words. Gush, some will call them. Well, among the
people of repressed instincts there is one instinct seldom
repressed--the instinct to sneer at those who let themselves go. This is
an inconsistency which will trouble them (we point it out that they may
give themselves over to their favorite delight of self-torture) but
which bothers the rest of us not at all. We know--the rest of us--full
well that the emotionalism of which Mrs. Richmond is the most successful
exponent is a cleansing and refreshing exercise. We read her and come
away a little surer of ourselves and of the world about us. For the
essence of that world is the people in it and there is something in most
people that does not change.
Mrs. Richmond has written many books. The only exact fact to be stated
is that in 1914--and several of her most successful books have appeared
since--she had sold 400,000 copies. The total must be well on to the
million mark by now. Then there are the cheaper editions of her earlier
stories; there are the readers of her work in the _Ladies’ Home Journal_
and other publications; there are the libraries where copies of her are
always “out” and there are new circles of readers, each book being much
like a stone breaking the surface of a pond and making its own widening
ripples;--no matter. Millions read Mrs. Richmond. That is enough to
know. It is the achievement of a quiet, country-dwelling woman whose
publishers have a time to get her to be photographed!
She lives in Fredonia, New York, and the sketch of her life is a bare
outline. She was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the daughter of the
Rev. Charles Edwards Smith, D.D., and Catherine A. (Kimball) Smith. Her
father was a Baptist clergyman, the author of _The Baptism of Fire_ and
_The World Lighted_. Grace was an only child. While she was still a
young girl the family moved to Syracuse, New York. There the daughter
was educated in the Syracuse High School and under private tutors,
following college courses of study under their direction. She gave some
indications of the writer’s gift before her marriage, in 1887, to Dr.
Nelson Guernsey Richmond of Fredonia. But the wife of a young physician
with a growing practice has not a great deal of leisure. It was not
until 1891 that Mrs. Richmond, whose first work was short stories for
magazines, attracted special attention by a story which appeared in the
Thanksgiving number of the _Ladies’ Home Journal_.
It had come in as hundreds of other things come in, had been read by the
principal reader and had by him been handed directly to the editor, who
accepted it without delay. The story was called _The Flowing
Shoe-String_ and described the reformation, through love, of a
charmingly untidy little literary genius. Mrs. Richmond remembers it
very well! She found herself in rather notable company--Mrs. A. D. T.
Whitney, Frances E. Willard, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the Rev. T. De Witt
Talmage and Russell Sage were other contributors to that Thanksgiving
number.
Very, very modest, and very, very busy, Mrs. Richmond did not deluge the
editor with other work. In fact, seven whole years passed before she
made her second appearance in the _Ladies’ Home Journal_, in 1898, with
_A Silk-Lined Girl_. It was the Thanksgiving number again. The company
had changed but was still notable; Henry M. Stanley, Caroline Atwater
Mason and Mary E. Wilkins, now Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, were on the
table of contents.
This second bow was the real introduction to her audience. Since 1898
Mrs. Richmond has been among the magazine’s most steady and popular
contributors. For twelve years, from 1902 to 1913, not a year went by
when she was not represented in its pages. Her most successful work has
had its first appearance there. May and June of 1902 brought to the
_Journal’s_ readers the first of a series of tales about Juliet which
became, in 1905, a book, _The Indifference of Juliet_. Juliet’s
indifference was toward a young author in relation to the subject of
marriage. Naturally interest in her did not stop with _The Indifference
of Juliet_ and so, in 1907, her further experiences as communicated to
the _Journal’s_ readers were published between covers under the title
_With Juliet in England_.
Mrs. Richmond is a doctor’s wife. In 1910 she created the character for
whom she is most widely known and thanked--Redfield Pepper Burns, the
generous, red-haired young doctor of uncertain temper and humane
impulses of whom we haven’t heard the last yet. _Red Pepper Burns_ was
followed by _Mrs. Red Pepper_ and _Red Pepper’s Patients_. But hold
on--not so fast. In 1906, between the two Juliet books, Mrs. Richmond
had given us the story of _The Second Violin_. In 1908 came _Around the
Corner in Gay Street_, in 1909 _A Court of Inquiry_; there were also the
two Christmas booklets--_On Christmas Day in the Morning_ (1908) and _On
Christmas Day in the Evening_ (1910). Between _Red Pepper Burns_ and
_Mrs. Red Pepper_ appeared _Strawberry Acres_ and a year after _Mrs.
Red Pepper_ was published _The Twenty-fourth of June_.
But this is becoming a mere catalogue, and the place for a list of Mrs.
Richmond’s books is at the end of this chapter. What we want to do here
is to consider her writing, or a few fragments of it as representative
as may be, and try to see what she does and how she does it.
Let it be said at the outset that she makes slips which would be
inexcusable if we did not all make the same slips. In the second chapter
of _Red Pepper’s Patients_ Dr. Burns has sheltered a Hungarian violinist
who is now playing for the physician and his wife: “Warmed and fed, his
Latin nature leaping up from its deep depression to the exaltation of
the hour, the appeal he made to them was intensely pathetic.” The
Hungarians are not a Latin race, but we know what she means, so why be
bothered? “His attitude, as he stood before his hosts, had the
unconscious grace of the foreigner.” Of any foreigner--they are all
graceful! Hang it! We always think of them as unconsciously graceful.
Why quibble?
Mrs. Richmond can be humorous in the most natural way. From _The
Twenty-fourth of June_:
“‘Rufus,’ said his wife solemnly, following him into the white-tiled
bathroom, ‘I want you should look at those bath-towels. I never in my
life set eyes on anything like them. They must have cost--I don’t know
what they cost--I didn’t know there were such bath-towels made!’
“‘I don’t want to wrap myself in a blanket,’ asserted her husband. ‘I
want to know I’ve got a towel in my hand, that I can whisk round me and
slap myself with. Look here, let’s get to bed....
“‘Ruth,’ said he, with sudden solemnity, ‘I forgot to undress in my
dressing-room. Had I better put my clothes on and go take ’em off again
in there?’”
It is funny because it is so exactly what we do say in such situations.
It is naturalism of a very high order and the more humorous for being
entirely unforced.
In the creation of character Mrs. Richmond is at her best simply because
she differentiates her people ever so slightly from what, lacking a
better word, we generally call types. Her main triumph is evenly shared
in this field and that other, of which we spoke at the outset. _Red
Pepper Burns_ was a very great success as novels go and Redfield Pepper
Burns is a very distinct success as the persons of fiction go; but the
Christmas stories that Mrs. Richmond has written and such intimate
little heart messages as _The Enlisting Wife_ and _The Whistling Mother_
are just as successful. Take the opening of _The Enlisting Wife_:
“Judith Taine, who was married to Lieutenant Kirke Wendell, Junior, just
before he sailed for France, is keeping in a small blue book a little
record which he may see when he returns. It begins with the last
paragraph of a letter from her young husband.
“‘If you hadn’t enlisted with me, my Judith, I shouldn’t be half the man
I’m beginning to hope I am, over here in France. If manhood means
standing up straight and strong, facing the future without the old
boyish love of ease and snug corners--then--well--time will prove me,
anyhow. Darling, can you guess how you are with me, every waking
moment--and some of the sleeping ones too, when I’m lucky? My wife--even
though I could be with her only those few hours after Father married
us--how absolutely she is that! My enlisting wife, my fighting
comrade!--_O Judith!_’
“I don’t cry often--not I, Judith Taine Wendell. I can’t afford to cry,
there’s too much to be done. But that last paragraph did bring the
tears--happy ones--and I kissed the dear words again and again before I
tucked the letter away in the warm place where each one lives, day and
night, till the next one comes. O Kirke! Even you don’t know yet how
‘absolutely’ I am your wife!”
Such writing is insusceptible of analysis; it admits only of
characterization. We all know how hostile some of the characterization
is likely to be, but the fact remains that Mrs. Richmond has contrived
perfectly to set down _not_ the things the Judith Wendells and Kirke
Wendells actually say and write but the unspoken thought that gives body
and coloring to their actual words. It is what we wish we could say and
write that Mrs. Richmond gives us. She transliterates the true feeling.
Remember, it is not our feeling but the depth of it that we are
habitually ashamed to show. It is only necessary to make that reflection
to understand Mrs. Richmond’s success. She is as popular with our
emotional selves as would be a person who should write letters for the
unfortunate inhabitants of an illiterate community. Most of us are
emotional illiterates and are likely to remain so. We need Mrs. Richmond
and more like her.
BOOKS BY GRACE S. RICHMOND
_The Indifference of Juliet_, 1905.
_With Juliet in England_, 1907.
_Round the Corner in Gay Street_, 1908.
_Red Pepper Burns_, 1910.
_Strawberry Acres_, 1911.
_Mrs. Red Pepper_, 1913.
_The Second Violin_, 1906.
_A Court of Inquiry_, 1909.
_On Christmas Day in the Morning_, 1908.
_On Christmas Day in the Evening_, 1910.
_The Twenty-fourth of June_, 1914.
_Under the Country Sky._
_Under the Christmas Stars._
_The Brown Study._
_Red Pepper’s Patients_, 1917.
_The Whistling Mother_, 1917.
_The Enlisting Wife_, 1918.
_Brotherly House._
_Red and Black_, 1919.
_Foursquare_, 1922.
_The first six books are published by A. L. Burt Company, New York; the
rest by Doubleday, Page & Company, New York._