Читать книгу The Women Who Make Our Novels онлайн

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“‘Brains’ is Mrs. Atherton’s favorite word. Any printer who sets up a novel of hers must add a special stock to his font of the six letters that spell it. Neither in her life nor in her work has she any patience with dullness. She could no more have written Pollyanna than she could have written the Book of Job. The blithe, all-conquering brain is her field of research.”

Mrs. Atherton, he tells us, neither talks nor writes “like a book.” She is “always buoyant and stimulating. Brains occupy as much space in her talk as in her books. She is never dull.” And turning to The Conqueror, he develops his idea:

“There were, we know, a few persons who resisted Alexander Hamilton. But important though they were, they were as dust under Mrs. Atherton’s feet. Hamilton led a charmed life. Hurricanes had spared him and the storms of war, of party, of faction left him safe. He was a genius, and cosmic forces enfolded him as in a protective shell. Surely no character was ever more certainly created to the hand of a novelist than was Hamilton for Mrs. Atherton. Not a merit or fault of his, but Mrs. Atherton could caress it with a mother’s hand. How she hates Clinton because he fought her idol, and how much she despises Jefferson! But Washington—even the most austere of the virtues of Washington pass with Mrs. Atherton, because he loved Hamilton as a father loves a son....