Читать книгу The Women Who Make Our Novels онлайн

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“That’s always the way with writing novels and stories. I never know how they are going to come out when I begin, any more than I could take a child right now and say just how I was going to shape its whole life.

“Most writers who deal with California in their books tell about nature and the plain people and the proletariat and such things. No one but myself has ever told anything about social life in San Francisco. It is full of drama. It resembles New York in part, but it has a character all its own.”

Mrs. Atherton works every morning from seven until noon, and does with dry bread and tea for a working lunch. Her New York apartment has balconied windows overlooking the Hudson. Before the door of the house which contains it stands a Barnard College dormitory. Eleanor Gates, writing in Books and Authors for September, 1917, said:

“In the wintertime, on ‘first Sundays,’ the Atherton apartment gathers in a very crush of notables—authors, painters, soldiers, diplomats, publishers, journalists, people of fashion, scholars, travelers and not a few who figure under the general title of ‘admirers of genius,’ and who have maneuvered for a card. Mrs. Atherton has the Englishwoman’s interest in world politics; her knowledge of things European is of the rare first-hand kind; her horizon is international. The lucky old-time friend of the author’s from ‘out West’ meets in her drawing-room a good percentage of the most distinguished people of the metropolis, along with men and women who are prominent abroad.”