The farmer and mechanic. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 18??-19??, 1911-03-07
STORY OF KATE
WIGGIN
Over Two Million Copies OF
Her Book Have Been Sold

who, by a certain quiet cnaTh1 OF theli
own. have freed themselves from most
Of the trammels Of form and traol1loh
TO which more ordinary writers are
subject: who, even in doing quite ordl-
nary things. do them III an ~eStTaordi-
nary way; who, in all they DO, are III
themselves, their personality, thelf at
titudes toward life, their own pest eA-
cuse for so doing.
are Just a few facts that are
worth putting briefly before US at the
start in order to understand more
clearly this particular authors sources
of inspiration, range of interests II
limitations of experiences; that she was
horn III Philadclphia; that she lived
throughout her %girlhood in the midst
Of the peaceful beauty Of rural New
England; that at the age of eighteen,
after her st~ep-father's failing health
had made a removal to California i'm
perative, she Joined her family at San
ia Barbara Immediately after her
graduation from the Abbott Academy
at A~ndover; that it was directly
through her efforts that the first free
ltindergardens for o children were
organized i'll California;; II that Tor
The past twenty-five years she has been
prominently associated in many an adj
ministrative capacity with important
CutCdl1ctid1 IIloN w
concern US for our present pur-
pose only to the extent to which they
explain why her writings are what they
are. and why they could not we'll have
been otherwise.
"A single sentence will serve to
make this clear. Kate Douglas Wig
gn is at heart a romanticist whose
romance IS woven not from the stuff
that dreams are made Of, but from the
honlespun threads of everyday life.
She has an exHterant and unQuencha-
BILE spirit Of optimism, Of the sort that
bubbles up spontaneously at the most
unlikely moments, casting a dash of
gold cross her just at the mo-
ment when the shadows seem to lie
heaviest. She reaches the heart and
she appeals to the memory because she.
has in abundance his power OF max
ing very ordinary lives seem beautiful:
becausc she writes only Of the life that
she has seen: and because from the
first story that she wrote up to the
most recent. she has always preserved
the clear directnesS of narration, the
unafTectedness OF form, that are the
qualities Unborn in any one who hopes
to interest q youthful audience, to hold
bright, eager little faces under the
spell OF a spoken tale. ....
New England is her chosen field.
and she goes back to it again and
again, with 10 visible diminution OF
interest or Of power. On the other
hand, it is quite easy to see how the
stimulus of foreign scenes of the kind
that produced the Penelope series
might grow duh to her as their famil-
iarity increased.
The easiest way to understand why
Kate Douglas Virgins books are just
they are II not something else;
way she is in a measure an anomaly
in American letters, being on the one
hand 50 peculiarly native and ever
local that n feels it would be posi-
Bile to pick out the particular habita-
ton of her childhood simply by stroll
ing through New England by-ways
until one happened upon it; and yet,
on the other. so cosmopolitan that she
has been frankly recognized in Eng
land by more than one critic as our
leading writer oil her sex, with just one
possible rival, Mrs. Wilkins Freeman;
and that, While she has that high
standard of good taste in letters that
makes he next of kin to Agnes Rep
plier (is this, Ny the way, a mark Of
sisterhoOd due to her Phiiadelphia
birth p. she nevertheless has achieved
that approal of democracy so conc1u-
siveIy and substantially attested by
sales that reach tho two hundred thou
sand mark for a single volum-the
easiest way to understand ali this IS
to remember that before she was
known as a writer h was a master
hand at kindergarten work: she knew
how to hold the attention of children.
she knew the way which for her was
the best, the inevitable way, to tell a
story to children; and all the stories
that she has printed have owed their
power and their charm to that pervad-
ing simplicity and sincerity and naive
l~teralness hat made her successful in
the chosen work of her girlhood.
And it is precisely in the spirit of
~ldhood that the public has received
her books. Whether she writes Of the
siInple-hearted Rebecca or the cosmo-
poitan and sophisticated PenelOoe.
there is the same clamorous demand
for mora demand which. like all
Sood-natured story-te1lers. n ,3oes