by Mary Roberts Rinehart
[Farrar & Rinehart, $2.50]
SOMEBODY once said of Roosevelt that his was not an extraordinary mind, but simply an ordinary mind used in an extraordinary way. The comment recurs to the reader of My Story, Mary Roberts Rinehart’s autobiography. Here is no ‘genius.’ The Mary Roberts of the early ’90s was like thousands of other girls of her day; her environment and education were commonplace. How did she make herself what she is?
Countless girls, with a little education, a little professional experience, carry through into the period of marriage and maternity the ambition to write only to give it up, because they cannot manage to combine family responsibilities and authorship successfully. Mrs. Rinehart managed, not — probably because she had a different kind of ability, but because she mobilized on her problem the whole force of her will, her immense vitality, and her skill in capitalizing experience. What she has done (we seem to hear her say) any woman could do, if she tried hard enough. Hers is an admirably modest autobiography, her single evident point of pride being that an immense professional activity has never been allowed to interfere with a continuously happy and constructive family life. She has little patience with the woman who sacrifices her family to her career. ‘ I would both work and hold my home together. If anything suffered, it would be work.’ This was said years ago, just after The Circular Staircase had been accepted, justifying an ice-cream-and-cake party for the little boys. And the resolve persisted, even through the time when Mr. Curtis offered her the editorship of the Ladies’ Home Journal, and she refused, for the sake of the Pittsburgh home.
How full the years between have been is hardly to be grasped even by a count of the forty books and plays to her credit; My Story reveals the extraordinarily varied activities underlying them. Her adventures in putting on a play and following it on the road; her experiences at the front during the World War, and her interviews with the Queen of the Belgians, Queen Mary, and various military leaders; the time she sneaked across to Calais on a boat she was forbidden to take; her life in Washington during and after the war; the camping holidays with husband and sons in the West; adventures in Egypt and Bagdad — all are as varied and chromatic as a kaleidoscope.
At one point Mrs. Rinehart mentions her sons’ discovery, through their literature courses at college, ‘that Mother was no light of the world, but only a good professional writer.’ But this is only a small part of the truth. My Story is the revelation of a real personality, of a will to see life steadily and see it whole, of purpose intent to accomplish, sweetened by a spontaneous and loving interest in people and lightened by irrepressible humor.
TERESA S. FITZPATRICK