Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/472

 was republished in 1924 by P. K. Pirret & Company in Tacoma. The embarrassment that the appearance of this novel caused her in her home town of Bellingham, was described by in the San Francisco Sunday Examiner Magazine in an article entitled "Seven Women on the War Path," which had this large-type introductory:

Seven angry women in Whatcom, Washington, has threatened the life of Ella Higginson. They claim identity with Mrs. Flush in that clever author's latest novel. With their shrill, excited treble is heard the sullen muttering of belligerent bassos, for several married men unblushingly declare that they are Mr. Mallory, the too-gay Lothario of the book.

Hatred of the little novelist runs high in her home town; so high that the mails bring ugly anonymous letters to her door; so high that she is not allowed to venture upon the streets at any time unprotected, and has been practically a prisoner in her own house for weeks. She recently decided to take refuge in her native town in Oregon, but was warned not to come, because of violence at the hands of certain persons also clamoring for kinship with her book.

This Sunday newspaper feature was highly colored, but this novel and other stories did stir up a good deal of indignation among her neighbors for the way they thought they were being portrayed. One of them has said:

Mrs. Higginson used her friends in her stories, often making them recognizable but putting strange dialect forms of speech in her characterization of them, which turned them into enemies. Mrs. Higginson has disclaimed such fidelity of realism and told of Mariella to a newspaper reporter.

I did not put one real person in the book. I did not have in mind for any character one of these people—not one who has been chosen from real life as exactly fitting it. Then the reporter observed:

Whenever Mrs. Higginson draws her brows together and says with guiltless solemnity, "I only take the characteristics of several persons to make one character," she is interrupted by spontaneous bursts of mirth. "Of course, of course. That is precisely the way with Mrs. Humphrey Ward . . . and every other writer who gets into fixes by the 'absolute verity' of his delineations."