Page:The American Novel - Carl Van Doren.djvu/264

 Mrs. Catherwood during the years 1889-1894 forecast almost all the developments of the more fecund years from 1896—1902 which saw the most active school of historical romances the United States has produced. Merely to name the more successful performances of the period suffices to show in what fashion the romantic imagination then worked: Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), James Lane Allen's The Choir Invisible (1897), Richard Harding Davis's Soldiers of Fortune (1897), S. Weir Mitchell's Hugh Wynne (1897) and The Adventures of François (1898), Charles Major’s When Knighthood Was in Flower (1898), Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock (1898), Mary Johnston's Prisoners of Hope (1898) and To Have and to Hold (1899), F. Marion Crawford's Via Crucis (1898) and In the Palace of the King (1900), Paul Leicester Ford's Janice Meredith (1899), Winston Churchill's Richard Carvel (1899), The Crisis (1901), and The Crossing (1904), Booth Tarkington's Monsieur Beaucaire (1900), Maurice Thompson's Alice of Old Vincennes (1900), Henry Harland's The Cardinal's Snuff-Box (1901), George Barr McCutcheon's Graustark (1901), Robert W. Chambers's Cardigan (1901), Mary Hartwell Catherwood's Lazarre (1901), Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902), Gertrude Atherton's The Conqueror (1902), Ellen Glasgow's The Battleground (1902) and Deliverance (1904), John Fox's The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903). Mary E. Wilkins Freeman left her austere tales of rural New England to write a romance of the swashbuckling seventeenth century, The Heart's Highway (1900); Edward Bellamy similarly turned away from his forte in The