Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

to keep the manuscript moving forward. Fortunately, she had plenty. Henry James, who wrote through the eyes of the married son, offered barbed critiques, but acknowledged the whole fraught disaster was Jordan’s to direct: “You will smile it out, I am sure, all successfully.”

The final product was a mess, Jordan freely admitted, but it was one of her own making and it was just the kind of chaos, held in check by tendrils of charm and good organization, that she relished. In fact, she dove right into another composite novel, The Sturdy Oak, a 1917 book about women’s suffrage, with contributions from her friend from the World, Anne O’Hagan, and the western novelist Mary Austin. During her editorship of Harper’s Bazaar from 1900 to 1913, a position she felt was finally a perfect fit, though the pace seemed painfully slow after late nights in the Pulitzer Building, she spent her days soliciting stories from Stephen Crane and opinions on fairy tales from Jane Addams. When Hearst bought the magazine, she moved over to Harper’s Book Publishers, where she edited Sinclair Lewis’s first novel. Her own literary production never slowed. She was a prolific novelist and short-story writer, work that included Tales of Destiny, Tales of the Cloister, Young Mr. X. Several of her books were turned into movies: Make Way for a Lady and The Girl in Number 29.

CAROLINE LOCKHART, “THE POST WOMAN”

After writing for the Boston Post, and then the Philadelphia Bulletin, Caroline Lockhart ran off with her editor and lover, A. C. McKenzie, to Cody, Wyoming. There, she palled around with Wild Bill Hickok, had a parade of boyfriends, bought and ran a newspaper, and wrote seven popular Westerns, including, The Man from the Bitter Roots, The Fighting Shepherdess, and The Lady Doc, which featured both lesbian characters and abortion. The Lady Doc met with a generally glowing reception, though one tremulous reviewer commented, “The story itself is almost too strong for the average reader; it will haunt a man, and what it will do for a nervous woman is not nice to think about.”

EVA (MCDONALD) VALESH, “EVA GAY”

After the New York Journal fired Valesh, she moved to Washington DC to write for a syndicate, churning out lengthy pieces analyzing policy details—postal thefts, tariffs, an increasing push toward imperialism that she felt was misguided. “It was the happiest work I ever did in my life,” she said later. She moved on to the American Federation of Labor’s magazine, but when Samuel Gompers refused to credit her, she went to the magazine American Club Woman. In 1907, her divorce from Frank Valesh was finalized. She remarried, and when her fun-loving, debt-ridden second husband died in 1923, Valesh renewed her Typographical Union membership, then spent long years as a proofreader for the New York Times.

A 1950s photograph of her with her adult son shows them sinking into a comfortable couch, in front of a window full of tree branches and light, his arm slung around her. It’s much more relaxed than the stiff 1890s portraits, high collars and tight fabric, photos taken while she struggled to balance her health, her child, and her ambition. In the later picture, her hair is still cropped short, and she wears a boldly patterned shirt. She’s leaning back and laughing.

ELEANOR (STACKHOUSE) ATKINSON, “NORA MARKS”

In 1909, Eleanor Stackhouse, now Eleanor Atkinson after her marriage, wrote a letter explaining the story behind a famous portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Even all these years later, after she’d penned a slew of history books, including The Boyhood of Lincoln, The Story of Chicago, and Johnny Appleseed, her undercover exploits loomed large in her mind. Signing the letter, underneath her real name, she still scribbled, “Nora Marks.” The two years in journalism, faux fainting in the street and investigating prison conditions, were a vital part of her life story. When one of her daughters published a novel with a plucky, mystery-solving heroine who worked as a reporter in Chicago, the daughter told an interviewer that writing ran in the family: “During the 90’s mother . . . was a sob sister on the Chicago Trib.”

HELEN (CUSACK) CARVALHO, “NELL NELSON”

On a warm June afternoon in 1915, New Jersey women gathered at the lovely Plainfield house of Mrs. S. S. Carvalho. An art gallery filled with old masters opened out into a garden where summer dresses swished across the grass. A thirteen-year-old girl played rousing music on the piano. A local suffragist leader gave a speech, warning the women to prepare for the fight ahead, and expressing gentle scorn for those who declared themselves neutral. “You know what the Lord said about them?” She asked the audience, nodding in their chairs. “It wasn’t pretty talk.”

Helen Cusack, unless she hid herself under an as-yet-undiscovered pseudonym, wrote little after her marriage in 1895. If she’d ever imagined herself in the tenement houses she visited, worried that one economic downturn or lost job could put her there, those concerns were long past. She raised her two daughters, Sarah and Helen, both teenagers at the time of the suffrage tea, and drove her husband to the station, where he continued to manage the business affairs of Hearst’s papers; the couple attended Hearst’s wedding in 1903. Her home became a site for fundraisers for the soldiers fighting in Europe during World War I and lectures on topics like “What the Women Are Doing in the War.”

ELIZABETH BANKS, “POLLY POLLOCK”

During World War I, while sales of her book Dik: A Dog of Belgium, featuring a Red Cross dog, funded wounded soldiers, Elizabeth Banks traveled back to Wisconsin, site of her lonely childhood. After writing her condemnation of stunt reporting, Banks had a long literary career. Despite her early reservations about do-gooders, she became overtly political, campaigning for woman’s suffrage and other causes. Tromping through meadows, she peered at the experimental farm where her uncle tried to pay the mortgage by tinkering with the latest scientific theories of making molasses. Old habits die hard and even here, for