Early Childhood
Gertrude Franklin Horn was born on October 30, 1857 in San Francisco to Thomas Ludovich (in business) and Gertrude Franklin Horn. Her paternal grandfather, Stephen Franklin, was a devout Presbyterian, insisted she be well read, and this influenced her greatly. She eloped with George H.B. Atherton, son of Faxon Atherton, on February 14, 1876. She was only 19 at the time, and later had two children with him. Two tragedies changed her life dramatically: Her son George would die of diphtheria, and her husband perished at sea. She was left with her daughter Muriel, and she needed some way to support the two of them.
Writing career
After her husband's death, in 1887, she was free to pursue her writing career as a protégée of Ambrose Bierce, eventually writing 60 books and numerous articles and short stories. She first submitted The Randolphs of Redwood: A Romance (March 31, 1883-May 5, 1883) to The Argonaut under the pseudonym Asmodeus. When she revealed to her family that she was the author, it caused her to be ostracized. In 1888, she left for New York, leaving Muriel with her grandmother, and London, and would eventually return to California. Atherton's first signed novel, What Dreams May Come, was published in 1888 under the pseudonym Frank Lin.
In 1889, she was invited to Paris by her sister-in-law Alejandra Rathbone (married Major Jared Lawrence Rathbone), which she would accept. That year, she heard from British publisher G. Routledge and Sons, that they would publish her first two books. William Sharp wrote in The Spectator that he praised her fiction and would later invite Atherton to stay with him and his wife, Elizabeth, in South Hampstead.
In London, she had the opportunity through Jane Wilde to meet her son, Oscar. She recalled in her memoir Adventures of a Novelist (1932), that she made an excuse to avoid the meeting because she thought he was physically repulsive. In a 1899 article for London's Bookman, Atherton wrote of Wilde's style and associated it with "the decadence, the loss of virility that must follow over-civilization."
She returned to California in 1890 due to the death of her grandfather Franklin and her mother-in-law Dominga Atherton. She then resumed taking care of Muriel. In 1891, she wrote for The San Francisco Examiner, and this was where she met Ambrose Bierce, with whom she carried on a taunting, almost love-hate friendship.
When Kate Field remarked that California writers' neglect of the picturesque and romantic old Spanish life of the state, Atherton explored the history and culture of Spanish California in Monterey, San Juan Bautista, Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara. From these experiences came Before the Gringo Came (1894).
She wrote Doomswoman in 1892, and it was published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, before being published in book form in 1893. The story focuses on Chonita Moncada y Iturbi and her love of Diego Estenega (modeled after Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo), as he dreams of modernizing California, retaining its Mexican character without sacrificing American economic vigor. Chonita is Catholic, and her faith stands in the way of Diego's political ambitions. The dramatic climax peaks when Diego kills Chonita's brother, Reynaldo, and she is forced to choose between her cultural loyalty or the love of her life. This story closely resembles Romeo and Juliet.
The book was successful with critics, some comparing it to Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona. She was not pleased with this because Jackson was not from California, but was when Bierce said it was "as in its class . . . superior to any that any Californian has done".
In 1892, Atherton left for New York. There she wrote for the New York World. She also wrote letters to Bierce, confiding her loneliness, her dismay at the necessity to do freelance writing (in particular the New York World), and even how much she disliked eastern literary circles. Her distaste came from their belittlement of the West and their authors, and the fact they did not accept Bierce's work.
She next wrote Patience Sparhawk and Her Times, A Novel (1897), but it proved to be too controversial. This rejection encouraged her to leave for London. It was 1895 and John Lane of The Bodley Head agreed to publish it, but not for two years. She continued to write, writing book reviews for Oliver Fry's Vanity Fair and even completed The Randolphs of Redwoods, (retitled A Daughter of the Vine, 1899) while staying in Haworth.
Max Pemberton asked her to write a 10,000 word for a series he was editing for Cassells Pocket Library, which she wrote A Whirl Asunder (1895).
Once Patience Sparhawk and Her Times, A Novel was published, William Robertson Nicoll gave a review of it in the April 12, 1897 edition of The Bookman and said it was "crude" in its portrayal of a clever young woman with burning interest in life and identified it as a protest against the tame American novel. In a May 15 issue of The New York Times, the reviewer said that Atherton had "incontestable" ability and a "very original talent" while noting that the book offered a series of "fleshy" episodes in Patience's life that must have scared a sensitive reader.
It was banned from the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute, and the San Francisco Call review said it represented Atherton's departure from her proper literary goal of treating early California themes romantically
The year 1898 saw her complete The Californians, her first novel in the post-Spanish era. Critics received this much more than Patience and a review in the The Spectator in the October 1, 1898 issue said it "was by far more convincing and attractive in delineating California manners and morals. . . . The novel fairly establishes her claim to be considered as one of the most vivid and entertaining interpreters of the complex characters of emancipated American womanhood." The November 8 Bookman said it was her "most ambitious work," which has "a feeling of surety that only the consciousness of knowing one's ground can convey";
She would travel to Rouen and write American Wives and English Husbands (1898), set in contemporary time. In this novel, she contrasts English and American men, American and English civilizations, and the relationships between men and women. She would also complete The Valiant Runaways (1898), an adventure novel for boys that dealt with the Spanish Mexican attempt to civilize California. 1899 saw her return to the United States.
Her novel Senator North (1900), was based on Maine's senator Eugene Hale.
In a May 1904 article Why Is American Literature Bourgeois? in the North American Review, Atherton critiqued William Dean Howells "the littleism" or "thin" realism of his fiction.
She is best remembered for her "California Series," several novels and short stories dealing with the social history of California. The series includes The Splendid, Idle Forties (1902); The Conqueror (1902), which is a fictionalized biography of Alexander Hamilton; and her sensational, semi-autobiographical novel Black Oxen (1923), about a middle-aged woman who miraculously becomes young again after glandular therapy. The latter was made into a silent movie in 1923.
Her novels often feature strong heroines who pursue independent lives, undoubtedly a reaction to her stifling married life. "The Foghorn," written in 1933, is a psychological horror story that has been compared to The Yellow Wallpaper. W. Somerset Maugham called it a powerful story in a 1943 publication of his, Great Modern Reading/
In 2009, The Library of America selected Atherton’s story “The Striding Place” for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales.
Charlotte S. McClure in a Dictionary of Literary Biography essay said she (Atherton): "redefined women's potential and presented a psychological drama of a woman's quest for identity and for a life purpose and happiness within and beyond her procreative function, " She also said that
Patience Sparhawk was Atherton's "first significant novel."
In a 1898 essay in
Bookman, a critic stated:
"the amazing and memorable Patience Sparhawk may perhaps be referred to as the first foreshadowing of the good work that [Atherton] has done since. It seems to have been also generally conceded that no matter what the subject chanced to be . . . nothing from her pen would be commonplace or dull. [But] that startling performance [in Patience Sparhawk] introduced her to a different audience, one much larger and more seriously interested than she had had before."
Carl van Vechten said of Atherton in a Nation article: "Usually (not always, to be sure), the work of Mrs. Wharton seems to me to be scrupulous, clever and uninspiring, while that of Mrs. Atherton is often careless, sprawling, but inspired. Mrs. Wharton, with some difficulty, it would appear, has learned to write; Mrs. Atherton was born with a facility for telling stories."
In an essay for
Bookman, Frederic Taber Cooper stated that in
Senator North, the character Harriet "is practically a white woman but for a scarcely perceptible blueness at the base of her fingernails, this character of Harriet is perhaps the best bit of feminine analysis that Mrs. Atherton ever did."
