LEA, Fannie Heaslip

Born 30 October 1884, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 13 January 1955, New York, New York

Daughter of James J. and Margaret Heaslip Lea; married Hamilton P. Agee, 1911 (divorced 1926); children: one daughter

Fannie Heaslip Lea, the daughter of a newspaperman, quickly took up the journalist's trade. She wrote class poems and plays and edited the Newcomb College (New Orleans) yearbook. After receiving a B.A. from Newcomb in 1904, Lea did graduate work in English at Tulane University in Louisiana for two years. From 1906 to 1911, she wrote feature articles for the New Orleans daily newspapers and short stories for national magazines such as Harper's and Woman's Home Companion.

After her marriage, she moved with her husband to Honolulu, where he had accepted a position. She continued to write prolifically, undeterred by the birth of a daughter. After her divorce from Agee in 1926, she took up residence in New York, where she published 19 novels and more than 100 stories, poems, and essays in newspapers and journals like Good Housekeeping, Collier's, and the Saturday Evening Post. An Episcopalian, Lea was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Authors' League of America and a regular contributor to philanthropies.

Lea's first novel, Quicksands (1911), embodies many of the qualities that mark her best work. As in most of her tales, the heroine is an intelligent, spirited woman; but Rosemary chooses to live her life, "not think it," when she marries an unsophisticated but devoted Virginian. Her superficial serenity is disturbed by the return from New York of her husband's best friend, a thoughtful writer, whose presence emphasizes the intellectual stimulation missing in her marriage. The triangle is formed, but Lea renders Rosemary's conflict fairly and creates sympathy for each of the characters, although she resolves their dilemma with an unexpected twist in the plot.

The rather conventional romance that is the basis of this and most of Lea's stories is considerably enlivened by her sparkling and realistic dialogue. Lea had a good ear for clever conversations and the ability to create well-rounded characters, such as Rosemary and the writer, from whom such talk seems natural.

Romance and marriage were the staples of Lea's plots, especially in her short stories, but she was also inventive in exploring that theme from varied perspectives. Many of her independent heroines struggle with the conflicting lures of career and marriage, as in With or Without (1926), Happy Landings (1930), and Dorée (1934). Others must face the difficulties of marriage and divorce as in Not for Just an Hour (1939) and Half-Angel (1932), which is a particularly honest portrayal of a young couple coping with their first year of marriage. In Goodbye, Summer (1931) and later works like The Four Marys (1937) and The Devil Within (1948), Lea centers on the dilemmas of mature women. Though none of these are very satisfactorily plotted or focused, they do reveal Lea's efforts to explore the complicated psychologies of selfishness and jealousy and their effects on love. Lea even approached her subject from a male point of view in novels like Anchor Man (1935) (which features a wily grandmother to rescue the hero) and Once to Every Man (1938), whose middle-aged hero falls in love again after years in an empty marriage.

Lea also wrote several plays. Her first, Round-About, was produced in 1929 by the New York Theater Assembly. Her two collections of verse are light and entertaining, but generally undistinguished. Lea was one of the league of popular romancers whose novels and short stories never failed to delight her readers. Always intent on entertaining, she had a gift for believable characterization, pointed dialogue, and romantic comedy. Her medium was essentially slight, and she rarely transcended it, but her graceful style and wit distinguish her among popular writers.

Other Works:

Jaconetta Stories (1912). Sicily Ann (1914). Chloe Malone (1916). The Dream-Maker Man (1925). With This Ring (1925). Wild Goose Chase (1929). Take Back the Heart (1931). Summer People (1933). Crede Byron (1936). Nobody's Girl (1940). There Are Brothers (1940). Sailor's Star (1944). Verses for Lovers (and Some Others) (1955).

The papers of Fannie Heaslip Lea are housed in the University of Oregon Library in Eugene, Oregon.

Bibliography:

Reference works:

NCAB. TCA. TCAS.

Other references:

Dial (16 Sept. 1911). Good Housekeeping (Aug. 1923). Literary Review (10 Apr. 1926). Newsweek (24 Jan. 1955). NYT (18 Oct. 1931, 26 Oct. 1932, 14 Jan. 1955). New Orleans Daily Picayune (23 Apr. 1911). New Orleans Times-Picayune (14 Jan. 1955). Saturday Evening Post (29 May 1926).

—BARBARA C. EWELL