Leslie, Annie (Louise) Brown

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LESLIE, Annie (Louise) Brown

Born 11 December 1869, Perry, Maine; died 7 October 1948, Detroit, Michigan

Wrote under: Nancy Brown

Daughter of Levi Prescott and Ann Robinson Brown; married James Edward Leslie, 1904

Born in rural Maine, Annie Brown Leslie attended high school in Middleborough, Massachusetts, and graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1892. She taught school for about ten years, in Vermont, in Connecticut, and finally in Michigan, where she married a journalist and editor. At his death in 1917, her husband was drama editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch, and for a time Leslie took on this job.

In 1918, however, she joined the women's department of the Detroit News. It was part of her responsibility to answer letters from women readers. From this task grew her column, "Experience," one of the earliest and most influential of the letters columns that became a standard feature in newspapers all over the country. Leslie adopted the editorial name "Nancy Brown," and as such she became a public figure throughout Michigan, lending the influence of her column to charities, cultural events, and such special projects as the reforestation of burned-out areas of northern Michigan. She retired in 1942 and died in 1948, leaving no children.

Although "Experience" started as a column of domestic advice, it broadened its scope as Leslie tackled moral and social questions: the propriety of couples living together before marriage, the place of religion in daily life, the proper education of children, the consolations of music and art to the disheartened, and a variety of timely topics that would fit into the medical and psychology columns of newspapers today. The column had professional consultants, and in more than one instance Nancy Brown seems to have intervened to put a correspondent in touch with a hospital or other facility for needed care.

Although the Detroit News had for the most part an urban readership, Leslie enlivened her column with letters from lonesome cowboys and other figures out of the romantic tradition of the American West. Readers sometimes exchanged views through the medium of her column. One letter, for example, tells an Enoch Arden story: a man presumed dead arrives home to find his bride happily married to another man. Should he reveal his identity? The letters that follow take on the tone of dramatic narrative.

Leslie's views were generally conservative, although her advice was crisp and forthright. When one reads the letters sequentially, as in the volumes of column contributions published by the Detroit News, one is struck by certain resemblances between the editor's style and the prose of the letters themselves. These pseudonymous contributors seem not to suffer from the awkwardness that mars the writing of many nonprofessionals. One feels that Leslie selected letters carefully and put them through extensive and thorough editorial processing.