Atherton, Gertrude (1857–1948)

American author of novels and short stories. Born Gertrude Franklin Horn on October 30, 1857, in San Francisco, California; died in San Francisco on June 14, 1948; daughter of Thomas L. (a businessman) and Gertrude (Franklin) Horn (a homemaker); attended Clark Institute, St. Mary's Hall, and Sayre Institute; married George Henry Bowen Atherton, on February 15, 1876 (died 1887); children: George (d. 1882), Muriel.

Published first novel, What Dreams May Come (1888). Wrote over 50 books, including Los Cerritos (1889); The Doomswoman (1892); Before the Gringo Came (1894, revised under the title The Splendid Idle Forties, 1902); Patience Spearhawk and Her Times (1897); The Californians (1898, revised 1935); Senator North (1900); The Conqueror: Being the True and Romantic Story of Alexander Hamilton (1902); The Living Present (1917); The White Morning (1918); Black Oxen (1923); The Immortal Marriage (1927); The Jealous Gods (1928); Dido, Queen of Hearts(1929); The Sophisticates (1931) and The Horn of Life (1942). Also published stories and articles in Cosmopolitan, Lippincott's, North American Review, Harper's, Godey's, Yale Review, San Francisco Examiner, New York Times. Elected to National Institute of Arts and Letters (1938); chosen first recipient of California's Most Distinguished Woman award (1940).

Gertrude Atherton's maternal grandfather, Stephen Franklin, migrated to California from New Orleans in 1849 in hopes of sharing in the wealth of the gold rush. The rough life in San Francisco seemed incompatible with Franklin's strict Presbyterian notions of propriety, but after two years he determined that the area had become sufficiently civilized to send for his wife Eliza and 15-year-old daughter, Gertrude Franklin. The attractive young woman quickly became a belle in a society where men greatly outnumbered women. She apparently had no desire to marry while an exciting social life was available. Nonetheless, at age 19, Gertrude Franklin submitted to her parents' urging to marry Thomas Horn, a rich tobacco merchant. Nine months later, their daughter Gertrude was born.

Her parents' marriage was rocky from the outset, exacerbated by what was seen as her mother's immaturity and frivolity and her father's drinking and business failures. They divorced when Gertrude was only three years old. With no skills and no inclination to earn her own living, the senior Gertrude took her small daughter to her parents' ranch several miles outside San Jose, where young Gertrude often stayed with her grandparents while her mother resumed her social life in San Francisco.

The child flaunted the rules of appropriate behavior, became destructive, and essentially ungovernable. When she was seven years old, her mother married John F. Uhlhorn. The second marriage provided two half sisters and a despised stepfather who managed to drink and gamble away his own and his wife's money. Meanwhile, Gertrude moved into adolescence. She attended three different girls' academies in four years, and although she seemed quite intelligent she never applied herself to her studies. She was finally packed off to the Sayre Institute in Lexington, Kentucky, where her grandfather hoped Gertrude would conform to the supervision of a stern Presbyterian great aunt. Instead, she was sent back to California after a year, lest her outrageous behavior corrupt her cousins.

During those chaotic years, Atherton developed a passion for reading. She began with romances, standards such as Little Women and

Jane Eyre, and fairy tales. When she was 14, her grandfather decided that she should read aloud to him for two hours each night. Thus he would help her to become an "intellectual woman." For the first time, Gertrude, who knew her conduct had always displeased her grandfather, attempted to win his approval through exercise of her intelligence. Together they read history and literary classics. The world of books became the happiest and most stable part of her life.

The Uhlhorn marriage ended in divorce. When Gertrude returned from Kentucky she found her mother with a new suitor. He was George Atherton—spoiled, handsome, aristocratic and 14 years younger than her mother. George's attentions turned from the mother to the daughter, and Gertrude responded. On February 15, 1876, the two eloped.

Both families were dismayed at the match. Gertrude remained estranged from her mother and her grandfather for three years until after the birth of her daughter Muriel. The senior Athertons had hoped George would marry someone more socially connected and less independent in spirit. As George had few business talents and fewer intellectual interests, the marriage had little chance of success. When, in 1882, their six-year-old son Georgie died of diphtheria, Gertrude turned her energies to work on a novel. In three months, she had completed the manuscript for The Randolphs of Redwoods. She had been inspired by a newspaper article about the declining fortunes of a prominent family and, as she would often do, Gertrude used a news item as a springboard for her fiction. The story was serialized in the San Francisco journal The Argonaut under the pseudonym "Asmodeus" (a Hebrew demon who destroyed domestic happiness). It caused a sensation for its unconventional portrayal of alcoholism and sensuality. It also caused a furor in the Atherton family. Her mother-in-law believed that publication by a woman was unseemly, while George was jealous of the time devoted to writing and of Gertrude's ability to make money and her refusal to share it with him.

Two years later, she completed a manuscript for the novel What Dreams May Come, sent it off to publishers, and moved from the Atherton family compound to her own flat in San Francisco. By this time, her marriage was a fiction maintained for appearances. Atherton admitted in her autobiography that she often wished George were dead so she could strike out on her own. In fact, George died at sea in 1887 en route to Chile. His shipmates embalmed him in a barrel of rum, and in that container his remains were returned to San Francisco.

Atherton moved to New York later that year to earn her living as a writer. Her daughter Muriel remained behind where she was raised almost completely by her two grandmothers. Atherton frequently boasted that she was devoid of maternal qualities. In New York, she found a publisher for What Dreams May Come. She worked at her writing for six or seven hours a day, producing a column called "Letter from New York" for a San Francisco paper and completing another novel, Hermia Suydam. This story featured a heroine who resembled the author in looks, literary aspirations, and disgust with marriage. Hermia, however, shocked her contemporaries with an extramarital affair, something the self-contained Atherton would never do. Hermia Suydam engendered a storm of criticism from the guardians of Victorian morality. Although the notoriety did not entirely displease her, Gertrude had no real ties in New York, so she set off for Europe.

The peripatetic pattern would continue through much of Atherton's life. She would travel from coast to coast in the United States, back and forth to Europe, to Cuba, to the West Indies, to Egypt. She would reside in Munich for a five-year period and finally settle in San Francisco during her last decade. Much of her travel involved gathering background for her books, but, ironically, Atherton often retired to an entirely different locale from the setting of the book she was writing. Thus in 1889 she wrote a historical novel about California, Los Cerritos, at a Sacred Heart convent in France.

Her early novels did well in England where the reading public seemed captivated by stories of the United States, especially of the West. Typically, Atherton wrote of loveless marriages, of young girls instructed by wise, bookish older men, of disillusionment. During an early stay in London, she met Henry James whom she admired, but who was appalled by Atherton's brashness and self-promotion.

If Atherton and her work did not win favor from Henry James, she did make a favorable impression on fellow California writer and critic Ambrose Bierce. Bierce praised her 1892 novel The Doomswoman, but also pointed out the uneven quality that was bound to occur when one wrote as hurriedly and with as little revision as did Atherton. Her association with Bierce was one of the longest relationships of Atherton's life, but it was a relationship that flourished only when the two were miles apart and communicated through tart yet intimate letters.

Patience Spearhawk and Her Times, first published in London in 1897, may have been inspired by several actual murder trials where the victim was poisoned. Again, the heroine resembles Atherton, while her handsome but weak husband, whom she is accused of murdering, resembles George Atherton. Patience Spearhawk is obstinate and self-assertive; she delights in shocking people. Aside from the authenticity of the characters, Atherton drew her settings from life. She attended a murder trial to appreciate the courtroom atmosphere, and she even visited a prison and sat in the electric chair at Sing Sing.

But if Gertrude Atherton wrote of women who defied convention, she also came to admire men who exercised power. Two of her more highly regarded books, Senator North (1900) and The Conqueror: Being the True and Romantic Story of Alexander Hamilton (1902), featured male heroes who exemplified the jingoistic spirit that was prevalent after the Spanish-American War of 1898. She gathered material for Senator North in the chambers of Congress and at receptions in Washington D.C. She cultivated Senator Eugene Hale of Maine whom she used as a model for North, a mature and sexually attractive hero whose integrity and power win a strong and independent woman.

Some commentators have argued that if any one of Atherton's books has enduring value, it is her fictional biography of Alexander Hamilton, The Conqueror. As usual, Atherton traveled to the place where the story was set to gather material. In this case, she visited Hamilton's birthplace, the island of Nivis in the West Indies, as well as St. Kitts and St. Croix where Hamilton had lived as a child. Atherton read dozens of books dealing with Hamilton, and carried with her a copy of his portrait as an inspiration. Using techniques of both biography and novel, she was able to combine an uncritical romantic picture of Hamilton with careful attention to context and surrounding details. The book did well from the beginning, and eventually sold over a million copies. With the success of The Conqueror, Atherton came to believe that the value of her work had been vindicated.

The author returned to California in 1906, in time to experience the Great Earthquake on August 18. She took pride in calmly withstanding the shock by standing in a doorway, but all of her own records of the first 50 years of her life were lost in the earthquake and subsequent fire. In a piece for Harper's Weekly, Atherton compared the damage to the city to the ruins in the ancient world. Later, she would describe the "fresh, handsome, and bustling" San Francisco that was rebuilt on the wreckage. In the aftermath of the earthquake, she also developed her association with James D. Phelan, a banker, developer, and former mayor of San Francisco. A supportive, platonic friend and benefactor, Phelan kept a suite for Gertrude at his home Villa Montalvo from 1920 until his death in 1930.

During the first decade of the 20th century, the organized women's movement reached its peak in both the United States and England. Atherton had the makings of a feminist: her entire adult life had demonstrated independence and self sufficiency, and she had written of the limitations of conventional marriage and domesticity. Yet she did not have time or patience with women's groups. In 1910, however, she became involved in the campaign for the vote. Her major effort was to write a play, Julia France and Her Times, set in the British suffrage movement. Neither the play, which had only one performance in Toronto, nor the novel, published in 1912, was a success. "I have no love for it myself," Atherton wrote.

During World War I, she visited France and turned her attention to the activities of French women in support of the war effort. The experience with nursing or with munitions work, she believed, was giving women confidence in their own abilities. After the war, however, they might be repulsed by the men who had caused and prolonged the slaughter and refuse to bear children who would be blown to pieces. Two of her works during the war, The Living Present (1917) and The White Morning (1918), describe future societies run by women.

In her own contribution to the war effort, Atherton helped found a relief organization, Le Bien-Etre du Blesse (The Well-Being of the Wounded), to provide nutritious food to supplement the diets of hospitalized soldiers. In addition, she edited a highly patriotic journal, American Woman's Magazine, that condemned pacifists and slackers.

There is a good deal of fun to be got out of the Battle with Life, which begins with birth and ends only with death. Many go under, but millions do not. They fight to the end, and if they never quite got the best of Life, at least Life did not get the best of them.

—Gertrude Atherton

After the war, Atherton returned to California. She worked briefly doing screenwriting as one of Samuel Goldwyn's "Eminent Authors," but quickly became disenchanted with Hollywood. She seemed to feel that both her health and her reputation were in a stagnant state when she learned about the Steinbach Treatment, a rejuvenation procedure developed by an Austrian doctor. She began treatments in 1922 and claimed an almost miraculous rebirth of her physical and mental capacities. During the next year, she published Black Oxen, in which the heroine is "reactivated," her restored beauty and creativity making her the object of desire for younger men. The controversial Black Oxen was the bestseller of 1923 and was made into a film the following year.

During the 1920s, Atherton published three novels dealing with the ancient world. The Immortal Marriage (1927) was the story of Pericles and Aspasia of Miletus . She went to Greece, visited museums with collections of Greek antiquities, and consulted documents. Although not such a commercial success as Black Oxen, The Immortal Marriage was praised in both popular and scholarly circles. The Jealous Gods (1928) and Dido, Queen of Hearts (1929) had less public appeal.

The last part of Gertrude Atherton's life, the period after 1930, was spent mostly in California. Much of her fiction had been set in California and provided a sort of chronicle of that state's history, including Rezanov (1906) about a Russian explorer; The Splendid Idle Forties (1902), a collection about the Mexican period; Los Cerritos (1890), set in the 1880s; Ancestors (1907), set at the time of the earthquake; The Sisters-in-Law (1921); and The House of Lee (1940), dealing with the post-World War I era. In 1932, she produced her autobiography, Adventures of a Novelist, in which the author became one of her California heroines.

In her later years, Atherton received a number of important honors. The French government recognized her wartime service with the Legion of Honor in 1925. Mills College awarded her an honorary Doctor of Literature degree in 1935, and the University of California at Berkeley followed with an honorary Doctor of Laws in 1937. She was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and, in 1940, she was the first person named to California's Most Distinguished Women. Gertrude Atherton died of a stroke at the age of 91. She had been writing every day until a month before her death.

sources:

Atherton, Gertrude. Adventures of a Novelist. NY: Liveright, 1932.

Leider, Emily Wortis. California's Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times. Stanford, CA: Stanford, 1991.

McClure, Charlotte S. Gertrude Atherton. Boston: Twayne, 1979.

Wilkins, Thurman. "Gertrude Atherton." Notable American Women, 1607–1950. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1971, pp. 64–65.

collections:

Collections of Gertrude Atherton's papers and manuscripts are located in the Library of Congress and at the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

Mary Welek Atwell , Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, Radford University, Radford, Virginia