The Blue Window/Temple Bailey: an Autobiography
Temple Bailey
An Autobiography
ALTHOUGH my ancestry is all of New England, I was born in the old town of Petersburg, Virginia. I went later to Richmond, and finally at the age of five to Washington, D. C., returning to Richmond for a few years in a girls' school, which was picturesquely quartered in General Lee's mansion, now the home of the Virginia Historical Association.
I think it was, perhaps, because of my life in cities that I learned in early years to appreciate the romance of them, the picturesqueness, the charm. It was, indeed, one reason for my adoration of Dickens, that he made London a place of dear delights, finding in crowded squares and quiet streets the human stories.
I was not a strong child, and my school-life was somewhat intermittent, but my father in my out-of-school days supervised my English as carefully as my mother supervised my manners. I had to write themes which my father blue-penciled, and so I came to girlhood and finally to womanhood with a rather easy gift of writing. But I really did not want to write. I was not in the least ambitious for a career. I was tremendously interested in people. I have, in fact, been always an intensely social person, liking my kind, and clinging somewhat stubbornly to old ideals of democracy and the doctrine that "a man's a man for a' that."
There came, however, a season of stress and sorrow which drove me to self-expression. I scribbled a story or two, and found, eventually, that editors liked them. A prize came to me from a love-story contest in the Ladies' Home Journal, and I was much encouraged. After that, I wrote children's stories, a child's book, love stories; appearing at last in the pages of Harper's, Scribner's, the Saturday Evening Post, the Outlook, Collier's, and most of the women's magazines.
A series of novels followed. The first was "Glory of Youth," then "Contrary Mary," "Mistress Anne," "The Tin Soldier," "The Trumpeter Swan," "The Gay Cockade," "The Dim Lantern," and "Peacock Feathers."
Many of my books have Washington as a background, because I know it best, but whether I range from Boston and Nantucket to Maryland and the Chesapeake, or on to the Rockies and the Pacific Coast, I find that while people are modified by environment, they are fundamentally alike, and that the drama of life is as ancient as Genesis, and as modern as an airship.