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1 Introduction: The “Contradictory” Legacy of Corra Harris In 1931, Good Housekeeping editor W. F. Bigelow predicted that Georgia novelist Corra Harris’s reputation would outlive that of Nebraska’s Willa Cather, stating that Harris’s novel A Circuit Rider’s Wife was “far more important than Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.” Attesting to her continued national popularity, Bigelow informed Harris that she had held her own in Good Housekeeping’s contest that year to find the nation’s twelve greatest living women.1 Bigelow was wrong, of course, in his ranking of Cather’s and Harris’s works. Harris may have been disappointed at the outcome, but she would not have been surprised to find Cather’s works remembered and her own forgotten. In a 1903 review comparing fiction in the North and South, she noted that when the country’s “great fiction is written, it will come out of the West.”2 Harris was under no illusions about the merits of her own work.3 Whatever her legacy, Corra Harris (1869–1935) was the most widely published and nationally popular woman writer from Georgia in the early twentieth century. Critics during her day and since have had a difficult time categorizing Harris’s works, many either dismissing them as part of the lightweight genre of domestic fiction or unable to categorize them at all. Indeed, little about Harris’s life or writing fits neatly into any category. Whether the subject is her work or herself, she was a person who dependably , as her nephew said in a memorial speech, “defied characterization.”4 Interest in her works has revived over the past couple of decades, as indicated by the 1998 reissue of her most famous novel, A Circuit Rider’s Wife (1910), but since 1968, when John Talmadge published Corra Harris, Lady of Purpose, no one has revisited her life or works in depth. Harris’s popularity during her lifetime and her legacy since then derive from her identification with A Circuit Rider’s Wife and its heroine, Mary Thompson. Even though the book was only marginally autobiographical, Harris was ever after remembered as “the circuit rider’s wife.” Contempo-  / Chapter 1 rary readers who admired Harris and her work ranked her with various literary icons, from George Eliot to Shakespeare; regionally, one reviewer compared her with Ellen Glasgow.5 Hamilton Holt, one of her earliest editors , and John Paschall, her last, captured something of her reputation in eulogies they delivered in 1936, the year after she died, at the dedication service of a memorial chapel built over her grave. Holt was one of Harris’s most distinguished and sustained admirers, and their professional association and friendship lasted from 1899 until her death. Holt edited and for a time owned the Independent, which grew under his direction from a religious journal of limited reach to one focused on political issues with a much wider national circulation. He later served as president at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, from where he and Harris continued to correspond and visit. Politically, the two could not have been further apart.6 Holt was known for his liberal politics, most notably peace activism, and Harris for her “extreme reactionary conservative” opinions.7 Holt was well known for his work in journalism, politics, and education. Harris admired and respected him and valued highly his opinion. The regard was mutual. In his speech in 1936 at the chapel dedication, Holt reiterated what he had written in 1924 in a review of Harris’s first autobiography, My Book and Heart: “As I look back now I recall but one red-letter day like it in The Independent office—the day when Robert Frost—a stripling of eighteen—sent in his first poem.” Or perhaps “that day when Sydney Lanier’s first poem came in . . . when the whole staff gathered round [Dr. Ward’s] desk . . . to listen while he read it aloud.” In Holt’s opinion, Harris’s first autobiography, My Book and Heart, put her in the company of four of the Western world’s most renowned autobiographers: “I know of only two living Americans who seem . . . to have the courage, candor and literary ability . . . to emulate these four immortals [Benvenuto Cellini, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Herbert Spencer, and Benjamin Franklin]. One is E. W. Howe. . . . The other is Corra Harris.” To him, however, her genius transcended her writing ability . “Corra Harris knows the human heart as does, in my judgment, no contemporary writer in...

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