“So Completely Has My Vogue Passed Away”: Houghton Mifflin’s In-house Evaluations of Mary Hallock Foote’s Autobiography

From just about any angle, the story of Mary Hallock Foote’s life is an interesting one. Born in 1847 to a Quaker family near the village of Milton, New York, Foote turned a talent for drawing into a career as one of America’s foremost illustrators and, just as impressively, used what material she could glean from her peripatetic adult years to craft some of the most memorable literary depictions of the late-nineteenth-century American West. She and her mining engineer husband lived in places as varied as the rural and urban environs around both New York City and Boston, the mining country of both coastal and intermountain California, a baronial estate in southern Mexico, the high mountains of central Colorado, and the mostly arid banks of the Boise River in Idaho. All the while, Foote was very well paid for the illustrations she produced at the request of the finest magazines in the nation, most notably Scribner’s Monthly, the Century, and the Atlantic Monthly, and she wrote stories, sketches, and novels for the prominent publishers affiliated with these periodicals as well.¹ As her most recent biographer, Darlis A. Miller, affirms, Foote was one of her era’s “most articulate women to write about the West. … In both her illustrations and writings, she provided the nation with vivid images that differed sharply from those offered by male artists and writers” (xiii). By all accounts, Mary Hallock Foote was a well-known and successful artist.² Her combination of artistic imagination and personal experience led her to produce a singularly insightful body of work about daily middle-class life in the burgeoning American West, particularly as it was experienced by women.³

When the time came to do what many of her contemporaries did—namely, compose an autobiography—she did that, too. Foote even joked about the apparent obligation in the letter accompanying the partial manuscript she sent to Ferris Greenslet, her editor at Houghton Mifflin: “I fancy I hear you groan as you say: ‘More Remeniscences’! [sic] I have smiled at the other old babblers myself—but I read them!” (6 May 1923). Clearly, she was hoping people would read hers as well, yet no such book was ever published in her lifetime. To be sure, Foote spent at least a decade near the end of her life drafting a memoir; as Miller notes, “[a]fter 1923 or 1924, Foote’s ‘serious’ writing was limited to finishing and revising her autobiography” (260). The manuscript that Foote titled “Backgrounds with Figures,” however, was never published while she lived. Rodman W. Paul, the historian who in 1972 finally compiled and edited Foote’s various manuscript versions under the title A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote, refers to a “family legend” about how certain portions of the manuscript that were deleted and hence withheld from Houghton Mifflin “were a reason for the publishers declining to accept the book” (“Concerning” xii).⁴ While Greenslet may have responded rather coolly to what Foote called the “big batch of my fatigued-looking ‘copy’” that she had sent for his consideration (Foote to Greenslet, 6 May 1923), Miller’s account of the manuscript’s history implies that it was Foote’s failure to follow up with a fuller draft that doomed its prospects, at least at Houghton Mifflin (257–58). The lasting impression in both instances is one of reticence and inaction on Foote’s part.

The archives tell a different story. Granted, Foote did express some reluctance about revealing things held private by her family and friends, but the heretofore uncataloged and unpublished in-house materials from Houghton Mifflin that pertain to “Backgrounds with Figures” indicate that she did submit a complete manuscript roughly three years after she had sent her first fragments to Greenslet. This second submission has not been noted or commented upon by any scholar or biographer thus far, but it is of great importance to understanding fully Foote’s late-career place in a changing marketplace...