"Annie Fellows Johnston"

"The Beloved Writer of Books for Young Folks"
by Margaret W. Vandercook, December 1913

Like Nancy Drew, the Sweet Valley books, and now the Twilight saga, Annie Fellows Johnston's books were bestsellers for the young ladies of her time. While The Little Colonel is remembered today chiefly as a cutesy film vehicle for Shirley Temple, the Little Colonel series of books, which followed Lloyd Sherman as she grew from child- to womanhood, and also the adventures of her friends, like Mary Ware, are still recalled fondly by grandmothers today.

Shut your eyes and dream of the most beautiful southern home you can imagine. Because in such a house, called "The Beeches," in Pewee Valley, Kentucky, lives Mrs. Annie Fellows Johnston, the author of "Miss Santa Claus of the Pullman," "The Little Colonel" stories, "Mary Ware," and other books you know equally well.

Mrs. Johnston has not always lived in Kentucky. She was born in Evansville, Indiana, and spent her childhood and girlhood eight miles out from there, in another big house, white, with green shutters, built on her grandfather's place and facing Cherry Lane.

Those were the days when she used to read St. Nicholas to tatters, and afterward go to bed early just to plan having a story of her own published in it sometime. Of course she never confided this ambition to any one then, except to her mother and two sisters. To the ten boy and girl cousins living in the same neighborhood the idea would have appeared preposterous. They understood that Annie intended to write books, but that she should actually expect to have one printed in St. Nicholas would have been too much! Yet the subscribers to this magazine know how delightfully one girl's dream has been fulfilled.

It really does not seem exactly fair that fate should oblige so many of us to be city children. For have you not often noticed, in reading of famous men and women, that the large majority of them have spent their youth in the country?

Why, it would almost seem as though Annie Fellows Johnston was preordained from the first for this business of writing delightful books for girls. She had exactly the right background and training: she learned precisely the things that a girl ought to know; and she had such ideal home duties and amusements.

In the first place, she had the inspiration and the aid of a wonderful mother, whose name before her marriage was Mary Erskine. In those pioneer days in rural Indiana, education was not so easy to obtain as it is now. But when Mary was only eighteen, she inspired her brothers and a boy cousin with a determination to go to college. In due time she convinced their parents that she was capable of leading such an expedition, and with various household comforts, such as feather-beds and a cow, they started on their long, slow journey. Part of it was by canal-boat. As the college did not admit women in those early days, she attended the adjoining seminary, keeping pace with the boys, for whom she was a capable home-maker. For they kept house together in the most satisfactory and ideal way.

With such a mother, it is small wonder that Mrs. Johnston has had the talent and character for making the best of her opportunities.

Can you picture a small, brown-eyed, brown-haired girl perched up in a cherry-tree? For if you can, you have formed a pretty good image of your favorite author. Mrs. Johnston has not changed half so much as other persons do in growing up. She is still small enough to be a girl (shop people would be sure to offer her "misses" size, should she ever attempt to purchase ready-made clothes), and the brownness of her eyes remains so unusual that you have a fashion of remembering their color and the humorous light behind their outward seriousness long after she has gone away.

The cherry-tree was Annie Fellows' library, her study, her palace of dreams, and, at certain times of the summer, her refreshment room. In it she used to learn to parse Milton, to be recited later at the country school-house, and to memorize bits of literature from the old McGuffey readers. For it was a piece of rare good fortune for a girl, who was afterward to become a writer herself, that in her part of the State of Indiana, the precept "Thou shall not speak ungrammatically." was almost as sacred as one of the Commandments.

In almost all cases, it is true that the makers of books have been great readers. Yet think upon what different literature from that of the modern girl the author of The Little Colonel was brought up! She had the theological library of her father, a Methodist minister (who had died when she was a child of two). It included Pilgrim's Progress, but also such works as Fox's Book of Martyrs, and others even more depressing. The lighter literature was bought, borrowed, or smuggled in from the neighbors; The Wide, Wide World, St. Elmo, Andersen's Fairy Tales, and the "Godey's Lady's Book" of the early seventies, the one magazine of fashion and fiction that seemed to be found in every household of that day.

Mrs. Johnston says that in her home and in her part of the country the word "duty" was spelled with a big "D." Yet she had a privilege which, you will agree with me, was most unusual, and rather dangerous to mention in St. Nicholas: no member of her family was ever obliged to lay down a story until it was finished—lessons and tasks could be postponed, meal-times and even bedtime ignored.

So, you see, one grown-up person understood just how girls and boys feel when they are so possessed by a story that it is almost impossible to put it aside before its conclusion and come back to this workaday world.

Yet, from Mrs. Johnston's own description, it sounds as though the workaday world used to be a pleasanter place than it is at present.

"Mine was a happy childhood," she declares, "for my wise mother thought a girl should know everything that goes toward the making of a comfortable home." So being literary did not excuse little Annie from having a hand in all the old-fashioned country industries, learning to make preserves, patchwork, and pickles, even to "bread and buttonholes," that Rose complained of in Eight Cousins.

Still, business and pleasure seemed to make a closer combination when people used to go to old-fashioned quilting-bees and apple-paring parties, and had singing schools, and literary societies, and oratorical debates with the neighbors for audience.

There were no moving-picture shows, no matinées, and no soda-water fountains; there was not even a cross-roads store where one could buy peppermint candy, in the neighborhood where Annie Fellows lived as a little girl. Yet she herself declares that she never missed these delights because she never knew them. "We had instead the panorama of the seasons, sorghum-making time, when the boiling molasses made all outdoors smell like a delicious world-wide candy-pull: cider-making time, when the piles of red, golden, and russet apples poured into the hopper of the mill and, as if by some magic, came out a beautiful amber liquid. Then there were the hay-harvest, with the rides home on top of the gigantic loads, nutting, and coasting, and sleighing." One becomes quite breathless with the thought of all these delightful, old-time pleasures that comparatively few girls have the chance to enjoy to-day.

And yet in learning of such a girlhood, it grows quite easy to understand why Mrs. Johnston has become the most popular modern writer of girls' books in the United States. Has any one else ever known how to make young people have such good times, how to give such delightful house-parties, and how to make things turn out in just the way that her young readers wish?

There was a little girl living not far from the present home of Mrs. Johnston who came, one day, from a visit to her mother's intimate friend, wearing a very aggrieved expression. "Mother," she demanded, "why did Mrs. Hewitt say that she hoped my grandmother's mantelpiece might fall upon me?" It was not the mantelpiece but the mantle of the distinguished woman that the friend had desired to descend like a fairy godmother's cloak upon the little granddaughter's shoulders. So has it never occurred to you that perhaps the "mantle" of Louisa M. Alcott has fallen upon Annie Fellows Johnston? Of course the two authors are unlike in many ways, but they both seem to have had the same healthy, old-fashioned home-training; they both seem to have written about girls and a kind of living that was real and not make-believe, and they both have succeeded in attaining the first place among their readers. Miss Alcott belonged to those of us who were young twenty years ago; Mrs. Johnston belongs to those of us who are young now.

And yet neither of these two authors started out with any idea of finally writing girls' books. Mrs. Johnston declares that, as she was born in Indiana, it was her birthright to expect some day to write "the great American novel." And that making her début as an author in a story for children called "Big Brother," was like firing away with your eyes shut and then being surprised to find out that you had hit a mark. So, too, Louisa M. Alcott, having spent most of her life in Concord, Massachusetts, with famous friends, also conceived of herself at the beginning of her career as a future novelist for grown-ups.

But, living always in the same neighborhood, Miss Alcott felt obliged to write chiefly of the little New England corner of the world which she knew so well and intimately; while Mrs. Johnston, having traveled half over the world, has been able to take her heroines and heroes along with her. One of the best of all her stories, The Giant Scissors, owed its inspiration to her stay in the old walled town of Saint-Symphorien, in France.

A friend tells of a Christmas luncheon at "The Beeches" when the maid brought on, with the dessert, pecan-nuts from Texas and lichee-nuts from China, apples from Oregon, sweetmeats from Japan and Germany, maple-sugar from the Catskill Mountains—all gifts sent by friends who truly cared for the writer of the best girls' books.

Although known as a southern author, Annie Fellows came to live in the South only after her marriage to her second cousin, Mr. Will Johnston. It was perhaps this "cousinness" that made the three children of her husband's first wife her devoted friends from the beginning. But it was probably her "understandingness" of girls and boys, which we appreciate from her stories, that made the word "stepmother" never even thought of in her family.

John was the youngest child and the only son. To him is dedicated "The Quilt that Jack Built," for he was "The Boy Who Made All Boyhood Dear to Me." And to him also is dedicated "The Jester's Sword," for it was his brave and dauntless spirit through years of illness which suggested the allegory. It was in quest of health for him that Mrs. Johnston went to the Arizona desert. They lived there awhile in tents, then went to the hills of Texas, where they made a home on their place called "Penacres," until his death, three years ago.

The oldest daughter, Mary, is the artist who designed and painted the dolls and costumes for "The Little Colonel's Paper Doll Book," and who made some of the illustrations for "Ole Mammy's Torment."

In one of our photographs of Mrs. Johnston, she appears to be holding an ordinary homegrown kitten; but she is in reality clasping the tiny wildcat known as Matilda in Mary Ware in Texas. Among other choice members of the family at "Penacres" were "Joseph," the wolf,—whose chief delight was eating watermelon,—a number of foxes, badgers, chaparral-cocks, and at one time two mountain-lions. For in the years in Texas, John had a veritable zoo.

So, you see, Mrs. Johnston has lived a full and varied life. And always she has seemed to care most about people and places.

In her books she has created a world that holds all girl ideals. Lloyd is not just "The Little Colonel"; she is the type of a beautiful, high-spirited, generous character toward which thousands of other girls aspire. Mary Ware is n't the one plain, clever maiden who wins by wit and a good heart; she is the representative of many others like her.

Into the weaving of her plots Annie Fellows Johnston brings beautiful old legends, poems, and allegories of her own creation, which her readers will remember for long years. From the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, how many girls belong to "The Little Colonel's Order of Hildegarde"! And quite as many are now stringing a rosary of pearls, each pearl to mark some duty done, because of the example of Edryn, the little page who became a knight of King Arthur's Round Table.

For the really worth-while books must not only amuse us; they must give us something to think about, and something to help us. We know that Mrs. Johnston can make us laugh and cry almost in the same minute; and that she teaches us to dream big dreams, and then to do the littlest task in the cheerfulest spirit.

Of course most of her characters are imaginary; they only seem real because she makes them so. The places in her stories that are real have had many pilgrimages made to them—"The Locusts," Lloyd's grandfather's home; "The Beeches," now Mrs. Johnston's own place ; "Clovercroft," and "The Haunted House of Hartwell Hollow."

If long ago this most popular of young people's writers had not confessed that she found more rewards in writing books for girls and boys than for an older audience, the readers of St. Nicholas could very easily have convinced her. But Mrs. Johnston needs no such conviction. Years ago, she declared that she would rather stick to her present friends than turn to any others.

Mrs. Johnston probably receives more letters from appreciative readers than any other author in the United States. And the letters come from other countries as well as this, since some of her stories have been translated into foreign languages. Sometimes there are as many as twenty or thirty missives in one mail from unknown friends who have learned to care for her through her books.

In one of "The Little Colonel" tales, Annie Fellows Johnston retells the beautiful story of Robert Louis Stevenson,—how the Indian chiefs in a far-off Samoan island built with their own hands a road in honor of their friend, the white chief, whom they had named "Tusitala," the Teller of Tales. And this road was called "The Road of Loving Hearts." One wonders if Mrs. Johnston knows that her ardent young readers have been building just such a road for her; only its foundations are laid in the loving hearts of children.