7 best short stories by Alice Duer Miller E-Book

Alice Duer Miller

• Herausgeber: Tacet Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: 7 best short stories
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 131

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Alice Duer Miller was a writer from the U.S. whose poetry actively influenced political opinion. Her feminist verses made an impact on the suffrage issue, and her verse novel The White Cliffs encouraged U.S. entry into World War II. She also wrote novels and screenplays. This book contains: - The Candid Friend. - A Clash of Sentimentalists. - Emulation. - Home Influence. - Middle Age. - The Relapse. - The Respecters of Law.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

The Author

A Clash of Sentimentalists.

The Candid Friend

Emulation

Home Influence

Middle Age

The Relapse

The Respecters of Law

About the Publisher

The Author

Alice Duer Miller (July 28, 1874 – August 22, 1942) was a writer from the U.S. whose poetry actively influenced political opinion. Her feminist verses made an impact on the suffrage issue, and her verse novel The White Cliffs encouraged U.S. entry into World War II. She also wrote novels and screenplays.

Alice Duer was born in New York City on July 28, 1874, into a wealthy family. She was the daughter of James Gore King Duer and Elizabeth Wilson Meads, the daughter of Orlando Meads of Albany, New York. Her great-grandfather was William Alexander Duer, President of Columbia College. Her great-great-grandfather was William Duer, an American lawyer, developer, and speculator from New York City. He had served in the Continental Congress and the convention that framed the New York Constitution. In 1778, he signed the United States Articles of Confederation. Her great-great-great-grandfather was William Alexander, who claimed the disputed title of Earl of Stirling and was an American Major-General during the American Revolutionary War.

She was also a descendant of Senator Rufus King, who was an American lawyer, politician, and diplomat. He was a delegate for Massachusetts to the Continental Congress. He also attended the Constitutional Convention and was one of the signers of the United States Constitution on September 17, 1787.

By the time of her entrance into society, her family had lost most of its fortune. She entered Barnard College in 1895, studying Mathematics and Astronomy. She helped to pay for her studies by selling novels and short essays. She and her sister Caroline jointly published a book of poems.On October 5, 1899, she married Henry Wise Miller at Grace Church Chapel in New York City. He was born in 1877, the son of Lt. Commander Jacob Miller in Nice, France, where his father had been serving with the U.S. Navy.

They moved to Costa Rica, where he attempted to develop rubber cultivation, which eventually failed. In 1903, she, Miller and their young son returned to New York.Her marriage lasted to the end of her life, but it was not tranquil.

She became known as a campaigner for women's suffrage and published a brilliant series of satirical poems in the New York Tribune. These were published subsequently as Are Women People?. These words became a catchphrase of the suffrage movement. It reads:

"FATHER, what is a Legislature?/ A representative body elected by the people of the state./ Are women people?/ No, my son, criminals, lunatics and women are not people./ Do legislators legislate for nothing?/ Oh, no; they are paid a salary./ By whom?/ By the people./ Are women people?/ Of course, my son, just as much as men are."

As a novelist, she scored her first success with Come Out of the Kitchen in 1916. The story was made into a play and later the 1948 film Spring in Park Lane. She followed it with a series of other short novels, many of which were staged and (increasingly) made into films.

Her novel in verse Forsaking All Others (1933) about a tragic love affair, and many consider her greatest work. In the 1920s and 1930s, many of her stories were used for motion pictures, such as Are Parents People? (1925), Roberta (1935), and Irene (1940), taking her to Hollywood. She also became involved in a number of motion picture screenplays, including Wife vs. Secretary (1936). Her name appears in the very first issue of The New Yorker as an advisory editor.

Alice Duer Miller died in 1942 and was interred at Evergreen Cemetery in Morristown, New Jersey.

A Clash of Sentimentalists.

I

DEAR SYDNEY: I shall not expect you to be—after the received formula—delighted to hear of my engagement. Nevertheless, I write first to you. I am going to marry Hubert Frost. "What!" you will say, "Frost's Pure, Perfect, Refreshing Ginger Ale?" You will be quite right. It is, I am proud to say, the same (not his father nor his grandfather, who were both small farmers, not too successful, from up the State). He made his money, and a great deal of it, himself. And yet, though I am tolerably mercenary, this has nothing to do with my acceptance of him. I am marrying him because he is a man. And after all the involutions of subtlety and good taste through which I have followed most of my acquaintance, simple, robust masculinity appeals to me. You will, I think, understand when you see him. Lydia.

P. S.—Come to see us, but not for two weeks. I am going to stay with his mother at Sciossett, N. Y.

II

But are we so sure, after all, my dear girl, that I am not glad to hear of your engagement? If you won't be mine, why not be somebody else's? This is a point of view I actually arrive at in strongly reasonable moments. Besides, even when I was urging my own mediocre suit upon you, I was acutely conscious of interfering with your fitting rôle, which is, I take it, that of a prosperous young married woman, unless, possibly, that of an independent widow. (Perish the dangerous fantasy!)

As for Hubert Frost, whom your engaging egotism seems to suggest you have discovered, he is well-known among men as a capital fellow—a good man and a good business man. I congratulate you sincerely. Leave me, however, the mild gratification of believing that there are some aspects of your nature which he will never see; some of your more potent charms that will go whizzing clean over his head; in short, that he will never understand you as I have done, and will probably on that very account be a much better companion for you.

And this, I take it, is an extremely creditable letter from a man who is still just as absurdly in love with you as ever.

S. T.

III

Dear Hubert: I verily believe that you had so little respect for my judgment as to doubt whether I should know a really great lady when I saw her, just because she had been the daughter and the wife of a farmer. Your mother and I are very happy together in spite of your absence. The only drawback to my enjoyment is my recognition of the fact that it is so much less to your credit to be so nice a man, since you have had so delightful a mother. "My dear," she has just said to me, "I am so glad to see you do everything to make yourself as pretty as nature intends you to be. I don't regret having had to work hard throughout my youth, but I am sorry I never wasted any time on my looks." She told me, what I could easily believe, that she had been thought a great beauty—"Before my marriage," she added. And yet how young she was! Nineteen when you were born! When I think of the women in New York, older than your mother and without her profile, who are on terms of intimate equality with the season debutantes!

To-morrow we drive out to the old farm, to which, I see, your mother's heart still yearns. She showed me a photograph of you at two, lying on top of a haycart, elegantly attired in an enormous straw hat.

As for Sciossett itself, it may be, as you say, an excellent investment as far as real estate is concerned, but I should be sorry to pass my days there. It contains nothing old enough to be dignified, nor new enough to be smart.

Of its inhabitants I have seen little; of Mrs. Stiles nothing at all, although I have waited with breathless interest for some mention of her name. That night by the sea, when you first told me about her, will always remain one of the most important in my life, more so, I think, than even the occasion on which you first asked me to marry you. You see I had never, with what someone has called my engaging egotism, thought that, while I was examining myself truly whether I cared for you enough, you had the high standard of your former love with which to compare your feeling for me. I always think the bond between two women who have both loved the same man a singularly close one. She and I out of all the world have had this thing in common, and yet we have not as much as seen each other. I look to her to present to me all that you were, and she, to me to show all that you have become. I cannot help envying her a little for having been your first romance, "Youth's vision thus made perfect," nor despising her a good deal for having at the last preferred a, I am sure, wholly inferior Stiles. I hate her for having hurt you, and love her for having, as you say, helped you in the right direction. Except for a certain worldly wisdom, I'm afraid I have no qualities that will help you in any way, so it is fortunate that I am quite content with you exactly as you are.

IV

My Dearest Lydia: How can I thank you for a letter that has made me very happy. I never doubted that you would appreciate my mother, but the thing that has been a special pleasure to me was your expression about Winnefred Stiles. Although I shall never see her again if I can avoid such a meeting, I can think of nothing in this world which I could more earnestly desire than a friendship between you and her. However grateful I might feel, therefore, I should deeply deplore too great resentment on your part of the pain she has caused me in the past. How much I have suffered you only perhaps understand, because you only have consoled me. Nevertheless, remember that I brought it on myself by insisting that she should enter into an engagement with me, when I should have known that I was too much her inferior in every way to make its consummation possible. I have, too, to thank her courage and clearsightedness for sparing as much pain as could be spared. That you should have to envy anyone hurts me. I would to God I could bring you the first love of my youth, for surely you deserve all a man's best. Still, you realize that if my heart has suffered one total ship-wreck, it is now entirely your own.

H. F.

V

Ever since you went away this morning, dear Hubert, I have been thinking over our conversation of Sunday. Don't ever fancy I do not know how painful it is to you to go over all the story again, nor that I am not abjectly grateful to you for withholding nothing. Ah, dear, if only it had been I! If I had only met you first, I could have made you really happy!

I have been tormented all day by the knowledge that I have not treated you with a like generosity. You have been so open about the past that it is inexcusable in me to have been silent about the present. Yet even with the best intentions in the world, I find some difficulty in finding the exact words, the precise shade of meaning to express the situation. There is a man who is, shall I say, important to me. At first I felt that, as I had refused to marry him before I ever met you, I was justified in not mentioning the incident, although I still see and like to see him. Now, of course, I understand that no such incident is ever wholly past, and that it is always monstrously important. With this man, dear Hubert, I am not in love, yet there is a side of me, a little bit of my nature, that will always pine for his society—just that little bit precisely that you haven't had time to take in as yet. I am not in love with him, yet the moment when I see him in love with someone else will be disagreeable. And rest assured he is a man I might be proud to care for—a gentleman, a man of the world. He has been and always will be an element in my life. That's all. Not very much, you will see, but I could not rest while I felt I had been second to you up honesty.

I wish you and Saturday were here once more.

Lydia

VI

O, Hubert, how can I write to you! How have you deceived me, or must I say allowed me to deceive myself! I have seen your Winnefred, O, how appropriately Mrs. Stiles! Is this the woman for whom your past passion so shook me that evening on the rocks? Is this the woman to whom five years ago you were engaged, and for whom to-day I am barely able to console you, the woman whom I am fancying as so noble, or at least so dazzling a creature, that I might be proud to be her successor-—this crystallization of everything in you which I have most tried to ignore!

I need not tell you I should not write like this if I felt that anything further between us were possible, but it is not. You know I have been waiting patiently all this time for you to get round to appreciating my better qualities. I see now that if ever you should be so unfortunate as to discover them they would hopelessly alienate you. We may as well face the truth; you do not want the best. For this is what your Winnefred has shown me. Either you are one of those who love women for their pettiness and failings (which you sum up in the one offensive word "femininity", and this is the attitude that puts women in the harem), or else you ask only that a woman should present no characteristics, good or bad, so that you may wrap her about in your own idealization, and this is the attitude that renders love after marriage impossible. To one of these alternatives, it seems to me, the thoroughly commonplace, trivial, selfish little woman whom I have just seen and whom you have so worshipped, must commit you. Either one would make me unhappy as your wife, and let me say, as a dispassionate outsider, neither is a point of view which commands my respect.

This you will say is not a kind letter. I do not feel kind—the situation scarcely admits of kindness. I have put myself in a painful and ridiculous position by deliberately blinding myself to the obvious fact that you and I are as far apart as the poles.

You may wonder that under the circumstances I do not at once leave your mother's house. She has asked some people to meet me at luncheon on Friday, and I could not go before then without entering into a full explanation, which I do not wish to do until I have seen you. I assume you will wish to see me, although it would be easier for both of us if you didn't. I return to town on Friday afternoon, and shall expect you about six-thirty

Lydia

VII

My dear Love: I don