Of Mrs. Miller herself there are only a few brief facts to be stated. This tall and charming woman was born in New York in 1874, the daughter of James G. K. Duer and Elizabeth (Meads) Duer. She was graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University, in 1899. She was married to Henry Wise Miller of New York on October 5, 1899. Her New York home on the upper East Side of the city, just below Central Park and just off Fifth Avenue, is in the most fashionable residence section, is in the heart of that region where most of her characters unquestionably live and where most of the others aspire to.
_The Modern Obstacle_, 1903. _Calderon’s Prisoner_, 1904. _Less Than Kin_, 1909. _Blue Arch_, 1910. _Are Women People?_ 1915. _Come Out of the Kitchen_, 1916. _Ladies Must Live_, 1917. _The Happiest Time of Their Lives_, 1918. _Wings in the Night_, 1918. Poems. _The Charm School_, 1919. Harper & Brothers. _The Beauty and the Bolshevist_, 1920. Harper & Brothers. _Manslaughter_, 1921. Dodd, Mead & Company.
_With certain exceptions noted, books are published by the Century Company, New York._
Eleanor Hallowell Abbott (Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Coburn: Mrs. Fordyce Coburn) is the most fanciful writer in America to-day. Fanciful, inventive--not imaginative in the large and proper sense of the word imagination. Her method in writing is utterly different from that of any other popular author. She is in this respect as unique as Harold Bell Wright--to whom she bears no resemblance whatever. Wright starts a novel--we hope the reader will pardon this digression--by making an elaborate outline, synopsis, scenario, _not_ of the story but of certain moral and ethical ideas, concepts and principles which he wishes to impress upon his readers. Sometimes up to the very last typewritten draft of one of his books the characters are known only by words denoting the things they stand for. Then, at the eleventh hour, Wright strikes out “Greed” and inserts “Obadiah Jackson” and “Manliness” and inserts “David Fanning”--and the copy goes to the printer.
Mrs. Coburn, or Miss Abbott as we may permit ourselves to call her because of her pen name’s connotations--Miss Abbott finds a title and then constructs her story. “Her stories are made to revolve around the title, rather than an outgrowth of any plot,” says a writer in the Boston _Globe_, upon whose article we rely mainly for the facts of this chapter. It is an article with rather too much fluff but it presents the really interesting facts about the author of _Molly Make-Believe_ and presents them with point. The writer of it says: “Once a satisfactory title occurs to Miss Abbott, she follows it in exactly the same manner as the detective who is pursuing a clue.”