She had, meanwhile, been writing; she had always been writing a little. When she was sixteen the Louisville _Courier-Journal_ had published _The Reveries of a Spinster_, an anonymous companion-piece to _The Reveries of a Bachelor_. The spinster’s reveries brought many letters to the newspaper, letters read with due appreciation by Alice Hegan, author of spinster and reveries both. She had also written a few short stories and had been a contributor to humorous papers.
There was nothing surprising or wholly unpremeditated therefore in the writing of _Mrs. Wiggs_. Alice Hegan and her mother kept a “give-away bag” which went regularly to a “poor but merry and philosophic woman” living in a neglected quarter of Louisville, out near the railroad tracks, in the southern part of the city. This woman was the original of Mrs. Wiggs. “The story was not a ‘just-so story,’” says Margaret Steele Anderson in her over-effusive appreciation of Alice Hegan Rice, “nor was it a photograph, exact from head to toe, but, in truth, a development of the original. The merry woman served as a nucleus; the rest was all Alice Hegan.” To quote further:
“The manuscript was read one rainy Saturday morning to a little group of ardent young women which called itself, with a courage half gay and half ironical, the Authors’ Club of Louisville. At that time it boasted no ‘real author,’ but the following was the roster of the club: Evelyn Snead Barnett, Alice Hegan Rice, Ellen Churchill Semple, George Madden Martin, Annie Fellows Johnston, Frances Caldwell Macaulay, Abbie Meguire Roach, Eva A. Madden, Mary Finley Leonard, Venita Seibert White, Margaret van der Cook and Margaret Anderson. This club meant nothing at the time, but it means, now, such stories as _Mrs. Wiggs_ and _Mr. Opp_, _Emmy Lou_, _The Lady of the Decoration_ and the _Little Colonel_ books. It means also such work as Mrs. Roach’s studies of married life--which rendered a year of _Harper’s_ very memorable--and such achievement in anthropo-geography as has made Ellen Semple a name on two continents and a lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge. To this little club was read this little story--and the club, as a body, became the very figure of laughter, literally holding both its sides.