“I like _Jewel_ best. I think she is my high water mark. It is a Christian Science book and without the Christian Science terminology that is used in the story it, well, it would be a kind of second _Little Lord Fauntleroy_, and besides, it wouldn’t be _Jewel_.”
Which may be so but which does not hold true of _The Right Princess_. There the identification of Frances Rogers’s beliefs with the faith of which Mrs. Eddy was the founder is not indispensable to the narrative. Miss Rogers need not have been a Scientist. We should still have an unusual and effectively told story, a novel quite as entertaining and worth the reader’s while as _The Opened Shutters_, from which the terminology of the Scientists is entirely absent.
The point we would make, then, the point that ought, in sheer honesty, to be made at the very outset of any consideration of Mrs. Burnham’s work, is her genuine and incontestable achievement as a straight-way, out-and-out, talented story-teller, a pure and simple fictioneer, an experienced and popular American novelist. That some of her novels have probably done more to put Christian Science precepts before the world in what the Scientist believes to be the true light than anything ever written other than the church’s texts--that this is so may be granted. But it is not a fact we have to concern ourselves with here. We concede it and pass on. We pass on in either direction, going back to the fourteen books which preceded _The Right Princess_ or forward to the eight novels which have appeared since _The Leaven of Love_. They are the bulk of Mrs. Burnham’s work. And yet--it is to be feared we shall have to bestow most of our attention upon the six books between! They represent Mrs. Burnham’s widest popularity and what is possibly her best work judged strictly in literary aspects. But enough of this for the present; it is time enough to cross bridges when we come to them. Let us first get a glimpse of Mrs. Burnham herself.
A tall woman, spare in build, with light hair, blue eyes and a merry manner, a conversationalist with anecdotes, a manner of great simplicity, serenity, calm pleasantness. She was the eldest daughter of George F. Root, as popular a songwriter as this country has produced. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, she has lived most of her life in Chicago. She summers in Maine. Her education was in the public and in private schools in Chicago, and at the New Church School, Waltham, Massachusetts. Politically she is, or was, a Progressive; and at this point we cannot do better than to quote her own words in the Chicago _Record-Herald_ of November 24, 1912: