This is the best I can do for you in this way,--but whatever you are minded to say of my work say this--that I have been writing only four or five years and have not yet come to my full power, nor will yet for some years more.
So wrote Mary Austin in late fall, 1902. Very nearly a year later Houghton Mifflin Company published _The Land of Little Rain_, a collection of fourteen sketches that were read with admiration and joy, that are rediscovered every year, that established incontestably Mary Austin’s qualifications as a writer.
“East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders.
“Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian’s is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven.”
The reader draws in his breath sharply. This is a _writer!_ And she has style. Yes, but so have dozens of others. And they never do anything with it. They write charming little essays, fanciful, forgotten. What else has she?
She has keen eyes, a keen mind, a heart to understand and a silence and time to come to the understanding. This much you make sure of as you go deeper into the book, reading the accounts of _The Pocket Hunter_ and _Jimville: A Bret Harte Town_. When you have finished you know Mrs. Austin’s promise but unless you have read her later books you do not know her performance.
It began right after the appearance of _The Land of Little Rain_ with her next work, the novel _Isidro_, a romance dealing with the California of the padres, and it reached its high and sustained level with _A Woman of Genius_.
She did not remain on the edge of the desert. To do so would have been fatal. She moved about and with benefit to herself and her work. Now she lives in a house facing on Gramercy Park, New York, where she has a studio. She has exchanged the Mojave desert for the desert of Manhattan, but she is sheltered in an oasis touched with the lingering loveliness of the New York H. C. Bunner knew. Ask her about the advantages of her new environment and she will tell you a story: