Reviews of Mary Tappan Wright’s Aliens (1902)

compiled by Brian Kunde

Reviews from: | Atlanta Constitution, 3/9/02 | Baltimore American, 4/19/02 | Baltimore Sun, 4/10/02, 5/15/02 | | Book Buyer, 5/02 | Book News, 5/02 | Bookseller, 9/02 | Boston Evening Transcript, 4/23/02 | | Boston Times, 5/8/02 | Christian Register, 3/6/02 | Critic, 10/02 | Dallas Morning News, 3/31/02 | Dial, 6/1/02 | | Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, 5/02 | Ecclesiastical Review, 8/02 | Era, 8/02 | | European Years, 10/11 (3/2/03) | Evangelist and Religious Review, 4/3/02 | Hartford Courant, 4/30/04 | | Independent, 5/1/02 | Literary Boston of To-Day, 8/02 | Literary News, 5/02 | Living Age, 3/29/02 | | London Quarterly Review, 4/09 | Louisville Post, 6?/02 | Medical Century, 5/1/02 | Morning Herald, 3/30/02 | | Nation, 5/22/02 | New Age, 8/2/02 | New England Stationer and Printer, 4/02 | | New York Evening Telegram, 3/29/02 | New York Observer and Chronicle, 4/10/02 | New York Sun, 3/29/02 | | New York Times, 3/1/02, 5/3/02, 5/17/02 | New-York Tribune, 2/8/02 | Outlook, 9/6/02 | | Overland Monthly and Out West, 6/02 | Philadelphia Record, 3/29/02 | Publishers’ Weekly, 1/31/03 | | Richmond Times, 6/8/02 | San Francisco Chronicle, 4/12/02 | Saturday Review, 8/30/02 | | Springfield Republican, 3/10/02, 4/6/02, 4/15/02 | Washington Post, 3/17/02 | Watchman, 4/3/02 | | Worcester Spy, 3/9/02, 4/6/02 | World, 3/22/02 | World’s Work, 5/02 | These contemporary reviews of Mary Tappan Wright’s Aliens are reproduced complete, with both positive and negative judgments intact, in the order of their original publication. Note that as products of their time they reflect the prejudices of their authors, both conscious and unconscious, when discussing the relations of Anglo- and African-Americans, and utilize terms and descriptions in reference to the latter that would be considered inflamatory today. In the interest of historical accuracy this material is presented exactly as originally published—the sole exception being in the instance of words now regarded as profanity, which are elided. —BPK, March 17, 2008. As of the latest update, this page features 53 reviews. —BPK, May 18, 2017. <— New-York Tribune, February 8, 1902, page 10: BOOKS AND AUTHORS. CURRENT TALK OF THINGS PRESENT AND TO COME.      There is one period of recent Southern history, that between the years of reconstruction and the “New South” of the present, that has hitherto escaped the attention of the novelist. This is the period in which Mrs. Mary Tappan Wright has placed her novel, “Aliens,” that the Scribners have in preparation. It tells of a group of Northern people who go into the heart of the South, and is a study of the social conditions and of the play of character of the Northern and Southern people in contact. Mrs. Wright, who is the wife of Professor John Henry Wright, professor of Greek and dean of the Graduate School of Harvard, wrote “A Truce, and Other Short Stories,” that appeared not long ago. <— New York Evening Telegram, March?, 1902, page ?: MARY TAPPAN WRIGHT’S Novel of the South A L I E N S “An admirable novel—a more than ordinarily clever study of manners and customs.”—NEW YORK EVENING TELEGRAM. $1.50 Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York [from a Scribner’s display ad in the New-York Tribune, March 29, 1902, page 10; complete review will be posted when located] <— New York Sun, March?, 1902, page ?: MARY TAPPAN WRIGHT’S Novel of the South A L I E N S The NEW YORK SUN says: “THERE is nothing historical about it, no idea of instruction or of serving any cause, just a plain story, a vivid description of an unusually interesting bit of contemporary American life, that somehow, almost incidentally, brings home the real troubles of the South, so that they are not easily forgotten.” $1.50 Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York [from a Scribner’s display ad in the New-York Tribune, March 29, 1902, page 10; complete review will be posted when located] <— Philadelphia Record, March?, 1902, page ?: MARY TAPPAN WRIGHT’S Novel of the South A L I E N S      “The Southern types, with the subtle effects of social and political traditions, are portrayed with insight and power.”—Philadelphia Record. $1.50 Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York [from a Scribner’s display ad in the New-York Tribune, March 29, 1902, page 10; complete review will be posted when located] <— New York Times, March 1, 1902, page BR12: NOTES AND NEWS.      “Aliens, a Novel of Contemporary Life in the South,” by Mary Tappan Wright, which will come from the press of Charles Scribner’s Sons next week, deals with social and political conditions south of the Mason and Dixon line during the period of reconstruction, and up to the time of the birth of the new South. The author is the wife of Prof. Wright of Harvard, and her father, Prof. Tappan, was at one time President of Kenyon College, Ohio. <— The Christian Register, March 6, 1902, page 285: Literary Notes.      Mary Tappan Wright, whose novel of southern life, Aliens, is soon to be published by the Scribners, is the wife of Professor John H. Wright of Harvard University, the dean of the graduate department and professor of Greek. Aliens deals with that extremely interesting period of Southern recovery, neglected in fiction, immediately following reconstruction,—a period and environment of which Mrs. Wright is well fitted to write by reason of long residence in the South. This is her first long novel, but she is a successful writer of shorter fiction. <— The Atlanta Constitution, March 9, 1902, page A10: IN THE LITERARY WORLD      “Aliens, a Novel of Contemporary Life in the South,” by Mary Tappan Wright, which will come from the press of Charles Scribner’s Sons next week, deals with social and political conditions south of the Mason and Dixon line during the period of reconstruction, and up to the time of the birth of the new south. The author is the wife of Professor Wright, of Harvard, and her father, Professor Tappan, was at one time president of Kenyon College, Ohio. <— Worcester Daily Spy, March 9, 1902, page 12: LITERARY NOTES      Mary Tappan Wright, whose very strong novel of Southern life, “Aliens,” is soon to be published by the Scribners, is the wife of Professor John H. Wright of Harvard University, the dean of the graduate department and professor of Greek. She and her husband are well known in the society of Cambridge, where they have lived for years. Mrs. Wright comes of the well-known Tappan family of Ohio, her father having been president of Kenyon College. She was born in Steubenville.      “Aliens” deals with that extremely interesting period of Southern recovery, so neglected in fiction, immediately following reconstruction, a period and environment of which Mrs. Wright is well fitted to write by reason of long residence in the South.      This is her first long novel, but she is a successful writer of shorter fiction, her stories having appeared chiefly in Scribner’s Magazine and the Atlantic. — <— Springfield Daily Republican, March 10, 1902, page 5: NOTES AMONG THE PUBLISHERS. — NEW AND FORTHCOMING BOOKS. — A Wide Variety of Reading for the Spring Season.      .     .     .     Mary Tappan Wright, whose novel of Southern life, “Aliens,” is soon to be published by this house, [Scribner’s] is the wife of Prof John H. Wright of Harvard university, the dean of the graduate department and professor of Greek. Mrs. Wright comes of the well-known Tappan family of Ohio, her father having been president of Kenyon College. She was born in Steubenville, O.      .     .     . <— The Washington Post, March 17, 1902, page 9: ALIENS. By Mary Tappan Wright. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Washington: Ballantyne & Sons. $1.50.      A novel of contemporary life in the South, dealing with social and to a slight extent with political conditions. The title of the book indicates the point of view, viz., that the social conditions are still quite by themselves, and that Northerners find themselves in a civilization almost as strange as any outside their own race. <— The World, March 22, 1902, page 8: NEWS & VIEWS OF BOOKS AMONG FRESH WORKS OF FICTION. “The Strollers” and a Mid-Century America—A Romance Involving the Real Alexander Hamilton—New Story of the Color Line. ALIENS.—By Mary Tappan Wright. (Charles Scribner’s Sons.) IT is a long step form the vehemence of the Rev. Thomas Dixon to the artistic insistence of Mrs. Wright. Between the two, however, with “The Leopard’s Spots” and “Aliens” from which to sum up the case, a reader must get the most enlightening, all around view of the race question as it stands in Southern minds. The author of the book in hand is a Northern woman, but she has written with the broad mind which sees where bigotry and where intolerance make mistakes on either hand; which is able to allow for the world-wide differences of view inseparable from differences of birth and condition. Her book is that occasional marvel of the literary product which reveals and inspires thought without interrupting the story to set forth pages of didactic discourse.      A Northern professor in a slow-going Southern college brings his br[i]de to the scene of his labors. She, too, is of the North. But she is not further removed from the new emotions, convictions and unwritten laws among which she finds herself than she is from sympathy with the moods of the man whom she has married more from esteem than from love. Being young, gifted and attractive, she is the subject of no little jealousy of Southern chivalry, which she comes to understand in time. Meanwhile, through her own experiences and the boycotting which she sees sternly applied to a certain mission for colored children, established by zealous New England effort, she acquires a fresh knowledge of race conditions existing in a section of which Tallawara is a typical centre.      Mrs. Wright weaves her threads o[f] love, tragedy and comedy into a literary warp and woof, giving evidence of study and acquaintance among the conditions of which she writes. Her book has the importance which should endure as well as the narrative power that entertains and enlightens. <— The Living Age, March 29, 1902, page 823: BOOKS AND AUTHORS.      Mary Tappan Wright, author of the novel “Aliens” which is on the list of the Scribners for early publication, is the wife of Professor John H. Wright of Harvard University. Her story deals with southern life in the later reconstruction period and is the fruit of personal observation. This is Mrs. Wright’s first long novel, but she has an agreeable reputation as a writer of short stories. <— The Morning Herald (Lexington, Ky.), March 30, 1902, page 18: BOOK REVIEW — Aliens. Mary Tappen [sic] Wright. Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York, 1902.      Aliens is a very disagreeable and quite powerful story of contemporary life in a southern college town. The theme is the difference between the people and conditions, the standards, traditions and ideals of a small community in the South and those of a northern community of the same relative size and importance—a difference so great that when a girl, a product of the northern life, is transplanted in the southern environment she finds herself an outlander. The social and to a certain extent the political conditions are portrayed with a vividness that is almost graphic.      The story runs somewhat as follows: Helen Prescott, of the northern college town, marries the northern student now for more than a decade a professor in the little southern college. She does so without pretending to love him, but because of a Quixotic notion that the mild feeling of respect she feels for him is a better foundation for enduring happiness than a romantic attachment would prove. Going with him to his adopted home, at a time of unusual excitement because of the proposition to remove the college to the capital of the State, she finds herself wholly unable to comprehend the situation or cope with the emergency which soon arises.      The theme is an interesting one, and the reader can only regret that it is not handled with a more skillful hand. If Helen had had a sympathetic heart, if she had seen anything outside the range of her own narrow experience, if she had gained admission to her husband’s life, the barrier between her and the community would have been either broken down or comprehensible. But as she remains an alien in her husband’s development as as well as in the community life, the theme fails of illustration.      The presentation is unjust, too, to both sides. Just as the pettiness, the sordidness, the self-satisfaction, the vulgarity of the little southern town are presented in exaggerated fashion, so the hardness and unconscious selfishness, the obtuseness of the heroine misrepresent the present day education of the North. Men and women of Helen’s type are strangers and foreigners wherever unselfish and comprehending sympathy are demanded.      In spite, however, of faults in plot, construction and uncertainty in character drawing, the attention of the reader is held and there remain some vivid impressions of an alluring, if desolate, country. <— Dallas Morning News, March 31, 1902, page 3: “Aliens,” by Mary Tappan Wright. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.      Whether or not Mrs. Wright has her provincial little college town well located, there is no question she has seen the ins and outs of its petty side. She is the daughter of President Tappan of the Kenyon, Ohio, College, and the wife of Prof. John H. Wright of Harvard. In locating her scenes in the South—mayhap in Alabama, for the “black belt” is in evidence—it is doubtful if her materials were gleaned at first hand, or sufficiently studied. Her characters do not ring true in the Southern ear, but to a large and unfamiliar audience would doubtless prove acceptable. It is a story of contrasts, and these at least are well conceived. A Northern woman marries a professor in a Southern college, a Southerner with Northern training. Wholly unaccustomed to the modes of life and thought which she finds in the small Southern town where he takes her, she makes many blunders, and ends by being made very miserable. The strength of the book lies wholly in the author's evident sincerity and desire to be fair. There is almost no plot, and yet is better worth reading than many stories that have attained to cheap popularity. The moral is convincing, though not intended unpleasantly—the old one of well-meaning people who try unsuccessfully to make over a world which they can not sympathize with nor comprehend. <— New England Stationer and Printer, April, 1902, page 58: RECENT PUBLICATIONS CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS’ SPRING ANNOUNCEMENT.      A novel that will provoke discussion is “Aliens” by Mary Tappan Wright. It is a remarkable story of contemporary life in the South, dealing with the social and to a slight extent with the political conditions of a period more recent than fiction has hitherto treated. It is no longer the time of reconstruction, but one that falls well within the present decade. Social conditions are still quite by themselves, and the Northern woman finds herself in a civilization almost as strange as any outside her own race. <— Evangelist and Religious Review, April 3, 1902, pages 191-192:      In Aliens10, by Mary Tappan Wright, we have another of the novels of Southern life which bid fair to rival in numbers, at least, the historical romances. This one seems to us decidedly worth while. It is a careful, sympathetic, but unprejudiced exposition of present conditions in a typical Southern village. Although apparently not written with a view to the betterment of such conditions nor with a suggestion as to the solution of the many problems, the book nevertheless is suggestive, since it throws so vivid a light on the social life and to a certain extent on the political life. One feels the hold of tradition upon the people, the subtle influences of climate and of the relations between the two races, “the spirit of the land.” The Northern woman finds herself an alien in this South, “huge, remote, unintelligible,” With its “hospitable, warm-hearted but intensely Prejudiced people,” and is continually “in the certainty of her Northern theories, blundering over Southern facts.” The Southern types are all here; the “perfect gentleman” who has no qualms about shooting an unarmed man or insulting women whose only offense is that they teach negro children; the charming witty Southern belle; the young gallants who make love as easily and of as great necessity as they breathe; the colored people and many others, all the products, hateful and lovely, good and evil, of such a civilization. The descriptions are very beautiful; nature is often symbolically interpreted. “With us the trees seem to live,” says the Northern woman. “Even in the bare frost of our Februarys, they aspire; your trees sway forever in steady, despairing patience, mournful and dark, always blocking the horizon, waiting, but without hope. . . . it may be for expiation, as for the time of mourning to pass; perhaps for the uneasy giant to awake.” This is a strong story, picturesque, keen and full of dramatic incident.      10Aliens. By Mary Tappan Wright. Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1902. $1.50. <— The Watchman, April 3, 1902, page 16: Among the Books Other Books      “Aliens”: A Story of North and South. By Mary Tappan Wright. It is refreshing to turn from the ever-present historical novel, and the “problem” novel of fashionable society, to a story of our own day and country, but one which reveals a condition of society as stranger as that of another people and civilization. A Northern woman of exceptional education, refinement and culture, marries a Northern man who for ten years or more has been a professor in a Southern college, and the story opens with the termination of their wedding journey and the bride’s introduction to her new home. The book deals almost entirely with the social conditions of life in the South, touching political issues only as they affect the relations of society. Mrs. Wright’s work suggests a pen and ink sketch—every stroke tells; there is not a superfluous line in the book. The characters are sharply drawn, and reveal varied individualities in conversations amusing, exasperating, often amazing from our point of view, but never dull. The descriptions of scene and environment are terse but picturesque, leaving the details of local color to be felt. The story moves rapidly with dramatic force and increasing interest to the end. Mrs. Wright is the wife of Prof. Wright of Harvard, and the author of “A Truce, and Other Tales.” In “Aliens” she has achieved more than a successful novel—it is a book to be remembered. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Pp. 424. $1.50.) <— Springfield Sunday Republican, April 6, 1902, page 19: BOOKS, AUTHORS AND ARTS — A STORY OF THE SOUTH. —      An interesting novel, which will probably be received with scant grace in the South, and the complete fairness of which it is possible even for a northerner to doubt, is “The Alien” [sic] (Scribners), by Mary Tappan Wright, whose previous book, “A Truce and Other Stories,” attracted no little attention. The scene is an old-fashioned college town, the precise location of which is not indicated, and at the outset of the story Prof Thurston, a northerner, who had been a member of the faculty so long as almost to be adopted, is just returning with his northern bride, a brilliant but not an adaptable woman. The author represents vividly her disgust at almost everything she sees—the negroes and the way the negroes are treated; the shiftless life and the enervating atmosphere, and most of all the petty gossip which concerns itself chiefly with the love affairs of young people. Flirtation and scandal seem to be the chief recreations, with dueling, murder and lynching for more exciting moments.      As for characters, there is a brilliant young southern novelist, who is a tremendous flirt and is regarded by all the girls as a beau ideal, an ambitious storekeeper of second-grade society, who keeps a convict gang, a malevolent and sneaking professor named Yarnell, who is trying to oust Prof Thurston from his chair, a volatile young newspaper editor named Brinton, and a highly flirtatious southern belle, Zoe Mason, with whom southern critics of the book will probably find most fault. There seems little doubt that she is true to life; in her conception of life as in her dialect; the more important question is whether she is typical. Then there are a number of northern people who hardly count, as they belong to the negro mission, and are therefore ostracised, in spite of the fact that in family and education they are the equals of any families in the place. The justice of the picture may be left to the discussion of those concerned: as to the essential interest and vitality of the novel there can be no question, except for the fact that the author has unnecessarily emphasized the unpleasant portions of the narrative, and especially the little bickerings between Mrs Thurston and her husband, a well-meaning but rather cold and pedantic man. The point is that there is enough that is ugly in the story without bringing in needless domestic squabbles, which always make depressing reading. <— Worcester Sunday Spy, April 6, 1902, page 6: THE WORLD OF BOOKS — ALIENS.      By Mary Tappan Wright.      (Charles Scribner’s Sons.)      This is a novel of contemporary life in the South. It is not exactly a problem book, although the title itself indicates what the characters of the book seem to prove. A Northern woman in the South finds herself in a new civilization. The social conditions of the North and South as depicted here are totally different and the viewpoints of the people are yet more different. The story cannot be considered apart from these facts because it all depends upon the life of the young woman who marries a professor in a small Southern college.      The Southern types are portrayed with great skill. Ellen Thurston, the principal character of the story, is a refined and cultivated daughter of a wealthy Northern man. Her experiences and her disappointments in her husband’s character are the basis of the story.      A mild riot, in which a mission school conducted by an attractive Northern girl, is partly burned, and Professor Thurston is dangerously wounded, is the most exciting incident of the story. The social and political life of the South is portrayed in vivid colors throughout the story.      There is no attempt to indicate how the unsatisfactory conditions may be eliminated or altered. It is not like some of the recent stories—an attempt to prove the superiority of a race or the dangers of this or that,—but it gives the reader who accepts the truth of the author’s observation the idea that the North and South are still far apart in their real opinions. Taken as a whole the viewpoints are apparently irreconcilable.      The novel is not extremely good as a story. It is interesting; it cannot be called dull; it ranks much higher than most of the literature of this class. But one of the faults of the book is that none of the characters seem to amount to much anyhow. There is not enough interest in any individual or individuals. It isn’t cheerful even. It is dispiriting and discouraging. <— New York Observer and Chronicle, April 10, 1902, page 468: “Aliens.” A Novel of North and South. By Mary Tappan Wright. Charles Scribner’s Sons. $1.50.      The author of  “Aliens” has successfully attempted to portray Southern contemporary life with its own peculiar social conditions. There is a space of politics introduced. The local color is true to the surroundings, and the author’s point that social conditions in the South are still by themselves apart is well taken and amply demonstrated. Mrs. Helen Thurston finds herself amid scenes which bring new impressions to her mind, some of them not altogether pleasing, but all of them lasting. There is a picturesqueness about the story that those who know the South will appreciate. Its movement is dramatic and its characters vivid. The spirit of the land which wrought its spell on Helen Thurston is a familiar spirit to the author. <— The Baltimore Sun, April 10, 1902, page 8: The Aliens. [sic] By Mary Tappan Wright. (8x5, pp. 424. $1.50.) Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. [Cushing, Baltimore.]      We sincerely regret the publication of this book. The regret is personal in that “The Aliens” [sic] presents to the public a writer capable of good work in a false position. Those unacquainted with Mary Tappan Wright would from “The Aliens” [sic] consider her unfair and we might well add uninformed. There would be ground, too, for considering this author to be animated by a hatred for the South and filled with a desire to put the negro in the place of the white man. This misunderstanding of the talented author, who, we are confident, is as sincere as she is unjust, is certainly to be regretted. We are grieved that Mrs. Wright should have given to the world another of those unfair books that have done so much to keep alive sectional antagonisms. Judging her book carefully and without regard for any personal good feeling that we may have for its author, we say: “The Aliens” [sic] is a libel upon Southern society of today. It is written in the spirit of one of those Northern women who consort with negroes in the mission schools of the South. It is full of misstatements that are seemingly told with the purpose of creating prejudice and aiding the sale of the book as an anti-Southern document. The harm that such a book as “The Aliens” [sic] may do is happily limited by its circulation, but unhappily that circulation is among persons with prejudice already developed, and therefore errors will pass unquestioned because in line with the thought of the reader. We are certain that this book deserves only the contempt and neglect of every Southerner. <— The San Francisco Chronicle, April 12, 1902, page 8: SHORT REVIEWS OF                                                   SOME RECENT BOOKS A PICTURE, or, rather, a series of pictures, of Southern life in this day and generation, materially different from the limning of Cable or Hopkinson Smith, or, indeed, of any of the other novelists who have dealt with contemporary conditions in that most attractive of New World literary fields, is unrolled in Mary Tappan Wright’s “Aliens,” which is described in the title as “A Novel of North and South.” To be quite candid, it is more of the sketchbook type than of the novel. For a central theme the book has the story of a man and woman spelling out in sullen, suppressed bitterness the old, old lesson of unhappiness that goes with a marriage which lacks intimate understanding of soul and intellect—the unhappiness so lacking in material cause that there cannot be found for it a material cure, so indefinite that you cannot lay a finger here or there and say “here is the trouble.” One sees the sorrow and the pathos of it mostly through the eyes of the sensitive young Northern woman, rooted up from the orderliness and sustaining conventions of her New England environment. Thus the first glimpse of her new home impresses her:      Fatigue and excitement combined to make this great belt of cotton and color seem accursed, under a ban, unspeakably desolate in its lazy, hopeless unthrift; and the vast, melancholy plantations; the tragic tangles of cane and creeper; the blighted trees floating with ghostly moss; the scattered, squalid cabins; the blood-red gashes in the earth; the startling green of the pines and the heavy foliage of the mournful horizon—all inspired her with something little short of terror.      The husband, who is aptly hit off in the phrase “A man who had never come up,” fails to arouse more than pity for his lack of perception and his faculty of retreating into an impenetrable thicket of egoism at the very moment when a comprehending smile would have lit the pathway over the morass. Aside from the woes of the Thurstons—home-made, like most woes—the best the book has to offer is its study of such a phase of the racial and social problem as may be inferred from the presence of a few self-sacrificing men and women from the North in a wholly unreadjusted community of Southerners, still steeped to the lips in the prejudice of color and caste, striving for the moral and mental enlargement of the “man and brother,” and yet hungering, however vainly, for some companionship of their own blood. Trenholm, the leading man of the subordinate action, is that unlovely thing, a practical male flirt, a poseur, selfish, cruel and banal in all his manifestations. All in all, the picture of Tallawara and its people is depressingly somber, unrelieved by any gleam of hope or promise. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons: price $1.50.) <— Springfield Daily Republican, April 15, 1902, page 13: WITHIN THE SPHERE OF LETTERS. — NOTES OF BOOKS AND AUTHORS. — A Novel That Displeases the South.      When Mrs Mary Tappan Wright's new novel, “The Aliens,” [sic] was recently reviewed in these columns, the opinion was expressed that it would be received very badly in the South. This seems to prove to be the case. The Baltimore Sun, which is keenly sensitive to national lines in fiction, says:—      We sincerely regret the publication of this book. The regret is personal in that “The Aliens” [sic] presents to the public a writer capable of good work in a false position. Those unacquainted with Mary Tappen [sic] Wright would from “The Aliens” [sic] consider her unfair and we might well add uninformed. There would be ground, too, for considering this author to be animated by a hatred for the South and filled with a desire to put the negro in the place of the white man. This misunderstanding of the talented author, who, we are confident, is as sincere as she is unjust, is certainly to be regretted. We are grieved that Mrs Wright should have given to the world another of those unfair books that have done so much to keep alive sectional antagonisms. Judging her book carefully and without regard for any personal good feeling that we may have for its author, we say “The Aliens” [sic] is a libel upon southern society of to-day. It is written in the spirit of one of those northern women who consort with negroes in the mission schools of the South. It is full of misstatements that are seemingly told with the purpose of creating prejudice and aiding the sale of the book as an anti-southern document. The harm that such a book as “The Aliens” [sic] may do is happily limited by the circulation, but unhappily that circulation is among persons with prejudice already developed, and therefore errors will pass unquestioned because in line with the thought of the reader. We are certain that this book deserves only the contempt and neglect of every southerner. <— Baltimore American, April 19, 1902, page 10: A Southern Story.      “Aliens.” By Mary Tappan Wright. This is a novel of contemporary life in the South, dealing with social and to a slight extent with political conditions, dramatic in movement and full of picturesque color. The title of the novel indicates the point of view, namely, that the social conditions are still quite by themselves, and that the Northern woman finds herself in s civilization almost as strange to her as any outside her own race. The Southern types, with the subtle effects of social and political traditions, are portrayed with unusual vigor. Published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, and for sale by B. B. Eichelberger, Baltimore. <— Boston Evening Transcript, April 23, 1902, page 19: NEW BOOKS Aliens      “Aliens,” in which Mary Tappan Wright portrays with great exactness certain phases of marital conditions, is in many ways a distinctive contribution to modern imaginative literature. The average reader will find nothing exciting or emotionally moving in is pages, but the student of the psychological novel with welcome it for the insight given into the workings of the feminine mind during a period of storm and stress. Although the story is called “a novel of North and South,” its environment is merely incidental; the same woman under different conditions would have been similarly moved. Purely as a story Mrs. Wright has written nothing out of the common order; her success consists in the power of her analysis of human character and conduct. Her heroine is a newly married woman who goes with her husband to the little Southern college town in which he is teaching, and after a year of struggling against his self-absorption, growing indifference and the monotony of the life about her, she succumbs to the inevitable. The character analysis is utterly from the woman’s point of view, but as that point is too frequently neglected in fiction, Mrs. Wright is to be congratulated upon her adherence to it.      The problem of “Aliens” is not to be found merely in the change of an environment from North to South; the same effect would be created upon a impressionable mine, no matter what country, State or clime or through what cause it might be transported. It is really a universal problem which Mrs. Wright has discussed, in spite of the fact that she has localized it among the intrinsically disagreeable surroundings of a moribund Southern town. The mood of the bride and its reaction upon the bridegroom is thus shown at the very outside of the story: “Up to the final stages of the journey he had been full of the ideal. He was bringing home his bride! It was a triumph. His heart sang paeans and epithalamiums, and his thoughts bubbled over in vaguely ecstatic allusions— mainly literary. But during the whole of that last day he had been trying in vain to combat the leaden sense of discouragement that had seemed to be slowly creeping over Helen’s usually cheerful spirit; there was something in the silent, weary apathy she had shown toward all her surroundings that oppressed and irritated him. This was not the joyous anticipation he had expected; such evident dejection betrayed a lack of faith in his better judgment that was painful.”      “Aliens” is published in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons. <— The Book Buyer, a Review and Record of Current Literature, May 1902, pages 315-316: CURRENT LITERATURE “A QUESTION OF LATITUDES.” THE larger motive predominates in Mrs. Mary Tappan Wright’s “novel of North and South,” Aliens, and this is well, for, working inward, the reader grasps more firmly the meaning of the book. It is not only the social differences which make the Northerner an alien in the Southland; the temperamental divergence of which they are the outward manifestation is much more vital to a full understanding of the problem. The Southern novelist of this story, who in a Northern atmosphere appears far different from his own real self, to reassume it the moment he returns among his people, is a deft psychological expression of this temperamental difference; and, in a lighter way, Zöe Mason, the flirtatious, clever girl of the South, with her band of admirers, all of whom she keeps in uncertainty, is skilfully made to aid in carrying the analysis home. “It is all a question of latitudes,” said Numa Roumestan, of the Méridional; and “it is all a question of latitudes,” we may well repeat in reading this searching study of the divergences between our own North and South.      The minor characters grouped about the chief actors of this tale are all made to contribute to the picture, stepping forward out of their social system, or back into it, as may be needful for the author’s purpose. It is, indeed, a foreign life to the Northerner, who finds so much warm-hearted hospitality, so much anxiety to make him “feel at home,” provided he can adapt himself entirely and without reserve, mentally and intellectually, to a form of life that is crystallized, and will not change or move.      Northern ideals cannot be reconciled with Southern facts—that is Mrs. Wright’s conclusion, as it is that of all fair-minded Northerners who have dwelt below Mason and Dixon’s line and observed closely. The South lives in a state of self-defence, surrounded by a surging mass whose numbers grow from day to day, a constant menace to the white man’s supremacy, his property, his womankind, the continued existence of his civilization. He is willing to help the negro in his own way, from the depth of his understanding of him, in a manner that will safeguard his own safety and rule, but he is poor, and needs money to do so. That he welcomes from the North, but when well-meaning enthusiasts come thence to bring enlightenment to a race they do not know, he places himself on the defensive, ostracizes, and occasionally tears down. With him it is a question of numbers: educated or ignorant, the negro remains the same social and political menace to him. It is the insolvable problem of this country, and Mrs. Wright has done well to present it to us impartially, as a Northerner sees it who knows the South.      It is a life that has fallen behind the Northern times, paralyzed by the blow of the war, and by the reign of terror that followed it. It is but just regaining the use of its strength, and it is resolved that the scenes of negro supremacy it has witnessed shall not occur again. It has learned its lesson.      Mrs. Wright is not, however, merely a student of social conditions and their political consequences. She is a novelist as well—a good one, too, for not the least of the merits of Aliens is the utter absence from its pages of all personal trace of the author. The characters act the story, incident and background tell it; there is plenty of movement and fictional interest throughout; one need not read the book fro its information alone. As a novel merely it stands the test. The heroine—new-comer that she is from a superior centre of civilization—remains through many chapters a puzzled, discontented, disillusioned onlooker, unwittingly often giving offence. It is toward the end that she, too, unable to grasp the inevitable Southern view-point, endeavors to do the right as she sees it, and as it theoretically is, thus applying the tiny flame needed to cause the conflagration that has long been burning. It is this periodic catastrophe which we find time and again in novels of the contemporary South: it is but a reflection of the things that are.      Environment, in its widest sense, dominates the lives of all these people, environment made visible in character and action and atmosphere. The Southerners, being one with it, dominate in the impression made; the Northerners stand by and observe with us, we profiting by their misunderstandings, their blunders and mistakes, whether it be those of the bride from the New England university town, or of the zealous women who, endeavoring to serve the negro, submit cheerfully to a social death.      Mrs. Wright has added a book of deep significance to the small library of stories of American life that really illustrate their subject and interpret its deeper meaning. A. Schade van Westrum.         ALIENS: A STORY OF NORTH AND SOUTH. By Mary Tappan Wright. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 12mo. $150. <— Book News, a Monthly Survey of General Literature, May 1902, pages 738, 678-679: F     I     C     T     I     O     N      Aliens. By Mary Tappan Wright, author of “A Truce and Other Stories.” 424 pp. 12mo. See review page 678. [below] ALIENS.      This is a somewhat strange tale in which characterization is the essential feature. The psychological study presents a number of difficult and interesting problems, the attempt to solve which would require some extended knowledge, and in all probabilities would lead up to stirring controversy. The story deals with contemporary life in the South, giving an able delineation of the social and political conditions existing there. On the social side particularly, the author enlarges, introducing many pretty and piquant scenes as well as more serious and impressive situations. A large number of diversifying phases of human nature are set forth, the negro character being skilfully included.      There is just sufficient environment suggested to form a background against which to cast the characters, thereby bringing into prominence their individual points.      Although one cannot feel deeply interested throughout the entire work, yet if one looks deeper than the mere story, he will be able to find much that is worth considering and many thoughts for earnest contemplation. <— Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, May 1902, page 699: BOOKS AND AUTHORS.      Mary Tappan Wright, author of the novel “Aliens” which is on the list of the Scribners for early publication, is the wife of Professor John H. Wright of Harvard University. Her story deals with southern life in the later reconstruction period and is the fruit of personal observation. This is Mrs. Wright's first long novel, but she has an agreeable reputation as a writer of short stories. <— The Literary News, May 1902, pages 140-141: Aliens.      IT takes uncommon qualities to mark out a story in the legion of eminently respectable romances and novels that has been let loose upon us. “Aliens: a novel of North and South,” by Mrs. Mary Tappan Wright, may never be advertised as selling in its 300th thousand, but it will be enjoyed by all who read it and will make some of them think. There is nothing historical about it, no idea of instruction or of serving any cause, just a plain story, a vivid description of an unusually interesting bit of contemporary American life, that somehow, almost incidentally, brings home the real troubles of the South, so that they are not easily forgotten.      The main story of “Aliens” has nothing to do with either North or South. It is a bit of the psychology of early married life from the woman's side. Mrs. Wright leads her heroine through the trying year that follows the honeymoon, amid strange surroundings, with her husband sinking from the lover into the humdrum creature he was before marriage, and is likely to be forever after. Most women will recognize the girls revolts and struggles before she yields to the inevitable. We should have liked to have had the man's side as well, but the husband is the least definite of Mrs. Wright’s characters. It is a delightful lot of people she introduces us to; there is a fascinating young author who makes love to every woman he meets, there is a level-headed, humorous editor, who is a thoroughly good fellow; there is a spirited young belle that has to be subdued; there are a lovable old rector, and a landlady and a lot of others; there are very unpleasant persons besides. Then there are the Northerners, who are trying to help the blacks; two spunky, amusing old maids and a very lovely young girl with a New England conscience. They are all living, human creatures, and the love stories are charming. (Scribner. $1.50.)—N. Y. Evening Sun. <— The World's Work, May 1902, page 2122: THE WORK OF THE BOOK WORLD A SHORT GUIDE TO NEW BOOKS RECENT FICTION The Aliens [sic] Lastly Mrs MARY TAPPEN [sic] WRIGHT has written a novel (Scribner, $1.50.) which shows how alien still is the spirit of the North from the spirit of the South, as well as the strife between black and white. But the author's evident delight in tragedy dominates chapter after chapter. The men are for the most part weak or wicked, the women unfortunate, and all things work together for evil. It is a book all pessimists will enjoy. <— The Independent, May 1, 1902, page 1075: A New Picture of the South      FROM “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and its literary progeny the pendulum of popularity has swung of late years to the opposite end of its arc. A new sort of “sectional” novel has come into fashion, where the Southerner appears as the exponent of most of the virtues, and if exigencies of plot demand the bestowal of a few on a Northerner, it is commonly a girl, represented as a flower which has bloomed inexplicably from unpromising soil, born of, but not resembling, a mother connected with some Massachusetts Freedman’s Aid Society, and a “carpet-bagger” father.      The author of Aliens* has made a notable departure from both the earlier and the later type. The story deals with the experiences of a young Northern woman in a Southern village, the seat of a small college, in which her husband is a professor.      The manner of presenting the social and political questions upon which the plot depends is peculiarly effective. Few novels dealing with a subject where the natural tendency to sermonize is so strong are so free from anything of the sort. Whatever views the book seems to support come as irresistible conclusions from the words and actions of its characters; and, with almost no moralizing, with comparatively little descriptive writing of the ordinary sort, the author has painted the real South, has shown its peculiar charm without forgetting also the petty discomforts and restrictions which make life there irksome to the Northerner. The very opening paragraph breathes a new spirit. The Southern train that never goes has become a stock article in literature, but the impatience of the passengers has hitherto been soothed by the fragrance of magnolia blooms and yellow jasmine. It is a new experience to meet (in print) the “hot, damp breeze,” which in itself is enough to dishearten the most optimistic Northerner.      Mrs. Wright has a peculiar gift for making apparent trifles “point a moral.” The uninitiated may not know that there is any profound sectional significance in the use of fly screens, but it is even so! And it is a remarkable insight into Southern character which fills Helen’s new home with flowers, the tribute of a warm-hearted people to “the bride,” and yet makes her solitary walks become a village scandal, and brings on her when carrying an armful of bundles the criticism that “these Northern women don’t seem to value themselves any better than the n—rs.” Writers of Southern fiction have hitherto overlooked the fact that Southern hospitality tends more to the giving of roses than of sympathy or tolerance for customs and beliefs different from its own.      On the other hand, the spirit in which most Northerners come prepared to judge the South is all compressed into Helen’s greeting to her husband on his return from his first day’s work: “I am trying to learn how to speak to a n—r.” But whatever the Northerner’s opinions concerning sectional differences he does not ordinarily talk of them to a Southern guest. The Southerner still carries them as a sort of perennial chip on his shoulder. Helen puts it to Trenholm thus:      “‘That is the point! you would tell us, and we should listen to you politely     .     .     .     but if any one came here and criticised the same things, what would happen? If he were a man he would very likely be shot. If he were a woman’—she laughed. ‘I am not inclined to find out what would happen to him if he were a woman,’ she said.”      Individually none of the negro characters is especially noteworthy, but as representatives of the negro race as a whole their delineation is singularly just. There is no disposition to idealize them or minimize their faults, just as there is no hesitation in crediting the Southern white man with his share of responsibility for the immorality of the race. The treatment accorded to Northern teachers in colored schools has nowhere received more truthful handling. It is not mere prejudice which makes Helen cry, “They are martyrs!”      The author is less strikingly successful in the portrayal of individual characteristics—particularly in her Southern women—than of sectional ones, but the book on the whole is a strong one, and it is refreshing to meet with a writer who has been able to paint that South which is rather [sic: other] than “the ideal and beloved South as it ought to be.”      *ALIENS. By Mary Tappan Wright. New York[,] Charles Scribner’s Sons. $1.50. <— Medical Century: A Journal of Homeopathic Medicine and Surgery, May 1, 1902, page 148: The Library. NEW BOOKS. “Aliens.”      By Mary Tappan Wright, author of “A Truce and Other Tales.” Charles Scribner’s Sons. New York. 1902.      This is a novel of contemporary life in the South, dealing with social and political conditions. The portrayal of Southern types is one of unusual power and insight. The novel, which is really one of both the North and South, is one of dramatic movement, and interesting social conditions of the story and its stage is not only of exceeding interest, but full of instruction. Our readers can turn to novels of this type for a few hours’ recreation and feel that the time in their perusal is not wasted, but well spent. The price of the book is $1.50, and is in the handsome style of the “Scribners.” <— New York Times, May 3, 1902, page BR11: RECENT FICTION. Mary Tappan Wright’s “Aliens.”*      “Aliens” is a novel of more than usual excellence. It is well written, the characters are well sustained, and the situation—it is hardly a plot—is one that calls for much subtlety of discernment on the part of the author. The scene is laid in Tallawara, a small college town of the South., in which the problem of the races burns with little abatement some two-score years after the war.      The author does not attempt to solve the problem, but she puts before us a variety of dramatic scenes, each of which testifies to the sombre reality of a sentiment to which the Northerner born and bred is bound to be and to remain alien. Helen Thurston, who comes from [sic: to] Tallawara as the wife of a professor in the college, a Northern man who has been acclimated by long residence in the South, feels the oppression of conventions that have no meaning for her, the irritation of restrictions that suggest slavery of mind and bondage of soul, the fear inspired by an instinctive knowledge of the fire smoldering beneath the indolent, slovenly exterior of the society in which she is cast. As a portrait against the background of the languorous country she is admirable. The daughter of a scholar and a thinker, who never appeared before his daughter in intellectual undress, who gave her the cream of his thoughts, who interested her as her interested the outside world, and who treated her with the courtesy he showed to that outside world, she becomes the friend and then the wife of Thurston, whose ideal of home life is “a sort of Germanic idea, where a man may go about, mentally, in his slippers and dressing gown,” who prefers being first among his inferiors to taking his place among his equals, who is not above nursing small grievances and taking petty revenges for personal slights—who, in a word, is a second-rate man. The account of the adjustment between Helen’s acute intelligence, high mental standard, and loyal but somewhat disdainful temper, and Thurston’s brooding sensitiveness and egoism Is entirely convincing.      In the course of the story many human creatures are set in motion and the portraits of the negroes are driven home to our credence by countless incontestably lifelike details. From the sensational Lincoln, who runs so fast to a fight that his “laigs is all gave out” and he feels no strength when asked to carry a bundle, to the dark-souled, passionate Alisa and her husband, Hannibal, the negro character is delineated with a certain touch and a vivid comprehension. Humor, pathos, tragedy, and the cool, crisp exercise of logic are all to be found in “Aliens,” with only now and then the defect of superfluous explanation to mar the art with which the author has rendered life. *ALIENS. By Mary Tappan Wright. Cloth. 8vo. Pp. vi.-424. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1902. Price $1.50. <— Boston Times, May 8, 1902, page [?]: [The following is quoted in The Baltimore Sun review of May 15, 1902; the full review has not yet been located.] . . . The book goes on showing how they, our dearly beloved brethren of the South, not only chased n—rs with dogs, but burned schoolhouses, shot those who opposed them in politics and established an alien atmosphere in a country where the black people are hated and New Englanders despised. Oh, they are a lovely lot of Americans down there! <— The Baltimore Sun, May 15, 1902, page 8: SECTIONAL NOVELS.      In the Boston Times of May 8 there appeared a review of Mary Tappan Wright’s novel “Aliens.” the reviewer did not in the least concern himself with the merits of the book as a piece of literature, but merely repeated some of the statements made in the novel regarding the conditions of affairs in the South. So crudely was the work of reviewing done that the critic calls the author “Miss Wright,” and is evidently unaware that she is the wife of a professor at Harvard University. Boston must come to Baltimore, apparently, to learn the facts concerning those who live in the Modern Athens.      The reviewer, as we have said, contents himself with extracting statements from the book, and, after quoting a scene concerning the “setting of dogs” upon the trail of a negro who has attempted to commit murder, concludes his review with the following words:      “The book goes on showing how they, our dearly beloved brethren of the South, not only chased n—rs with dogs, but burned schoolhouses, shot those who opposed them in politics and established an alien atmosphere in a country where the black people are hated and New Englanders despised. Oh, they are a lovely lot of Americans down there!”      Now, a pseudo criticism which contains such crudities of English and puerile lack of dignity of form might well be passed over in contemptuous silence but for the fact that there is a lesson to be learned even from the venomous animus of the article. This lesson lies in the danger of sectional fiction in this country. In our review of Mrs. Wright’s work—a review, by the way, which preceded by nearly a month that of the journal published in her own city—we called attention to that fact that the book was utterly false to truth, though probably written with entire sincerity. This may be a matter of dispute—among those who have never lived in the South; but that which cannot occasion dispute is the absurdity of accepting fiction as an implicit statement of fact. That to do this is folly, and childish folly, must be evident to everyone who takes the trouble to think. How indignant were we as a nation when Dickens wrote “Martin Chuzzlewit” and gave his pictures of America as his hero saw it! Yet there was here the same substratum of fact that there is in “Aliens;” only it was an incomplete and therefore a totally false view. What should we think today of an Englishman who should form his opinions of America upon the statements made in Dickens’ great novel? We know that Dickens selected merely the salient facts which suited the purpose of his book; and he was perfectly justifiable in so doing. But who but a candidate for an asylum for idiots would accept the picture which he drew as a typical one of American conditions of his day? Yet that would be no more a warranty of fitness for admission to the above-mentioned institution than the acceptance of the statements in a sectional novel written by an alien to the section delineated.      The fact is that Mrs. Wright’s novel, as all of its class, is false from beginning to end. This statement does not mean that none of its facts are correct; they may be so, though we have no knowledge of such incidents having occurred. But the falsity lies in the representation of such facts as typical, when in reality they are nothing of the kind. Has our criticaster ever read the story of the Englishman who wrote that “all the women of Calais are red-haired and bad-tempered”? If not, we recommend it to his consideration. Mrs. Wright has been guilty of an old but unpardonable fault, that of generalizing from insufficient data and accepting particular incidents as general illustrations; and the reviewer has been guilty of the absurdity of accepting such statements as veritable. We who write remember, on a hurried trip to Boston; having seen at a restaurant a man who disdained the use of a fork in eating; shall we therefore write a novel in which we represent all the inhabitants of Boston as eating with their knives? And shall we find reviewers in the South who will commend the book and, upon our authority, declare that there is no refinement to be found in the modern Athens? And if not, why not?      There is a yet deeper truth to be found in a consideration of Mrs. Wright’s novel and of the tirade which that novel has called forth from our criticaster. It is this: No alien to a section can write the truth about that section, however long may be his residence therein. Mrs. Wright herself recognizes this fact when she makes one of her characters say: “After all, you really know nothing of the North, and I feel that I might be here for years and years and yet know very little more about the south.” This is profoundly true, and the very fact that the truth thus came to her should have induced Mrs. Wright to burn her MS. and refrain from issuing that which she knew must of necessity be an untrue account of Southern social conditions. That she did not thus act casts a suspicion upon the fairness of her attitude; but we will let that pass. The fact is that Mrs. Wright attempted the impossible. No inhabitant of either section of our country can find the truth concerning the other. He may see, and accurately note, the facts which make up his immediate environment; but the immemorial conditions which have given existence to those facts are hidden from him, and without knowledge of those his ignorance of the essential nature of his environment must be absolute. He who should give account of the existent conditions, being himself by birth and training alien to those conditions, would be in the position of a typewriter who copied some manuscript written in an unknown language; the copy might be accurate enough, but he would have no conception of the meaning of the work and could give no rational account of its tendency. No New Englander, be he the most receptive of men, can possibly become qualified to write truly of the South, because he can see only effect, while entirely ignorant of the underlying cause. It needs the most intimate and even racial acquaintance with the precedent conditions before the existing state of things can be even vaguely understood. The most indefatigable searcher after truth, under the circumstances, could find nothing but an aggregation of phenomena, the workings of which would appear to him distorted and crude because he could not grasp the causes which had called the phenomena into existence. Nor do we desire to confine our statements to any one section of our country. It would be as impossible for a native of the South, going upon a visit—even an extended one—to New England, to understand the existent conditions in their true aspects as in the reverse case. He could not by any possibility follow the old and wise rule and “put himself in the place” of the New Englander; he could not feel or understand the force of the racial traditions which have made the Northerner that which he is. He would not, if he were a man of intelligence, be guilty, for example, of supposing that our Boston reviewer was a typical Northern critic; but he would fail even here to understand the heritage of bigotry which makes possible such a criticism as that before us. Having read “Aliens” and the succeeding review, he might not indeed write, “All Northern novelists are shadow and all Northern reviews are blatantly ignorant and childishly credulous;” but he would none the less be unable to understand the social conditions which would permit the publication of such a review in the columns of a reputable journal. This merely as example.      There is another act to be considered. It is proverbially easy to see the faults of our acquaintances and even friends [but] difficult to recognize the compensating virtues. It is thus also with our national sections. When a Northerners goes South or a Southerner North, the first things that strike him—and first impressions always remain, at least in modifying influence—are those matters which are characteristic of the section and therefore antipodal to his accustomed conceptions of social polity. Even if he later learns the reasons for the existence of some of these things, he never becomes accustomed to the things themselves; they remain opposed to his racial traditions and even ideas and are to the end “tolerable and not to be endured.” And it is unfortunately the truth that it is precisely these departures from unity which are the most likely to be really reprehensible. Therefore the observer receives and retains a distorted impression of the social conditions of the foreign section; he does not note the obtaining of the virtues with which he is familiar—these being made unimpressive by their very familiarity—nor does he, as a rule, become acquainted with those virtues which are peculiarly sectional. Then he records, as is but natural, those points of departure which remain salient in his impressions, and thus gives a partial and corrupt view of the whole.      Again, the alien in our midst, whether North or South, however hospitably received, is rarely welcomed among us as “our own familiar friend,” and he can see but from the outside even the little which he sees at all. Such a view can never give result of truth.      For these reasons, and others which we have not space to enumerate, we deplore the existence of the sectional novel when written by an alien. We believe that we are justified in the statement that a true one has never been written; we believe that it is impossible that it should be. When a sectional novel appears, the wise man will receive its statements with great caution, though the fool in his folly may accept them as implicitly true. There have been novels of the North written by Southerners; shall we take them as our authority and, culling from their pages a record of ignorance, bigotry, hatred and all uncharitableness, exclaim in the elegant language of the review under consideration, “Oh, they are a lovely lot of Americans up there!” We should be as amply justified as our criticaster; and we should be as ignorant and foolish.      Let the writer of the review in question turn to “Roughing It” and read the account of the political disputes between the old Captain and “Williams.” He will find many interesting facts of history, both North and South; and we have no doubt that he will accept them in all good faith; for are they not written in a book? Then let him write a review of the work—it is only 30 years old, which is not much for Boston, apparently—and tell us triumphantly of the statements made by “Williams” as veritable facts. Such a review would be as creditable to his intelligence and taste as the one which we have made the basis of our article. <— New York Times, May 17, 1902, page BR12: FROM READERS. Mary Tappan Wright’s “Aliens.” The New York Times Saturday Review of Books:      In “Aliens” Mrs. Mary Tappan Wright has presented a wonderfully graphic picture of the South as it is to-day. A picture vivid with the descriptions of the violent antagonisms which still sway that unhappy region, pathetic in the portrayal of the misery of the negroes, and full of charm in the lovely pictures of the soft beauty of the Southern savannahs. I was born at [sic: in] the South in the old days “before the war,” and my earliest memories are of the wide cotton fields, the innumerable flowers, the drooping sweep of the gray moss, and the wild call of the bird notes across the river. I have visited there frequently since those early years, and may claim to know something of present conditions. Most ably are these sad, these deplorable conditions described in this book. The community of white people living in a region where they are “outnumbered eight to one” by the negroes who are still very much what they were in slavery, with the same careless good nature, the same indolence, and the same impossibility of rising to any higher scale than that of farm hands and servants. The poverty of the whites and their kindness to these poorer neighbors, yet the constant dread of an outbreak of the crimes that have made them a terror, the struggle of some brave Northerners to keep a school for the colored children, and the ostracism under which they live—all these things are described with wonderful power, while the characters of the romance are strongly drawn and the interest steadily maintained.      The heroine is a Northern woman, a product of Boston culture, who comes to her new home in a Southern State, where her husband is professor in a college, with high expectations of being able to reform the existing wrongs, and her gradual awakening to the impossibility of remedying evils which are the result of unchangeable forces is portrayed with wonderful skill. No one can read the book without learning much of the beautiful and unhappy South land, of which most Northerners are ignorant, and it would be well if the story could be placed in the hands of every Northern philanthropist who claims that “the black belt” will soon be as prosperous as a New England county; of every clergyman who holds that a little kindness and more religious teaching will suppress the temptations of certain vices which afflict the negro, and of every Northern statesman who believes that legislation for the colored people will lift the burden of poverty from the South and give prosperity to the vast region where the population is made up of a pauper peasantry, and a white society which has almost lost hope and which is constantly assailed and degraded by the close contact with the other race. LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE.      New York, May 15, 1902. <— The Nation, May 22, 1902, pages 411-412: SIX NOVELS. Aliens. By Mary Tappan Wright. Charles Scribner’s Sons.      ‘Aliens’ stands out prominently among novels of the South for breadth, for impartiality, for force. The region is the cotton belt; the time, contemporaneous; the motive, a showing of how little reconstruction has reconstructed, and of how worse than useless are many of the attempts to foist Northern ideas on Southerners of either color. The little colony of Northerners living in the town of Tallawara fall under the witching spell of the South, yet grow daily more and more aware of the unbridgable chasm between them. The conscientious New Englanders cannot understand why the negroes should not hold meetings; the Southerners cannot convince any outsiders that the mere word insurrection suggests to Southern ears enough to account for the ostracizing of Northern mission-school teachers. Mrs. Wright appears capable of understanding both points of view—so capable that her book makes a profound impression. As a story it is absorbing, in spite of some floating threads of diffuseness and disconnectedness. As a political document it is profoundly sad; its very freedom from exaggeration and morbidness only serving to deepen the shadow. Copies of Booker Washington’s writings ought to accompany it if it is not to make sorrowing pessimists of its readers. The story is not technically one of unmitigated gloom. There is infinite humor and variety in the types depicted; hardly one which, however familiar its genus and species, is not developed into individuality. The Southern flirt is even more originally flirtatious, unreasonable, and charming than usual. The New England women are human, though pronounced. The Southern politicians grind their axes with a difference. A few of the private problems lack decisive handling, as the relationship between Professor Thurston and his wife. A few of the characters are not needed at all. But never has the butterfly man been better delineated than in Trenholm, who—says Zoë—“is a part of our education; sooner or later every one of us falls in love with him. We’ve got to have it, like the measles or the whooping-cough.    .    .    .    I’m a scarlet-fever case myself.” In fine, ‘Aliens’ is emphatically a book to be read. It haunts the thoughts, and it leaves the reader with a patriotic but perhaps wholesome heartache. <— The Louisville Post, June? 1902, page ?: Aliens By Mary Tappan Wright      “Belongs distinctly to the higher class of modern fiction, and will not lack for readers, though the readers’ opinions concerning it are likely to be at odds.”—Louisville Post. $1.50 [from a Scribner’s display ad in The Book Buyer, June 1902, page 414; complete review will be posted when located] <— Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, June 1902, pages 983-984: Two Novels of the New South. I have for review this month two books by Southern writers protesting against the “black scourge,” which has come upon the South as a natural consequence of the sin of slavery. One is written in the hot spirit of revenge, possessed of a more than Puritan bigotry, and cannot lay claim to any great literary merit. “The Leopard’s spots,” by Thomas Dixon, Jr., is apparently a novel with a purpose, but what that purpose is further than to increase the race hatred already existing in the New South, is more than I can make out. The late Spanish war created considerable friendly spirit between the North and the South, but for the sake of that renewed affection I hope that Mr. Dixon does not represent a large class of men in the New South—men who cannot forgive certain events of the Civil War which it would not be magnanimous for the North to mention, and who, in the chronic sting of defeat, lay all the present woes of the South to the abolition of slavery. The simple fact is that the South owes all her woes not to the abolition of slavery, but to the original introduction of slavery. The South is to-day like a debauchee who has injected a poisonous narcotic into his blood. The first effects of the drug were pleasant, sedative, languorous, but when the false influences have worn away beware the gibbering fiends that haunt the sufferer!      The question of the Black Plague in the South is a grave one, and one that cries aloud for an answer; but I doubt if the stake, the rope, the bloodhound, and such inflammatory books as “The Leopard’s Spots” will do aught to mitigate the horror. As a pamphlet, “The Leopard’s Spots” is ineffective and fallacious, as a novel it is impossible.      Doubleday, Page & Co., New York.      There are few novels of the South but deal with the problem of regeneration and with the negro question. The South is in a state of transition. It is emerging from the debris of the wreck of the Civil War—emerging slowly but surely. New ideas, new ways of life, are coming to its people. They are losing the idea that they are the only ones of the earth, are realizing that Northerners have good qualities and customs and manners worth adopting. It is forty years since the great struggle that nearly dissolved the Union and paved the way to its greater consolidation. The work is going on slowly.      It is with this condition, these thoughts, and these feelings, that “The Aliens,” [sic] by Mary Tappan Wright, deals. The story is located in a Southern college town, Tallawara, inhabited mostly by negroes, and by whites not of the very highest quality—whites of the middle close with the race pride of the haughtiest first families, but without quite their qualifications. The plot revolves around Professor Thurston, a teacher in Tallawara College, and his bride, a Northern girl. At the opening of the story they have just arrived from their wedding trip. The opening is not cheerful—nor, in fact, is any part of their wedded life. It has been a friendship marriage between two people who do not understand or appreciate each other—who are, in fact, uncongenial. Their difficulties give rather a sombre tone to the whole book.      Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. [Note: the evident truncation of the second review is as in the original.] <— The Dial, June 1, 1902, pages 389-390:      In the general search for literary material now going on in America, the South is by no means overlooked. Mr. Thomas Dixon, Jr., takes the Reconstruction era for the topic of his rather ill-natured work, “The Leopard’s Spots” (Doubleday, Page & Co.). The author states again and again that the bitterness against the North is due more to the excesses of the “carpet-bag” epoch than to the deeds of the Civil War. He is full of hatred against the negro, who was rather the tool in the hands of designing whites than an actor on his own responsibility in the scenes complained of. Yet his book will not have been written in vain if it points out the dangers of ruling a people against its will, the awful perils of governing without the consent of the governed.      A book more just to both North and South is Mrs. Mary Tappan Wright’s “Aliens” (Scribner). A Northern man, long acclimated in the South through his service as professor in a small college, marries a Northern woman with all the virtues and prejudices of the intelligent American of New England birth and breeding. She brings to her understanding of the negro question a keen sense of justice and an inexorable conscience. Opposed to her is the inertia of a people who have learned from bitter experience what she has seen with unfamiliar eyes. The right and wrong of the case, the slow dawning of the vital distinction between a condition and a theory, are set forth with dispassion and a keen sense of justice to the contending forces at work. It is doubtful if the multiform problem presented by the Southern negro has ever been discussed in a manner more enlightened and with observation more acute. <— The Times, Richmond, Virginia, June 8, 1902, page 18: BOOKS AND AUTHORS, COMMENT AND GOSSIP The Aliens. By Mary Tappan Wright. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. $1.25. The Bell Book and Stationery Co.      An ostrasuzed [sic] colony of yankee teachers isolated at a negro school near a town in the middle South furnishes the storm center of "The Aleins." [sic] A beautiful and exceedingly attractive young recruit form [sic] Boston, daughter of the head of the institution is the light of love for Jim Trenholm, an insouciant descendant of old-time neighborhood lads of the soil, who writes strong romantic novels and is the northern idea of the Southern male flirst. [sic] Two other principal characters are Professor Thurston of the College at Tallowara, evidently a Harvard man transplanted to the South; and Helen Thurston, his wife a typical Boston-bred woman of a very fine sort, but who, of course, makes trouble from cover to cover, all with the best intentions in the world, from her point of view.      The Trenholms and the Johnsons are traditional rivals and Jim Trenholm and Guthrie Johnson stir things up pretty regularly in their secret rivalry for the favor of the young Yankee school teacher, Miriam Long; while Trenholm’s ostensible love-affair with Miss Zoe Mason is contested quietly but successfully by his friend Brinton, editor of the local newspaper. Probably the most remarkable character in the book is the negro woman Ailsa, [sic] who, it turns out, was Trenholm’s shamefully-born half-sister. This woman’s intimacy with the low-flung Johnson brings on the only bloodshed in the book.      The author is undoubtedly a northern woman, because only a northern woman would have drawn such a queer settlement of Southern people. She is not much of an artist with her men, although in places her work upon them is perfectly true, but the women in the story are drawn with remarkable fidelity to nature. Zoe Mason, particularly, is an excellent likeness to the well-to-do family who has been around a little and is the belle of her town and doesn’t care. She is serious at heart, but manages to have a saucy harum scarum, flirty time of it before matrimony makes her spirits get into harness. The dialect of the book may be true of the neighborhood which the author describes, but your writer knows no ladies in Virginia that talk of things being “right smart” and so on. The atmosphere of the book is full of the author’s impression of the mystery which seems to hover over the South. She describes it as a sad, still, brooding, distant mysterious atmosphere, gentle and sweet and absorbing, but conveying a feeling like that which a smouldering volcano inspires—a half-terror—sometimes as of unfathomable austerity and impending wild upheaval. <— The Ecclesiastical Review, August, 1902, page 236: Recent Popular Books. ALIENS: Mary Tappan Wright. Scribner. $1.50.      The misunderstandings of the natives of a Southern college town and the Northern bride of one of the professors, and the mischief wrought by injudicious Northern teachers of negro schools are shown with impartiality yet with vividness, in a story exhibiting many strongly marked types. The woman of mixed blood appears as the South knows her, not as certain Northern writers present her for partisan purposes, and although the subject is treated with more delicacy than is bestowed upon it in anti-slavery novels, the book is not to be recommended to young girls. <— The Era, August, 1902, pages 219-220: CURRENT LITERATURE Fiction . . . “Aliens,” by Mary Tappan Wright, drops a few respectable and intelligent Northern people into a Southern town, as permanent residents. They hold their better neighbors in high regard and the sentiment is reciprocated, but the longer the colonists remain, the further apart they and the Southerners drift—and all on account of the negro; the natives will not even tolerate Northern teachers for negro mission schools. “Aliens” should be twice read; first for its judicial view of Southern politics, secondly, for its fun and flirtation, to banish the attack of blues which the first reading will compel. (Scribner’s.) <— Literary Boston of To-Day, by Helen M. Winslow, August, 1902, pages 220-221:      Mary Tappan Wright is another familiar name to magazine readers. Mrs. Wright lives in Cambridge, on beautiful old Quincy Street, the wife of J. H. Wright, himself an author-editor as well as professor of Greek at Harvard University. She was the daughter of President Tappan of Kenyon College. Her books are “A Truce and Other Stories” and “The Alien,” [sic] a recent successful novel, treating of Southern life from the Northern point of view. <— New Age, August 2, 1902, page 7: BOOK REVIEWS      The period of recent Southern history between the years of reconstruction and the present new South has heretofore escaped the novelist. This is the period in which Mrs. Mary Tappan Wright has placed her novel, “Aliens,” Scribners publishers. Mrs. Wright is the wife of Prof. John Henry Wright, professor of Greek in Harvard. <— The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, August 30, 1902, page 274: SIX MONTHS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE.      .  .  .   In “The Aliens” Mrs. Mary Tappan Wright has made a close study of much later conditions in a Southern community. She describes with great distinctness, but without any surplusage of detail, an old college town, the peculiarities and characteristics of which are brought out by the introduction of a professor from a New England college and his cultivated wife. The novel is entirely free from the didactic element and is conspicuously fair ; it is to be commended as a study of the race problem as it presents itself in the daily life of a small Southern town. It is a book which may be read with profit by Northern as well as by English readers. <— The Bookseller, September 1902, page 325: ABOUT AUTHORS MARY TAPPAN WRIGHT      Mary Tappan Wright, whose very strong novel of Southern life, Aliens, is soon to be published by the Scribners, is the wife of Professor John H. Wright, of Harvard University, the Dean of the Graduate Department and Professor of Greek. She and her husband are well known in the society of Cambridge, where they have lived for years. Mrs. Wright comes of the well-known Tappan family of Ohio, her father having been president of Kenyon College. She was born in Steubenville.      Aliens deals with the extremely interesting period of Southern recovery, so neglected in fiction, immediately following reconstruction, a period and environment of which Mrs. Wright is well fitted to write by reason of long residence in the South.      This is her first long novel, but she is a successful writer of shorter fiction, her stories having appeared chiefly in Scribner’s Magazine and the Atlantic. — <— Outlook, September 6, 1902, page 13: RECENT FICTION. Books of Interpretation      The Outlook has noted from time to time of late years the increasing number of books interpretive of Southern life, explaining the Southern point of view, making the Southern attitude towards certain grave questions comprehensible by the Northern reader. Not long ago, Miss Ellen Glasgow’s “The Battle-Ground” was commented upon as an admirable interpretation of the older and later Virginia life, at once vivid, sympathetic, and dispassionate. Miss Glasgow writes as a Virginian who knows at first hand and almost by instinct the material with which she is dealing. Mrs. Mary Tappan Wright’s “The Aliens,” [sic] which came not Long ago from the press of Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons, has great value as a revelation of the social ideas, the charm of manner, and the peculiar bent of thought on certain questions disclosed in an old Southern community.      Although not a Southerner by birth, Mrs. Wright has evidently made a very close and sympathetic study of the delightful old Southern college town which she describes, the location of which many readers will have little hesitation in fixing. The novel is written in a rare dispassionateness of spirit, and the result is a contrast of Northern and Southern ideals and breeding which is not only very interesting, but which is of great importance as bringing about a better acquaintance between two sections of the country which have been widely separated, not only by differences of conviction, but by social traditions and methods of intellectual training. It has been an easy matter for Northern writers, entirely ignorant of actual conditions in the South and with no adequate realization of the difference of historical conditions between the sections, to comment dogmatically on the Southern attitude on the race question; such a story as “The Aliens” [sic] puts the candid reader in a different temper; and while it will not bring him to the point of view of a certain group of Southern people, it will make their attitude comprehensible. <— The Critic, October 1902, page 376: FICTION Wright—Aliens. By Mary Tappan Wright.      Scribner. $150. One who wishes to know the Southerner as he is can hardly do better than read Mrs. Wright’s “Aliens.” Written without partisanship, the book is, none the less, an eloquent plea for the people who for nearly a quarter of a century have wrestled with a problem that the average Northerner, even at a distance, would not care to take up. It is “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” read backwards; excellent Reading—for the North. <— The Publishers’ Weekly, Jan. 31, 1903, page 142: FICTION. . . . Mary Tappan Wright is the author of “Aliens,” which breaks almost unworked ground in its pictures of present social and political conditions at the South. . . . <— European Years: The Letters of an Idle Man, [by Hermann Jackson Warner], edited by George Edward Woodberry, October 1911, pages 340, 342-343: [Note: this entry is not really a review, but an extract from a private letter later published together with other letters of the author’s. It is reproduced here as an instance of the reaction of a reader rather than that of a critic.] ON THE ITALIAN RIVIERA, 2 MARCH, 1903.      Dear M.,— .  .  .  Well, at this present, the wife is reading aloud an American novel, written by a woman, one Mary Tappan Wright, entitled Aliens. It is all about life in the South; and the Aliens are folk that have gone down there on a “Fool’s Errand,” hoping to lift up the down-trodden n—r and make him a tidy member of the community. It is a picture, in fact, of the antagonisms which are all the time going on in the South, and as such it may interest you: for I do not believe that it is overdrawn, though sometimes blurred, like all Impressionist pictures.  .  .  . <— Hartford Courant, April 30, 1904, page 18: [From a review of The Test:] In “The Aliens” [sic] she treated the question of the practically irreconcileable [sic] differences between the North and South in an impartial and penetrating spirit making a story full of suggestiveness and conviction. <— The London Quarterly Review, April, 1909, page 278: POLITICS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION . . . The striking novel, Aliens, by Mrs. Mary Tappan Wright, daughter of a university president and wife of a university professor, shows how a university not under public control may yet suffer a considerable impairment of its independence through the necessity, for financial reasons, of keeping on good terms with the dominant party in the State. . . . HERBERT W. HORWILL.      last section  | main page |  next section These reviews were originally published in the journals and books credited. The works here reproduced are in the public domain. All other material in this edition is ©2008-2018 by Brian Kunde.