There are two actresses who are never interviewed--Alla Nazimova and Maude Adams. At least that was true some years ago; perhaps it is no longer true of Nazimova. But did you ever see an interview with Maude Adams? And yet, the interview is one of the most useful means of securing that publicity an actress must have. Exceptions establish the rule.
An author is not in precisely the same case with an actor, but personal publicity, of an entirely honorable and legitimate sort, has served most authors well. The truth is, the public has a certain right in the personality of any one undertaking to serve or entertain the public; in the words of statutes, a writer, like an actor, is, to a degree, “charged with a public interest” and the day may come when writers, like traction officials, will be subject to public inquiry. Perhaps Public Service Commissions will regulate them....
Until that day we may never know anything about the personality of Mary E. Waller, about the woman behind _The Wood-Carver of ’Lympus_. For, in the words of her publishers, “Miss Waller is singularly averse to publicity. She has never permitted her portrait to be published.” As for biographical data, meager is the word. Let us see just how scanty it is.
We know that she was born in Boston and that she traveled and studied abroad, taught in a private school in New York and later established and maintained for five years a school for girls in Chicago. We know that her family, for four generations, has been identified with the history of Vermont, and that for many years, until she moved to her present home on the island of Nantucket, Miss Waller spent the greater part of her time with her mother in the Vermont hills.
That is all any one has so far been authorized to say of the period before Miss Waller’s success as an author.
In 1902 there was published in Boston a book called _Little Citizens_, a story of New York street gamins. The following year saw the publication of a story of family life in the Green Mountains. Of this second book by Miss Waller, Margaret E. Sangster said, five years later (June 19, 1907) in the _Christian Herald_:
“I read the other day the most suggestive book that has appeared since Miss Alcott published _Little Women_. The title of the book, _A Daughter of the Rich_, by M. E. Waller, fails to convey an idea of the striking qualities of a most fascinating story. The scenes and background of the story are in a mountain fastness of New Hampshire, in a home where parents of culture and piety, encumbered by poverty, are successfully bringing up a household of delightful boys and girls. A city physician persuades the father of an only daughter to send his delicate darling out of the enervating atmosphere of a millionaire’s home that is motherless, into the sweetness and mother-brooding environment of the home on the mountainside. The little girl is introduced to strangers, who at once become her friends, and in the novel situation, without a single luxury, but in much homely comfort, she gains the health and strength that wealth could not give her.