“Stories are to entertain, and they cannot do this if they are unhappy, and then, all my early stories I used to read to my father, and he particularly disliked anything that was unhappy in them and urged me to take it out.”
Among Mrs. Burnham’s close friends are the brothers George Barr McCutcheon, the novelist, and John McCutcheon, the cartoonist; and George Ade. Charles Klein, the playwright, was a personal friend also.
It is improper to use the word trilogy in speaking of Mrs. Burnham’s Christian Science novels, since a trilogy, rightly speaking, is a group of three novels in which one or more characters persist, or which have a common setting. If we can speak of a trilogy based on an idea or set of ideas then Mrs. Burnham’s Christian Science trilogy consists of _The Right Princess_ (1902), _Jewel_ (1903) and _The Leaven of Love_ (1908). _The Opened Shutters_ (1906) is free from the special terminology of the Scientists, though saturated with their principles and beliefs in the character of Thinkright Johnson and later of Sylvia Lacey.
_Heart’s Haven_ (1918) is Mrs. Burnham’s account of May Ca’line, a village beauty who, as between two lovers, kept faith with the one to whom she had betrothed herself. Her son marries a girl of no breeding and is saved from disaster by his mother’s rejected lover, whose story he does not know. May Ca’line herself is later the means of restoring her son’s fortunes. There is a double love story very pleasantly told and very happily worked out.
Though with _The Leaven of Love_ Mrs. Burnham has given over writing Christian Science novels the underlying ideas of her work, which were there before she wrote _The Right Princess_, which were there when she wrote _Dr. Latimer_, remain unaltered and always expressed. These ideas are those of peaceful and happy existences, of the validity of mental experiences, of the influence of intellectual environment. Thus as lately as 1916, in _Instead of the Thorn_, she gives us the story of a Chicago girl brought up in luxury, whose father is ruined in circumstances that seem to her to involve his business associate. The fact that this young man is in love with the girl sets up the complication, or struggle, necessary to make a novel. The girl is finally persuaded to go to New England for rest, and Mrs. Burnham directs the reader’s attention less to the solution of certain external problems than to the way in which simple, quiet village life restores the heroine’s mental poise and happiness. As for the proof that Mrs. Burnham’s faith was antecedent to the first of her Christian Science novels what clearer evidence need be asked than Helen Ivison’s characterization of Dr. Latimer in the story, _Dr. Latimer_?