How to use this Page

Say hi to Inez Haynes Gillmore. I know some of you are familiar with her, but I suspect most of you are not. She could easily be your new favorite author. She’s pretty good. But mostly what she is is versatile.

I read a book of hers the other day called Gertrude Haviland’s Divorce. It made me re-examine three of Gillmore’s other books, just because it seemed so unlikely that they all could have come from the same person. So, there’s Gertrude Haviland, a divorce novel — and please don’t try to tell me that’s not a genre, because I won’t listen — and then there’s an adorable children’s book, a fluffy romance/adventure/ghost story/paean to old furniture, and a disturbing, bloody, and terrifyingly upbeat allegorical feminist fantasy. All of them are, in their separate ways, perfect.

We’ll start with Maida’s Little Shop. It’s the most innocuous. There were fifteen Maida books, two of which are in the public domain, but although the series ran until the 1950s, it was obviously never intended to be a series at all — there wasn’t so much as a sequel for eleven years. I’ve only read Maida’s Little Shop and Maida’s Little House, but that’s enough to be glad there was a sequel, and to take the rest of the books on faith, because they’re lovely. Maida is the daughter of the kind of fictional millionaire of whom, despite the fact that he’s clearly a great guy, everyone is terrified. She’s also a bit of an invalid, only capable of walking because of a recent operation by one of those specialists who are always curing crippled fictional characters. All she needs to complete her recovery is to take a real interest in something, so when she expresses a desire to run a store, her father buys it for her. I might have liked to hear a bit more about the actual running of the shop — logistics, and the kind of financial detail you only get from Horatio Alger, and things like that — but the friendships she forms with the children in her new neighborhood are completely satisfactory. Based on Maida’s Little House, I expect the rest of the series revolves around Maida and her friends being happy and industrious in a variety of settings while her father spends vast amounts of money on them. And what more could you want?

Then there’s Angel Island. I don’t know how it was received when it was first serialized in The American Magazine, but right now it’s probably the most famous thing she wrote, because of all the feminism. I kind of wish it was even more feminist, though. Or maybe a bit less pessimistic about human nature. This is the story of five young men who are shipwrecked with a lot of dead bodies and even more supplies. After they’ve been hanging around on their new island home for a while, they discover that they’re sharing it with some winged women — conveniently, five of them. In spite of the language barrier, they begin to pair off, “Peachy” showing off for Ralph, “Chiquita” hanging out with Frank as he writes, etc. And then Ralph is like, “So, obviously the next step is to capture them and force them to marry us.” The other men are initially horrified by this, but eventually they all come round to the same point of view, at which point they trap the women in a cabin the’ve built and cut off their wings. That was a but of a surprise for me. There’s all this talk about capturing the women, and then once they’ve done it Gillmore is like, “and then they pulled out their freshly sharpened shears.”

Then the men proceed to “tame” the women. Which, you know, if it’s going