 |
| in 1913, age 26 |
Her first novel, The Drift, was published in 1911 (about a young woman who falls in love with a man 17 years her senior who is unhappily married, and to avoid possibility of scandal she moves to New York to live), but she did not publish another book for more than two decades. In the interim, she became very well-known for her interviews, which she produced for about a decade, profiling interesting personalities of the day on subjects relevant to women.
She married Sidney Walter Dean in 1916, when she was 28. He was 45 (17 years her senior) and only six months a widow, with three children, aged 10, 8 and 6. He had been managing editor of the Boston Herald—likely when she was employed there—and had moved to New York in 1911 to become a magazine editor; one does have to wonder whether her novel The Drift was based on a relationship with him. After their marriage, she moved with his family to what had been his childhood home at 37 Brunswick Road in Montclair, New Jersey. By all accounts the couple had a very happy marriage; she “hasn’t missed having luncheon with her own husband once in 12 years,” it was stated in 1932.
The family spent summers at a seaside bungalow in Rockaway Point, N.Y., from which she and Sidney commuted daily to the city for work. Her first article about summering in a bungalow—“bungaloafing,” she called it—came out in 1924. The family tradition continued for more than a decade; in January 1935 she celebrated the publishing of her second novel (None but the Brave) by “spending a month at the beach, sitting on the back porch in a steamer chair wrapped up in a rug, watching the ocean and her pet loon which always comes in November, and occasionally reading a detective story.”
In 1922 she started writing a column called “The Woman of It,” which she continued until 1931, when she moved to the William Randolph Hearst–owned New York Journal and changed the title of her column to “Just Like a Woman.” In addition to her newspaper work, she wrote for numerous magazines including Harper’s, Woman’s Home Companion, McCalls, and McClure’s. She began writing novels in earnest in 1934; she tended to stick to the romance genre with common themes such as Quebec, New Hampshire, the ocean and nurses. She went on to publish a total of 14 novels; “most of her novels were written in moments snatched between headline stories and interviews with countless celebrities.” In 1937 she lost her job when the Journal merged with another paper, but she spent a few months writing for radio before her column was picked up by King Features Syndicate, which sold its stories to newspapers nationwide, and continued the column until 1945. Marguerite and Sidney moved to New York that year, residing at 148 E. 34th Street.
In 1941, finally empty nesters—she and Sidney never had any children of their own—the
couple made a major life change. “For more than a quarter-century of marriage
both of us had been wearing out journalistic and domestic grindstones with our
noses. We had never taken a real vacation. We had been literally nowhere except
from house to office and back again,” Sidney wrote. “When responsibilities
slipped from our shoulders, we knew exactly what we wanted to do—and did it.
Instead of a car we bought a boat,” a 30-foot cabin cruiser named Margot—likely after Marguerite, who was
known to sign correspondence with that name. “My husband and I are going to
ship a typewriter and do most of our writing aboard,” Marguerite declared. The pair took to the St. Lawrence, sailing up
into Quebec—and falling deeply in love with that province, ultimately spending
six months aboard every year, and writing a book published nine years later
titled, appropriately, We Fell in Love
with Quebec. They also purchased a chalet, which she called le Roc, in Lac
Bauport, a mountain town 20 miles north of Quebec City, in 1951.
Life aboard their boat sounded largely ideal. He liked to cook—indeed, he published a few cookbooks late in life—and would whip up supper while Marguerite “was ashore picking blueberries.” But it was not all fun; Marguerite badly broke her ankle in 1943, apparently in Quebec—and once again made it the subject of future writing; when Wilderness Nurse was published in 1949, a short biographical sketch in the front of the book declared, “Three years ago Marguerite Mooers Marshall had the same accident, in the same surroundings, her heroine has in Wilderness Nurse,” described in the book as this:
“It seemed safer to scramble over the ledges. At the third chasm the drop to the bottom looked easy. A drift of leaves, through which shot up spears of new grass, promised a soft landing. Seated on the brink of the shelf-like ledge, balancing by a palm on either side, the hurrying nurse let herself go with the mountaineer’s bent knees. She came down on hard rock, camouflaged by leaves and a pinch of soil. Her right ankle snapped and dislocated itself at the same time. … She felt almost no pain, but bone pushed out flesh at a sickening angle just inside the instep.”
Walter died in New York in March 1952 at the age of 80, and her last books were published that year. Marguerite continued to summer at the Quebec chalet. In May 1964, when she was 77, her body was found in the woods a mile from her house. She had set out for a walk on Sunday, May 3, and apparently fallen into a ravine. She was not discovered missing until Tuesday, and her body found the following Sunday. An autopsy found she had died of exhaustion and exposure. “She was known as an experienced outdoors woman who on one occasion dragged herself to safety in 24 hours after breaking a leg in the woods. Last year she hiked 10 miles over a mountain. This year she arrived in Lac Beauport April 29, in good health despite a bad ankle and deafness,” reported one obituary. She was buried in the Anglican Church Cemetery in Lac Beauport.
In 1913,
when she had been a little more than five years in newspapers, she offered the
following advice to other would-be women journalists: “The woman who succeeds
in newspaper work is, above everything else, the woman with stick-to-itiveness.
In most cases the girl who wins her permanent way to the city room of a great newspaper
serves a free-lance apprenticeship which is not for the weak-kneed and
wabbling. If the strongest passion in her isn’t the determination to make good
in her chosen profession, if she can’t see that ‘getting her story’ is all that
counts, headaches and broken engagements being entirely incidental, then she’d
better open a kindergarten or accept a position in a public library. Of all
that the successful newspaper woman must be, I should select the qualities of
tolerance and humor as most closely involved in her success.” She was clearly an
intelligent, educated, strong woman to have done so well in journalism, one who
worked hard and played hard. If her death was tragic, she did at least lead a happy
and successful life.
Nurse
into Woman – also published as Ward Nurse
Arms and the Girl
Wilderness
Nurse
Nurse
with Wings
No comments:
Post a Comment