a thing since, but I doubt if I have ever known again the unadulterated delight that was mine when my first insignificant check was held within my hands.

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[Transcriber's note: Mrs. Hungerford (Margaret Wolfe Hamilton) (1855?-1897) "How a novel is written" (from The Ladies' Home Journal vol. VII No 2 Philadelphia January 1890 p.11)]

The Duchess

"How a novel is written"

The characters in my novels, you ask how I conceive them? Once the plot is rescued from the misty depths of the mind, the characters come and range themselves readily enough. A scene, we will say, suggests itself—a garden, a flower show, a ball-room, what you will—and two people in it. A young man and woman for choice. They are always young with me, for that matter, for what, under the heaven we are promised, is so altogether perfect as youth! If any one of you, dear readers, is as bad a sleeper as I am, you will understand how thoughts swarm at midnight. Busy, bustling, stinging bees, they forbid the needed rest, and, thronging the idle brain, compel attention. Here in the silent hours the ghosts called characters walk, smiling, bowing, nodding, pirouetting, going like marionettes through all their paces. At night I have had my gayest thoughts, at night my saddest. All things seem open then to that giant, Imagination. Here, lying in the dark, with as yet no glimmer of the coming dawn, no faintest light to show where the closed curtains join, too indolent to rise and light the lamp, too sleepy to put one's foot out of the well-warmed bed, praying fruitlessly for that sleep that will not come—it is at such moments as theses that my mind lays hold of the novel now in hand, and works away at it with a vigor, against which the natural desire for sleep hopelessly makes battle.

Just born this novel may be, or half completed; however it is, off goes my brain at a tangent. Scene follows scene, one touching the other; the character unconsciously falls into shape; the villain takes a rudy hue; the hero dons a white robe; as for the heroine, who shall say what dyes from Olympia are not hers? A conversation suggests itself, an act thrusts itself into notice. Lightest of skeletons all these must necessarily be, yet they make up eventually the big whole, and from the brain wanderings of one wakeful night three of four chapters are created for the next morning's work. As for the work itself, mine is perhaps strangely done, for often I have written the last chapter first, and founded my whole story on the one episode that it contained.

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