AGNES SLIGH TURNBULL

I’ve recommended an author to a couple of people lately, as I’d noticed that they like to read mostly gentle books, with mostly kind people, and nice endings. I discovered her in Elementary School, in our little school library, and for many years I considered the first of her books that I read ---THE ROLLING YEARS---to be the best book I’d ever read. I re-read it every year for a long time, and except for being totally awestruck by Steinbeck’s EAST OF EDEN, (MY nominee for THE Great American Novel), I still consider it my favorite book.

Her name is Agnes Sligh Turnbull, and she was born on this day in 1888, a time in which Lady Authors, or Authoresses, as they were generically Plume-Nommed, were expected to write of hearth and home and perhaps flower-pressing and embroidery, with a tender, innocent romance culminated by clasping hands beneath a bough.

She looks kind and intelligent, and I like the way she smiles, as if she holds a wonderful secret. I’ll bet she was one of the first in her family to bob her hair; I imagine she could drive a car, and I like to think that she was a good cook, for her descriptions of cooking and food of the bygone eras are most evocative.

She IS a gentle writer, but her scope is far wider---in THE ROLLING YEARS, she wrote of young widowhood and tragedy and loss and war:

THE DAY MUST DAWN is a view of the gritty Pennsylvania frontier, through the eyes of a woman committed to securing a better life for her only daughter. The book portrays some of the tragic events which happened in the author's native western Pennsylvania, and gives a wonderful portrait of the triumph of human spirit.

THE GOWN OF GLORY is the one I always recommend to be read first of her books---its gentle simplicity of a Pastor’s family and their years in a small parsonage at the turn of the century is sweet and charming, with just enough hardship and loss to enhance the storyline, and a hopefully fulfilling ending.

And, until I went searching for pictures of her books to use, I did not know of her great popularity and remembrance amongst the dog-lovers of the world---she must have been quite a devotee, herself, for one of her quotes was printed on dozens of posters featuring pictures of dogs:

She was born in western Pennsylvania, the setting of so many of her stories, and then lived the last sixty of her ninety-three years in New Jersey.

It also brought me a little pang of regret to read the date of her passing, for since she was an author of my childhood, I had no idea that she lived until 1982. Knowing that she was alive when I was all grown up, and I could have written to tell her how much I had enjoyed all her wonderful stories and characters---I still feel the rue of missing that.

It was as if Jane Austen had still been alive in my lifetime, and I could have sent her a letter of thanks for all that her books and her words had meant to me.

And I SO wish I had.