My Great Grandmother in Female Fiction

Well, I must thank Patricia Clapp (now two years defunct), and I do, for having written an eminently entertaining and largely factual biography, which I have just finished reading, of my Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grandmother Constanta Hopkins Snow. It was to be expected that, as a work of explicitly Juvenile Fiction--written about, by and for, immature members of the Sex--it should have a great deal more "romance" and "kissing" in it than a masculine taste (even that of an indulgent great-grandson) can well tolerate; but it is otherwise, in its verisimilitude, in its conveying of the character and flavor of daily life in the first years of Plimoth Plantation--and in its surprisingly accurate and well-described (even a trifle dull) account of the economic and political facts of life of Colonial America--nearly faultless. And, after all, there was, that we know, a great lot of romance and kissing going on among these attractive, intelligent, healthy, capable, and adventurous young people who were so busy building, inhabiting, and populating an entirely New World.