╬Atherton, Gertrude Franklin Horn1857╨1948novelistBorn in San Francisco on October 30, 1857, Gertrude Horn grew up in a prosperous neighborhood of that city until her parents╒ divorce and thereafter mainly on the San Jose ranch of her maternal grandfather, under whose stern discipline she was introduced to serious literature. She attended St. Mary╒s Hall school in Benicia, California, and for a year Sayre Institute in Lexington, Kentucky. In February 1876 she eloped with George H. B. Atherton, who had been courting her now twice-divorced mother. Her life at the Atherton estate, Fair Oaks (now Atherton), California, dominated by her mother-in-law, was an unhappy one. Despite her husband╒s attempts to stifle her, she managed to write a novel, The Randolphs of Redwoods, based on a local society scandal, whose serial publication in the San Francisco Argonaut in 1882 outraged the family. (The novel was published in book form as A Daughter of the Vine in 1899.) The death of her husband in 1887 released Gertrude Atherton, and she promptly traveled to New York City and thence in 1895 to England and Europe. In rapid succession she produced books set in those locales or in old California, including such titles as What Dreams May Come, 1888, Hermia Suydam, 1889, A Question of Time, 1891, The Doomswoman, 1892, A Whirl Asunder, 1895, Patience Sparhawk and Her Times, 1897, The Californians, 1898, American Wives and English Husbands, 1898 (later reissued as Transplanted, 1919), The Bell in the Fog, 1905, Ancestors, 1907, Tower of Ivory, 1910, The Living Present, 1917, and The White Morning, 1918, both drawing on her experiences in hospital relief work during World War I, The Sister-in-Law, 1921, Sleeping Fires, 1922, Black Oxen, the sensational best-seller of 1923, which made a world celebrity of Dr. Eugen Steinach, whose ╥rejuvenation╙ treatments Atherton had undergone, California, 1927, and Sophisticates, 1931. She also wrote a volume of stories, Before the Gringo Came, 1894 (later reissued in revised form as The Splendid Idle Forties, 1902); three fictionalized biographies, The Conqueror, 1902, on Alexander Hamilton, Rezçnov, 1906, about the Russian entrepreneur in Alaska, and The Immortal Marriage, 1927, on Pericles and Aspasia; and a volume of essays entitled Can Women be Gentlemen?, 1938. Most of her novels featured strong-willed, independent heroines active in the world at large, and not infrequently their success stemmed from the characters╒ frank pursuit of sexual as well as other pleasures. As literature they were largely undistinguished. Adventures of a Novelist, 1932, was an autobiography, as was in part My San Francisco: A Wayward Biography, 1946. Gertrude Atherton died in San Francisco on June 14, 1948. styl ` @ ! ¬ ! 5¬ + 5¬ 5 !I ÷ !I !I a !I i !I ░ !I ╞ !I ╨ !I Σ !I ∞ !I ∙ !I !I !I !I ) !I 1 !I @ !I H !I g !I o !I !I ç !I ¬ !I ─ !I ╨ !I ┘ !I ∞ !I ⌠ !I ² !I !I !I !I - !I 9 !I J !I ₧ !I » !I ╖ !I ┼ !I ═ !I ╫ !I j !I t !I Ç !I ì !I ║ !I ╨ !I · !I !I = !I J !I i !I p !I ª !I ╗ !I ⁿ !I !I
