Irene Temple Bailey

Background

Temple Bailey was born on February 24, 1869 in Petersburg, the daughter of Milo Varnum Bailey and Emma Sprague Bailey.

Education

She grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, D. C. , where she attended private schools and enrolled in some college courses.

Career

Temple Bailey's literary career began in 1903 when the Ladies Home Journal published her story "The People of Two Worlds. " The following year, with "The Prince and the Painter, " she won a love-story contest conducted by the Journal. Her magazine stories, clearly marked for girls and women, soon established a wide readership, and her subsequent novels won her an even larger public. Her first novel, Judy, was published in 1907.

Over the next forty years, her books included Glory of Youth (1913), Contrary Mary (1915), Mistress Anne (1917), The Tin Soldier (1919), The Trumpeter Swan (1920), The Dim Lantern (1923), Peacock Feathers (1924), Wallflowers (1927), Silver Slippers (1928), Wild Wind (1930), Little Girl Lost (1932), Enchanted Ground (1933), Fair as the Moon (1935), Tomorrow's Promise (1938), The Blue Cloak (1941), The Pink Camellia (1942), and Red Fruit (1945). The Tin Soldier, The Dim Lantern, and The Blue Cloak became best sellers.

Many of Bailey's novels were first serialized in such popular magazines as St. Nicholas, Scribner's Magazine, McClure's, Outlook, Ladies Home Journal, Woman's Home Companion, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Collier's, and the Saturday Evening Post. Some of these magazines also published her short stories, which she preferred to her novels in the belief that they represented her most artistic work. At one time Bailey was one of the highest paid writers in the world; McCall's gave her $60, 000 for one serial and Cosmopolitan provided her with a $325, 000 contract for three serials and from five to ten short stories. Total sales of her books exceeded 3 million copies, with a much higher estimated readership from circulating rental library collections.

Bailey's chief publisher was the Penn Publishing Company of Philadelphia, while Grosset and Dunlap published reprint editions of her books. The John Wanamaker stores were the best single outlet for her writings because John Wanamaker himself was an avid reader of her works--when a new title was published, he regularly ordered 150 to 200 copies for gifts to his friends. Bailey was one of the feminine escape writers who included Kathleen Norris, Alice Duer Miller, Faith Baldwin, Margaret Widdemer, and Margaret Culkin Banning. In her work, as in theirs, superficial plots and shallow characters are held together by a neat formula of high ideals, wholesomeness, self-sacrifice, and the inevitable happy ending, all woven into "high-flown romance with a bland disregard for realities".

Bailey frequently chose picturesque settings as backgrounds for her tales, including the seacoast of Nantucket, tidewater Maryland, the romantic old South, the land-boom period in Florida, and the political scene in Washington, D. C. Given the limitations of light romance, her stories were for the most part well written and skillfully told. Although some critics described her innocuous and guileless themes as vapid and commonplace, her books undoubtedly provided a high level of entertainment for her faithful readers.

In her last years she wrote little. She died at her apartment in Washington. Although she concealed her birth date, she was probably in her late seventies or early eighties at the time of her death.

Achievements

• Temple Bailey had three of her books on the list of bestselling novels in the United States in 1918, 1922, and 1926 as determined by Publishers Weekly.

Works

More photos

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  • The Trumpeter Swan

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • The Selected Works of Temple Bailey (Illustrated): (Seven books with illustrations)

    (Irene Temple Bailey (February 20, 1869 – July 6, 1953) wa...)

  • The Blue Window

    (Hardcover, August 1926, 5th Edition/Printing, Grosset and...)

  • Wallflowers

    (Penn Publishing Co. Philadelphia 1927, 1927. Hardcover. D...)

  • Contrary Mary
  • The Tin Soldier
  • Peacock Feathers

Politics

She was "Neither Bolshevik nor Bohemian" by nature - she was a Republican.

Personality

She seldom granted interviews, she was no recluse; she belonged to several writers' groups. In an autobiographical sketch, she described her normal routine as including three hours at her writing desk each morning.

Connections

Bailey never married or had children.

Father:

Milo Varnum Bailey

Mother:

Emma Sprague Bailey