https://www.amazon.com/Ladies-Then-pseud-Beatrice-Fairfax/dp/B000IAPND6?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000IAPND6
Marie Manning was born on January 22, 1873 in Washington, D. C. . He was the only daughter and younger of two children of Michael Charles and Elizabeth (Barrett) Manning, both of English birth. Her mother died during Marie's early childhood, and the girl was sent to private schools in Washington, New York, and London. Her father, a War Department employee, died when she was in her teens, after which she was reared by a guardian, Judge Martin F. Morris of Washington.
She received schooling in London and New York City (she was disciplined at one school for reading tabloid papers during the meditation hour) and attended finishing school in Washington around 1890. Young women of her social station sometimes went off to college, but it was rare for one to work actively to establish herself in a career outside the home. Manning, however, was an avid newspaper reader, and harbored a secret ambition to become a journalist.
According to her autobiography, she found a way to realize her dream when she met Arthur Brisbane, then an editor on the New York World, at a dinner party. Going to New York a few days later, she called on him and was given a job on the World, at space rates. After obtaining an interview with former President Grover Cleveland when experienced reporters had failed, she was added to the regular staff to report "the woman's angle" on news events. In 1898 she left the World and followed Brisbane to the New York Journal of William Randolph Hearst. Miss Manning's career as a columnist began when Brisbane, then managing editor of the Journal, showed her three letters the paper had received from troubled women: one whose husband was a philanderer, another who had been deserted by her lover, and a third who was being bilked by a brutal son-in-law. Miss Manning suggested that the letters might form the basis for a new department, a column of advice to the lovelorn. The first column appeared July 20, 1898, under the signature "Beatrice Fairfax, " a pseudonym she derived from Dante's Beata Beatrix and Fairfax County, Va. , where the Manning family owned property. The column became an almost immediate success. It was soon syndicated to 200 papers and was attracting as many as 1, 400 letters a day from correspondents who wanted to discuss their perplexities and to get advice from an impartial source. Typical questions posed to Beatrice Fair-fax at the turn of the century were: Should a young man go down on his knees while proposing? Should he get the consent of the girl's parents first? What should a young couple do about a chaperone when they went out on a bicycle built for two? What should a jilted girl do, especially if she were pregnant? How could a wife hold an errant husband? Miss Manning's advice was invariably commonsensical: "Dry your eyes, roll up your sleeves, and dig for a practical solution. " As a national oracle on problems of love, "Beatrice Fairfax" became a byword; she was quoted in vaudeville skits and became the subject of a popular song ("Just write to Beatrice Fairfax / Whenever you are in doubt . .. "). While carrying on her column, Miss Manning, under her true name, continued to work as a journeyman reporter for the Journal and to write short stories, mainly for Harper's Magazine, as well as romantic novels: Lord Allingham, Bankrupt (1902) and Judith of the Plains (1903). On June 12, 1905, Miss Manning retired from newspaper work to marry Herman Eduard Gasch, a Washington real estate dealer. During the next twenty-five years the Beatrice Fairfax answers were composed chiefly by a series of other writers, although during World War I Mrs. Gasch interrupted the rearing of her two sons, Oliver H. and Manning, to resume the column for a short time. Severe losses in the stock market crash of 1929 obliged her again to become Beatrice Fair-fax on a full-time basis. The column was still popular, being syndicated and sold to some 200 newspapers, but the problems of the lovelorn had changed. There were now more letters from men and from mature people than from the young, and a large number concerned broken homes, "the forays of the love pirate, the ennui of the restless wife and the problem of children of divorced parents. " The mother confessor to Hearst readers wrote her column (which was syndicated by King Features) from Washington, where she also covered women's news for the International News Service. She died at her home in Washington of a coronary thrombosis in 1945. Although she had earlier listed herself as a Catholic, her remains were cremated and the ashes scattered on the Manning farm in Fairfax County, Va.
She was almost six feet tall, plain in appearance, indifferent to dress and formal social life, she longed to become a newspaperwoman.
