Alice Brown(Barry) Born in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire in 1876, Alice Brown was without question one of the finest American writers of her day. Her major works such as Tiverton Tales and Meadow Grass explore the role of women in the rural New England society prior to industrialization. A prolific author producing a book a year until she stopped writing in 1935, her popularity waned after the turn of the 20th century. Although she was a well-known writer during the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, the majority of Brown’s works are no longer in print. Brown died in Boston on June 21, 1948.

I first discovered her books as free downloads from the internet (i.e. Gutenberg Press). What makes Alice Brown’s short stories so unique? There is a deep wisdom embedded in her grasp of human nature. Read virtually any story and six months later you’re still unearthing rich implications secreted away in the wickedly clever story telling. Using a rather simple, unambiguous language - I sometimes think of it as ‘meat-and-potatoes prose’ - Alice Brown mesmerizes you with the subtle depth of her insights.

In one bittersweet offering from her short story collection, Meadow Grass, a farmer and his wife argue. The farmer in an act of desperation builds a wooden partition down the middle of the home and they live apart for the remainder of the marriage. What really transpires in this multi-faceted tale can only be appreciated by reading Alice Brown’s brilliant prose in the original.

We sometimes tend to view authors from previous centuries as passé, old-fashioned, outmoded and hopelessly unsophisticated. Discrediting this foolish myth, a renaissance in American literary fiction emerged in the late eighteen hundreds following the Civil War and extended straight through the turn of the century. World-class short story writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Ben Ames Williams, Ellen Glasgow, Edith Wharton, Honore Morrow, Susan Glaspell, etc. were in abundance and quite popular among American readers. Alice Brown was a shining star at the very pinnacle of this illustrious list.

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