TWHP


Gertrude Atherton, 1857-1948   

One of the first modern women in the world, Atherton was born into a well-connected San Francisco-area family and stole her divorced mother's fiance to marry into one of the Bay Area's wealthiest. After her unloved husband died on a sea voyage--she later delighted in telling how Faxon Atherton, Jr., was shipped home in a barrel of rum--she pursued a writing career that made her famous. Atherton started with articles for California periodicals and wrote her first novel in 1899. The Randolphs of Redwoods told the almost true but heavily embellished story of a drunken mother who purposely addicted her daughter to alcohol to punish her prominent husband for efforts to discourage drinking. She scandalized San Francisco society, savored the phenomenon, and kept on writing. Her main theme was women who violated taboos, pursued true love, and ended in ruin. Disliking men as useless impediments, Atherton seems not to have had any genuine romantic attachments after her marriage. She traded suggestive letters with Ambrose Bierce, but the two could not get along in person. She went East, impressing people as a bold, dangerous woman, and became a media celebrity as New Woman. From there she proceeded to London, where she epitomized the California exotic. Atherton realized that Europeans were fascinated by the West, and determined to exploit its early pre-Yankee history with stories of the old Spanish dons. Eventually, she moved to Europe, finding San Francisco too provincial. In the '20s, she returned and settled down, producing some more steamy novels. Then she turned to writing her autobiography--Adventures of a Novelist--and some spotty California histories. She created the misapprehension that Benicia was the state's first capitol, an odd mistake given that one of her novelistic heroines was a real woman who spent her life as a nun there after an unrequited love. Even more to the point, Atherton's own grand-daughter entered the same convent, and was buried in the same cemetary, also following an unsuccessful romance. The woman earned a reputation as a difficult, judgmental bully, and she bitterly denounced the design for Coit Tower, which she considered an unworthy blight on the skyline.


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