FROM THE LIFE
good for her mind to dwell. He had not the heart to tell her not to touch his manuscripts, since she had copied this one to help him. So he undertook to write something that it should not depress her to read.
Hence Fair Anne Hathaway.
He began it as a short story, in the intervals of his newspaper work, but it grew into a novelette, and then into a "three-decker," designed to carry her, as its sole passenger, to "the Islands of the Blest." When she had copied out the first three chapters, bit by bit, as he wrote them, she asked him, timorously, "What happened then?" And thereafter he talked it over with her in advance, inventing it for her, and making it meet her expectations when she voiced any.
It was, for her, a complete escape from reality. And that, no doubt, was the secret of its success with the public—the great public who read in order to get away from themselves and their lives. When Francis Hackett, in The New Republic, lately ridiculed Fair Anne Hathaway and its successors in an article on "The Literature of Escape" he hit the secret nail on the head, blindfold, and in the dark. And in pointing out the connection between the success of such books and Jung's theory of mankind's "escape into the dream" he was not only analyzing a tendency of the American public; he was psychoanalyzing the disorder of Carey's first reader.
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