Had she but known

The life of Mary Roberts Rinehart, for many years America's best-known author, is one of love and violence, overpowering ambition, and immense courage. From witnessing the carnage on the battlefields of France in World War I to surviving a murder attempt in her own house, from the pain-wrecked wards of a Pittsburgh hospital to decades of glittering celebrity, Mrs. Rinehart is here depicted by fellow writer Charlotte MacLeod, a lifelong fan whose empathy and perception bring a complex woman back to life on these pages. Born in 1876 to a farmer's daughter and a sewing machine salesman, Mary Roberts would always be torn between a desire for middle-class respectability and a life of adventure fostered by her irrepressible will and determination. At not quite seventeen, just out of high school, she defied her parents to become a student nurse. Faced with the poignant realities of hospital life, she learned much about human frailty, both physical and moral. Three years later, after a tempestuous forbidden courtship, she married one of the hospital staff, Dr. Stanley Marshall Rinehart. . Like all young marrieds, the Rineharts had to watch their pennies. While Stanley was off on his evening house calls, Mary took to writing fiction. Gradually, her sales became a growing source of income, first to cover household crises, later to support the opulent lifestyle and reckless spending that even her enormous income could not always cover. In Had She But Known, Mary Roberts Rinehart appears in chiaroscuro tones: the demure doctor's wife and prolific professional author; a no-nonsense campaigner against social ills; and a socialite who dined at the White House in silks and diamonds. Here too are the conflicts that made her 36-year-long marriage a struggle between power and devotion, yet a union so intense that it led the widow to attend seances after her husband's death. A half century of fame and an indefatigable energy for turning out bestselling books that also became a gold mine for the burgeoning moving pictures industry made the author a larger-than-life figure to her vast public. In private life she faced illness, emotional stress, and a strange affinity for danger that led her down untrodden paths. . Charlotte MacLeod's vivid portrait reintroduces to a new generation a woman whose name was for many years a household word. At a time when women are questioning whether it is really possible to "have it all and do it all," here is the story of Mary Roberts Rinehart, born just one hundred years after the birth of our nation, who did it all...and did it with style, panache, and irrepressible zest.