Faith Baldwin was once one of the bestselling authors in America, although she was never a lauded award-winner. Instead, Baldwin practiced what was variously called “light” or popular fiction, and today is generally called romance — usually with a touch of superiority. In her obituary, The New York Times declared her 'the doyenne of American light fiction writers.” Raised in relative wealth and comfort in Manhattan, Baldwin initially saw acting as a means for a single women to gain independence, but as her writing career took off, she embraced it. At the start, she wrote for the women's magazines, publishing poetry and prose -- whatever there was a market for. In 1921, she published her first novel, Mavis of Green Hill, and by 1927 she was able to regularly sell the serialization rights for many of her novels to mainstream magazines, assuring herself of a steady income. Critics have alternately praised Baldwin for being a proto-feminist and dismissed her for being too conservative, which is unsurprising as Baldwin generally wrote about the domestic concerns of love, marriage, and a woman's career, concerns which tend to be under-appreciated in any age. But, in novels like Private Duty (1935), Hotel Hostess (1938), and Career By Proxy (1939) she often returned to the question of whether a woman could be fulfilled through work and also find marital bliss — although her heroines often had to accept their fate of leaving their job after marriage — and she frequently f... [more Collecting Faith Baldwin]
