Had she but known

by Charlotte MacLeod

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 tempest