The House of Helen

Corra Mae Harris (nee White, 1869-1935) was an American writer and journalist born in Elbert County, Georgia. Her formal education was limited to teacher training at nearby female academies though she never graduated from any of the schools she attended. In 1887 she married Methodist minister and educator Lundy Howard Harris with whom she had one daughter to survive to adulthood. For two decades she struggled through various personal tragedies including the death of two infant sons, the scandal and humiliation surrounding the abandonment, betrayal and return of her husband in 1898 and his public confessions of adultery, the financial destitution resulting from the loss of his teaching position, his suicide in 1910, her daughter's death in 1919, and that of her sister shortly thereafter. Her literary reputation came from her novel A Circuit Rider's Wife (1910) which, whilst reputedly autobiographical, bears little resemblance to her actual life other than on a spiritual level. She wrote more than two dozen books, 19 of which were published, in addition to over 200 articles and short stories and well over 1,000 book reviews. She was one of the first women war correspondents to go abroad during WWI. Although she achieved fame through her fiction, she also had a reputation for her reactionary conservatism resulting from her first nationally published article A Southern Woman's View upholding the southern practice of lynching which appeared in 1899. This piece launched her writing career and was followed by several essays on southern identity. This novel was first published in 1923.