Mother: A Story

Mother is a romance by Kathleen Norris, one of the most successful women writers of the first decades of the 20th century. The story was published in 1911 and it was the first out of the 75 novels by the author. It brought Norris instant success and established her as a novelist so popular that President Theodore Roosevelt visited the author personally to congratulate her.The story is set in a small town a few hours' distance from New York. The Mother in the title is Mrs. Paget, a woman devoted to her husband and her seven children, willing to undertake hardships and never ceasing to sacrifice her own good for her loved ones, but most of the story is about her beautiful daughter, Margaret. The girl is charming and wishes to live a life of richness and luxury, but is forced to stay with her family, teaching at the local school. A strange incident introduces her to a rich lady from New York, Mrs. Carr-Boldt, who is charmed by the young girl and invites her to the city to become her secretary. Margaret accepts the job offer and moves to Mrs. Carr-Boldt's luxurious home. The two ladies go abroad where Margaret meets Dr. Tenison, a charming young gentleman and they fall in love with each other. They are forced to part, then they become reunited in Margaret's home town.At the end of the novel, Tenison meets Margaret's mother, too and he tells the girl that he recognizes in her the qualities she inherited from her mother and these are in fact the qualities that he finds most charming about Margaret. It is these qualities what makes Margaret's character so exemplary and what makes the novel resonate with today's readers, too - the appreciation of love over riches, of depth over shallowness and of family values over mundane life.