I should start with an apology β two of them, actually. First, I apologize for not posting here for the last two months. There may be no better evidence of the symbiotic relationship between Hollywood and the literary world of the early s than The Woman Accused. Smith would collect the chapters in a book that would hit shops at the same time.
Poor Mr. Consumer would have to make concerted efforts not to stumble into one or another of its packages. As the most popular magazine of the time, it was easy for Liberty to round up nine willing writers Polan Banks graciously offered his services. At the time, a single feature story in Liberty could earn a writer more than the average American made in a year.
By late , the recruitment process was over and the writing well underway. The cast of contributors is testimony to the fickleness of literary success:. In theory, The Woman Accused would have taken months to write, with each author receiving the previous chapters and adding their own, in a version of the game Consequences.
In practice, it appears that Banks and Hughes came up with the outline of the story and the transition points for each chapter to ensure continuity, and all the writers churned out their chapters in a few weeks. The exercise was not much of a stretch from that of writing a typical magazine short story, which all of them were doing as many as a dozen times each year. Churned is the operative word here. Much magazine fiction of the time relied on a formula perfected decades before by the likes of O.
Henry: characters recognizably based on stereotypes, a dramatic quandary, and a twist. And The Woman Accused is simply a concatenation of ten different versions of this stereotype hung upon a skeletal plot. Happiness awaits them. She decides to take the course of radical honesty and tells Jeffrey all, expecting his rejection. But Jeffrey demonstrates exception tolerance β or a uniformly low opinion of women:.
