Improbable Fiction: The Life of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Jan Cohn

The mystery stories and other popular fiction of Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958) brought her wealth and fame, but she was much more than a writer.  She was a well-known American, respected and loved during a time when few women achieved national influence. Her early life was conventional enough.  Trained as a nurse, she met and married a physician, with whom she had three sons. She was living the stereotypical life of a young matron in Allegheny (now part of Pittsburgh), when her husband’s investments evaporated during a stock market crash. She began writing as a means to supplement the family income. Rinehart became a prolific writer.  In addition to her mysteries, she wrote serious fiction, plays, poems, magazine articles, and editorials. Her regular contributions to the Saturday Evening Post were immensely popular and helped the magazine mold middle-class taste and manners. In this fascinating account of a woman ahead of her time, Cohn illuminates the tensions that pervaded Rinehart’s life.  Rinehart’s commercial success conflicted with her domestic roles of wife and mother; she often endured periods of illness and depression but also pursued adventure, including a job as the first woman war correspondent at the Belgian front during World War I. Throughout, Cohn presents Rinehart as a woman of many complexities whose zest for life always prevailed.

Genres: Biography

312 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1980

Reviews

[Kim Carhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have lived in Pittsburgh all my life and never heard of Mary Roberts Rinehart.
I grew up reading Agatha Christie and I never knew that Mary Roberts Rinehart was known as the “Agatha Christie” of Pittsburgh. She also coined the phrase, “The butler did it!”
This was a learning adventure for me!

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mary Roberts Rinehart was a Pittsburgh novelist, mostly of Victorian style whodunits, who in her lifetime was as famous, if not moreso, than Agatha Christie. It was one of Rinehart's novels that led to the phrase, "the butler did it."

She also is a fascinating example of a self-made womsn at a time when that was rare, and in her prime, particularly in the early part of the 1900s, she outsold Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and many others more famous today.

I did a three-part series on her, and much of my information was based on this fine biography by Dr. Cohn, who died too young a couple of years ago.

[Nadine · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's the story of Mary Roberts Rinehart from Pittsburgh, a nurse who became a very prolific writer after she married a surgeon and had 3 sons.She published stories, plays and novels. With success came lots of moolah and she died a rich woman. It's a fascinating story.