SOURCE: Iorio, John J. “Mary Ellen Chase and the Novel of Regional Crisis.” Colby Library Quarterly 6 (March 1962): 21-34.

In the following essay, Iorio asserts that several of Chase's novels effectively delineate the decline of old New England life as well as the indomitable spirit of the characters.

When Mary Ellen Chase was born in 1887, many of the forces of cultural change that were to shape and sustain her fiction a half-century later were already engaging the energies of a continent. The old agrarianism, allied with maritime power in New England, and centered on handicrafts, individualism, and the town, retreated before the new capitalism with its aggressive gods of technology, progress, and megalopolis. Long before the end of the century, that sacred ethos that had produced Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Melville had exhausted its motive concept. Neither Hebraic injunctions nor the newer Victorian decorum could cope with the fissures...