Gertrude Atherton - Legacy

Legacy

Atherton was often compared to counterparts like Henry James and Edith Wharton. James assessed Atherton's work and he found the author had reduced the typical man/woman relationship to a personality clash.

Atherton was a founding member of the Writer's League of America, besides a strong advocate of social reform, and, as the grande dame of California literature, a leader in promoting a California cultural identity. She was a personal friend of Senator James Phelan and his nephew the philanthropist Noel Sullivan, and often was a guest at their estate, the Villa Montalvo. Among her celebrity friends was travel writer Richard Halliburton who shared her interest in artists' rights, and whose disappearance at sea she lamented. Though she could be offensively assertive with her acerbic wit, notes Gerry Max, she valorously embraced many of the key intellectual freedom issues of her day, especially those involved with women's rights, and remained, throughout a long creative life, a true friend to writers.

An early feminist well acquainted with the plight of women, Atherton was ultimately an egalitarian. She knew "the pain of sexual repression, knew the cost of strength required to escape it (strength some women do not have to spend), knew its scars—the scars that made her wary of emotional commitment and relegated her, despite her splendid professional triumphs and her surpassing benefit to women, to largely an observer role in human relations. She knew the full cost of the destructive battle of the sexes, and urged that it end at last with true sexual equality."