[PW] Bessie Mae Hopper

[Dennis Lien]

At 02:26 PM 3/12/2007, you wrote:
>I suspect that Bessie Mae is fictional.  I'm copying Andrew White, the
>dramaturg for my theater's current production of one-act plays by women
>in the early part of the twentieth century, to see if he has a view;
>he's well-versed in women dramatists of the period.
>
>Andrew, this was just posted to a reference librarians' website.  Any
>insights?  Thanks.
>
>-- Tom
>
>**************************
>
>Tennessee Williams' _The Glass Menagerie_ mentions Bessie Mae Hopper,
>who had supposedly just written _Honeymoon for Three_.  I have searched
>Google's homepage for "Bessie Mae Hopper," and all the links point back
>to _The Glass Menagerie_.


Difficult to prove a negative, but:

Isn't that the serial about the "horsy set" that was supposedly
appeareing in THE LADY'S HOME COMPANION, for which Amanda was
hustling subscriptions?

THE LADY'S HOME COMPANION was the original title of THE WOMAN'S
HOME COMPANION, but it changed to the later title in 1895, and
THE GLASS MENAGERIE is obviously set later than that.  So, since
the magazine in which the serial was *appearing* is fictional,
there's no reason not to assume the author and the title of the
serial are equally fictional.

As to whether Williams had a specific woman's fiction writer in
mind when he named "Bessie Mae Hopper," I doubt it; it just
sounds to me like the sort of triple-barrelled authorial name
you might expect to find on middlebrow magazine fiction of
the period, like "Bess Streeter Aldrich" or "Mary Roberts
Rinehart."

Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu